Lewd Dungeon, Chapter 386

Chapter 386 – Considerations

Even in a world of magic, it would take time for the adventurers I’d hired to reach Knighthold. Sure, there was magic that allowed people to move great distances through teleportation. However, on Bluemountain, that magic typically took the form of static teleportation circles in the depths of palaces, allowing government officials to reach the lone spaceport in the city of Bluemountain, if they needed to. Most people on the planet didn’t even know they existed.

And any mage who was granted a class like Space Mage, which could get access to the Teleport spell, typically did not remain an adventurer, either, and they certainly weren’t setting up to offer public transit services. No, they were typically ensconced in a kingdom’s military or spy service, or added to a ruler’s personal guard. Being able to send messages quickly and securely was invaluable to any general or spymaster, and a mage who could teleport the king to safety when enemies were at the gate was no small thing.

Now, that wasn’t to say that there weren’t quicker options for getting around than just saddling a horse and riding off. Airships existed in this world, but they were rare. Took some powerful magic to make a ship fly, after all, and a wooden ship in the middle of the air looked like a nice target for any flying monsters. That meant a trip by airship was expensive, but it would cut the travel time to go long distances by three-fourths, compared to riding on horseback.

Either way, though, it would be at least a couple weeks, if not a month or two, before the adventurers made it to Earth and went to test the Shatterchain side of things. I could try and follow them along their journey, since one of them actively worshipped me, but I shelved that idea. I would check back on them later, if it took them too long to arrive, but I wanted their full abilities and tactics to be a surprise. It was rare for me to get complete newcomers to my dungeon, after all.

Thankfully, most of my people out in the galaxy, whether they were dungeons, adventurers, or otherwise, were not having any real trouble. Real trouble, not the normal, everyday stuff, like trying to get through a dungeon or working to capture a tough target. No crusades getting called on them, or anything like that. Thankfully, I’d gotten to the point where the System’s divinity section covered for my abilities in that way, so I didn’t have to try and manage all of those problems on my own.

That was something that had actually unlocked once I’d made contact with other gods, and been fully inducted into the System as a deity. Not getting added to GodNet from the moment I became divine wasn’t a bug, like I’d thought, but a feature. From what I could understand through GodNet, the reason for it was because, before a species is old enough to be brought into the galactic fold, their gods are typically confined to a single planet. The initial isolation was intended for a newborn god or divine creature to acclimatize to their newfound powers and responsibilities, before adding on to that with knowledge of other worlds, and all the types of people that might live upon them.

How it was supposed to work was simple. Once a divine being made contact with another divinity from their own region, the Local GodNet formed. Multiple regions would grow, as their respective peoples grew, until they met, and then the Local GodNets would merge into a Planetary GodNet. The Planetary network would continue absorbing the local ones until you had the whole planet under that network. Eventually, the young species that grew on the planet would either be contacted by aliens, or they would leave their home system, and find new life amongst the stars. At that point, the Planetary GodNet would merge with the main GodNet, and those deities would be able to interact with all the different pantheons across the galaxy.

The whole process was designed to gradually widen a divine being’s perspective, as their worshippers gained new perspective. And, for primitive or uncontacted societies growing into civilization, it worked well. Unfortunately, Earth being knocked out of the System had changed things up, quite significantly. I was the first divine being to arise on Earth, not counting divinities who had been born out of the beliefs of humans while the System was not working, and been forced into sleeping. The first divine beings I met were gods from other planets, which meant that I, and all the other divinities of Earth, immediately got added into the main GodNet, instead of growing along the way.

Fortunately, the gods on GodNet were too busy with actually running their religions to actually spend much time just hanging out in chat rooms and the like. Now that Earth had been fully added to the mix, the speculation and conversation on GodNet had quieted down. There was the odd controversy now and then, like when one of the Fimaazro gods noticed how my followers were starting to use freighters with wormhole drives. They still didn’t know that the warships I sold the UN had been upgraded to use wormhole drives, though. I was looking forward to that revelation.

That thought drew my attention back to Earth. The governments had not been idle. Now that the immediate chaos of the System turning on had died down, and the System Shop allowed them access to technology they otherwise wouldn’t have, several countries had begun construction projects in space. My annex on the moon was not the only structure there, anymore. The US, China, European Union, and a collective of African nations had all created lunar outposts, now that you didn’t need massive rockets to get to space, which needed 17 to 22 times the mass of the payload in fuel each flight. Those outposts were quickly growing into full-fledged colonies, and were working towards becoming self-sufficient.

It wasn’t just the moon, either. Major colonies were in the planning stage for Mars, as well as its two moons. And the UN was subsidizing a colony on the dwarf planet, Ceres, in the asteroid belt. Not only was it a good waypoint for exploring the outer solar system, but construction had already begun on ore processing and manufacturing centers, as well as a shipyard. New ships to join the UN forces would be built, there.

