The demonic city I had just conquered had once housed over two thousand demons. Now it was completely depopulated. I wasn't the sort to let good souls, or rather evil ones, go to waste. I rose a hand into the air above me and without uttering a single word I silently began to pull the remaining fragments of demonic souls that lingered in the city to me.
Soul energy was invisible to mortals and even to outsiders, but it wasn't invisible to me. Not anymore at least. As I began to pull soul fragments towards my outstretched hand, I began to see purple lines appear in the air around my hand. Soul fragments, the tiny chunks of souls left over when an extraplanar entity dies in the dimension of its birth were flowing into my hand. As they were I began to utilize another power.
I possessed a number of nasty abilities that were tied specifically to theft. I could steal essentially anything from a target that I wanted, and today, atop the ruins of the depopulated city, what I want to steal were memories. As soul fragments flowed into me I began to steal their memories. And in doing so I swiftly began to learn.
One of my greatest abilities was my ability to learn. I possessed a number of ways to learn, and one of my personal favorites was when I learned at the expense of my enemies. In the moments after I began to drain knowledge from the remains of my enemies I felt an incredible amount of information begin to flood my senses.
I was using "Greater Drain" on what was left of my enemies. As I did I ignored their class-levels and focused specifically on stealing everything they had ever learned. I was a gluttonous parasite, feeding on the lived experiences of others. Every memory of every sensation each member of the horde of demons had locked away in their minds were now being recalled and experienced by me, and it was a lot to take in.
I experienced every sin even the lowliest member of the city committed. Every murder, every instance of adultery, every lie, every threat whispered, it all hit me at once. It was a lot, but it was also good. I closed my eyes and shivered in delight. I was also experiencing the taste of every mortal they devoured, and the sensations of every time they had sex.
The collective weight of every memory, thought, and secret, possessed by over two thousands demons, many of whom were many millennia old, was immense. But it also wasn't enough for my mind. The more I learned the more knowledge I wanted. The more sin I got to live through, the more sin I wanted to inflict.
I witnessed vivid memories of cities, regions, countries, and even planets brought to ruin by the machinations of clever demons, ones whose intelligence apparently dwarfed Agustino's. Demons who had succeeded in their goals. One day I planned to make them my servants as well.
I acquired memories of the oldest demons I had slain interacting with actual demon lords, all of whom were unique beings with devastating powers, and I even had a few memories of demons seeing archon queens when they invaded good-aligned plains that I had yet to learn anything about. I saw demon-lords with powers over things like darkness and war, and I saw a horde of demons clash with an archon-queen who was clad in armor that radiated holy light. The archon-queen was a beautiful woman with silver hair and colorless eyes who flew on dragon-like wings.
After a few moments, seconds after I absorbed the last soul fragment, I finished acquiring the last memory, last thought, and last secret of the final demon I had killed, I opened my eyes again. I felt... different, compared to how I felt before I began to absorb their memories.
The oldest demons who had been in the city were over three quarters of a million years old. The youngest had still been several thousand years old. More than three hundred of the two thousand plus demons were old enough to remember the end of the mythic age, and a portion of my mind fixated on their knowledge.
I mulled over that amazing reality, that such chaotic and evil entities could survive so long, while I summoned a loyal servant to my side. I sent my most loyal lieutenant a mental message calling her to my side, along with granting her permission to move through my shadow. A second later I shivered as I felt a creature pull herself up out of the ground behind me. She grunted as she did so, annoyed at having to exert so much effort.
I silently grabbed her using telekinesis and lifted her out of my shadow, before gently placing her down next to me. Without even glancing at her I smiled and greeted her with a bit of warmth.
"Hello Sombra. How are you?" I asked, my voice filling her mind and causing a healthy rush of shadowy, demonic blood to flood her cheeks. And elsewhere. Sombra shivered and momentarily bit her lips before gathering herself enough to respond to me.
"Hello master. I am good. Thank you for calling me over to your side." She said, speaking softly. She looked different.
Sombra was a praereptor demoness. She was a demon of envy and shadows, and was the very first demon I had ever brought over to my side. She was also the first incorporeal creature I had ever given a form too.
The shadowy demoness was given the form of a heart-achingly beautiful drider woman, just without the spider lower half that driders were known for. And at the moment she was wearing clothes, but she wasn't wearing a top. Her dark breasts, including fully hardened, diamond-like nipples, were exposed to the damp air of the demonic swamp. She was wearing pants, and shoes, but the demoness did not like shirts or other clothes that covered the top half of her body and so she didn't wear them.
