Sama was still glaring at the display of Shelled Salamander Demons of all sizes. “So, can you get us in touch with a few Orca Rulers? Because you know there’s going to be something big in the middle of all this.”

“Thunderbird probably knows a few. The Eagles don’t prey on the warm-blooded sea creatures, and mammal Emperors are low on the Totem pole in the seas, even if some of the Tribes are individually powerful creatures. There’s just too much old and powerful shit in the seas for them to matter.”

“So, let me follow the logic. The Sea Emperors have discovered this breeding system where they can mass-produce hard-to-kill but ultimately sterile hordes by breeding two viable species together. Even if we utterly destroy this horde and the Nautilusk and Lizards propagating it, it really won’t matter, as they can just go find some more breeders and restart the process.”

“Pretty much?” I agreed.

“So, if they lose the whole shebang, all it does is set them back some time, and they can use the same trick again in the future.”

“Also true. Shall we call it a Breeding Bomb or something?”

“It’s more like a disaster-level Beast Event, except it’s replicable. In any event, it’s no rare thing, so the Whales wouldn’t actually be targeted for eating all of them, would they?”

“A good point.”

“You’re heading down to Antarctica tomorrow, right?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Yeah. Gotta hoof it like three hundred miles overland, no magic, to reach Ice Phoenix Emperor’s territory. Gonna be fun.” Meaning a total pain in the arse. I couldn’t let the many Imperial Ice creatures know I was there, or the Rulers. The Commanders I could likely play around with some, but I couldn’t show off any Magery or I’d attract a lot of unwanted attention.

Likewise, I couldn’t bring Sama and Briggs along, because if I was discovered, I could indeed run away. The two of them were much less likely to be discovered than I was if they went stealthy, but they couldn’t outrun the more powerful natives.

“The atmosphere down there is dense with Ice Mana, it’ll activate your Bloodline for certain. How are you going to conceal yourself?” Sama asked reasonably.

“Invisibility and a Heat Sink, lots of lightfooting it.”

“And if you are revealed?”

“Pretending to be some type of Icefire Wraith using Wraithform.”

Sama grinned despite herself. “Sounds fun! Good luck!”

“Thanks.” Reuniting the two Phoenixes would be something special, to be sure!

------

Getting across the stormiest strait of water in the world wasn’t that hard. Hundred-foot waves, howling icy gales of wind, massive icebergs moving erratically, and massive Aquatics swimming leisurely in the deeps below while the air was drenched with Ice, Water, Air, and Void Mana...

Yeah, nothing to it. I was using pure Valences and Eldritch Energy with some Soul Magic, no tapping the Manafield at all, and so everything was kindly Warded by my Astral Ward at VI on Zeben. Some Noble or Emperor expending a huge amount of energy might have been able to find me by saturating everything with Mana and looking for an empty spot... but they had to know I was there to do that, and I wasn’t giving them any help on that matter.

Winging low over the waters with Primus’ carefully-controlled Elemental Command deflecting the hurricane-force winds around me, I kept a lookout for the many flying creatures darting around, a good portion of them Elementals or Spirits of Cold or Wind exulting in the rapidly increasing density of the Manafield.

It was said that the saturation of Water Magic in the oceans amounted to triple the default Mana density of the Land, and so Sea Beasts in the water were thrice as strong as Land Creatures of the same ranking.

The Ice Emperor had done much the same in Antarctica, establishing a Natural Formation here and reinforcing it over the ages here at the naturally coldest place on Earth.

Here, the Ice Mana density grew to five times that of other Lands’ Manafields. The result was that this was the most ideal cultivation area for Ice Beasts in the whole world, and no Beasts in their right mind challenged those who dwelled here.

Naturally it also meant the most powerful Beasts of Ice dwelled here, and there was no room for newcomers without killing or chasing off something already living here. The sole exception was the shorelines, where migratory Tribes of what amounted to feeding stock for the natives were allowed to dwell for the seasons, but were generally chased off to other waters as the southern winter approached.

Even the idiot Sages who had bugged the Ice Emperor hadn’t dared to come in the dark of winter, when the Ice Beasts were at their mightiest. The fact I was daring to do so meant I probably wasn’t right in the head by Human standards...

But I had done the Ceremony of the Frozen Soul. This place just felt like home to me, and that was before ignoring the 195% attunement to my Firefrost Seed. Even now the Seed was humming happily and would have been trailing blazing flames behind me in joy if my Heat Sinking Shield slung on my back under my Cloak wasn’t pulling all the flames in.

It meant I couldn’t use the Fire-enhancing and stacking effect of my Firefrost Seed, but oh well. I’d have to be satisfied with x3.5 damage/power on all my spells, which basically was exact mid-range for a Spirit Seed, instead of the x12 Heaven Seed Territory for them stacking.

Pity me.

I swept into a broad bay, which in the summertime would be occupied by Seals and Penguins and several tribes of Seabirds. Now, it was covered by pale blue ice, frozen down to the seabed and leading up to a land covered in white, not a hint of the dark stone beneath breaking the icy expanse.

The number of Ice/Wind Elementals about was increasing drastically as I came in very low, watching them playing in the freezing winds gleefully. I glided out of the sky as I came to the shoreline, not quite settling down onto my lightfoot an inch above the snows and ice.

