I opened my mouth, closed it while blinking. “This one admits not looking inside the False Stars of Thunderbird and Fire Phoenix Emperors, perhaps distracted by the extremely pure and compressed Mana the False Stars seemed to be composed of...”

“TO HOLD SUCH A CONSTRUCT STEADY WOULD REQUIRE PARTS OF OUR CORE POWER, NOT MERELY EXTENSIONS OF WILL. A TINY BIT OF SPIRIT IN EACH LITTLE FALSE STAR WOULD BE NECESSARY FOR STABILITY...”

I turned around and looked as the Portal drew back, enough to show a Startrail of False Stars gleaming near the knowing cerulean eye of Flowing Silver Emperor.

They required spirit. They required Soul...

I took a very long and deep breath as I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Apologies, Your Imperial Majesties. There were routes of power forbidden to this one to use in other manners, and so this one did block any consideration of employing them from Her thoughts. This one will not be able to emulate an Emperor, but she knows what to do, now.”

Godsfreaking dammit! No magic here was viable unless it was mixed with the native Arcane energy!

That included the Wrath of my Pact Magic... and Soul Magic!

I’d tried using Soul Magic externally in my Tats and in my Feats, and had been completely unable to. In the Beast Plane, I’d found out I could use my Stars to power them up, but doing that here in the Mortal Realm took them and their Mana out of play. Not a huge thing, but it meant I couldn’t form the highest Tier of Magery Spells if I needed to, and depriving myself of 49 Mana per Star AND the high Casting Tier was, well, stupid. I basically only kept it as an option on Noble and Zeben as I rarely used the highest Tier of Magic, preferring to use lower Tiers and Boost them.

I couldn’t just pour in the Soul Essence on this world. I needed to make it into False Stars!

The Rules were Different Here. I was such a godsdamned idiot at times...

I couldn’t manifest Wrath externally at all... which shouldn’t have bloody surprised me. I couldn’t even use Eldritch Theurgy to weave it into my Valences... because that wasn’t using the native Arcane energy!

Which was why the Wrath worked perfectly fine being dumped on Reynard along with his Summoning Magic feed, giving him a dozen times the energy and more that he expected to be receiving. As a result, his growth had been unreal by any measure, to the point where he didn’t even have to go looking for any resources for himself!

I held up my right hand, and brought out a point of Soul Essence, wrapped up and inside a point of Mana, holding it steady as a point of light.

A golden glow ignited on my palm, much brighter than the Emperor’s False Star, but that was because mine was less stable and would only last for my concentration while held externally like this.

I had forty-seven bloody points of Soul Essence, and basically all they were doing for me was giving me more Health and Soak at this point, not that I begrudged either.

I had to turn it all into internal False Stars, and I could finally use the stuff without having to dip into my actual Stars. I’d need to take in a point of otherwise unusable Mana each, but that didn’t bother me at all.

I was such an idiot...

“LITTLE HEALER FAE, WHAT KIND OF ENERGY ARE YOU USING TO DO THAT?” Flowing Silver Emperor asked keenly, and I noted Thunderbird Emperor was staring at it intently as well.

Well, maybe not a total idiot.

--------

China was one of those countries that was very proud of its history and heritage, and embarrassed by its lack of progress compared to many other countries. Its magical power and foundation, despite being as old as any nation on the planet, was still woefully undeveloped, and it wasn’t considered pre-eminent in any Element of magic, let alone in magical technology. Whole sections of the country still lived as their ancestors had a century or more ago, only barely touched by the advances in magic and technology which could only be afforded and accessed by the elite of the country.

It was not a problem unique to China, instead being shared by many countries around the world. China found it embarrassing to be the biggest of the laggards, and was always vying to increase its status on the world stage, ignoring the fact that the culture it clung to so arrogantly was the biggest impediment it had.

Their recent showing in the World University Games, where teams of college-age kids from each country duked it out to show how awesome they were, had generated a big wave of national pride there. Unfortunately, while the rest of the world found such things entertaining, it actually affected the international viewpoint not a whit. The winners of the Games were almost inevitably the children of wealthy and powerful Families who’d won/forced/bribed/strongarmed their way onto the teams, and “Yeah, your Families are now wealthy enough to spend their way to a championship” didn’t have the same international influence it might have, especially in the average Joe’s eyes.

Also, the most elite universities and organizations were generally forbidden from sending their best students to the Games, since they’d dominate them as a matter of course. The TRUE elites didn’t go to public universities, after all...

All of that interplay meant dealing with the Chinese government and people was a crapshoot. Many of their Families were a thousand years old or older, and had massive influence in their nominally ‘egalitarian’ government, the Magic Association, the Hunter’s Guild, and the local Magic Court. They were openly nepotistic about favoring their own people, and scorned the common folk who didn’t have the resources to even Awaken their magic, let alone develop it properly.

