Hey yall!
I’m up to 171000 words on the main doc!
Starting in on chapter 40.
Hope everyone has a good day/night.
Three more days passed before Kreacher finally finished his conversion Dremora.
Leon Instantly dragged the House Elf out of Coldharbour and ordered him to retrieve the Locket Horcrux for him.
Once Leon had the Locket in hand he ordered Kreacher to return to the Black household behave like a good House Elf, maintain the Black Property well and to carry out the orders given to him by Sirius Black as if they were his own, unless they went against Leon’s interests.
With that finished, Leon proceeded to extracting his new Mortys for the two Horcruxes that were now in his possession.
Both Mortys converted in less than five minutes.
And Leon granted them both Daedric Wands then had them join the other two Mortys in their endeavors.
With that done, Leon proceeded the Hunting Grounds.
It was time to pull the Island out of the Vivarium.
“It’s time!” Leon declared as he appeared before the Nuckelavee and Arachne who were arrayed around the giant Inlet where the Island was about to get placed.
In the past week they had been working hard to spread plant life and the baseline ecosystems in the surroundings.
“We are ready My Lord.” The gathered Dremora said in unison.
With that, Leon checked on the Mortys who were all sitting inside the security area of the Vivarium, watching the monitors to see how the artifact was going to react to the sudden removal.
With everything in place, Leon extended his godlike awareness into the Vivarium and fully encompassed the island and its surrounding waters.
With a flex of his will, he seized the entirety of the contents of the vivarium, minus a layer of stone about three miles down.
Everything inside of the Vivarium froze for a moment.
The air stilled, insects ceased their chirping, birds froze mid-flight, the Goblin carts ceased their travel, and a small vibration passed through the entire Island as Leon hauled the whole thing through a direction that Three-dimensional matter normally can never move in.
A second later, the entire island and its surrounding waters appeared hovering above the Inlet that was to become its new home location.
Leon gently lowered the entire island into the inlet.
Like a Tetris piece it slotted into a section of the inlet.
Not dead center, but off to the side where the deepest section of it was.
And Leon also had to push the island down while reinforcing it the whole time to sink its stone into the bottom far enough to match the shoreline heights.
He took his time.
And made sure that everything was in place.
After a final look over, Leon released his hold over the island.
Motion restarted.
Animals panicked, Goblins panicked, the Centaur tribes reared up and witnessed that their sky had changed drastically.
Birds shrieked and flew every which way.
The Vivarium island released a cacophony of noise as its inhabitants reeled from the sudden transition.
At the same time, the island seemed to go into complete bloom mode.
Tree’s started budding out of season.
Grass began developing seed pods.
Ant queens suddenly started laying clutches of royal eggs.
Prey species of every flavor started searching for mates like breeding season had come once again.
And all the while, Leon and his Dremora host observed the island waking up to its new world.
Leon turned his attention to the interior of the Vivarium and was shocked by what he saw.
The layer of stone that he’d left behind was growing at a visible pace.
Stone, ores, and gemstones appearing layer by layer.
The growth rate was astonishing.
But it wasn’t going to be growing back into a full island any time soon.
At the rate that it was growing, Leon predicted at least a few years for it to grow back to its normal sea level height.
After a moment of watching the regrowing stone, Leon went into the Vivarium to see the Mortys each at their own iteration of the security booth.
“So what’s the prognosis?” Leon asked as he approached.
“My Lord!” Morty-1 exclaimed, “It is entirely fascinating, the moment that you pulled the island out, all the screens flashed red and unknown symbols appeared.
Flaring multiple times as a series of symbols cycled in the top right-hand corner.
When the symbols stopped, everything flashed green.
Everything.
It was blinding.
Then the monitors restarted and the feed is just showing regrowth.”
“Any idea how long it’ll be before the island regrows?” Leon asked.
“No, My Lord.
Just guessing by what we can see.
It should take three to ten years for the island to return to a habitable state ready for a new ecosystem.
But…
that is a wild guess on my part.
It could well be a century or more for all I know.
Maybe the base layers are faster to regenerate?
Maybe rich soils and mountainous terrain are more difficult?
It is impossible to tell at the moment.” Morty-2 spoke for the group.
“Ok, when I return to Hogwarts I’ll just place it back on its time pedestal to regen faster.” Leon said.
“Hopefully that will work My Lord.” Morty-4 said, “I had an idea involving that time bubble My Lord.
“Go on.” Leon made a coaxing gesture.
“My Lord, accelerated time, with a landmass like this.
