Soul Venerable (Re-written)

 

The mutant kobold is an interesting specimen; Mordred would not kill it even if he refuses to be subjugated by him. His enslavement-path methods were numerous; if the mutant kobold wouldn’t surrender to him, Mordred is too happy to invite him for some intense ‘discussion’ of how great it is to serve him. Of course, this discussion will have mental, physical, and soul torture to eventually brainwash him.

But if he understands his place, then using command-path methods on him is a better alternative.

Command-path was a minor path derived from enslavement-path and wisdom-path. Unlike enslavement-path that focused on dominating lifeforms to do one’s bidding, command-path is specialized in commanding armies of intellectual lifeform. The difference in concept is little, but the actual difference on the field is as far as heaven and earth.

Enslavement-path is rigid, dominated lifeform has little capacity to think for oneself. In complex situations, the limitation of enslavement-path is evident. Command-path on the other hand is specialized in the calculation and arrangement of intelligent armies. Even without the commander present, command-path armies could react depending on the formation of the previous arrangement. 

Therefore, his preference in handling matters through the use of command-path methods, instead of enslavement-path.       

After Mordred recovered his spiritual force through telepathic emotion conversion due to his intense thought expenditure, he brought the mutant to the kobold encampment with Kor as guard while leaving the battlefield to Ymir to take care. He wouldn’t let a hundred or so kobolds run away after all that hard work. In his mind, they are already his property.

While walking towards the kobold encampment not far from the battlefield, Mordred silently used [System Interface] towards the mutant.

 

Attribute Statistics

Name: Grem Ironclaw
Race: Ironscale Kobold
Occupation: N/A
Rank: 0 

 

Physical Attribute

Strength: 1.7
Endurance: 2.2
Agility: 2.1
Flexibility: 2.1
Perception: 1.7
Reaction: 1.8

Energy Attribute

Internal Energy Development Quotient: 49% 

Extra

Current Effect: [Interface System]

 

Grem the mutant kobold is a variant kobold who could consume metallic substances in a low dose. His biology differed from typical kobold as the metallic substances he devoured would be refined by his body to form a natural defense of bio-metallic scales. In terms of raw power, his strength is stronger than goblin captains. If Mordred allows Kor to fight Grem, it was only time before the martial will within his sea of consciousness would run out. Kor would be meat to a chopping block by then.

Besides, Grem’s reptilian bloodline and his physiology grant him more stamina and endurance while his small size allows for rapid movement. This mutant kobold was almost superior in any way compared to the typical goblin.

“You are all my slaves. If you want to survive, do as I told you.” Mordred declared in front of the kobold encampment through sound-path methods, his voice reverberated to all corners of kobold camp. The declaration brought despair to some of the young ones. Yet, they did not retaliate.

More specifically, they couldn’t.

Their little minds couldn’t think too far ahead. While discombobulated, Mordred used his wisdom-path method to disseminate telepathic fake thoughts towards the kobolds.

“Serving me will be a lot more beneficial, I won’t mistreat my subject: as long as you obey.”

He planned to govern the minor races through law and order, instead of using absolute power to suppress them. However, at the early stage of his rule, he needs to show his domineering might lest they have funny ideas of retaliating against his rule.  

“Food, clothing, a place to live. I promise you those.” Mordred offers the benefit. “Failed to fulfill my expectation, then my army wouldn’t mind having extra meat in their meal.” He also threatens. “Your life is mine to dictate. Make the best use of it.”   

Some were filled with despair for the future to come. The adult ones understood the crippling defeat Grem brought into the tribe, but they were helpless in changing the situation since they are the non-combatants. It’s not like they were capable of fighting in the frontline anyway.   

“Lead your people to the cave for work, if there’s any resistance, the others could feast on their meat. Don’t forget to bring all your resources, they are all mine now.” Mordred simply said towards Grem, who was already feeling regret about his decision of surrendering. Cannibalism is something that has been practiced by the Iron Claw tribe for a while, but those are under some special circumstances. Not like this.

