The Fiend's Creation System

Interesting Development 2

Julius returned to the Main Sanctum and entered his castle. The previous outcrop had been remodeled into his castle while underneath that was his Fiend’s Sanctum.

From the outside, it only looked like this castle was all that was of Julius’s kingdom, but underneath it was a complex 8-floor dungeon, each floor filled with homunculi working nonstop around the clock.

Every floor of the sanctum had a specific role assigned to it. The first floor was the farm, the fertile layer of the dungeon where all of the plasm-mutated crops and livestock were being raised as food for his fiends.

Naturally, the fiends thrived on the battlefield as devouring other creatures was their main way to sustain themselves. However, Julius wasn’t a fool that would cause and induce conflict wherever he went just so he could provide food for his fiends.

It wouldn’t be enough because one day, there wouldn’t be any more things to eat once he plunged the entire world into chaos and devoured everything. Thankfully, the fiends could eat normally just like every other creature except that the food they ate needed to be mutated by the fiend’s plasm. 

The first underground floor was the largest floor of the dungeon since it had large fields of mutated crops and animals in it.

The second floor was a bit smaller. This floor was the armory where all of the armor and weapons Julius acquired through trading with the elves, dwarves, and humans were stored.

His fiends didn’t need weapons, but they could use armor. An extra layer of protection for any of Julius’s soldiers was always welcomed. Of course, they had to be tailored to the body structure of his fiends but the dwarves took care of that.

Only the homunculi and mimics needed the weapons stored on this floor since the Fiend Soldiers and their betters didn’t need such things when their bodies were their weapons.

Julius thought that he should also learn how to wield a few more weapons since his new form had 2 extra pairs of arms, totaling 6 in all now. It’d be a shame if he didn’t use his other 4 arms.

Naturally, his original pair would already be wielding the bow and arrow. Sammael was a Holy Knight so Julius intended for him to be his instructor in sword-wielding once he was reborn.

Queen Yvette used the greatsword just like Eisha and apparently, the two women hit it off pretty well during the time Eisha was working as his proxy, and according to his wife, she was actually learning from Yvette whenever they met up and had free time from their alliance business.

It was good that she found a teacher because brute strength, or strength without skill, wasn’t really all that reliable, especially in the long run. Strength with skill was what separated amateurs and experts on the battlefield and that’s what Julius wanted Eisha to be, an expert, and not some amateur swinging around a slab of steel that could also turn out to be a potential hazard not only for herself but also her allies.

Now, things like this couldn’t be settled with just a quick night in bed. These skills could only be acquired through strict and disciplined training, something both he and his wife weren’t foreigners to.

They had their fair share of combat training back when they were growing up which was why when they were out on the battlefield in their [Metamorphosis] form, they didn’t just throw around their weight like 2 children.

The next floor which was the third floor was the training floor and it wasn’t actually a necessary area to have because no one apart from the hero units would ever need to use this place but it was always good to have one just in case.

The fourth floor was the spawning area, the location where all of the fiend creation constructs were built, the fifth floor was the hatchery, the sixth was the food storage as well as where the reservoir was located, and the seventh floor was the evolution floor.

Finally, the last floor, the eighth floor, was the ‘graveyard’. The place where Julius stored all of the corpses that he and his fiends acquired through battle that was worthy of being kept and preserved.

This place was actually the most important because these corpses would be used by his fiends that showed remarkable performance as a quick and easy ticket towards their first unique evolution.

Gaining abilities and strength, Julius’s fiends could either struggle and do this by themselves, or take the easy way by acquiring it from another person, another dead person.

ArchBishop Tallos and a few other Holy Light Church soldiers had their corpses preserved here on this floor so that they could be used later by his fiends. 

However, Julius wasn’t going to be heading towards his dungeon. Instead, he would be going to the tallest spire in his castle because that was where his Fiend’s Nucleus was located.

He could have placed it somewhere more secluded and safe but for whatever reason, the system wanted him to build it at the highest but most secure place he could build it on.

Obviously, being at the highest point of the castle where it was exposed to the elements and perhaps the flying creatures of the Shifting Hallows were not the most secure place but Julius had placed some defenses around the castle so it was pretty secure, so to say.

