The Power of Ten: Book One: Sama Rantha, and Book Two: The Far Future

Damn thing was literally the size of a mountain. The ornate, glowing crystal pyramid fancifully illustrated in so many books and things across the galaxy was less than a bottlecap on a beer bottle to the actual depth and power of the Crystal Throne.

The Emperor had driven the thing down, down, down, not up. If I was right, He’d actually converted the entirety of Mount Everest into the Throne, and from there He’d been powering it up with the souls of the dead of all of Tellus for thousands of years. He’d been plugging all the undead psions brought to Him from all over the galaxy who had died serving Him into it, tapping their psionic power and might as batteries and generators forever.

I could sense the ripples of Nimbuses being released, with no real sense of coordination, hundreds of thousands going off at every second, manipulating and guiding the massive flow of psychic power being downloaded into the Throne, also at every second.

The undead would be shifting in state between Meditation and Focusing constantly. Meditate, regain power, dump power into the Throne save for 1 PP, and then spend all the time Focusing. Once Renewal passed, they would approach their allotted time, Meditate again, and repeat the process.

They were definitely on very strict schedules of dumping PSP, with Meditation times figured down to seconds, and as undead, they would not find this tedious, nor would they rebel against it.

They were doomed to remain here until their corpses fell apart and their spirits could no longer Animate them, at which time the Throne would draw them inside to become part of the massive spiritual battery of undead within.

This thing represented power in its biggest and most absolute form. If all these undead let loose a Nimbus at the same time, they’d blow out the minds of any unprotected living creature upon a planet. They could repeat that blow endlessly.

With the spirits pushing it, and if they had a locus, they could push that power out across the galaxy, and they had, wiping out multiple planets one after another, who could literally do nothing to stop them.

The light was extremely bright and powerful to me in my Wraithform state, but to a living person it likely would have proven to be ghostly and full of the pain, fear, and hate the trapped souls were being subjected to. Be that as it may, I had things to do.

I could move at full speed and remain hidden, despite the many, many, MANY layers and levels of scanners, watchers, constructs, and devices covering the place in so many eyes.

Ethereal movement is mostly a function of willpower, and I had plenty of that to go around. The local spirits could not possibly hold a candle to me as I circled the mountain that was the Crystal Throne, all those chambers carved into it and out of it, where the corpses of sacrificed psions gave their power to the Emperor, and I formed a layout of it in my mind.

I didn’t have a Markspace Connection right now. This close to the Emperor, getting that amount of telepathic activity? No, no way were we risking it. I was on my own here all the way, except for Chalice.

But that was cool. This sort of thing was why I had clawed my way up to Twenty over literally mountains of dead, stamping my existence on Reality and letting it know I could do impossible shit like this.

I plotted out the mountain, reading the psionic flows and channels through it with my hair. I was nothing more than ethereal mist to the slaved spectres and ghosts standing guard here as I closed in on the Throne, and upchucked the first crystal I had to place.

Finding out exactly what the Crystal Throne was made of had required some data-diving only the top five Ranthas and Tech-Psions working with us had dared attempt. We (I was one of them) had to get access to information feeds leading to the Palace, and break into material requisitions that were repeated for thousands of years, so droll and beneath notice as to be routine, hiding in plain sight.

The Crystal Throne, to contain the dead and expand its reach, had to keep growing, too.

We had found the shipments of ‘minerals’, the ships they were coming from, and broken into one of them while it was in transit, backlogging its travel path while we took samples of its loads, and over the course of thirty years figured out where everything came from.

What and how the Emperor combined these Elements of Time, Space, Death, Dream, Ether, Mind, Fate, and Earth to make the substance of the Crystal Throne was something we might have been able to replicate if we had a sample, but in truth, we didn’t need to.

After all, it wasn’t like we were going to build one of our own. The production of those Elements, and the places where they came from, made that literally impossible for living things to do.

We could shut them down, of course, but we had not done so, as that would have been tipping our hands, and really, at this point, what did it matter if the Throne grew a couple feet higher?

Nope, all we really wanted to know is what it looked like, and then get close enough to do our own thing, our own way.

Put in enough Dream and Death to replicate the ghostly light, put in the Earth to match the resonance. Put in enough Space to hide what was going on within. Put in enough Mind to charge the thing up.

And then load it all up with Mass, Force, Light, and Life and maybe a spark of Vivus, and wait for it all to go boom.

I vomited up the first Thronebreaker Crystal, and set it in place.

I had scribed biorunes onto my mouth, throat, and stomach a long, long time ago, making them the equivalent of an internal Masspack, and a pretty high-order one. I could swallow something down that was bigger than I was, and digest it if I needed to, with some of the most powerful gastric juices that could exist anywhere.

Or, I could simply eat hundreds of incredibly powerful, perfect crystals designed to tear down the Crystal Throne, shut down all my internal acid production, and tote them around inside of me, using my Vajra to bring them up on command.

