Molting the Mortal Coil

With the Scyzur base captured, Sage used their knowledge to find other Scyzur bases. He didn’t feel like wasting his time slowly taking down everyone in the base this time. Instead he used one of the weaker Scyzur and convinced him that he needed to have a private conversation with one of the important Scyzur in the base. With the suggestion implanted, Sage’s Scyzur met up with the other Scyzur and made friends with them. The rat man had completely forgotten that he carried a golden ring in his pocket and schmoozed with his people. After a few days he managed to befriend one of them and they had a drink in the important Scyzur’s tent. At that point, Sage hopped out and hypnotized him.

From that ratman, Sage learned who was in charge of the base and the Universe Ring was passed over. The new Scyzur repeated the process to get some alone time with the boss of this base and Sage took control of the boss after exhibiting his full strength.

Sage was a little annoyed that this method took about the same amount of time as his original one, but on the plus side he only had to act a few times. The rest of the few weeks were spent training while a Scyzur did all the other work for him. With the boss under his control, Sage got the location of all the Psionic Crystal, Astral Silver, Indigo Quartz, and Lunarstone deposits that this Scyzur group knew of. Even better, he had the boss go and contact the other groups they knew of. With the tribe chief under his control, it was far easier to get some alone time with the chiefs of other tribes and Sage also hypnotized them.

From the information he gathered, Sage gained the location of dozens of mines. Along the way, he also learned a bit about the Scyzur. They were from another world that had the Astral Realm spilled into it many many generations ago. Over time they learned to make use of their own shattered world and eventually they even began to thrive. The groups operating on this planet were actually their version of prospectors. They were so experienced with the Astral Realm that they could track where it spilled over to and then send their people there to mine the resources it created. Every decade they would be able to reconnect with their homeworld and send back the spoils of their labor to benefit their home tribes.

Sage found them to be quite brave for traveling to another world, but at the same time they were here in conflict with what he considered to be other humans. Even if he didn’t have any other connection with them, they were still of the same race as him. So, he didn’t feel so bad when he robbed them all blind. Taking away their resources would put them in a more difficult position against the two human powers, but that wasn’t his problem. While he was training he couldn’t help but ponder on this topic as it not only applied to these Scyzur but to the Demonic Beasts that had human forms. Their level of intelligence had reached a level that made them comparable to humans.

Thinking it over, Sage realized he had a slight bias, but at the same time that racial bias was completely trumped by relationship. There were many humans he would happily kill, while the loss of King had hit him hard. He realized that his bias was not as extreme as he thought. It was especially apparent in his further activities in this world. If he was truly so pro-human then he would have done far more than just take resources from the Scyzur. He had captured most of the first tribe he ran into, but for the others he merely used them to get the information he needed. Some of them died along the way, but those were very much exceptions and not the norm. Sometimes the Blacksilver Pawns couldn’t control their strength properly, and other times the rat men kept firing frantically when the Blacksilver Pawns were close to their own allies and ended up killing their friends with friendly fire in their desperation.

After six months of ‘prospecting’, Sage finally mastered the Ego Forge Technique. Then he bribed Guan Zhenyan with a few thousand Psionic Crystals and got some tips, testing it out on some of the more minor magical tools he had collected over the years. The first few attempts ruined some Red Crane Messages and a Messenger Flying Sword. Then after getting the hang of it, he altered a generic plate for the Prospector’s Pendulum so it could help him track down Psionic Crystals. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to work very well on crystals. It pointed towards anyone who had absorbed one, and if it was within a few tens of miles of an Astral Realm Fragment it just went haywire. After a few more attempts he gave up and tried to use it on the other valuable materials.

The Indigo Quartz and Lunarstones were also not easy to find, which is what led to Sage’s judgement that it wasn’t a great device to use with crystalline minerals. On the plus side, it worked quite wonderfully finding deposits of Astral Silver. Sage found such large deposits of it that he stopped looking. He couldn’t clear the whole mine even if he went all out for two years straight.

With his better understanding of the Ego Forge Technique, Sage turned it inward and focused upon the little seed-like magical tool that was sitting inside his Spiritual Sea. The device couldn’t record anything going on inside his body, but it was watching everything that was happening on the outside. Sage had to modify the Memory Seed to edit out the Universe Ring and he also wanted to modify the quantities that it recorded him collecting. He didn’t want to hand over all the Astral Realm Fragments he was gathering, and he decided not to let the Thundercloud Sect know about the Shard Rifles.

He carefully experimented and soon found the knack for it, but it certainly wasn’t easy. If operating a Memory Altar to edit a Memory Sphere was like using digital editing software, then reforging the Memory Seed with Ego Forge was like making a scrapbook. It was many times slower and more difficult. Sage carefully edited his memories, replacing the times in the Universe Ring with him walking into a camouflaged tent and cultivating. Then he changed it so that the Scyzur’s Shard Rifles disintegrated whenever they died. The time he infiltrated the Hexacrats and went on a mission with them, he changed the Shard Rifle into one of the Gauss Rifles that the Hexacrats could build. Sage had captured a few of them during the last few months. They were present in Scyzur treasuries, which Sage had raided after he had a Tribe Chief under his influence. All Sage had to do was hypnotize the Chief to have the urge to check on his tribe’s treasury. Once Sage was led to the right location he could use his many tricks to take what he wanted and then sneak back out again.

Sage wanted to remove the times he took his true form, the usage of the Blacksilver Pawns and even his possession of Heavenly Materials. After thinking about it for a while, he finally decided to leave them in. If the Memory Seed had recordings of him showing off some of his greatest trump cards, then the Thundercloud Sect would be far less suspicious of him. Some of his abilities would surely be looked down upon by most, so it would become a card they could use to threaten his reputation. With that assurance, they would be more likely to trust him in the future. His beast form had already been revealed when he was on the run, so anyone who really wanted to investigate him could likely find the information anyway.

If he let them feel like they already had control of him, then they wouldn’t need to create their own real leverage.