The Fiend's Creation System

A Month

Julius was sitting on the throne with Eisha on his lap. In the middle of the hall was a very large stone table with a map carved into it.

A castle figure with a ‘Sanctum’ label was located on the west side of the map and it indicated the Fiend’s Santcum’s present location which had shifted far away from their previous location.

There were some other figures as well on the map which Proto was moving around from time to time. Julius had sent out a large number of his homunculi and Fiend Soldiers to scout the Shifting Hallows and he was relaying the information in real-time to Proto who was constantly updating the map.

The shift had occurred a few days ago and Julius was still remapping the Shifting Hallows. All of his previous hunting spots had changed and the Mysantis Swarm’s hive was also shifted far away from his location.

At first, Julius had been building his land outwards, but when the shift happened, a large part of the area he had been developing hadn’t been shifted together with his outcrop so it had all gone to waste. 

Julius had decided to build downwards and turn his Sanctum into a dungeon. He wanted to experiment and see how much of the land around and under his outcrop would be taken with him on the next shift.

The shift was a rather strange phenomenon. Apparently, if there’s a large group of similar species organisms living together, said organisms will be shifted together whenever the shifting happens.

The reason was unclear but Julius wasn’t going to try and find out. The Shifting Hallows had been around for as long as anyone could remember. None of the Eastern Continent’s races inhabited the place because it was too dangerous and the people that went in, never came out.

Now Julius knew why. If he had been living in the Shifting Hallows and had his home shifted periodically every month he would definitely be lost. If it wasn’t because of his map, Julius would have had the misconception that he was still at the northeastern side of the hallows.

The worst part about his current location was that it seemed like they were close to a boneyard. There was bound to be undead spawning there. 

The undead wasn’t limited to just the Western Continent. The Eastern Continent and practically everywhere else had the undead. They spawned anywhere but the only place that had an organized force with a king leading them was the Western Continent’s Undead Legion.

Julius didn’t know how strong the undead in his area was, but he had to be cautious now. Unlike the Mysantis that only came during the night, the undead at the nearby boneyard roamed around as they pleased whether it was day or night.

Naturally, if it was at night, they’d grow more powerful due to their race’s traits but even in the daylight, they were still a threat. He had to be especially careful about the necromancer-type undead such as the Lich and the Banshees that could spawn more undead using fresh corpses and souls.

The Mysantis Swarm was easier to deal with because despite Julius losing a few homunculi during the battle, no harm would come of it since he could just escape. However, if he lost a homunculus to the undead, the corpse left behind would be used to spawn even more undead which was something he didn’t want.

The Banshees who used souls to spawn more banshees were also something Julius wanted to stay away from the most. The homunculi he spawned weren’t without souls. Each one had a soul given to them by the collective consciousness and losing even a small piece was very detrimental to him and the system.

“These undeads, they’re exactly like our counter-force…” Julius mumbled.

“We’ll have to be extra careful when dealing with them,” Eisha spoke up.

“Mhm, we’ll stay clear from them and we’ll only attack if they attack.” Julius thoughtfully said. “We’ll keep a few bird-type mimics around to keep an eye on their movements.”

“Shall I go capture some Desert Hawks today?”

“Sure, but the hunting grounds have shifted to a place far from here. Bring your personal guards out this time along with a few mimics. Just have them devour the monsters and transform on the spot so you can fly home after that.”

“Alright, honey~ I’ll be out for a few days then!” Eisha gave Julius a deep kiss before jumping off his lap. 

He watched his wife leave the hall and focused his attention back on his map.

“We haven’t even finished scouting the full area of the Shifting Hallows and now this happens… what a headache.”

“My Lord, we have reached capacity for the spawners.”

“Already?” 

Julius walked out of the throne room and to a room that had a transparent floor. He looked down and saw the first floor of his Fiend’s Sanctum which was bustling with activity. 

All his homunculi, Fiend Soldiers, and Mimics were moving around busily like worker ants.  

The number of hatcheries he had couldn’t support any more fiends so the Spawners on the lowest level of the dungeon had ceased working. Normally, Julius wouldn’t be able to control such a large force but he found out from the system that he could actually exert two types of control over his fiends. 

He could either act as the overmind that ruled over everyone, controlling each fiend as he would his own limbs or like a hive mind, letting each individual fiend act on their own, giving them their own consciousness and a goal to accomplish.

