Age of Adepts

The ritual hall.

While a storm of blood raged outside, the ritual hall bustled with activity.

Several goblin researchers in white robes were busy walking in and out. They were directing goblin engineers and ordering them to check all the metal pipes and control center stretched over the interior of the mountain.

If the animation of the Steel Capital were successful, then these metal pipes would become the blood vessels of the magical machine known as the Great Emperor. The giant space furnace would then become its heart. Old Goblin Gazlowe would be reincarnated within the Titan body of the Great Emperor, and he would become the true ruler that manipulated this giant beast.

Indeed, this was Gazlowe’s true plan!

Whether it was the immortality ritual or the invasion of the adepts and the dragonborn, everything was only a part of Gazlowe’s plan to put into motion Project Titan.

Gazlowe had only finally managed to gather all the staff and resources he needed inside the Steel Capital after so many tricks and schemes. Even though the adepts and the dragonborn were still freely moving about in the tunnels beyond his control, it only mattered that they were here.

Everyone knew how expansive the Steel Capital was. Trying to animate such a massive city into a magical machine lifeform required life force and souls beyond the imagination.

That was why Gazlowe designed this plan to bait all of the elite combat forces of the Goblin Plane into the city. When that happened, not only would the one hundred and twenty thousand goblins living in the Steel Capital become his sacrifice, but even his private army, the Royal Army, the adepts, and the dragonborn would become nutrition for the animation of the Demon God Titan.

He, the smartest goblin in the universe, would use this massive wave of life force to assimilate with the Steel Capital and become the undying Fourth Grade Demon God Titan.

The Goblin Plane would become the springboard for his ascension, allowing him to become a god that could rule over multiple planar worlds. He would be creating a new species for the multiverse– magical machine lifeforms!

However, before this could come to be, Gazlowe needed a massive surge of life force to allow his assimilation to succeed.

Gazlowe’s elderly body lied upon a metal operation platform in the ritual hall. His skull had already been split apart like a blooming flower. His loyal subordinates had carefully extracted the brain inside and placed it in a massive glass vat that was five meters in diameter and fifty meters tall.

The inside of the jar was filled with light green nutritional liquid. Gazlowe’s fist-sized brain was swimming inside like a tadpole in a pond. A dozen tentacles floated beneath the trembling brain. It was these tentacles that allowed the gray brain necessary movement.

As the battle progressed, several dragonborn scouts that had been murdered were sent into this ritual hall. Their corpses were then thrown into several small corpse dissolving pools by the side. Their bodies, souls, and everything about them was being dissolved and melted into a pure solution of life force. The solution was then injected into the glass jar, becoming nutrition for Gazlowe’s brain to grow and strengthen.

One hour after the battle had started, Gazlowe’s formerly tiny brain had grown into an Overmind three meters in diameter. The Overmind was happily swimming about in the nutrient solution.

The growth and development of the brain allowed even the unfortunately magically challenged goblin to obtain some strange supernatural mental powers. Gazlowe didn’t even need that technological equipment to communicate with his subordinates now. He could directly speak to their minds.

Moreover, this mental power was strengthening as the brain continued to develop and expand. It even started to create related mental spells.

Telepathy, Soul Stab, Soul Whip, Soul Blast, Mind Control, Hypnosis, Mental Illusion.

Several mental and soul spells that had never been heard of before popped up one by one. They allowed Gazlowe to become extremely excited. He had never experienced supernatural powers before. The massive Overmind swam about in the glass vat, repeatedly using these strange magical abilities of his.

In general, he was able to become proficient at the use of some of the more simple mental powers after a bit of practice. However, the more complicated mental abilities such as Mind Control and Soul Blast were hard to master.

After all, these abilities were not techniques he had obtained through hard work and practice. They were mysterious fragments of knowledge from a different world that Gazlowe seemed to be able to hear and see after his Spirit had strengthened to a certain degree.

Most of the time, these mental powers were innate abilities that one would gain upon their Spirit reaching a certain level; one should be able to master the use of them without any practice or learning. However, Gazlowe’s goblin origins undoubtedly had too lowly a spiritual origin. That made it hard for him to master a lot of these innate abilities successfully.