The possibilities are endless under normal circumstances.
But… We were brainstorming ideas for generating points.
Establishing Cults in your name among the goblins seems inefficient when we could just kidnap a bunch of homeless muggles, tamper with their minds, and have them live inside the Vivarium under the accelerated time field.” Morty-4 explained, “And with the monitoring capabilities of the Vivarium, we could easily establish full society that only operates in your name.
Along with Dremora enforcers.
The people would have a God that actually responds to their prayers, the heathens would be struck down, the faithful healed, the pious rewarded.
We could prevent long-term drift of ideologies.
It seems like a perfect solution.
A year or two in accelerated time would be 500 to a 1000 years of development.
You could then replicate your feat of transplanting the Island to one of your realms and start again.
if we use the rest of your time at Hogwarts wisely, we could potentially establish four or five island societies that are completely developed in your name.”
Leon pondered the idea for few moments.
Kidnapping a bunch of homeless people and wiping their minds to indoctrinate them into a full blow religious society was ambitious.
But without anyone knowing what was going on and stopping him, he couldn’t see how it would go wrong.
The only problem was developing a full-blown theocracy.
The only problems would be that Leon would need to dedicate at least 1 Morty to supervising the entire operation.
On top of that, there would also be the occasional witch and wizard Muggle-born cropping up inside the Vivarium that would need to be trained.
So, Leon would need to dedicate at least two Mortys to the endeavor.
Leon agreed with the plan and began brainstorming among the Council of Mortys.
If they were going to do this, they needed to do it right.
And Leon would need to do some research to see how many people he was going to need to start everything off.
A single breeding pair of humans would result in complete extinction within a generation or two.
It was simply not possible to start a human population with just two people.
Even with dozens the problem would still be the same.
Leon was not sure what the minimum population was going to have to be.
But he was fairly certain that he was going to be shooting for an initial population of at least a few hundred breeding pairs.
“After the Island regenerates, we will do a test run using Goblins.” Leon finally declared, “If it works as we hope, that will give us a baseline.
Then, we can move on to the kidnapping of humans in a few years.
After the first batch of humans, we can just reuse some of the population to start again.”
With a potential infinite point farm on the horizon.
Leon turned his attention to his wand.
It was time to infuse a Dremora Soul into it and turn it into a Daedric Wand.
Leon watched the Waters of Oblivion until a new form was emerging.
A Drider that only existed as a Drider for a few milliseconds before Leon ripped its soul out of its body and held it over his wand.
Very gently he coaxed the Dremora Soul into his one wand and the transformation took hold.
When the wand’s transformation was complete Leon took it in his hand and felt a shiver run through his being as it connected to him at an even deeper level than it had before.
The Daedric soul within rejoiced as he admired the now menacing design.
His wand had retained its exact length, 11 inches.
But the once sleek and simple ebony wooden shaft now contained Daedric runes running along its length which now looked more like a spike for stabbing.
A grid of web-like ridges caged the shaft in a very menacing style.
And it had gained a pommel at its hilt with a curved hook.
His newly improved wand looked the part of a Daedric Prince’s wand.
Leon was almost giddy as he began casting every spell he knew.
Testing it out without pause.
Much to his delight, every offensive spell that he could cast seemed to have its upper thresholds magnified greatly.
Alongside the increase in overall power, the level of control he gained was insanely precise.
He could tone the Knockback Jinx down to the point that it would feel like a gentle tap.
At its highest level of output, Leon’s Knockback Jinx should be renamed the Battering Ram Curse.
While testing, he straight up blew a hole the size of a cow through the solid stone walls of the palace.
Which he then promptly fixed with a quick repair charm.
Harry Potter magic was supremely convenient like that.
The next thing that Leon discovered while playing with his upgraded wand was that his Transfiguration capabilities had skyrocketed.
Matchstick to a Needle?
As easy as breathing.
Beetles to buttons?
Leon didn’t even need to chant anymore.
Actually, that was true for all of his spells.
Leon no longer needed the verbal component of any of his spells.
The Dremora Soul within the Wand read his intentions with absolute clarity and executed the spells that he intended with perfect precision, exactly at the level of output that he desired.
At least for all of the spells that the Wand was already familiar with.
New spells would be much easier to learn from now on too.
Especially transfiguration spells.
Leon also discovered that he could also use his wand as focus for Magicka now too.
And it was ridiculously good at that too.
It even amplified the effect of his Magicka spells several times over.
Casting a basic [Sparks] spell resulted in a significantly greater range and lethality.
