Chapter 277: Oath of the Magnificent Bastard (Patreon)

Mila

“I am not a good person. I am cold, I am calculating, and I manipulate everyone around me be they friend or foe. But, while my plans are often complicated, my motives are pure.”

These were the words Mila had spoken after killing a couple vile B ranks she and Aalam had captured, and they had helped form her first oath.

Oath of the Magnificent Bastard

You are not a good person, but you are incredibly competent and you live by a code not to betray those on your side

Benefits:

Exceptionally increase the power of disguise and soul category skills

Remarkably increase control over qi, mana, and psyforce

Should you successfully execute a plan without any true betrayal and without breaking any of your personal rules of conduct, there is a high chance of entering into a state of sudden enlightenment

Limitations:

Betraying those you care about or those you’ve given your word to using your real identity will shackle your soul, the greater the betrayal the worse the shackles and the longer they will last

With the completion of the first part of the plan for reviving Diana and raising her, Isaiah, and Aalam to B rank, Mila entered into a state of sudden enlightenment, her true body taking the chance to cultivate in the Enlightenment Zone on Earth while one of her doppelgängers dealt with the aftermath with Isaiah, her main mind uncontrollably going over the various aspects of her plan.

First, her goals.

In order of most important to least, they were to revive Diana, to get Aalam the time and resources he’d require to make it to B rank, and to keep everyone in the Heavenly Soul Universe safe, followed by saving the Alchemist of the Deep Woods and gaining the required resources for everyone else’s advancements as well.

The first goal was simple. They just needed to find a trustworthy individual, powerful enough to make it to the top two in the Universal Tournament but willing to allow Aalam to strip them of their power to the point they regressed all the way back to G rank, to reincarnate with Diana’s soul, then do the nearly impossible task of gaining over half the points in the C rank Universal Tournament. After finding Vanar Tedros, the first requirement was easy to meet, but the second was a lot more work.

The fourth goal, rescuing Aalam’s master, was also simple in the same way, i.e. not very complicated but nearly impossible. After looking through Krysta’s memories, they just had to find a way to cancel 7 contracts which couldn’t be bought out and then pay out 9,763,218,582 A rank universal credits to buy out all the rest.

Four of these contracts which couldn’t be bought out were with relatively weak forces, created when the Alchemist of the Deep Woods herself had been weaker, a simple dose of enhanced charm magic followed by memory manipulation enough to have them disappear like they’d never existed. But the remaining three had been with much more powerful forces, a force directly under one of the Lady of Laws’ subordinate gods, the direct force under the elven goddess War Dance Koraline, and the largest of the human empires, one which worshiped the Primordial Sovereign directly.

The most difficult goals of all, however, were two and three, getting Aalam everything he needed and keeping everyone under the United Federation of Planets safe.

Following her goals, there were the tools and resources Mila’d had access to, and the additional complications they introduced.

Back when they’d all been early D ranks, Earth’s connection with the small other universe had succeeded, raising Earth to A rank and making everyone’s cultivation easier. But, while what later became the Heavenly Soul Universe was simple to conquer, Aalam’s power enough to take in the entirety of the uninhabited universe as it was only roughly seven galaxy clusters large, with only a single B rank planet, it also presented a problem.

The connection between Earth and the Heavenly Soul Universe was only strong enough to allow C ranks through, and the Heavenly Soul Universe’s positioning made it impossible for it to connect with other universes.

This meant the Heavenly Soul Universe could only hide their force up until they were C rank, with anyone who advanced to B rank inside likely to be trapped, and it didn’t provide much in the way of the high rank resources which were required for advancing to C rank and beyond, only the resources on Earth of much use.

More positively, however, they’d had access to the D rank Trial Tower, which Mila and Aalam had been able to enter together three times, getting such things as the complete almost corpse of a powerful B rank Chaos Dragon Aalam had used to somehow allow Isaiah to gain that race’s power on top of his existing Balance and Runic Dragon abilities, some supplementary resources for Aalam’s own C rank race advancement and C rank armaments, and the supplementary resources required for the rather insane plan Aalam had for allowing Diana to be reborn as an incredibly rare type of monster.

This, combined with the resources she and Aalam had found and then usually stolen while visiting backwater planets with their sensory domains activated, had made it relatively easy for everyone from the United Federation of Planets who met the requirements for advancing to C rank to do so, leaving them with nearly a thousand C ranks in their force by the time the C rank Universal Tournament started, several dozen of which had enough talent and age to reach the finals of the C rank Universal Tournament if provided with good artifacts, artifacts which Aalam could create due to the same abundant sources of resources.

And, as usual, when it came to allowing plans for doing the near impossible, Aalam was the key.

Even before Aalam had awakened to it after advancing his race to C rank, it had been obvious his Power of Order racial ability would be utterly ridiculous when paired with his abundance of order category Laws, and, like Nana Xara had guessed, it, combined with his other powers, made him capable of killing low to middle grade A ranks, allowing Mila to safely let him take a few extra risks.

Even more important, however, Aalam had invented three new skills in addition to Ruler’s Domain, two of which Mila had instantly identified as incredibly useful.

Emperor’s Eyes of Analysis, an eye skill Aalam created after he awakened to a third eye line uniqueness of his own, allowed Aalam and Mila to see matter and energy flows at a much, much higher resolution, and, combined with a high grade third eye line uniqueness, it could be merged with the sensory domain from Ruler’s Domain to allow Mila to see the full extent of even divine level runic defenses around things such as the Lord of Twilight Flame’s personal treasure vault.