My Seed was blazing happily in basically a freezing furnace of Ice Mana that would have frozen a normal human to death in seconds. There was absolutely nothing friendly about this place, from the landscape that was basically an unreadable blanket of white, to regular gusts of one to two hundred mile per hour winds driving razored shards of ice and snow across said expanse of white, to a cold both real and magical that would give even Ruler Beasts conniption fits.

Yeah, this was not a friendly place to Humans at all. I had my Nogged Golden Armor up right now, +9 Natural AC, like having skin made of steel, on top of Greater Force Armor with Argent Savancy and Defiant/Ice granting me another +10, like being wrapped in a knight’s suit of plate armor. All that, combined with Damage Reduction 25/Holy Silver, was managing to hold off the environmental damage from the ice and snow, while Prime’s Air Elemental Command was sliding the winds around me so I wasn’t blown away.

Detect Location was up, and despite not having an actual map to go by, save the additions Sama and Briggs had put up which were so tightly constrained, I knew where to go.

Fire Phoenix Emperor could not be mistaken as to the location of his mate. She was three hundred miles inland thataway.

I kept my Awareness very passive, but Magical Beasts use Magic. Discern the Weft of the Weave of the World, Detect Magic at VI, gave me six hundred yards of totally passive magical awareness in all directions, which was a pretty damn good range for my purposes. I wasn’t even ‘looking’ at things, and so pinging their Awareness, I just knew what was there.

Sighing to myself, I set one foot in front of the other, and began to skate.

My lightfoot speed wasn’t based on Monk Levels, but base Caster Level, due to my Arcane Fist variant. It was also completely self-contained, no combinations of Wind, Earth, and Void Magic being used to alert everything and sundry around, even if it would vastly accelerate how fast I was moving.

Nope, I was going overland, and I was going to avoid encounters instead of Blinking past them and raising an alarm. I didn’t want any of the creatures here to know a Human had come and gone at all, unlike the Sages intent on proving their power and skill and right to barge in here.

I wasn’t all that much faster than I was when running with Sama in the jungle to the Night Weaver Spiders, and I wasn’t doing a marathon run, more of a trot double-move and stuff. I didn’t want to stumble into anything, and really, that was plenty fast enough. Base 30, +10 Fast Move, +15 Fleet amped with Melee Levels, +10 Exemplar Lite, +10 Travel Domain, + 8/3 for base Caster Level of 26 right now, was about 255.

Okay, wow, I was near Sama’s base back then. I was warping the magic quietly around me to give me some serious hoofing-it speed, doing a leisurely 70 mph overland.

I suppose it fit. I was getting close to the speed of sound when I was flying full out now.

Still, that meant seven hours of travel, ignoring terrain and detours. Yay for an inhuman Constitution score of 33, I could keep this up all day.

Of course, that also meant seven hours of me-time (ignoring the thoughtstreams happily chatting/teaching/collating/designing/translating away) to think about things; programming in a partial fugue state to continually assess the area around me for things without fail and fix on the tiniest discrepancy for the lethal thing it probably was; while avoiding the Spirits and Elementals diving and playing around.

Happily, the things didn’t like to get close to the ground, another reason I was not flying.

I’d thought that getting my Sagedom would be a cakewalk. After all, I could and had filled my 2401 Typeless Stars up with matchless speed, Eldritch Theurgy once again working with my Archmage Talent to reduce the time needed to fill so many of the things down to, erm, an unreasonably short time period, even with all the tempering.

My Caster Level had been at 24. I’d treated every single Star to Tier 5, something I was absolutely sure had never been done in the history of the planet. I totally had the Intellect to support a breakthrough in my Prime Stat, and I had Thunderbird, Fire Phoenix, and Queen Gichigumi for inspirations and guidance on how to do it.

Sagedom involved reaching past Earth’s Manafield and drawing down power right from the Stars themselves. Beasts didn’t actually do that, but the Emperors had seen and helped Sages in the past attain enlightenment and do it, so they knew the process and could pass it on.

With my Void Phoenix Bloodline, this was basically a bloody given. I knew stepping into Legendary process was supposed to be tough, but seriously? I should have just hopped over the barrier!

Of course, I was a Typeless Archmage. There’d never been a Typeless Archmage before. Wizards had not existed afore, and the crazy advance schema we’d put into place to exploit that fact was now butting into a barrier that didn’t seem to know HOW to let me past it.

Elemental Magic seemed to be an ESSENTIAL thing at this point. Becoming a Sage was historically about calling on that Element to come on down and empower them to limits beyond what mortals could do, open up a Universe of 16,807 Stars, and pave the road into Eternity... or something.

For some reason post-20’s didn’t become Eternal here. Racial Class limitations, maybe?

There was no way I had the power to call on multiple Elements from Beyond at once to mix and burn Typeless Stars up in arcane fire.

But... I had seven different types of magic to do so...

A key Element of Magical Beasts was that they had to gather Mana and accumulate great reserves of it to break through to a higher Level. But to make Emperor, they ALSO had to step back and refine all that Mana to a higher degree, in addition to accumulating vast amounts of it. Even for creatures with powerful Bloodlines easing their way, making Emperor was a huge thing that required a great amount of time to happen.

I had tempered all my Stars through the many Arcane Schools and Spheres of Magic, making them true Arcane Stars. I was now going back through them and re-tempering them to the same standard, but with the other Six Traditions.

Divine, Natural, Heartsong, Pact, Artifice, and Soul Magic were now being used to Temper all my Stars and the Mana within them, a combined degree of refinement and Tempering that exceeded even what True Emperors were doing!