Mordred returned to the cave first, followed by the undying yet heavily wounded red goblin, leaving the Iron Claw tribesmen to savor the fear and despair their chieftain had given them.

“Everyone, let’s move according to his will. The five hunting groups were defeated with one spell from that undead…” Grem tried to explain the current circumstances, filling them up with more fear and despair.

Far away, Mordred smiled as he savored the negative emotions flooding towards him. This was one of the best nourishment and great cultivation resources for him. He needed to have more of this, but he can’t be too harsh towards them. If he went too far and killed too many, then the cycle of birth wouldn’t be able to keep up, thus killing his livelihood for a short term benefit. That will place him on the same level as those shortsighted chaos-factions, which he abhors the most.  

“Underground city… I need to construct a city of minor races to support my cultivation in the long term. Being a skeleton mage is too limiting. I need to accelerate refining a magitek artifact to free myself from relying on telepathic negative emotion from my slaves just to have a fully functional thought process.” He started pondering about the feasibility of this plan.

Back when he was the Archmage of the Sacred Alliance, he became an overlord of light and order who ruled his subject with love and peace. He blesses his people with countless glory and grace through excellent magical artifacts, making the standard of living in his lands one of the highest.

Now, he needs to re-design a city, a civilization that is centered around darkness and progress strong enough to support him to refine magitek artifacts that will free him from the lack of physical body.

“It’s not entirely impossible. That means I have to start collecting resources, building up facilities, and re-start the abandoned mine. But first, I have to determine what kind of resources this mine has produced in the past.” He muttered absentmindedly. “If this abandoned mine is a common metal-path or earth-path resource point, then it’ll take me a long time to research a magitek artifact from the present materials…”

As he was thinking, he saw Ymir cleaning up the battlefield and sorting the weapons and armor looted from the kobolds. Their weapons and armor were a little too small for goblin use, but if they could be refitted, it would be more helpful. Unfortunately, goblins have no blacksmiths. On the other hand, kobolds are somewhat capable of working on metal tools, despite the rough craftsmanship.

But Mordred hasn’t completely trusted them yet, for now, he put this thought aside.

“Ymir, a new batch of kobold will be coming. I’ll wait for you to line them up in front of me.”

“Yes, chief!” he replied with respect and awe.

Ever since the chief turned into an undead, he felt that the chief became more powerful. He had never seen the chief cast an offensive area of effect spell. Before that, the spells the chief could use were merely shamanic supportive buffs and post-battle minor heals. Ymir returned with the other goblins to carry out his orders.

It took a long time before all the kobolds were mobilized onto the mouth of the cave. Standing up in an elevated ground, Mordred gazes upon the defeated army. Nobody dared to look into his empty eye socket, “Good. This is what slaves should do upon seeing their master. Now, I want you to kneel for me…”

The order made a lot of kobolds angry. Some obliged immediately, while some also took their time to decide whether or not they would kneel. A small minority, however, was resolute enough to fight against his gaze and stood tall.

Seeing the rebels, Mordred smiled inwardly. “I said, KNEEL!” He used a heavy tone as he released a soul pulse attack. His soul foundation wasn’t strong enough to kill them all, but it was enough for them whose soul had never been attacked directly, to feel an excruciating burst of pain. This creates an illusion of being grand and irresistible in their eyes, to not even needing to lift a finger to show off his power which lowers their resistance in the future.

The next moment, all kobolds kneeled, followed by the goblin who has no idea why suddenly they felt pain in their whole being. After all, Mordred spoke in kobold tongue. The goblin instinctively surrendered to his powerful will.

Despite most of his enslavement-path methods not usable to this number of intellectual lifeforms, his attainment in command-path was not low. He just needed some form of control and suppressed their will a bit once in a while for a long time to subjugate them completely.

“Good! From now on, you are my property. If I want you to dig, then dig! If I want you to shed blood, you will bleed for my amusement. If I want you to die, then die. Failing to comply with my orders, then I can give you physical, mental, and soul pain that you could never have imagined before.”

