Merchant Of Yliaster

Blueberry was slithering peacefully on the ground when a mental message suddenly slammed into her mind. She was momentarily surprised but quickly filtered the weird squiggles humans used from the message, slimming it down.

She was unsure how and why her human sent her a message, but the contents were exciting. She could feel a sense of promise from the message, and she apparently needed to remove some humans from a place.

The message included some vague depictions of what the people she would need to find would look like. She could see that she would need to hunt people with stabby things. The location of the place, though, was a mystery. Maybe the squiggles were meant to tell her that?

She was confused, but she figured it wouldn't be a problem. How hard could it be to find a group of people with stabby things? She had seen plenty around when she was coming here anyway.

Maxwell stood above a hill in his Drakhabgar persona, looking down at a field. It turned out that it was pretty hard to travel when you looked like someone's worst imagination, so he traveled somewhere close using his own identity under the guise of exploring the city.

Now, though, he was quite speechless as he stared at the field before him. This place used to be a farm place, at least that's what the papers said, but all Maxwell could see was a big ass anthill.

Even the holes were bigger than a regular human could fit into, and ants were everywhere. It was worth noting that these ants were almost a meter in size and leveled between 15 and 25.

Maxwell could understand why this was a veteran mission. If anything, he was a bit confused that they let him take this mission. He couldn't imagine how someone would destroy this anthill.

Mass destruction was probably the best way to go about this, but the field would be pretty pointless to reclaim if it were completely inhabitable after Maxwell was done with it. He could probably siphon the bad energies out, though, so it was still an option.

In his domain, he could see that tunnels went almost endlessly downward. He couldn't even see the end of it. In the end, he decided to do something interesting.

He focused and started to gather water mana above the ant hill. Apart from the time they spent near the river, water mana was a type Maxwell didn't really use. Even back then he only watched it due to his curiosity rather than it being a powerful type of mana.

The function of water mana was simple. As mana had qualities similar to what it presented, fire mana being hot, and blood mana giving vitality, water mana was apparently good at dissolving other mana types inside it.

Add this to the fact that there was a lot of water in the air; it was pretty easy to get large amounts of water infused with different energies when you used water mana. As Maxwell was using a persona, he couldn't nuke this place using a variety of different mana, and it was a given that he would need to use darkness mana, at least in some form, if he wanted it to be believable. He didn't mind this, as it forced him to be more creative.

As he made the water mana above the ant hill thicker, he could see a cloud forming slowly above it due to water vapor in the air getting attracted to the water mana he was piling up. Maxwell did something quite different, as he injected the water mana with two different types of mana at the same time, both of them quite fitting the persona he was creating.

Decay and darkness flowed into the mass of mana, and the clouds slowly took a sickly dark color. Maxwell could feel that the darkness mana was trying to absorb the other two, but with a small encouragement from Maxwell, it behaved. Maxwell pushed more and more mana into the cloud, his purpose being simple.

Since ancient times, people have prayed and performed interesting rituals to achieve the end result that Maxwell was trying to achieve. Maxwell, though, took a more direct approach. Soon, the clouds turned dark, and Maxwell stopped water mana from spreading too far apart, indirectly controlling the clouds too. This didn't work on solids, and most of the time liquids, but vapor was a lot more malleable, so he could do this.

The ants, apparently having noticed something was happening was hastily moving around, as they tried to close down many holes leading to their enormous home, but it was apparent that they were used to getting earlier warnings against something. They were too late, and the first drop soon touched the ground.

Maxwell watched as the grass around the spot where the water drop touched decayed in high speed, and slowly disintegrated due to darkness mana consuming whatever leftover energy it had. It was truly a terrifying combo, and it would soon be unleashed on the ant nest.

The speed of the rain slowly increased, and more and more drops started falling, causing all of the vegetation around the nest to disappear. Maxwell was really proud of himself, as he tied the darkness mana with decay mana, causing it to not consume anything immune to decay. This meant that the mana wouldn't go to waste trying to push through stone.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Soon, the rain was fast enough that water was slowly flowing into the ant nest through the numerous entry points the creatures created. He was pretty sure that the nest wouldn't flood, as that didn't happen in regular rains, but he didn't need that. He just needed the water to pass through the nest, and all would be cleaned.

Title Acquired: Rainmaker

Rainmaker: You would have no problems finding a job in an ancient tribe. Congratulations.