The [Thunderbolt] Spell flashed like a real lightning strike and generated an immense boom and rolling thunder that echoed throughout the imperial city in Coldharbour.
“Gotta remember not to do that in my Earthly Avatar.” Leon muttered to himself as he cleared the spots from his vision.
That would have been debilitating in his Earthly Avatar.
Unfortunately he didn’t know how to exclude himself from those secondary effects of his spells.
Being able to cast Magicka spells through his wand now, meant that Leon could actually use Magicka more freely in his Earthly Avatar.
Quite a few of his spells from the Elder Scrolls universe were quite useful, but only being able to cast them from his free hand would have looked really strange and drawn attention to the abnormality.
Now he didn’t have to worry about that at all.
Sure, Leon was probably going to have to explain his new wand.
But that was easy to explain away.
The return to Hogwarts was uneventful.
The train ride was pretty much the same as it had been both previous times.
Except this time Harry was complaining about Petunia constantly sending Hedwig(Harry’s Owl) to deliver letters to Professor Snape.
Poor Hedwig was exhausted from the number of letters she sent.
It had apparently gotten to the point that Harry insisted that they go to Diagon Alley to purchase another Owl for the house.
Aside from Harry’s misery at dealing with his Aunt aggressively pursuing he least favorite teacher, Ron was excited to share what he had been up to over the Christmas break.
Apparently, Leon had underestimated the adaptability and learning potential of Common Souls.
Ron’s Chess set was getting good enough that Ron acknowledged the board as a genuine opponent.
He absolutely loved the Chess set and spent much of the ride back to Hogwarts telling both Harry and Leon detailed descriptions of games he had played against the board itself.
Leon could only imagine if he had infused those sets with Grand Souls instead of Common.
They would probably start plotting world domination or something.
Returning to Hogwarts after Christmas break, the students didn’t take boats across the lake.
They took the Thestral drawn carriages once disembarking the train.
“What are those things?” Harry asked, pointing out the skeletal horses.
“Thestrals.” Leon replied, “Only people who have witnessed Death can see them.”
“What?” Ron said while looking very confused off into the distance, “I don’t see nothin.
Wha’cu two on about?”
“The Thestrals pulling the carriages of course.” Leon said cheerfully, “They are skeletal horses with wings.
Fun fact, they are also pure carnivores… they only eat meat.”
Ron paled, frantically trying to spot the dangerous sounding creatures.
Leon laughed at him for a moment as they boarded the carriage, “You know.
Its odd that you don’t know much about things like this.” Leon gestured around himself, “I wasn’t even aware of the magical world until I got the letter from Hogwarts, and I seem to know more about it than you do.” This story is hosted at novelping dot com.
“I’m more interested in Quidditch and Wizard’s Chess than learning about Magical Creatures.
Especially ones I can’t even see!” said defensively as the carriage took off.
The view of the lake and castle from the air, though Leon had seen it before, was magical.
Both literally and metaphorically.
The lights of the castle reflecting off the still waters of the lake marred only by the occasional ripple.
The castle itself was almost always a sight to behold if one took a moment to actually stop and admire it.
There always seemed to be something new about it no matter how many times one looked.
Leon sighed as he looked out over the castle grounds, “Its good to be back.” He muttered.
And surprisingly, he really meant it.
Hogwarts was fun, every day was a new experience.
And he had friends… It was a stark contrast to his life outside of Hogwarts which was mainly ‘work’ oriented and aimed at furthering his goals almost 24/7…
Leon pulled out his notebook and wrote a note for himself.
Figure out a good work/life balance outside of Hogwarts.
He’d done it in Hogwarts; he could do it at home too.
Classes started up for Spring Term without preamble.
The first day back, Leon had removed the Vivarium from Coldharbour and replaced it in its time bubble to regenerate.
The very next day Leon found himself getting right back into the routine.
Classes, Homework, play with Harry and Ron, ‘go to sleep'(Really practicing magic in Coldharbour), and squeeze in time trying to memorize stuff in the Undercroft for his Task.
It took two weeks for the Vivarium to return to its general shape of an island inside of the temporal dilation bubble.
That is when the Vivarium revealed a function that Leon hadn’t noticed and was something that he had overlooked when he went over its storage.
The Vivarium apparently retained enough eggs, seeds, and even live specimens of every creature that had been within its confines, except for the Goblins and Centaurs, in stasis to seed itself with a new ecosystem.
Leon let the ecosystem of the Vivarium run for another two weeks of his time before he pulled it back into Coldharbour to start with the plan of establishing a civilization dedicated to a cult run in his name.