Mordred’s evil presence was natural. In addition to his undead nature and the fake telepathic thoughts that he had spread into their mind, the gloomy and dark aura he releases suppressed any remaining resistance in their heart.

“Grem, the Iron Claw tribe will be responsible for digging. I will give you time to settle down your tribe outside. Later, your tribesmen’s area of work will be given to you. If your performance is good, then I might reward your people by letting them stay inside the cave.”

It needs to be said that wild beasts live rampantly in this world. Most intellectual races will form communities in certain places to defend themselves. Living on the surface exposed without walls is dangerous and risky.  

Grem received his order, nodded profusely. There was no resistance at all. “We’ll do as you say.” He then started to bark some orders to his people to build some camps and divide rations.

As a simple-minded creature, the concept of farming had never been considered in their mind. Most of the food they carried is meat hunted from wild beasts or animals. Kobold and goblin culture is nearly the same level in this aspect.

Using a wisdom-path method to savor the nourishment of emotion and pondering about this matter, he began to plan ahead of the topography of his future lair. The abandoned mine will be his focus here because as an undead, sunlight is very hostile towards his existence. The war was happening during the early time of the night, with both sides having natural Darkvision which allows them to see in the night as bright as day. Later after dawn breaks, he will need to return to the dark and damp underground so that his body won’t be weakened by the sunlight.

In simple terms, sunlight is a perpetual light-path saturation attack towards undead like him. At his current level, he has no way to resist this. After reaching rank 1 he would have the method to deal with this by erecting a perpetual magical force shield on his person.

For now, he needs to maximize the time he has to instruct the slaves for work. Both goblin and kobold are mobilized to plow the land, cut the trees, and form an encampment for the kobold to live in the future. The sight of hundreds of small reptiles working together in tandem was a sight to behold. The larger sized goblins were also called from the depth of the cave to work. Most of them were instructed to carry weight since it would be more effective for them that way.

The amount of work that can be done in one night is limited, Mordred was forced to return deep inside the cave to hide from the sunlight. Since he’s an undead, he had no real need for rest, except when his thoughts were nearing depletion. Thus, he kept himself busy by surveying the cave to build his first necromancer’s lair.

“The abandoned mine is extremely wide; space is all we had here. I want you to clean these areas into squares. I will give you the details later…” he called Ymir, who has been working tirelessly from the night to his chamber. His room is a door-less room with a relatively closed location in the deeper part of the cave.

Dead tired, Ymir nodded instinctively without any complaint. By now, he had noticed that the former goblin chieftain that he respected had turned into someone else. His character had changed in a night, yet he couldn’t fight against him. First, the victory he brought was his gift towards the Blood Fang tribe. He understood that if his presence made him unhappy, then the chieftain could kill and replace him with any other more competent goblin which to his despair and frustration.

Thus, he didn’t let his fatigue show.

“I also have drafted some plans. In the future, I will have you and Grem come into my room every day to study.”

Ymir fell into confusion, “Chief, what is it?”

“Reading and writing. Until I find a more intelligent intellectual race to subjugate, you two will do. Try your best to learn, else I do something nasty to your little brain.” Mordred has started to openly threaten Ymir, shedding all pretense of being the original goblin chieftain.

Suddenly, Ymir understood. “Yes, my lord.” He changed his honorifics.

“Also, I need you to get me a large amount of fresh blood, I don’t care where you get it.” He ordered him.

After Ymir left and returned with several waterskins of fresh blood, Mordred used to construct a blood-path formation to heal Kor. Despite being a zombie-like undead, Kor requires a large amount of blood-path resources to recover from heavy wounds.

“Bloodguard could be considered as a blood-path humanoid magical artifact. The flaw of needing a large number of resources for maintenance is a burden, if I can improve my methods of creating mass-produced Bloodguard as commodities, perhaps there’s a market for this? I’ll put a mental note for this one in the future.” Mordred pondered as the blood-path soul formation enveloped Kor, healing him and allowing him to cultivate.

While Kor was recovering, Mordred checked the inventory after his victory over the kobold tribe. Blood Fang Tribe’s ration supply was scarce, due to the pursuit of the Iron Claw tribe but after merging the two, it could last for around a few days without hunting. It wasn’t as scarce as it used to, but it was still dangerously low.

