Ixtra learned a lot in the 8th circle. When it was time to meet up again, he was already much stronger than Merca.
However, he would share. That was the precedent set by the other archdemons towards him, so he'd follow the same example, at least for now.
Anyhow, the knowledge was valuable, but not if you were at the requisite strength level. Merca could go get it himself someday, so Ixtra wasn't reluctant to share his many findings.
They both came to the spot where Ixtra had ascended. Merca was there first and had to wait a few hours.
When they met, Merca noticed the demonic energy around Ixtra was moving in an usual manner.
Hearing of what Ixtra had learned, he was somewhat surprised. Not at what he learned, but how he learned it.
To think archdemons were so nice.
Apparently, the culture of peace amongst archdemons had existed since their inception. Well, it made sense. Humans fought for land and resources, but would land and the wealth of the ground bring you strength at this level?
Not at all. An archdemon with all of hell under his arbitrary dominion would still be helpless before a demon king. So, what was the point? Fighting was meaningless.
Might was well prioritize their long lived lives, and the best way to do that was to foster peace.
The less conflict, the better.
It had to be said that the longer one lived a good life, the more one would cherish living it for even longer.
Moreover, the 8th and 9th circles worked under an interesting law. Every time a new archdemon was born, he could "claim" a new space in the 8th circle's boundary. This was done using a combination of a spell and an innate ability.
When this spell and ability were cast together near the 8th circle's edge, it would trigger the 8th circle to automatically generate a new area of land near the edge, and that would be considered that archdemon's territory.
The same thing happened, but at a larger scale, for demon kings in the 9th circle.
This was also why most demon kings stayed in the 9th circle.
It was because their natural territories were there.
This setup also meant that the demons that became archdemons and demon kings earlier had territories in the center of the 8th and 9th circles, while all the newer ones were nearest the edge.
The demons of similar eras being closest each other as neighbours was also another nice side effect of this system.
The creation of land at this large scale was determined by a Law. All the laws of a world were initially made by its creators, and except some unique cases, usually stayed that way.
Ixtra had learned that the key to a warp drive was spatial magics. Well, that wasn't surprising to anyone. However, he also learned what magics were required to make one.
He copied over a lot of the books he read for Merca to keep in his treasury. Might as well, it wasn't difficult, with magic.
Within them were higher circle spells, up to the max, 20th circle.
Recal that higher circle magics were just more and more encrypted. The highest circle of magic was generally regarded as the 20th circle.
Ixtra had managed to learn a lot of spells quite quickly, but Merca would be able to do so even faster.
There were also books on arrays and many other things. They would all be quite useful.
Merca thanked him for bringing them over.
Ixtra had something similar to Merca, in that he had a space to store things. His was inside his demonic energy. It wasn't as versatile and useful as the treasury, but it was quite powerful too, especially as he got stronger.
According to the books, the warp drive would merely require a specific set of arrays. These arrays were based on very high tier spells, up to the 20th circle.
There were also arrays that cast [Void Hazmat] for you, although they were very costly.
Merca used almost all his void mana he had built up over 50+ years to create such an array, and installed it on his partially built ship, which he still had.
With this, he could stay in the void for as long as he wanted, without using up more void mana. This was extremely useful.
The next few years were spent learning spells, arrays, and techniques of all sorts, all whilst Merca also inscribed various arrays onto his blood.
This was different from warlocks, who inscribed individual runes, and further onto only their organs. Then they would switch to a different tactic later on for further advancement, completely differentiating them from mages.
Inscribing arrays in the blood before the void magic stage is useless, as they'll dissipate. Only void mana will prevent array dissipation.
Merca also didn't know this was the proper advancement pathway.
The technique he had once practiced, Asteroth's failed technique, was similar to this stage of advancement, but it couldn't work at the level it was meant to be used at.
When he inscribed these arrays into his blood, they were of tremendous help. He grew in power at a ridiculous pace.