Fortunately, Leon had already prepped a seed population for this experiment.
Well, he hadn’t done any of the prep work himself.
All he had done was kidnap 500 male and 500 female goblins that were at the perfect age from the cities that were now in the Hunting Grounds.
The Morty’s, along with the Silver Goblin Dremora who had constructed new Gauntlets for themselves, had done a carful bit of memory alteration on all of the Goblins to start everything off.
Morty’s 1 through 4 were going to be joining the whole expedition.
Their research into creating that Translation Ritual would be better done under the effects of accelerated time.
Along with the Mortys, Leon was sending over a hundred Nuckelavee, a thousand Goblin Dremora, including a dozen of the Goblin Mage Dremora, and five thousand combined Arachne and Drider Dremora as enforcement forces.
Between the Morty’s and the Goblin Mages, the magical firepower would be more than sufficient to maintain control of the Magical population that would emerge.
And the overall forces would be sufficient to deal with quite a bit.
Ideally, Leon would post an army of at least a million Dremora in the Vivarium.
But this test run was only meant to go for six months, well, five really, or close to 250 years for the Vivarium.
Enough for twenty or so generations of Goblins to be born and raised inside the Theocracy that they were aiming to design.
Leon had given the Mortys a list of all the domains that he could possibly unlock over that time.
Their theocracy needed to create a culture that would generate the most amount of OP for Leon.
Know what all of his potential Domains would eventually be allowed for them to plan for the future gains, and not just the immediate ones.
With the Vivarium set up in it time bubble once more, this time with a population of brainwashed Goblins establishing a Theocracy in the name of the Father of Coldharbour, Leon turned his full attention to school and his friends.
Time seemed to do that weird thing where every day individually felt long, but when he looked back on it things felt like they flew by.
Madam Hooch was extremely excited when Leon brought out his Bound Broom so that he could actually participate in Flying Class.
She was fascinated by the design saying that it was a perfect fit for a Halloween theme line of brooms.
She wanted one.
Badly.
Even when Leon made up a price tag of 300 Galleons and a made-up reclusive broom maker, she pestered him until he agreed to make an introduction to whoever had made it for him.
It went so far as Leon ‘writing’ a letter to the supposed ‘broom maker’ and setting up a time and date for Madam Hooch to meet with him.
Aside from the Madam Hooch issue, Leon’s upgraded wand didn’t actually invite any questions.
Though it did induce a few raised eyebrows, no one asked him about it.
Leon’s performance in Transfiguration, Charms, DADA, and… Potions surprisingly, earned Leon a ton of House Points.
Herbology, Astronomy, and History of Magic were Leon’s least favorite classes.
Herbology because the plants were all afraid of him.
Astronomy because it was really boring.
And History of Magic because Binns had a talent for making even the most interesting portions of history sound as mundane as watching paint dry.
Leon’s work on his most recent Task didn’t end until the middle of May.
That freaking Torture Magic book that was part of the Gaunt’s family legacy was seared into his mind.
Every letter of every word.
If Leon never saw the book again it would be too soon.
But finally, on May 14th, Leon checked the [Shop] after yet another study session and snapped to attention when he found that the Task was complete.
It was with a shaking breath that Leon accepted his reward and felt Apocrypha slide into his awareness.
Alongside the usual rush of power that came with getting a new realm Leon felt a new affinity for something he couldn’t immediately identify settle into his Avatars.
Leon’s awareness spread over a vast plane of inky oceans filled with continents and islands composed books, books and more books.
Mazes and Labyrinths of towering stacks of black bound books that contained strange and meaningless writing in their pages.
Leon looked over his new plane with a bit of a frown.
He highly doubted that Apocrypha would ever be useful to him other than the stat boost.
He didn’t see a way to have an ecosystem take root in Apocrypha.
Even worse than Coldharbour in that regard.
There were ‘mines’ where Leon could sense a form of Paper Ebony, that would probably serve some greater functions in the future.
But for right now it was probably just going to sit there collecting dust.
Finally, Leon turned his attention to his status page and his latest Task.
Race: Oblivion Lord
Named Realm/s: Coldharbour, The Hunting Grounds, The Shivering Isles, Apocrypha
Unnamed Realm/s: None
Avatar/s: [Coldharbour 1/1(Human/changeable)] [HP-Earthly Realm 1/1(human/wizard)]
Mind: 4
Body: 4
Spirit: 4
OP: 55773
[Shop]
[Task: Destroy 50 Undead.