“Zweit, go get some rest. I’ll take over.”

Julius’s clone who was ‘sleeping’ inside the capsule of the Nucleus quickly rose into the air and nodded towards him before quietly floating away with its eyes closed. 

Zweit couldn’t talk or walk because most of the functions of this clone had been redirected towards enhancing the capacity and functions of its brain. It had no sense of touch or taste, it was blind, mute, and emotionless with the only cognitive function it had by default was the ability to hear.

It could transform its body similar to Proto and since it had that ability, Zweit was able to constantly swap out which cognitive ability it wanted to use at any given time though he could only use one at a time with hearing being the default option. 

Whenever Zweit was using the Nucleus, he would always have his cognitive function set to default but when he was eating, his sense of taste was turned on instead. 

Basically, Zweit was able to readjust his senses according to what he needed in any given situation so when he needed to talk, he activated his voice, though he never needed it because he would always communicate using telepathy, a skill he gained thanks to the enhanced functions of his brain.

Zweit couldn’t walk but thanks to his powerful mind, he used telekinesis to move around instead. His main form of attacking was psychic shockwaves and direct mental attacks to an opponent as well as his telekinesis.

Once Julius saw off Zweit, he entered the Nucleus and connected his mind to it. Once the connection was established, Julius was immediately able to feel the thoughts of every one of his fiends pour into his brain.

The connections were like numerous threads connected directly to his brain, at the end of each thread was the mind of another fiend. Just ‘tapping’ on one of these threads allowed Julius to quickly enter that fiend’s mind and control them.

Today, he wasn’t going to be doing that. First off, he was going to maintain the fine-tuned behaviors of his mimic spies since that took precedence. A large portion of his mental capacity was used up for this before he began looking through the information those mimics had acquired on their missions.

Most of the things he filtered through were rather useless but since there was a large amount of information to go through, Julius decided to leave a different portion of his brain to handle that for now.

He looked at the overall progress of his fiends’ development and the numerous working homunculi who was here in the Main Sanctum, at the Arachne Sanctum, and the ones that were abroad before he began spying on his wife who was still in the middle of her training after he saw that everything else was in order.

Ever since her evolution into a Matriarch and his evolution after hitting level 3, he had, for some reason, been growing more and more possessive and obsessed with his wife. Though he never showed it and tried to reel in that desire because he felt that it was a bit corruptive.

“Oh god… what am I doing? We just separated a few hours ago…”

Spying on his wife wasn’t going to do him any good because his sense of time inside the Nucleus was amplified to 100 times the speed it was normally. He could spend 100 hours watching his wife right now but only 1 hour or even just a second would have passed outside the Nucleus.

“Damn, I’m slowly becoming more possessive…”

Julius sighed and went to look at his other fiends. Aria was currently in a battle against the Mysantis Swarm, an enemy that Julius didn’t think he would be seeing so soon. However, unlike the first time he clashed with them, this time was different.

The Mysantis were the ones being chopped up while Aria and his fiends were cruising through their rank, reaping the life of every Mysantis insect that stood in their way like they were harvesting wheat.

Speaking of harvesting wheat…

“It’s almost that time, right?”

Julius swiftly switched his perspective and saw the large mutated wheat fields on his dungeon’s first floor and noticed that harvest day was close. Thanks to the plasm mutating the crops, they had enhanced growth so that every month his fiends would be able to harvest them.

In the Nucleus, Julius was able to see and process so many things in parallel that to an ordinary person, his thought process would be more like an unintelligible and random mess of things.

While looking through so many things at once, Julius suddenly found something interesting from one of the mimics that had been able to get themselves in one of Harrdigor’s largest criminal organizations.

“A demon race’s vessel? And it’s not just an ordinary one at that!”

The vessel Julius saw through the eyes of the mimic was completely black in color and had nothing else noteworthy about it except the few demons who were disembarking. The ship was docked at an underground port located on an island not too far off from the mainland but the fact that there were humans working together with the demons whom they despised so much was rather ironic.

“Interesting… humans who are in league with the demons...I guess that’s not too surprising but since they’re here, does this mean that the demons are planning to invade soon?”

This was a nice piece of information but Julius wondered what he could do with this knowledge.