She had blemishless skin and was always happy to flaunt her body, given to her by the master she very literally worshiped and served. She wanted to inspire envy in those she felt were lesser beings, and that was everyone but me.
The demoness was wearing makeup. She had applied a shade of lipstick to her full lips and when she smiled her darkened lips were extra desirable. As a creature of lust I was incapable of being truly distracted by lust, but even I had to admit that Sombra, whose body was modelled after the first creature I had ever been attracted too, was almost distractingly attractive to me at the moment. That said I calmly refocused and spoke once again to the demoness.
"I am happy to see you, little one." I told her, causing her to smile radiantly at me, even as her scarlet eyes widened in shock at my words.
"Master, do you have need of my power?" She asked, assuming I wanted her by my side because of her utility. I shook my head at her question before responding with words.
"Sombra... I am the source of your power, why do you think I would need you for your power?" I asked curiously. I was a creature of potentially infinite power, and to date the only creature I had met who could challenge me was a vestige, an almost undead remnant of another deity's power that comes into existence when a god perishes. I chuckled after asking her my question and began to speak again.
"I have called you here to be by my side. Nothing more... Nothing less." I informed the shadow demoness. These words brought a smile to her face. And then she began to study her surroundings. I watched as she did this, while mentally ordering the infested pair of demons I had seized control of to stay away from her.
Upon seeing her the demons had been filled with an urge to infect her with the spores I had infected them with and thus subsume her will. My spores were in all likelihood my most dangerous power, as they could infect anyone and anything, even the undead and extraplanar entities. And what's more is that the spores that infested people were filled with a powerful urge to spread spores to most lifeforms that weren't also infested.
"Althos... Spread us!" A voice whispered in my head. It was a friendly voice, and judging from the tone of the whisper it appeared to believe that subsuming more creatures into the super hivemind it and I ran was doing something kind. I gritted my teeth, and sent a mental message right back to the creature who had spoken to me.
"Not to her." I whispered, sending a message back to the bizarre, mind-subsuming entity known as the subdomain of fungi. The creature was one of the subdomains I ignored more than others, as the entity had a strange fixation with absorbing entities into the interplanetary and interdimensional hivemind that was mental network of minds linked by my parasitic spore power.
The fungal subdomain and I commanded the super hivemind created by my "parasitic spore" power. To date I had only really used this particular power on a few demons and on a test world that I was willing to wish my more apocalyptic powers on. I wasn't eager to spread it rampantly throughout the Heart of Darkness. Maybe someday, but not now. Not yet.
I heard an annoyed sound within my mind, but for now I chose to ignore it. That said, I did offer the subdomain something of a consolation prize. I quietly spoke to specific members of the fungal hivemind I was tied too, the inhabitants of the ruined test world I had taken over, and I ordered them to infest other creatures. My absolute empathy power picked up the shallow surge of excitement felt by the fungal subdomain, and I mentally sighed.
For now I had to content myself with this. The truth was that a small part of me was happy about this as it meant that soon I'd be able to acquire the second tier of influence over the fungal subdomain, since at the moment even if I wanted I couldn't acquire the second tier of influence over the subdomain. I needed to infect more creatures with parasitic spores to be able to do that, I just didn't want to subsume all of the Heart of Darkness.
My powers over spores were fascinating but also frightening. They were devastating powers which could allow me to infect a single person with a parasitic spore and decimate a city, or take existing fungi and transform them into beings of considerable power. If I wanted too I could easily take over damp caves that tended to be the homes of thousands of fungal lifeforms. Eventually I would do this, but for now I worked to focus on my present situation. I needed to tackle challenges one at a time.
I closed my eyes and began to do something I had never done before: I began to use higher tier necromantic magic. I focused and gathered the dreadful unlife energies which infused the undead and allowed them to come to unlife.
All around me the temperature of the swamp began to drop. I was gathering and generating immense amounts of necromantic power, and there was a cruel smile on my face as I did so. I teleported myself and my servants, the infested and the uninfested alike, down to the sickly waters of the swamp. This was easy for me to do, especially with my enhanced powers over conjuration and alteration.
As my servants visibly reacted to the abrupt change of location, I began to gather all of the bodies that my violent conquest of the city had created. With the exceptions of the infested demons I had let there be any survivors in this city, and as I began to teleport bodies from their final resting places to the murky water at my feet they began to pile up.
Over the course of the next few minutes as I gathered power and activated abilities, both old and new, I created a mountain of corpses. The mountain before me featured a diverse assortment of demons, who I could now create from nothing thanks to the synergistic powers I had. And what was even better was my ability to make this dead horde into an undead horde.