Why so sarcastic? Maxwell was speechless seeing the explanation. The feat just now cost him almost three thousand mana, and he sat on the ground to get some rest. Being prepared wouldn't hurt if there was a particularly strong ant inside the nest capable of surviving the rain.

Notifications soon started flowing in, most of the dead being the lower-level ants. He was also forced to mute the notifications below level 10, as there were too many. It made him feel like he was engaging in genocide, but considering that these were ants, the only factor making what he did different from what humans usually did was the size of these ants.

Maxwell kept the cloud in a completely unnatural round shape and watched the rain rage with an increasing speed. Through his soul dominion, he could see shapes retreating downwards, and prima sense showed that there were still a good number of ants living inside the nest.

Maxwell, though, realized something terrible about this situation. Now that he was just working on sustaining the cloud, he could feel that all he needed to keep this rain up was pushing his mana regeneration inside it. This meant that this rain wouldn't stop as long as he wanted without him losing even a shred of mana.

When he was regenerating some of his mana, the scale of the rain got smaller, but it still easily covered the whole nest. Maxwell also carefully commanded the mana to dissipate after some time, as he didn't want to unleash wild darkness and decay mana into the ecosystem.

After some point, the kill notifications slowed down, but Maxwell could see with his prima sense that there were still alive ants beyond the range of his dominion. Their number was still considerable, too. Maxwell let the rain cloud dissipate and gazed at the nest thoughtfully. He was a bit lost about how he could fix this problem. The ants probably managed to divert the stream at last, and he was a bit lost about how he could manage to reach so deep using anything else.

Maybe I can create an explosion under the ground? He contemplated. As long as it was inside his soul space, he was pretty confident that he could control mana pretty well. The problem was that the explosion would be greatly absorbed by the amount of solids under the ground.

This, though, made him remember an old friend. Now that he thought about it, wasn't this an excellent environment for the space rune? He smiled and started to work.

Just at the edge of his perception, around 250 meters downwards, he started creating expansion runes in the tunnels he could detect. In total, there were around seven tunnels this deep, and Maxwell created a rune in each.

Now, having learned that staying near such things was dangerous, he created a small platform of mana beneath his feet using metal mana. If anything, it would absorb some of the impact if something volatile happened.

He slowly started to push space mana inside all of the runes, not being very hasty about it. He was not very concerned that others would discover that he used something other than darkness, as the environment was much too fucked for that to be noticed.

Some time, and around seven thousand mana evenly distributed to seven runes later, he was ready to activate the runes. He sent the command, and it didn't even take a second for him to realize that he fucked up.

When he planned to use these runes, he completely forgot that his dominion was limited to 250 meters. Not that the runes were activated, all of them were probably far, far away. This blinded him except for a small percentage of the nest he could see, and even that was a bit hard to understand.

Apparently, creating six runes was a bad idea, as the part he could see oscillated in a completely bizarre manner, all parts moving around erratically as they were affected by the everchanging expansion. Maxwell couldn't even imagine what was going on below, and from the purple haze he was seeing below, he was pretty sure he needed to get away as soon as possible.

It was worth noting that all of these happened in a very small fraction of a second, and the next thing, Maxwell was frantically using infusion empowerment to push himself upwards. With the hope that it would help him ignore air resistance, he used wind mana, and fortunately, he was soon flying upwards with a breakneck speed.

He gazed downwards; around half a second had passed since the activation, and he was pleased that he chose to push himself up. The ground swelled like a balloon all around the nest, and entrances to the nest immediately got clogged with the swelling dirt. As soon as this happened, the nest did something Maxwell didn't quite expect.

The whole ground above the nest proceeded to fall down as a whole, getting pulled down by the vacuum effect created by the space getting expanded with the same air inside. This gave Maxwell a really bad feeling, as this expansion was only temporary.

He figured that being directly above the space was really unwise, so he pushed himself to the side with more wind mana. He felt that he could find a much better way to fly, but this was an emergency. He was launched to the side, as the nest below continued to collapse without showing many signs of resistance.

Apparently, the ants didn't design the place with the possibility in mind that their home would one day turn into a vacuum tube. The constriction effect made the falling soil gather even more tightly as it continued to move downwards, still looking absolutely weird as different physics laws fought for dominance in the erratic space.

Maxwell was starting to think that him having the expansion rune was a mistake made by the system at this point, as this was becoming ridiculous.

It didn't take long for the inevitable explosion to come, as the world was consumed with a deafening sound of rocks and soil doing movements that couldn't easily be explained with words.