Reward: The Colored Rooms]
This… was a surprisingly easy task.
Leon even knew of a place where there were a lot of undead.
The Cave, where Voldy had stashed the Locket Horcrux, was filled with Inferi.
But it was going to have to wait until Summer Break.
Which wasn’t too far away now.
Leon glanced longingly at his OP count before he dismissed the status screen.
He was so close.
He had already given in and decided that he was just going to get the Novice Tier of he traditional six Schools of magic before saving up for more of them.
60k was all he needed.
“The Colored Rooms huh?” Leon muttered to himself.
The Colored Rooms were a collection of Realms belonging to Meridia, the Deadric Prince of Life and infinite energies.
She was an oddball among the various Daedric Princes.
Technically, she was one of the Magna-Ge.
She had participated in the creation of Mundus and fled after discovering the true intentions of Lorkan, alongside Magnus and various other Et’Ada.
At some point she had been cast down from Aetherius for consorting with Daedra and became a Daedric Prince.
Meridia’s hatred of the Undead was legendary.
Hence, the Task.
With his latest Task complete, and his newest Task being something that he would need to wait to accomplish, Leon suddenly found himself with more free time on his hands at Hogwarts.
Which he chose to spend socializing.
∞∞∞
Dumbledore sat in his office feeling incredibly uneasy.
After the break in at Gringotts at the beginning of the school year, he had been all but certain that Voldemort was going to make a move on Hogwarts to try and steal the Philosophers Stone.
And with Harry having his first year… Dumbledore had set up an elaborate trap that would hopefully remove the Horcrux on Harry and put a massive delay on Voldemort’s future return.
The trap would make sure that at least one Horcrux was destroyed and Voldemort left scrambling whilst Dumbledore searched for clues as to the location of remaining Horcruxes.
He knew of the whereabouts of at least two.
Though he had dared not retrieve any of the ones that he knew about just yet.
If Voldemort knew that he knew… Voldemort would likely bury them so deep that it was impossible to find them.
But the fact that Voldemort had seemingly given up after the break in at Gringotts had Dumbledore extremely worried.
He had been certain that Quirrell was possessed during his sabbatical.
But after he fainted during the Welcoming Feast, he had awoken not even remembering having gone on Sabbatical, his stutter gone, and seemingly every intention to go back to being the Muggle Studies Professor after this year was over.
Fortunately, Dumbledore had a very good replacement for the DADA position next year.
But as the year had worn on, without a whisper, without a peep.
And with Pettigrew revealing a bitter truth that first week of school then killing himself after only a few days in Azkaban.
Dumbledore found himself jumping at shadows.
Every whisper of any dark activities that his network caught wind of had him scrambling for information.
But there was nothing.
For the past 11 years Dumbledore had had at least an inkling of where and what Voldemort was up to.
But now… it was like he had vanished completely.
And that scared him.
Almost as much as the idea of Grindelwald walking out of Nurmengard Castle.
“Where have you run off to Tom?” Dumbledore muttered to himself.
∞∞∞
The final weeks leading up to the exams were extremely stressful for the older members of the student body.
The OWLs and NEWTs preparation and stress eating at them visibly.
The lower years were stressed out, but not nearly as much.
The first-year exams were not something that Leon was stressing about.
His memory and recall were fantastic at this point.
When he was focused on something it was easy for him to remember the material.
And he had pretty much mastered the use of all the First-Year spells, at least, he didn’t struggle with any of them.
The only person that was perhaps better prepared for the exams than Leon was, was Hermione Granger.
Speaking of Hermione, Leon had attempted to befriend her.
Be more conscientious than before.
But it seemed that the bridge had been burned before it ever had a chance to be built.
Hermione was not actively hostile or even just mean.
But she obviously didn’t want anything to do with Leon.
Any time they spoke her responses were short and clipped.
Then she would ignore him or simply vacate the area.
At first Leon had felt bad about the situation.
Seeing as how his intervention in the timeline had prevented her from ever really becoming friends with Harry and Ron.
But when he noticed that she actually seemed to have a decent friend group among the girls of Gryffindor House, Leon was relieved to see that she wasn’t solely an ostracized but brilliant witch among her peers.
The breadth of spells that Leon and all of the First-Years had actually learned over the course of the year was quite staggering if Leon was being honest.
The amount of chores spells was almost exaggerated.
Everything from spells to make your bed in the morning, sweeping, dusting, and folding laundry were part of the charm’s curriculum.
Making the Pineapple dance was kind of a quirky spell that showcased a student’s greater mastery of charms in general.