The Throne had an ethereal existence, so I had no problem placing the crystal where it needed to go. As soon as I let go of it, the Wraithform effect was cancelled, it returned to corporeality, and adhered to the Throne.

Draining PP from the Throne would have been a no-no. That flow of power had to be known to a single digit, and any sudden lowering of it, however small, would be noticed, tracked, and then everything would go bell-shaped.

But Nimbus releases? There was no way to stratify them, except with the law of large numbers. Even now I could feel irregularities from the release of them, as sometimes they harmonized, and sometimes they didn’t, drawing more and less power and synchronizing more and less as they did so.

Over time, it all evened out, but what it meant was that draining power from the Nimbus releases was not something that would raise any eyebrows. The sheer amount of energy running through here would totally overwhelm any amount we were draining off, and statistically, if the crystals did nothing more than add .001% to the synchronization rate of the Nimbuses, it would look like the Nimbuses were entering an upswing, not that power was being drained off.

So, naturally, we went with a target of .002.

From the huge Masspack that was my stomach, I upchucked Thronebreaker Crystal after Crystal, and began to place them around the Throne.

Resonance grew between them, synchronizing across the surging of the Nimbus field, another vibration lost in the tiny waves of greater harmony of the stronger tides about them. The monitoring devices would notice a statistical upswing, a minor confluence of effect which would neither help nor hinder operations, but would certainly disguise the fact that there were things charging up on the surface of the Throne.

The albedo and crystal refraction of what I was putting in place matched up with the Throne precisely, the light it glowed with was the same. Unless the undead watching here had memorized the surface of a square acre or more of jagged crystalline cover, there was literally nothing to see... and they’d have to actually feel the surface to tell it was there, given how I was placing them, and none of the ghosts or spectres seemed to have the slightest inclination to get within twenty yards of the Throne, lest they be drawn within it accidentally.

The biggest wild card had been... how was I going to get the time to actually do all of this? If I had managed to enter corporeally... at some point something would go wrong, the sentries would sense something, send out an alarm, and the fecal matter would hit the ambulatory rotator.

A Dawnstopped Wraithform was an Elixir at IX. Only the Ruk High Priest of the Grimshield, in the entire galaxy, had the power to Cast such a thing. Only a Null who could lock the magic inside their Vajra could drink it without gathering the Warp to them.

I had sucked it down less than a minute after my Renewal. I had just a breath shy of twenty-four hours of incorporeality to do what I needed to do.

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I had plotted the whole pattern out in my mind after examining the Throne, a combined Psicraft/Spellcraft check of 50 or so. I had to back this up with Stealth checks to remain unseen, Perception checks to locate the perfect locations within my (not nearly large enough) margins of error, and Sleight of Hand checks to put them into place both perfectly and without drawing the attention of the sentries.

I circled around the mountain that was the Throne, placing Crystals, spacing them out, fine-tuning the Rune Pattern in my head. I bypassed streams of doomed souls being drawn within, sliding by millions of undead Beacon psions slaving away for the Emperor, setting the Crystals wrought only by Fifteen-plus Craftsmen at QL 45, each gone over at least a dozen times by their peers and overseers to make sure they were all suitable.

We’d made twice as many as this. I only had the best of the best of them. Compared to what the Emperor had spent on his Crystal Throne, it truly wasn’t much, and even the Ruk agreed that the cost was very, very minor in comparison to the devastation it would inflict on Him.

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He was less than a hundred meters above me when I placed the final Thronebreaker. His Presence radiated through the Throne, grabbing the power, guiding it here and there in millisecond surges of energy and purpose, throwing His Psight across time and space to find a way through, patiently sifting and sending instructions here, there, and everywhere, eking out the minor points that would turn battles, or at least cost His enemies more.

I finished up with about an hour left on my Wraithform. Coincidentally, there was just about an hour left before this last stone charged up.

Without this last stone, the entire Pattern of Thronebreaker Stones meant nothing, just like pebbles on the beach.

With this last stone, well, things were going to go sideways for His Bones pretty fast.

Thus, I had to stay there, my hair out and covering that stone with my Null as it charged up.

Because I knew what I was looking for, I was able to sense the vibration within the tides and waves of the Nimbuses going off, the incidental synchronization hiding and making irrelevant the slight weakening present, as if the one was trading off the other. Even if the Emperor noticed it, it was within statistical variance, and the harmonic power made it irrelevant. It was like instead of rolling so many 7’s, you were rolling 6’s, but fewer 2’s, 3’s, and 4’s, also. The ocean was smaller, but the waves were bigger...

There was no reaction from above, which would be clear if He devoted even a fraction of attention to attempting to discern something different going on. His prescience was focused far, far away, and there was nothing around and below Him to indicate that it was all about to go very, very bad.

The Thronebreaker Keystone cycled to full, and I withdrew my Null.