When the final corpse appeared atop the mountain of bodies I had gathered, I rose a single hand and flooded all of the corpses with powerful unlife energy. I watched corpses begin to twitch as unlife energy infused them, and I flooded some of the bodies with powerful souls I created to turn into undead beings such as "death-kings", "liches", and even dreadful "flesh-titans".
The swamp was now a macabre location. The god who conquered the demonic city did so through a bloody genocide of the city's inhabitants, and in doing so he created an abundance of bodies for his powers to be used on.
The bodies were piled high and thanks to the funk of the swamp they were difficult to smell, for the time being anyway. The god himself was busy watching as the first of them to resurrect, banshees and other simpler beings, and because of that he didn't notice the powerful pungency of the swamp.
The god's power was illuminating the swamp and filling it with an eerie, icy blue tint. The blue color was the power of unlife that was so abundant in the swamp it was directly, physically visible. It also chilled the air, causing the swamp to begin to freeze in the areas close to the mountain of corpses the god had created.
Althos' powers allowed him to raise up female demons in the form of banshees. These women had unsettlingly beautiful appearances and phased through the mountains of bodies that surrounded their corpses so that they could greet their creator.
They bowed before their master and smiled at him, their new souls now suffused with both his necromantic power and the intoxicating effects of being in his presence. They had incorporeal forms and glowed with the same fel power that their murdered reanimated them with.
Other undead also began to arise, slowly. Death-kings, potent and corporeal undead who in unlife tend to be fanatical servants of their creators and in the ancient past were infamous for being loyal war-priests devoted to gods of necromancy and death, began to arise and push bodies off of themselves.
Flesh-titans, horrific and ghoulish works of art that formed from multiple bodies congealing together and forming disgusting looking frames that resembled a shambling humanoid, also arose from the mountain of bodies the grim, conquering god had created. These hill-like undead were simple-minded creatures of immense power and they were incapable of being commanded by mortal necromancers but they obeyed and worshiped deific necromancers.
A pair of the demons the god had slain with his powers over acid, flames, and apathy even transformed into liches! These powerful undead were potent spellcasters, veritable masters of necromantic magic that had arrisen from a pair of corpses who were among the city's few necromancers.
By the time the city had been fully reanimated into powerful undead beings only a few of the undead were of any true interest to me. I immediately ordered the flesh-titans I had created to go and patrol the city. In total their were almost one hundred of the dimwitted beasts, and I had created them to be the protectors of my newly acquired territory so once I commanded them to leave my presence and they obeyed me I lost interest in them.
The death kings were more fascinating to me. Each of them came to life with levels in classes, despire the fact that many of them weren't made from bodies that had class levels. They were among the undead who arose, came to me and then fell to their knees in a show of fealty in front of me. They resembled hallow versions of their old selves.
The banshees were also intriguing to me. They were the reanimated spirits of demons I had killed, or rather the newly created spirits I had created to inhabit empty demonic bodies that I could reanimate and convert into undead beings.
I had absorbed the souls of the demons into myself and devoured them to gain the power to create demons freely even while not being a demon-lord so I created souls that were perfect for transformation into undead life-forms and filled the demonic corpses my attack had left behind with them. The scheme had worked better than I had dared hope and banshees were one of the clearest examples of that.
The liches were enormously interesting as well. Both of them came from demons of greed, massive sluglike demons who had tenaciously clung to life until acidic fire finally burned them into motes of dust, that were only restored by my power to take a single fragment of a corpse and use that to create undead. As I gazed at the demons of greed that my powers had transformed into fearsome liches I used my ability to assess creatures and learned of the powerful magic the demons were capable of and sighed.
That explained their ability to come back as liches, powerful spellcasters who had overcome death and acquired a sort of immortality and limited invincibility rolled into one by taking their souls out of their bodies. I also received a notification alerting me that the phylacteries of the liches were now stored in my shadow and if I wanted too I could use them to cause the lich to experience pain.
The pair of liches did not resemble humanoids at all. They were some of the few demons I had seen to date whose forms bucked the norm of being at least a little humanoid. The pair were enormous slugs, or at least slug-like beings, with slightly more humanoid facial features such as hair and a nose. The pair of them slowly crawled over to me, secreting a gross mucus as they moved in my direction.
Their eyes shone a bright blue as they made their way towards me. I sensed an intense fanaticism in them as they drew nearer and nearer to me, and I chuckled as I felt the powers of the domains of emotion, law, and the subdomain of enchantment wash over them. I now radiated an aura that left all manner of creatures fascinated and infatuated with me if they were in my presence for any period of time, especially if they were focused on me while in my presence.