Right now, Julius was exerting the latter type of control, the hive mind. He assigned higher-ranked Fiends to control the lower-ranked ones while he would only need to control 5 of them.

Those 5 fiends each controlled 10 fiends a rank lower than them and those fiends did the same. The chain just continued downwards until the lowest-ranked fiend within Julius’s forces. He was still connected to each fiend so he’d still be aware of what they were doing without there being too much stress on his mind from having one thousand fiends under his command.

Currently, he couldn’t become the Fiends’ overmind because he was too weak. Controlling all one thousand fiends and more which he will inevitably have in the future was too burdensome for his still developing consciousness. He first needed to integrate the entire Fiend’s collective consciousness with his own but that was not something he could do at the present.

If Julius tried, it would be his consciousness that would integrate with the Fiend’s collective mind and he didn’t want that. He’d surely lose his personality if he did such a thing and that wasn’t something Eisha and him wanted.

Julius still wanted to retain his sense of self so he needed the collective consciousness to integrate with his mind, making him the dominant one, and not the other way around. For now, he was limited to just connecting with the collective consciousness, not controlling it.

The connection worked both ways so there were times when Julius would suddenly find himself moving unconsciously or something like that. This was due to the collective consciousness of the Fiends influencing his actions unknown to his will. 

The system didn’t hide this from him and informed him upfront whenever it took control of his body. Julius was appalled whenever this happened but he was a little relieved that the system wouldn’t do anything that would cause harm to him. 

Most of the time, the system would only override the control of his body when he was met with an unexpected, life-threatening situation. It was the system’s way of preserving Julius who was the progenitor of the fiends.

The fiends down below quickly took notice of their supreme ruler. They all looked up at him and stopped whatever they were doing. Julius connected his mind with the 5 higher-ranked Fiend Soldiers and Mimics. He read their memories before his consciousness began to split and connect with the other fiends who were doing the heavy lifting of the tasks he assigned.

He took account of their progress before disconnecting the link. Proto handed Julius a handkerchief that he used to wipe the blood that flowed down his nose. Splitting his consciousness was rather burdensome on his mind that this was the usual reaction he got whenever he did so. 

He had acquired the [Parallel Thought] skill from the system just a few days ago and he was putting it to good use. This skill was something he needed so that he could put the two types of control he had over his fiends to good use.

There were merits and demerits in both types of control, but for now and with the aid of the [Parallel Thought] skill, he could only use the hive mind-type. As a hive mind, Julius didn’t need to control every single one of his fiends. He only needed to give the higher-ranked ones an objective and they would complete it by coordinating with the fiends under their control.

He could check on their progress by using his [Parallel Thought] skill and individually connecting with the fiends at the same time and hearing their report or directly seeing what they were doing by reading their thoughts and looking through their memories.

Using [Parallel Thought] would always cause him to bleed. At least now, after Julius had gone through quite a bit of training, he didn’t bleed out from all his orifices like he did when he first used the skill.

He still needed to train so that he wouldn’t damage his brain whenever he used it. He could immediately be healed by sleeping inside the Fiend’s Cradle, but he wanted to be able to use the skill without any backlash so he continued to train by deliberately splitting his consciousness manually without the skill’s assistance.

For now, he could manage to manually split his consciousness into 3. It was still far from enough since the system informed him that he had to be able to split it into 10 at the minimum and he should be able to do it at will.

Only if he was able to accomplish that would the backlash of the [Parallel Thought] skill be mitigated by a large degree. To completely be rid of the backlash, Julius needed to do much, much more.

“Expanding outwards isn’t possible so we can only expand downwards… we can’t go any further since we don’t know what the maximum range of the Shifting Hallows’ shift is. We might just be wasting our time just like previously…”

“My Lord, maybe we should look for another location to set up a Sanctum,” Proto suggested.

Julius nodded at Proto’s suggestion.

“I had the same thought as well. It’s the only way if we want to create more hatcheries and spawn more fiends. Lead a team out, Proto, and find a suitable place.”

Proto turned around and left. A few fiends from the large crowd below began moving to the entrance. Without Julius even needing to order, the fiends had already moved on their own.

“Efficiency-wise, I couldn’t ask for a better race to rule over!” Julius chuckled before returning to the throne room.

Down below, the fiends began resuming their activities after he left. He checked up on Eisha’s location on his map before going up to his meditation room.

“Time to cultivate again.”