While Gazlowe was having fun with his newfound powers, the battle outside the hall had become incredibly intense.

Old Goblin–no, Overmind Gazlowe’s–perimeter could no longer hold back the adepts and the dragonborn. Many checkpoints had fallen, with soldiers and mercenaries dying en masse.

However, Overmind Gazlowe didn’t mind at all. Instead, he used his spiritual sense to send the cruelest order to his subordinates– massacre.

As Greem and Alice set foot on the path toward the space furnace, a bloody slaughter started in the Steel Capital a thousand feet above them.

As a goblin city, the Steel Capital had plenty of gardens and plazas.

At the moment, all of these public areas were filled with slave goblins.

They were all bound with ropes and made to kneel on the ground. The streets were sealed off by goblin chariots. Several fully-armed goblin mercenaries stood tall along the buildings nearby, their black gun barrels pointed at the slaves in the plazas.

With the order given to them, fire spat out of the black gun barrels, and a storm of bullets shot into the crowd. The slave goblins cried and howled in agony, but it didn’t help.

Plazas of goblins were murdered on the spot at the hands of the goblin chariots and mercenaries. Scarlet blood flowed out of their tattered bodies and turned into a stream. This stream then gathered into a wave of blood as it trickled into the sewage, where it was directed straight into the core area of the underground tunnels.

Jars in the ritual hall slowly filled to the brim as large amounts of blood gathered there. Overmind Gazlowe’s glass vat had turned a crimson red. The dense concentration of blood had covered his body.

It was hard to see the changes happening within, but one could sense that a massive being was struggling inside the jar due to the tumbling blood waves within. Occasionally, one or two long and fearsome tentacles would crash against the transparent walls of the vat. The limbs would squirm about, the suction pads on them clear for all to see.

Gazlowe’s evolution hastened as if he could sense the approaching danger. The number of goblins being sacrificed in the city above also began to peak. The population of the Steel Capital numbered a hundred and twenty thousand. If one were to include the citizens that Gazlowe’s army had caught from the nearby areas, the number of goblin sacrifices had reached a record of a hundred and fifty thousand.

Such a massive flow of life force directed into the underground became a catalyst for Gazlowe’s assimilation with the Steel Capital. The entire underground network also started to fill with a strange, sinister aura.

Gazlowe’s Spirit continued to strengthen and power up. It was even starting to radiate through the vat and spread outwards. Metal components, alchemical machines, control platforms, magical machines and magic energy weapons, every inanimate object; as long as they were within reach of Gazlowe’s Spirit, they would possess a trace of consciousness.

Wherever Gazlowe’s Spirit extended, the objects there would be enveloped in a coat of white light. They would then start to distort and twist according to Gazlowe’s consciousness.

In just fifteen minutes, Gazlowe had managed to animate the ritual hall and turn it into part of its body. Moreover, as more life force surged into the room, his consciousness started to extend out to other areas of the underground network via the energy pipes and control centers.

Soon, the entirety of the underground network had become part of his body!

However, compared to the insentient metal machines and alchemical machines, Gazlowe’s assimilation process of the space furnace was arduous. The violent and roiling magic energy in the space furnace was like scalding lava. He would be thrown into immense pain every time he touched the furnace.

In the past, Gazlowe would have left the space furnace for last and chosen to expand his consciousness domain within the Steel Capital. Sadly, he had no time!

His spiritual senses indicated that another round of vibrations had started in the planar door; it seemed something new was happening in the Dragonborn Plane. If the opponent’s reinforcements managed to arrive here, it would cause unpredictable impacts to Gazlowe’s reincarnation project.

That was why Gazlowe used all the power he wielded to cut off all of the energy pipes to the planar hall. However, the Dragonborn seemed to possess a different energy source. They were sustaining the planar door through their own means.

With no choice left to him, Gazlowe assigned an enhanced group of magical machines from the outside to hurry to the planar hall and stop the Dragonborn from teleporting reinforcements.

Apart from the Dragonborn, Gazlowe also discovered a dozen intruders inside his ’body’. What frightened him the most was the arrival of the fearsome fire adept. That man had brought a female adept with him and had made it extremely close to the space furnace without his knowledge.

That undoubtedly put Gazlowe on guard!