Chapter 474: Crush

As I closed my hand, the earth answered. I had drawn a great many Scripts into the earth, and there were nine joints left to make to finalise the process. I had left them undone on purpose, knowing that with the nature of lightning, it would be almost impossible to stop me from activating what I had created.

The first joint was directly under my feet, and when I raised my hand and closed it, that was only a visual diversion, as I released lightning through my feet, and it went into the bedrock and found the first Joint Script, and this Script woke the six hundred beneath it.

Like a wave that grew larger the further it travelled, every Script I had made lit up and began to draw essence from the surroundings.

Inscription worked with both Anima and essence, and Anima was clearly the better method to fuel Inscription. However, everything changed when scale was brought into it.

When I drew Scripts that were a few inches long, Anima could draw more power out of that Script than the small amount of essence in its surroundings the Script could pull into itself.

But two things changed all of that. The first was that in this era, essence was far more prevalent. I had not measured it, but I would say there was about ten times more of it than could be found in the future. It was odd that this age rejected mages, but it was almost paradise for us.

The second change came from the fact that the Scripts I had been drawing these past three days were extensive, covering miles, and there was a difference between an Inscription the size of a pen drawing essence and vast linked Scripts covering miles doing the same.

There was a loud cracking sound, and then the entire area for several miles went cold, almost to freezing point, as every single shred of essence in the air was drawn into the ground... I had not expected such a violent eruption, and then the valley floor moved.

The entire ground for about twelve miles vibrated, and at the edge of that vibration, thick slabs of earth began to rise at once in four enormous faces.

It was as if the earth itself was rising up, as each slab carried ridiculous amounts of soil, trees and whatever else had been standing on it, and they kept rising and leaning inward along the fold-lines I had written into the rock.

The sound of it was apocalyptic, as the earth groaned and millions of tons of stone and sand went against the pull of gravity and followed my design.

The stranger beside me did not even rise from the ground. He was just looking up as the earth rose around us. The crows did not have his nonchalance. They all rose in a single black column, as they could see what I was about to do, but it was already too late.

The four slabs came together two miles above the valley floor and the last seam closed with a resounding snap, and the crows that were about to escape slammed into the earth, and despite their rugged vitality, a great many of them were crushed to death, and the Necromancer screamed.

I had been inside a prison built to seal Transcendental Demons, and I was a Warden of Caelith Mourne. I may not have had that Celestial structure with me, but I had seen enough of it to duplicate part of its shape here.

Whatever was going to happen next, I had created my tomb, and I was no longer fond of dying alone.

∞

The cries of the Necromancer were the cries of several million crows, and the sound slammed against the barrier of earth and was reflected back, as several gigantic Scripts began to glow on the walls of the pyramid I had just built.

These Scripts were there to harden the earth, and most of my resources had been spent in creating them. If I wanted to build such a massive structure and not have it crushed by its own weight, then these Scripts were indispensable, and they would also serve to create a prison that could not easily be broken out of.

The reflected cries of the crows were so loud they created a storm, and I winced, but I was sure that this storm was killing more of them than the closing of the seam had.

The stranger had not moved at all. He slowly brought his hands together and clapped. "Ah," he said, and I heard him perfectly over the sound storm. "That is what you were doing. How are you able to bend the lifeblood of Terra? Not even the gods are able to do this. Is this what the Dragon God works towards? A way to use that Pivot to touch the core of Terra?"

I arched my brows. Lifeblood... so essence was a resource that even the gods could not manipulate. And the other things he had said... well, it was the wrong time to be distracted.

I said nothing, and the stranger shrugged. "It does not matter. If you think you can keep the Necromancer and me here with earth alone, then you are wrong. You have just created your tomb."

"I know." I nodded. "But I have not shown you all the other fun surprises I have inside this tomb."

The entire pyramid suddenly groaned, and my Inscription Pen appeared in my right hand. I held it up, lightly pressed the nib into the space in front of me, and whispered, "Crush."

∞

There was a sensation I had felt when I grew bigger that I easily shrugged off, just because of the power I wielded, and that was the effect of weight and gravity on my body. When my sight was drawn into the void, my soul was almost torn to pieces, but I did not come back from that experience with just a weird skill. I also gained knowledge.

Most of the knowledge I gained was weird and disjointed, as if I had glimpsed random sentences without any order from a tome with a billion pages. However, from all that randomness, there were a few truths I was able to decipher, and one of those truths was the connection between size, mass and gravity.

I had created a pyramid from the earth, stretching twelve miles, and no amount of Anima I could reach would have channeled a working this impressive. What it got me was not just size, but weight, and a rough guess put it at a trillion tonnes at the least.

Not even a mountain would weigh so heavy.

The shape of the pyramid, the ground beneath us... everything should have shattered catastrophically in a second, if not for the Scripts I had engraved into the earth that hardened the stone. But hardening the stone was nothing. I did not set all of this up just to trap these two here with me, and leave out the most potent weapon I could harness.

The weight of the pyramid, focused and amplified.

The cries of the crows that bounced back and created a storm were nothing.

The word came back off the walls, and the roof came down to meet it.