And that was just in charms class.
Between the spell heavy courses, Transfiguration, DADA and Charms, the First Years were expected to have nearly thirty spells memorized and be proficient in casting them.
And that was excluding the spells that were taught in Herbology, Astronomy, and Potions.
Almost all of the spells were basic quality of life type spells that came in handy on a daily basis.
What was even more impressive was that most students actually knew more spells than what they were being taught in classes.
The sheer variety and variation of spells was enough to make one’s head spin.
Though, once you understood the fundamentals of spellcasting it did become easier to cast others that were in the same vein.
Anyway, the tests for first year were pretty easy.
The hardest one, in Leon’s opinion, was actually History of Magic.
It was just a bunch of rote memorization.
Leon’s grades were bother better and worse than he expected when he received his report card.
Astronomy: Acceptable Charms: Outstanding Defense Against the Dark Arts: Outstanding Herbology: Exceeds Expectations History of Magic: Acceptable Potions: Exceeds Expectations Transfiguration: Outstanding
Three O’s two E’s and two A’s.
Not bad.
But not particularly good in Leon’s opinion.
Snape may be known for discriminatory House Point allocation.
But he was also completely fair in his grading.
Even students that he actively didn’t like and targeted in class were given fair grades.
Many Slytherins failed to meet his standards to take his NEWTs level courses after the fifth year.
As for the others?
Herbology was probably never going to reach O standards.
The written portion he could ace, but the practical portion was always going to drag him down since the plants were terrified of his mere presence.
Astronomy was just boring and he didn’t feel like putting more effort into the class.
And history of Magic was a slog of dates and names that all blurred together.
All in all, Leon was satisfied and now knew what he needed to work on to improve for second year.
A few days before they were set to leave the Castle, Leon finally returned to the Room of Hidden Things to pull the Vivarium back into Coldharbour.
It was odd that he hadn’t noticed a single bit of increased OP Generation over the five-ish months that the Vivarium had sat in its time bubble.
A few Dremora had killed themselves inside the Vivarium to respawn inside of Coldharbour and report what was going on inside the Vivarium over the course of the months.
And their reports were universally positive.
Yet Leon hadn’t seen a single extra point coming in beyond the norm.
which felt extremely odd.
With Gaskets help, Leon entered the Room of Requirement for the last time before summer break and made his way to the stone chamber hidden within.
He deactivated the Time Bubble and didn’t immediately pull the Vivarium into Coldharbour, instead he pulled up his system to see if his OP was behaving differently.
“Huh… so the Time Dilation is interfering with point generation.” Leon muttered as he watched his points total start to immediately tick upwards.
He shrugged, “Would have been too much of a cheat if I could just generate millions of points with a little time magic.”
Leon waited for just over ten minutes to see how many points he was gaining… It honestly didn’t feel like much.
He was gaining just a hair shy of 7 extra points every ten minutes.
Call it 6.9 OP every ten minutes.
Leon did the math, and that meant that the Goblins inside were generating only about a thousand OP every 24 hours.
That didn’t really make sense at all, given that there was a significant population inside that was dedicated to him.
The reports from the Dremora said that there was at least a 100k population fully indoctrinated into worshiping him as a God, ritual sacrifices, games, and all kinds things were dedicated to his name.
“Fuck… I’ll bet there’s some kind of Point Gain Cap.” Leon said to himself as he hauled the Vivarium back into Coldharbour, then sat down and transferred his mind back into his Coldharbour Avatar.
Leon had a couple of issues to address now.
The new Goblins needed to be removed from the Vivarium, he needed to understand what was going on with the OP generation mechanics, and he needed to check in on the Hunting Grounds.
“First things first” Leon said as he set up the Vivarium and expanded it to its full mansion size before entering.
“Did you miss me?” Leon asked two of the Mortys who were seated at the monitoring stations.
Both Mortys immediately leaped from their seats and bowed deeply to Leon, “Master!” the cried in unison.
“It is so good to see you again!
We have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams with these Goblins My Lord.” Morty-1 said gesturing wildly towards the monitoring screen, “A population of nearly a million Goblins, all of them worship you.
Your divine hand is in every aspect of their lives.
Their faith is rewarded constantly.
The gains must be enormous!
And we have developed a regime that will be easily applicable to humans as well… there is so much that we have accomplished in this time you’ve given us My Lord.
I hardly know where to start.”
“Well, it seems that while the time bubble is active, I can’t gain any points from the population inside the Vivarium.