In addition, when combined with the special effects of the interaction between Mila’s Third Eye Queen uniqueness and her Shadow and Illusion Laws, anything under the effects of stealth or illusion under the divine level could no longer be hidden, sticking out far more than if they were just left in plain sight, allowing Mila to find many hidden caches in A rank territories, such as Thunderstrike Taravan’s contraband.

Meanwhile, Aalam’s second new invented skill, Thirteen Life Legion, was a clone skill which allowed both Mila and Aalam to form up to twelve clones using subsets of their twelve extra mental forges, mana wells, and core containers, each set of which was attuned to one of the twelve elements.

First and foremost, this could enable Aalam to generate his own resources for advancing to B rank by allowing his twelve single element clones to individually participate in the Universal Tournament—something made possible by Mila’s powers to manipulate bonds and the spaces the System couldn’t access in the Steel Swamp Blessed Land.

So long as each of Aalam’s clones made it to at least the fifth round while being members of the United Federation of Planets, it would be possible to reincarnate them as monsters, raise them up to C rank, and then have Aalam reabsorb them using the power of his bloodline to push his race half way up to Divine grade. Then an ungodly amount of pure refined nascent energy, one of the possible maximized rewards for placing first in the Universal Tournament, was enough to push his race over the edge.

And all Mila would need to advance her race along with his was to place in the Universal Tournament’s top four.

Aalam also had his rather insane crafting abilities, which allowed him to make things like the faked artifacts from the Havadim Imperium, and, if he completed all the puzzles in his two copies of Camoran the Spirit Smith’s puzzle books—and the Primordial Sovereign finished all the puzzles in the final puzzle book he’d bought during the last Universal Auction, something Mila’d calculated he’d almost certainly done—each puzzle book would make a shield which could protect the activator from even divine level attacks before teleporting the activator away.

Aalam, however, wasn’t the only one with specialized abilities to build a plan around.

Mila herself had the extremely rare abilities of memory manipulation, faith energy control, and disguise talents which she later learned could even fool gods, all incredibly helpful.

And there were a lot of useful abilities from others in the United Federation of Planets as well.

Javier Garcia, for example, had a skill which allowed him to alter the appearance of others in a very hard to see through way which proved incredibly useful.

The soul signatures of most members of the United Federation of Planets hadn’t been exposed before the Universal Tournament, so, with Javier’s help, it was easy to set most of them up with created identities, almost all of those who awakened skinwalker line uniquenesses from Aalam’s experiments not having to make use of them.

As for Aalam, Isaiah, and Irena, all of who’d had their soul signatures exposed, Aalam and Isaiah both gained an Empyrean grade version of the skill Polymorph upon advancing to C rank, which could allow them to fool the passive scanning of even gods, so they were fine as long as they avoided gods and A ranks before they were contestants in the Universal Tournament, when cultivators of such power could no longer actively scan them without major repercussions. As for Mila’s grandmother, she’d been one of the ones to awaken to a skinwalker line uniqueness, so she’d taken on the identity of a dying woman and fulfilled the cultivator’s last wish to get revenge for herself and her daughter.

Meanwhile, Mila’s grandfather had gained a skill which allowed him to slowly integrate with the soul signature mask created by his own skinwalker line uniqueness, so he could safely take on longer term identities of those in even divine level forces, just like Mila.

Altogether, Mila had had a lot of tools at her disposal, so she’d even had enough wiggle room to add side goals to her plan.

First, Isaiah reasonably wanted to find and then protect his brother, something which proved much more difficult than they’d expected given Raven had been accepted into a divine level force as a slave and then sold to an evil merchant to be used as an ingredient, but, unlike with Mila’s other side goals, they were at least only dealing with juniors from a divine force, unlikely to anger the elders, so this side goal had been relatively simple.

Second, for the race Aalam wanted Diana to choose after her monster tutorial, a powerful external resource known as a Semi-Deified Faith Gathering Stone was required, and the core component of such a resource was a simpler resource known as a Faith Gathering Stone, a special rock which allowed for easier gathering of faith energy.

Such resources, which could help A ranks advance to divinity, were incredibly rare, and incredibly controlled, most in the hands of divine factions, so, when Mila had found one inside Thunderstrike Taravan’s special copy of ‘Ms. Horval’s Guide to Fungi and The Dissolving of Corpses’, she’d added the side goal of gaining the resource from the A rank, Vanar Tedros’s revenge a nice additional side benefit.

Third, there were the Single Element Spirit Crystals grown and processed by the divine level force of one of the independent gods known as the Stalwart Gladiator which were only ever sold through the main forces under the Prime Material’s three merchant gods, including the Quintessence Merchant Union under Merchant God Perival, where Yorick Strong was competing to become the head. These crystals were essential to the formation of the ideal races Aalam wanted for his reincarnated clones, so Mila’d had her grandfather take on Yorick Strong’s identity and disappear a few hundred years after selling all the raw Single Element Spirit Crystals he could get his hands on to her.

Then, finally, the biggest side goal Mila’d added was to help find a new inaccessible base for the United Federation of Planets.

In the process of doing everything required for the C rank Universal Tournament, it was unavoidable to not have the Heavenly Soul Universe discovered, and this meant it was only a matter of time before Earth’s location was uncovered as well. Meanwhile, the Heavenly Soul Universe, with its stablest possible portal only allowing up to C ranks to pass through, couldn’t enable the United Federation of Planets to grow. So the United Federation of Planets needed a new side universe, one where the max possible stable portal was B rank. But Mila had no idea how many of these other universes there were or who controlled them, so what she really needed was a multiverse map. And the easiest multiverse map she could access, one which she could be sure would give her many options, was in the personal treasure vault of the Lord of Twilight Flame, a vault where all she’d need for access was to have her own body emanate the divine aura of the famously wrathful god.