Given that, China was still very, very eager to get their hands on Typeless Mages. They had hundreds of millions of people who could potentially be Awakened, and even if it was to an ‘inferior’ branch of magic, they, like so many other powers, were watching keenly what Coralost was doing, and more recently, what Cameron Dow was doing in India, and the changes that were taking place there.

Sama, Briggs, and I had been offered vast sums of money and resources, as well as authority, to open Coralost Academies in China and begin the gargantuan process of training ALL the Chinese into magic, and so start the process of truly elevating them to the greatest nation in the world. China had unfortunately learned that we were all unbribable, we didn’t trust the people involved who would be our nominal superiors, and their continued efforts to lure Typeless wizards and artificers to China didn’t help matters.

We’d flatly forbid any of our students from going there, and actually deliberately had a few do so, just to test the waters as warnings to the others.

It was utterly remarkable how those who went there ‘got into trouble’, ‘went missing’, ‘went adventuring’, ‘messed with the wrong person’, ‘were detained for practicing disputed magic’, and so forth and so on.

Every single damn one of them ran afoul of the government, the Families, the Mage Association, or the Magic Courts.

Every one.

Every single one of them got out of that trouble, too, because Sama went in and got them out.

Government holding cells? Private Family safehouses and properties in distant locations? Secure Mage Association isolation chambers? Magic Court jail cells?

It didn’t matter, Sama went in and got them out, and the people behind the decisions to detain our people went missing, often with whole swaths of underlings.

Of course, when our people popped up back at home, there’d been diplomatic kerfluffles about fugitives from the law and such things. The Deputy Vice Head of Chinese Intelligence had retired soon thereafter and another person was promoted to take his place, mainly because his head was down in Sama’s basement, as were all the heads of the two teams of intelligence operatives assigned to take revenge for the slights to China.

Word went out, and none of ours trusted China after that. Their attempts to enroll some prize students at the Coralost Academies also went nowhere...

So, China wasn’t happy with me, and asking for a passport to go through their territory would have been a very bad idea. Naturally, I didn’t bother to do so, as I was going into an area they had no authority over, anyway.

K’un-Lun had no contact with the Chinese government, even through its Sages. It spoke volumes about how the Beast Emperors evaluated the country, those who led it, and the Humans who ‘claimed’ such a large amount of territory.

Territory, I noted, which warded K’un-Lun from the sea.

The outermost areas of K’un-Lun were an Avian realm, ruled over by Emperor Garuda, King of all Rocs, with a lot of powerful Noble and half-Emperor flyers vying for status in the hierarchy.

Naturally enough, the winds in the domain were lethal things, cold and like razors. While it was possible to spend power to withstand it, that meant your power was being constantly eroded. The Beasts of the Mountains were tough enough to withstand the damage, so they weren’t nearly as inhibited as Humans who came here.

Flying was a no-no here. The Avians and other fliers fought hard for their positions on the mountains’ heights, and were very proud of their status here. Taking to the air as an unrecognized outsider was basically instantly challenging their position and territory, and you’d draw all kinds of trouble to yourself... normally.

Someone winging their way in discreetly and staying low to the terrain, instead of blatantly flying high and directly through the territory of powerful Avians, was a bit of a special case. The Commanders and lower-tier Beasts couldn’t even face the Will of an Emperor, and the more powerful ones would be very leery of doing so if there were just one.

I was carrying almost a dozen. I probably could have made a beeline and not had to worry about anything below a half-Emperor, but I wasn’t going to be rude about this... although any Envoy bearing the Wills of multiple Emperors was basically entitled to do whatever they wanted in pursuit of delivering a message.

The whole area was spatially expanded and bent. From the outside, the Himalayas were a bunch of mountains rising towards the sky, the rippling of continental plates mashing together.

From the inside, the mountains went up, and up, and up! Going IN meant also going UP. My Detect Location assured me that after passing a mere two or three mountains in the exterior, I was already above thirty thousand feet, and the mountains ahead just rose higher and higher... and I hadn’t even hit a ‘snow level’ yet, despite the air being replete with Ice and Wind Mana.

I just followed the trails towards the middle. The Avians commanded the air, naturally, but the mountains were equally valuable places of real estate, and there were all kinds of Noble Great Beasts dwelling on them, along with Tribes of their descendants. They just watched me flying past with my Wills, the fact I was Human a minor detail compared to what I was carrying.

Sama had managed to get ahold of the general location of the Guardian Peach Tree through raiding the black information systems of the Hunter’s Guild and Chinese military, so I was taking a route that led to it, helped by Locate Plant pinging it for me.

I didn’t know if I could actually use a Peach from it on a Typeless Core, but for better or worse, I was going to be the one to test it out.

It also overlapped with the Blessing Magic that could administer such a permanent Boon, and the two did not stack. I had not yet begun that regimen of treating the key Elements of our people yet, but I would soon, naturally using myself as a test subject.