“The predicament has turned into profit. I will need some time to process my gains. Food and water is the most important thing in a city, it’ll be difficult if I rely on hunting to feed the two tribes. I must design pastures both aboveground and underground, prioritizing underground construction to compensate for the lack of walls…” He made a mental arrangement for the kobold and goblin to work in the future.

There weren’t only rations, the Iron Claw tribe also possessed a large number of raw materials such as beast skin, bones, and even some metal ores. All of these have yet to be transferred inside the cave, but it wouldn’t be a problem for the goblins to move them all by the end of the day.                  

Done with administrative tasks, he starts his cultivation.

After the battle, he harvested the souls of the dead, storing them inside his soul phylactery. Despite being small, the soul phylactery could store a large number of souls. Besides, Mordred possessed the method to expand the size of the phylactery to hold even more souls, but that wouldn’t be required at the moment.

The soul of the dead is like a freshly grilled juicy meat to the starving him. With a voracious appetite, he devours them slowly, recovering a large amount of soul essence.

As more kobold souls are devoured, his soul grows with each passing moment.

Mordred’s True Inheritance regarding soul-path cultivation separates it into three facets: Self Soul, All Being’s Soul, and Heaven and Earth’s Soul. Self-soul regards the quality of one’s soul, all being’s souls relates to the soul of all living beings and the interaction thereof, while Heaven and Earth’s Soul is the use of Soul Arts and the secret of heaven and earth.   

In this case, the soul cultivation of Self is separated into three aspects: Soul strength, soul quality, and soul pacification.  

Soul strength could be measured by one of the most common information-path spells: [System Interface] by the attribute of soulforce. One unit of soulforce is equal to the soul strength of an average human mortal in his prime. As one’s physical body becomes stronger, one’s soul will naturally follow suit, unless it was a surge of rising in strength, then some mishap will occur.

Maintaining the balance of soulforce and physical strength is extremely important, but typically only soul cultivators possessed the methods due to the extreme difference between the two since normally an extremely strong soul could not be supported by a cripplingly weak body and vice versa.

The second aspect is Soul Quality, which is a unique quality possessed by every soul. Humans have a human soul, kobold has a kobold soul, and dragon possess dragon soul. Needless to say, some soul mutations allow one to have an advantage over others. For example, an accomplished dragon warlock might harbor a dragonman soul instead of a human soul. Not only will it allow the dragon warlock to effectively use dragon-restricted methods, but it will also grant high affinity with dragon races.

Upon reaching a sufficient level of soul strength, one’s soul quality would be referred to as paragon soul. At that point, a paragon soul could interact with the material world as if it was a physical body. Paragon soul is extremely rare though, since soul cultivators are scarce in Morgen world, while those that cultivate their soul could not break through to paragon soul due to the extremely difficult requirement.    

Mordred’s current soul quality is Spectral Soul. It referred to a creature called spectral soul whose specialty is to possess living creatures, occupying their body and enslaving their mind. Spectral Souls did not exist in this world before the arrival of Mordred, it wasn’t a well-known ectoplasmic lifeform.

Just because a spectral soul is specialized to possess living creatures, doesn’t mean it’s all-powerful. There are various reasons why he could not simply replace the goblin chieftain’s soul when he was still alive, because his soul foundation was not strong enough. Furthermore, spectral soul is an enslavement-path soul method, it has low effectivity in enslaving intellectual creatures.

If he wants to take possession of an intellectual creature’s body, there are other soul-path lifeforms that are better for it.

Of course, as a soul magus, Mordred can alter his soul quality into something that fits the body, but why would he do so for a mere goblin? It took resources that he didn’t have at that moment, and upon having the said resources, he could’ve done so much more than altering his soul quality for possessing a mere goblin chieftain.  

As for the third aspect: Soul Pacification, it relates to recovery and affinity.