This was because of the exponential nature of the process. Arrays to help inscribe more arrays would cause countless returns, same with absorption type arrays, learning type arrays, spellcasting type arrays, and so on.
After 10 years passed, Merca could use 20th circle magic.
This also isn't unusual. This was actually quite a lot slower than the ancestral mage race's children learned 20th circle magic. Although they also took around 10 years, that was from scratch, and with undeveloped brains. Merca already knew up to 11th circle magic, and his mind was fully developed.
In that sense, he was actually quite slow to take 10 whole years.
Although the mage race was nowhere to be found in this era, their progression pathway up till a certain point was fully maintained in text.
Thus, Merca had no trouble getting to this level. However, this was where it got more difficult.
Only basic magic encryption was recorded in the books. Past that, it'd be up to him to figure out alone.
This was a complex process. Not only would he have to discover new forms of magical encryption that were ever more complex all on his own, he'd have to create new arrays to perform the encryption, and then a new method to inscribe them, since the inscription of every array into the blood required a slightly different method.
It wasn't something that would see a lot of progress very quickly.
Ixtra had hardly progressed in his magic comprehension, but he wasn't focusing on it. He was primarily training techniques.
Even with those, he was slightly weaker than Merca overall.
One day, something interesting happened.
It was the day Merca inscribed a 21st circle encrypted array into his blood, the first time he had done so.
All of a sudden, there was a large natural phenomenon of mana swirling around him in a large area of hundreds of meters.
As he floated in the center of the mana, he felt his blood change slightly. That was all, a minute change to experience, but an important one.
And then the mana phenomenon went away.
Merca tried various methods to see what had changed, but the only difference was the compass' status tab, which showed his only remaining health condition as "Undead (Reanimated Body)".
The curse was gone. He still wasn't entirely sure what it had ever done that was curselike.
As for any other health conditions, they had all gone away at some point or another.
Apparently, this phenomenon had meant that the world had recognized him as of the mage race, officially. This was important as it lead into the next realm of power.
After the void magic stage, which ended once the world recognized your class blood as being potent enough to fulfill the minimum conditions of an ancestral class race, was a stage of unification.
All power systems would eventually unify into one realm, the god realm.
Power systems and even entire realms were themselves created by those at the god realm. Thus, you couldn't use a god's power system, which worked based off of their power, to become a god yourself.
Thus, there was a prerequisite realm before the god realm, which allowed one to become a god.
Godhood meant control over Laws. That was a fancy way of saying you could control the fundamentals of space in a region. Technically, any creature with a strong enough domain of control around them could be considered a god.
However, you weren't truly considered a true god until you could create your own independant space with its own laws.
This was different from interspatial artifacts, like interspatial rings.
Those created an independant space that was pregoverned by a certain set of laws. Creating something similar but with your own laws was much more difficult, and was the entryway into the god realm.
The concept of a god was a being that created the worlds. They were not bound either by power or capability. Thus, there were both fairly weak and extremely strong gods.
Some stronger gods created worlds with creatures in them that were stronger than some weaker gods.
To gain the control over laws that allowed one to achieve this, you needed a special energy known as divinity.
There were once many gods that controlled the law of divinity in the cosmos, which was responsible for creating and controlling divinity. However, there was a large holy war that resulted in just one god remaining, who had complete control of the law of divinity.
All further gods were his descendants and creations, and used the divinity he bestowed unto them.
He was known as the Lord God, lord of all the gods.
Divinity didn't require meeting that being personally. He couldn't be bothered with that, so he left ways to gain divinity all around the cosmos. However, divinity couldn't be absorbed by the bodies formed from normal laws of normal gods.
Hence, a special body, a godbody, also known as a divine body, was required to absorb divinity, given that you could find any, and become a god.
Godbodies actually weren't physical avatars, but spirit bodies. Spirit bodies existed in a different plane of existence, and were connected to the soul. They were considered a part of the soul, in a sense.
This meant a mortal death wouldn't get rid of them. One would need to have their soul destroyed and the spirit body along with it to truly die.