So, the point gain hasn’t been effected until just now.” Leon said with a sigh, “Another thing, I seem to be gaining significantly less than I should be.
Maybe only a thousand points an hour?”
The Mortys blinked before one of them smiled, “He still gains a thousand point an hour while they all sleep?”
“Wait what?” Leon asked, mildly confused.
“It is part of the Order and Domination Domains My Lord” Morty-1 explained, “Exactly eight hours of their day is dedicated to sleep.
The entire population is only allowed to sleep during those hours.
And if they are not asleep, they are not allowed to work or do anything, the Driders act as enforcers for this.
We are right in the middle of sleep cycle.”
Leon almost let out a massive sigh of relief.
If his point generation was capped at 1000 points a day it would take millennia to reach the point totals he needed for the higher tiers of knowledge and skills that he could buy.
Let alone purchasing the Unnamed Realms which started at a million points a piece.
Though he couldn’t help the bad feeling that there would indeed be some kind of cap.
His system seemed to be designed to purposely slow his growth.
The vivarium and the time bubble were already a massively lucky break that had set him forward by decades.
“Ok, I don’t really want to pull the whole island out of the Vivarium again.
So, we are going to need to figure out where to place the Goblins in the Hunting Grounds.” Leon said.
“Yes, My Lord.
We planned for that at the beginning if you remember.
The infrastructure in place is sized for human occupation.
The next phase can start as soon as we have a suitable seed population.” Morty-1 spoke with eagerness in his voice.
“I looked into that a little bit.” Leon said, he had had Mother and Father do some research on the homeless populations, “it doesn’t seem like a good idea to source our seed population from solely from Britian.
If half the homeless population in a city disappears it will cause a panic.
Perhaps even the ministry will get involved.
This summer is going to be busy.
Lots of travel to snatch our seed group.”
“Oh, these are the results of those rats you had us looking after as well.” Morty-2 handed Leon a notebook, “It seems that going through developmental phases as a Dremora gradually changes the organism.
Those rats are now apex predators running around in the Vivarium.
But they were unable to breed.
The full observations are in the notes.”
Leon accepted the notebook.
He had handed off his breeding experiments to the Mortys.
But had already concluded that they weren’t a particularly viable path.
He’d go over the notebook sometime in the future.
Casting his awareness into the Hunting Grounds, Leon couldn’t help but admire the changes to the portions where life was flourishing.
The plane was infinite, so overall everything was still bare, but after the better part of year the portions that had been seeded were blooming and growing at an unprecedented rate.
Trees, shrubs, grass, and a variety of wildflowers and magical flora were spreading across vast swaths of land at about 15 times the normal growth rate.
With sixish months of actual growth and spread that had translated to the beginnings of massive forests and planes of grass that were spreading far and wide.
The micro biomes were keeping pace with the growth too.
The only creatures that seemingly had trouble keeping up with growth were the large predators.
The Apex of the ecosystems was developing faster than would be normal, but at this point they physically couldn’t hunt fast enough to keep their prey species in check.
Even the Acromantula who had started to spread out beyond the island were not overtaking the explosive growth.
In a decades, The Hunting Grounds was probably going to have a large enough ecosystem to rival the Earth.
And then it was going to just keep on expanding.
Forever.
At some point in the far future, Leon would probably be gaining billions of souls a second… if not trillions or more.
The seeding of the Shivering Isles was proceeding as well.
However, without the fundamental nature of the realm pushing the development and expansion, that project was looking to be significantly slower.
The strangest issue that Leon was facing in the Hunting Grounds though was with the fourth and fifth generations of the Micro Biomes.
Ants, Spiders, Flies, and all that lower ecological life that is necessary for spreading were being born… different.
Mutating into new things, heavily affected by Magicka and the nature of the Realm they were in.
It wasn’t much of problem at this point, since the first generation of mostly everything was still producing offspring.
But it was coming with a change that Leon hadn’t predicted.
Those mutant variants were providing Leon with nothing.
They didn’t have souls… at least, not souls that he could interact with.
And even the Soul Dust that was accumulating rapidly didn’t help.
This meant that Leon was pretty much bound to continuously have to harvest from Earthly Realms in the future.
Not that it bothered him.
It gave him a reason to not just hole himself up in his realms forever and continuously expand.
And the real problem was not something that he would have to worry about for at least a few decades.
It was easy to replenish the lower ecological niches with fresh first-generation life with the help of the Vivarium.
So, this wasn’t a problem that he would need to really address until after the Plane Meld plan was completed.