When a person engages in combat or intense actions such as cultivation that put a large pressure into the soul, it will have problems such as being absent minded because the soul suddenly detaches from the physical body. Naturally, every soul possesses its defense mechanism to recover itself from being separated from the body. The best way to ensure it didn’t happen was to pacify it once in a while.

How to pacify an excited or tired soul? Sleeping is one of the best and easiest methods, but it takes time. Cultivators would prefer cultivating instead of sleeping, because of this, most cultivation manuals of either spiritual or body cultivation have soul pacifying properties.    

That being the case, Mordred’s Soul Devouring method is devised from All Being’s Soul to strengthen the facet of Self Soul.

His soul cultivation is unique and worlds apart from the backward soul cultivation system of Morgen world that requires one to develop one’s soulforce development quotient to 100% before ascending as a true rank 1 soul cultivator. Every magus is resourceful scientists, experts in their field. As Soul Magus of Holy Terra, he had developed myriad ways of soul cultivation.

Devouring souls recover one’s soul essence, which could be considered as external energy of the soul. With soulforce acting as internal energy of the soul, the two could be used in tandem to perform soul arts that could move the earth and shake the heavens in exchange for using magic spells, but soul arts are more than for mere destruction.

“The best use of using external energy to cultivate is… condense them into runes!” Mordred’s soul starts vibrating as he activates his methods.

Magic caster has magic runes, soul cultivator has soul runes, and for comparison purposes, body cultivator has body runes, each unique in its various forms, functions, and abilities.  

For magi, runes are miracle methods that could be employed in almost all aspect cultivation. Some could be carved in media like paper or stone slabs, powerful ones required special materials such as dragon scales to be engraved, others could be engraved in the body itself to empower the strength of the body or granting special abilities. Some special ones could be engraved on immaterial things like magus mind runes that could be engraved in one’s sea of consciousness.   

Numerous methods could be employed through the use of runes, and cultivation is not an exception!

Mordred constructed several dozen tiny runes in the air. The runes were purple; each blinking light was condensed from the soul essence gained from kobold souls.

“Combining soul art and magic spell into a [Killer Move] is a tedious task that consumes both soulforce and spiritual force… Even if it’s a watered-down version of the original, the effect of the killer move is more effective than using the two separately.” Mordred muttered as his concentration fell upon the tiny soul runes.   

“Rank 0 soul-path killer move, [Invigorating Soul Pacification]!”

The runes were absorbed by Mordred’s body as his skeletal figure draped in faint purple light. Invigorating Soul Pacification was a restorative killer move that not only gives a small increase in his soulforce attribute but also pacifies his soul!  

As the last soul runes were absorbed by his body, the shimmering purple light faded. “I have grown… 4 units of soulforce in one sitting… Soul devouring is truly the fastest method to recover to my peak. But unfortunately, reality is not that easy.” He contemplated.

Morgen World is under the rule of the Gods. It was okay to devour weak believers since there were so many of them and cases of souls dissipating on death were not uncommon. But the souls of strong believers with blind, unconditional faith are irreplaceable assets in the material world. Even before they died, their souls are already claimed by the divines to serve as heroic spirits in Divine Kingdoms.

In other words, devouring souls is an extremely taboo method that could not be used to anyone, especially intellectual races in large numbers. Of course, he did not consume souls after deciding rashly. He had done sufficient calculation of risk and only done so after ensuring the risk of being noticed by the gods is so minuscule that it could be ignored.

“Only rank 3 Legendaries are worthy enough to catch the attention of the divines, but I shouldn’t let my guard down. Military, political, economic, and religious leaders of any intellectual race, especially humanoid and its variants must be handled with extreme cautions…”  

After ensuring no mishaps happen in his soul cultivation, he began processing the memories he gained after devouring kobold souls.

Unlike animals or beasts, Mordred’s soul-devouring method could absorb fragmented pieces of memories of intellectual souls when they were still alive. It wasn’t as effective as [Soul Search] that collected some crucial moments if not all memories of a living person, but the quantity of kobold soul that he devoured compensates for the lack of clarity of the information to find out the background of the Iron Claw tribe.