Merca's Arachne bloodline was also connected to his spirit body, and so he could recover it automatically in any avatar.
The process of developing and transforming your spirit body to become a godbody was the premise of the realm before the god realm, and was also the necessary midpoint between any given power system's max tier and the god realm.
This realm was known as the Spirit Infusion Realm.
Forming a godbody couldn't be done by a normal power system's laws and mechanics. Thus, it was necessary to break away from these lesser power systems, no matter how strong they might be, and instead temper the soul and spirit.
This required going to each of the 3000 realms in the inner cosmic ring and achieving the max tier of power in each power system, in each realm. This would infuse the power of the power system into the spirit body and soul. Enough infusions in, and it would cause a qualitative change.
The 3000 worlds of the inner ring were also the ones with the most powerful power systems in each of them, and the most numerous. Each world did not have just one power system.
Hence, that was more than 3000 power systems to reach the peak of. For reference, the class blood system was considered one of those, as the independant space of the mage civilization of old was one of the 3000 realms of the inner cosmic ring.
Not only was this time consuming, the bigger issue was that it was difficult, and at times impossible for most. Breaking away from a power system for another one sounded simple, but it wasn't in practice.
Take for instance Merca's mage bloodline. To break away from the class blood system, he'd have to change bloodline. A bloodline that, by now, had actually already infused itself into his soul and spirit.
And he couldn't undo that infusion since the whole point of becoming the best in so many power systems was to strengthen the soul through that infusion.
So, he had to keep the mage bloodline, but break away from the power system. However, that was innately contradictory, right?
Not quite. There was a loophole. Power systems worked on laws, and a law only detected what it interacted with. In other words, a law that can't disrupt the infusion of power into the spirit body could be safely broken away from.
The process was even quite simple, just create a new avatar to possess with your soul, and before the bloodlines and powers of your past could infuse themselves into the new body, begin practicing a new power system.
The window of time after possessing a new avatar was usually quite small, but you could just will your spirit not to infuse power into an avatar.
If this process was attempted with a law that could disrupt the spirit and power infused within it, then things got complicated, and there were indeed laws like that, but we'll get to those another day.
For now, Merca would have to make a new body and practice, say, the demonic system Ixtra was using, up to the demon king level. Then, a new avatar, and a new system of power and repeat this for every power system in the 3000 realms.
Making a new avatar wasn't that difficult at his level now, but that didn't mean the process wasn't extremely tedious and also difficult. After all, each power system was different.
Reaching the peak of one didn't mean you could reach the peak of another.
However, the biggest issue was that some power systems were exponentially harder than others, to the point that they might as well be impossible.
Thus, the mage race had focused on what they were good at, improving their mage bloodlines and magical encryption and spellbreaking, instead of attempting this foolhardy challenge of becoming a god.
Many others, most even, did the same.
After all, although there weren't overly many, like millions, of ways to become immortal in the 3000 realms, there were enough. One didn't need to become a god to be immortal, nor to be happy, so most didn't bother.
It was more of a passive, "I might as well do this if I can and I'm really bored" kind of thing than anything else. Of course, some people just wanted the power that badly. A whole realm all to yourself to create, who could resist the allure.
After all, this wasn't like a book or a painting, it was a true world.
Since it was such a long term endeavor, Merca decided not to focus on it for now.
Of course, with every new avatar, there was no need to sacrifice previous avatars.
The common tactic was to leave other avatars in a pocket dimension, in some kind of sleeping state until needed.
It all seemed like a large hassle, so Merca didn't make a new avatar immediately.
First, he wanted to travel the realms for a while.
The mage race didn't have as long of a lifespan as demons, but it was still quite long. Anyhow, he was currently undead, so it didn't matter anyways. He had all the time in the world.
He was finally strong enough to make all the arrays needed for the warp drive, and he would soon begin the next step of his journey.
He had wanted this for over 200 years now. At last, it was time.