“Where shall we place the Goblins my Lord?” Morty-1 asked, “Far enough away from the other Goblins to prevent immediate discovery, but close enough that they can develop in peace before launching a conquest?”
Leon raised a brow at that and looked over at Morty-1 intending to say that conquest was unnecessary.
But he paused.
Such an outcome would result in a lot of point generation surly…
He dropped it and gestured to the Hunting Grounds, “Find a good location, and prep the goblins for a move in… lets say, two days.
They can take everything that they can carry.
It will be you and the other Dremora’s responsibility to make sure that they settle in here and get to developing their infrastructure.
How are we doing on Goblin Mages by the way?”
“The Goblin Mages are far more common than Muggle Born, out of the close to 1 million population we have fostered, about 10% of them are born mages.
The Silvers provided them with the knowledge of how craft their Gauntlets and have trained them well.
I dare say that we could easily conquer Earth itself with their assistance.” Morty-1 replied with pride evident.
“And the Translation Ritual?” Leon asked.
“Well and truly complete My Lord.
Every Goblin has undergone the Ritual and communications will no longer be an issue with the old Goblins already in the Hunting Grounds.”
“How do their Gauntlets work?” Leon asked, getting derailed by sudden curiosity.
“The Gauntlets are quite different from a Wand.
First of all, there are no Gauntlet Makers.
Each Goblin Mage has to craft their own Gauntlet.
And they have to do it completely from scratch.
They have to acquire the materials themselves, whether it is hunting, mining for the ore and gemstones, cutting and curing wood from trees.
Even the tools they use to make everything, from the forge and anvil, to the hammers and chisels need to be crafted by the individual Goblin Mage creating their Gauntlet.
It is quite an ordeal and requires a great deal of skill and knowledge before they can even begin to try and craft their Gauntlet.” Morty-1 explained, “As to their spells… complex hand movements, finger snaps, and verbal chanting are required for a great deal of their magic.
But… I hesitate to say this.
The Gauntlets are at least equals to Wands.
Many of the spells they have are simple and brutal.
I would say that Gauntlets are slightly more combat oriented, with curses, hexes and jinx only requiring very simple hand movements with extremely small incantations.
Utility spells is where they fall behind.
Where with a wand you simply give it a wave and say a word to get all house chores done, A Gauntlet requires complex motions and multi-word chants to accomplish the same thing.”
“Huh… Can human witches and wizards use them?” Leon asked.
He loved his wand, but having another option in his arsenal was always a good thing.
Plus, learning an entire new school of magic in the Harry Potter universe would be helpful in pinning down underlying mechanisms of magic as a whole.
Leon had gone to the library and used his recommendation to see the translated African texts.
But all of it had been far too advanced.
There was no equivalent to ‘First-Year’ texts in the Hogwarts archives.
“Yes, Morty-2 and Morty-4 have made their own Gauntlets.
But they still prefer their wands.
Anyone who follows the steps can create their own Gauntlet.” Morty-1 replied.
“Ok, make sure that the Goblins are ready for transfer in a few days.
I’ll be supplying you all with significantly more Dremora troops for the human development project.
And I figured that I’ll also leave them in the bubble for at least two years real time.
That’ll give them a thousand years of history and time to really develop the high-density population that I want.” Leon said.
“We are going to travel a lot to get the seed group though.
I want the highest possible genetic diversity.
And I want at least two of you Mortys to stay behind to assist me.
How’s the equipment situation looking like for the Dremora?”
“The Goblins live up to their reputation as master smiths and miners.
All of the Dremora that you sent with us are equipped with full Goblin Silver armor and weaponry that would make Gryffindor himself weep with envy.” Morty-1 said with an evil chuckle.
“Good, those who are fully equipped will remain in the Vivarium to serve as enforcement and the upper ranks of the new batch of Dremora that I’ll provide.
I predict that humans are going to be a little harder to control than the Goblins.
Especially once their population reaches a certain point.” Leon spoke with certainty.
Humans are naturally chaotic creatures.
Goblins are specialized.
Humans would eventually get ideas that needed to be crushed.
Though with active monitoring and policing, rebellion would be significantly harder.
Leon was certain that they would find a way to try and rebel at some point.
So having greater forces arrayed would offset the greater risk.
With things in his realms taken care of, Leon enjoyed the last few days of freedom around Hogwarts Castle and got a preemptive start on his summer homework.
Boarding the train to return to London, Leon took a moment to mentally review the year.
In all honesty, this year had probably been the most fun he’d ever had.
Past life included.
Magic, friends, and a side of evil plots in the shadows.