Chapter 24

As I considered the problem, the solution occurred to me. Castration was a common punishment for sexual crimes. Plants could grow via grafting. I simply needed to combine the processes. As soon as I started, though, I realized why it would be more difficult than I'd anticipated. First, the will of the females was rejecting the male anatomy. Second, the male anatomy was rejecting the female will. Both would be even larger issues once it came time to use the space for circuitry. Especially if they were allowed to advance in class, then the foreign nature would be a poison for their will, causing all of their circuitry to lose stability when it needed it most.

Had I not already learned the principle of dimorphism, this would have been an insurmountable problem. Now that I did, it was fairly simple to find a dimorphism shifting rune and work that into a circuit to keep the two from rejecting each other. It took far more goblins than any experiment I'd tried before, as the will often started chain reactions of rejection once a rune was formed, but I figured it out. It was a bit strange seeing the new females with will that didn't seem to be theirs mixing with their own and causing no issues, but it seemed to work as I wanted it to.

Now having access to the Conclave's library, I had much more confidence in making will circuits for my human worshippers. I had been reticent due to the potentially limitless options, but the human library allowed me so many choices each human had a unique true circuit. I felt a bit of regret that I'd already given them lord-style physiques, seeing how diverse the physique section was, but I put that aside. Lords were designed to excel in raw force, intimidation, oppression of their own, and control. There were many less versatile physiques I could have wasted humans with. On the plus side, the soldiers hadn't been given the lord-physique, so I could still experiment with them. The limited number of soldier-based physiques was still irritating, but there were several very promising candidates.

By this time I'd collected all of my forces at Adrian and the reinforcements were close enough to see the walls. They were also close enough for my will to reach them. I decided to test a new circuit. I still wanted to do most of my killing as a means of proving the inadequacy of my Creator, so I based it on the same crystal bullet spell. Instead of a single bullet, though, I made it to spray a fine powder of bladed crystals. It was non-lethal, but that was by design. I wanted more bodies to experiment with the physique templates and invent more with.

Activating that circuit over the reinforcements from Celius took a long time to show any effects, but the end result was a complete destruction of their morale. I didn't even need to ask for their surrender, they begged to surrender before I thought they would obey if I asked. Adrian CMXXVIII was my herald this time, building the worship rune with a lot of aid from me. She was still trying to resist my influence, though. She was putting strain on her will, resisting the formation of a will-core. Luckily, she didn't already have one. If she'd already had one, it may have shattered under the strain of her refusal to submit to what she intrinsically needed to submit to.

What shocked me about this was that her will wasn't being shredded by its self-resistance. Instead it was growing. It wasn't accumulating will, it was creating more. As I studied the flows in detail, I realized that she also had unlocked a process by which it was possible to increase the weight of her will. She wasn't doing it on purpose so she couldn't utilize it to do so, but I could. I also had enough sensitivity to find a less self-destructive form of the exercise. I still probably would have done it, but decreasing the risk of killing myself was a good thing. As soon as I had a good method for myself, I started using it on my favorite worshippers. I couldn't really explain it to them, so I infiltrated their wills and enacted patterns to get the same turbulent flow. They would need to be conscious of the flow to stop it, and none of them were.

Trgl and Mgrt had the highest possibility of figuring it out. I'd finally found the rune I wanted in the hell hound natural brain circuits. The core of their will circuits were intent, so they'd have more sensitivity than anything once I figured out the rules for creating composite runes. The Conclave had some insight, but they only knew what and how, I needed to know why before I started making permanent alterations to my most valuable true circuits.

On the other side of Adrian I tested a different circuit on the reinforcements from Agatha. Still based on the crystal bullet, but I removed the air slipping rune and replaced it with a repeat rune, turning it into a channeled circuit instead of an activated one. It was slower than activated circuits, as I could simply make more at once, but the mana cost was much lower per bullet. I also altered the shape from the diamond it had been to the shape the siege slingers had anticipated fighting ogres with. The range was reduced from hundreds of pedes to tens of pedes, but in return the spikes were much more effective. I'd designed this spell to kill extremely tough creatures, but the continuous rain of spikes worked fairly well on an army as well. I did have to mess with the shape a bit to make it as effective as possible. Shaping the weights around the head was the most important part. Once I got them to spin, they could tear through several armored humans each.

The mental damage was less, though. Angie actually had to effortlessly eviscerate several hundred of them as I continued a steady barrage before they finally bowed to me. The reason was easy enough to figure out; Agatha sent a force of their elites while Celius sent a larger number of chaff. The soldiers from Celius were all writhing on the ground, screaming like their lives depended on it, while the soldiers from Agatha couldn't stand, but they managed to hold in their screams.

The repressed agony seemed to excite Angie, as she was dancing among the grimacing soldiers. She was always careful to wipe a little blood on her every time she passed a pool with a clean surface. Angie was almost orgasmic in her level of euphoria as she reveled in the power I'd granted to her. Not only was she a far more powerful wizard than she'd ever thought herself capable of becoming, I'd granted her physical power that exceeded even that.

She'd managed to obsess over me so much and feel such devotion that the pieces of her orbiting my will-core had formed a separate will-core to her own. I wasn't sure what this meant, but I was very interested to learn. In gratitude for such a wonderful opportunity, and to see what happened, I'd built another true circuit into her second will-core. The second was vastly superior to the first, refined with knowledge from the Conclave perfected by myself. It was second only to my own true circuit, also having will as the core rune but being less balanced in the first circle to compensate for the inadequacies of human will. The result was…less destructive than I'd thought it would be. It worked as if she'd simply gained another true circuit. Success on the first try? That was becoming rarer as what I tried became more complex. I was also learning that every question I answered came with new questions.

An effect I hadn't anticipated was that all of my worshippers recognized her. She'd been a small person in a large city before, but now every single person that worshipped me knew her and held her in extremely high esteem. It made her uncomfortable, but I wasn't sure how to avoid it as I still didn't know why it was happening in the first place. It could have been a reaction to her euphoria in my initial invasion, but she'd remained fairly inconspicuous for a while. I had to search through the memories of my worshippers to learn that they could feel a direct suppression on their souls when she was near. A suppression identical to what they felt when they came across one of my constructs. That was what cemented my opinion that they were the ones generating the suppression, as there was no reason for their will-cores to have a reaction to the constructs. My will was always touching them, there was no sudden concentration around my constructs. They saw them as direct lines to me, though. Now I just needed to figure out why that effect was added to Angie as well.