Even if these colonies weren’t all in the public eye, I knew about them. Not because I was spying on world leaders, or anything like that. No, I knew about them, because each project included a shrine to me in their plans. Yes, there were some religious types who objected to putting a shrine to the God of Domination, Pleasure, and Dungeons in their colony plans, but the benefits of being able to move people through the portal network greatly reduced the strain on logistics, and helped ensure that, despite colonies being self-sufficient, they did not get isolated enough to start getting ideas of rebellion.

Plus, my deals with different governments had been fairly benign, so far. I hadn’t pushed any of them as hard as I could have, and they knew it. Even when I had governments in a position where I could easily bend them over the barrel and have my way with them, I didn’t do that. Which is why, for them, the benefits far outweighed any costs they’d suffered. And, in return, I made myself too invaluable to everyone in power, meaning that nothing short of planetary genocide or a cataclysmic natural disaster wiping out Earth’s population would be able to overthrow my power base in the Sol system.

Basically, I’d made myself essential to the Powers That Be on Earth. Even if they didn’t like me (and many didn’t), or even if they hated me (and some did), they needed me, in both my Dungeon and Divine forms, and they knew it. I couldn’t abuse that status too much without someone eventually deciding that the benefits no longer outweighed the headaches, and deciding to do something about me, but that was fine. So long as I kept my ‘fun’ to my own domain, and made sure to make examples of people who caused trouble, then I was pretty secure.

That was without accounting for the System Contracts needed to access the portal network, of course. With the numbers of people who had signed that contract, and my Dungeon Contract, any attempts to actually take me down would have to deal with a large percentage of the planet’s population being forced to fight against them. The way I figured it, the only way for mortals to safely move against me was to either wipe out most of the planet’s population, or keep anyone from making new contracts with me until those who already had contracts died off from old age.

Now, with people turning into Elves, Vampires, and other long-lived or immortal beings, I didn’t put it past someone to try and come up with a generational plan to try and cut off my power base on Earth. However, that plan hinged on no longer having a significant number of people being under contract to me. And, realistically, the only way that could possibly happen is if someone found a way to make my portal network unnecessary.

The System did have options available for teleportation networks. It was a big galaxy, after all, and there was no way I was the first to think of magical mass transit. However, those were typically enchanted items of some kind, like engraved Teleportation Circles, linked in a network so that they could only go to certain locations. Unfortunately, it didn’t take a genius to see the potential problems with a system like that.

The first problem, and the biggest, was that they were actual physical objects. Physical objects that could be broken, sabotaged, or altered. Smashing or disabling a Teleportation Circle was bad enough, but if you altered one, then you opened up a nasty can of worms. Causing a circle to redirect everyone that used it to a slave camp was one of the kinder possibilities. If you took out some of the protections, you could teleport people into solid objects, or have them come out the other side with their actual velocity, not their relative velocity.

People didn’t think about it, but even standing still on Earth, you were moving at significant speeds. At the Equator, the Earth was spinning 1040 miles per hour. It was only the force of the Earth’s gravity that kept anyone from just getting thrown into space immediately. However, Earth wasn’t just standing still and twirling like a figure skater. It was moving around the sun at around 67,000 mph, and hurtling through space in its path through the galaxy at 483,000 mph.

Normal teleportation spells and effects isolated those kinds of numbers, and had someone come out the other side of the teleport moving the same relative speed and direction as they were when they went in. Even if they were now in a completely different part of the world, someone standing still when they teleported would be standing still when they appeared on the other side.

If you took out those very necessary safety precautions, however, the best-case scenario for someone teleporting is that they emerge on the other side and are immediately converted into a nasty red stain on the receiving pad. That was considered the best-case scenario, because it would be over too quickly for them to actually feel pain or even recognize that they were about to die. Less happy scenarios involved people getting flung into space at many times escape velocity, or launched into other people like a missile, and so on, where, depending on their defenses and regenerative abilities, they might actually be alive long enough to suffer as they died, or realize that they were about to kill a bunch of unrelated people.

There was a reason why experimenting with teleportation was something generally relegated to areas far, FAR away from any other people. And why the Galactic Assembly preferred to just hand developing species a copy of existing teleportation methods, along with demonstrations of why poking around in the ’code’ was a terrible idea. It was also why weaponized teleportation attacks on unsuspecting civilians usually brought a response that was similar to the ones that happened when people started unleashing weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations.

The other problem with a physical teleportation network was, of course, cost. Infrastructure cost money. You had to pay to build it. You had to pay to maintain it. You had to pay for safety checks. And the people you had to pay were all expensive, since they went to a lot of trouble to learn their work, and the consequences for bad craftsmanship were even more costly.

On the other hand, my portal network just required people to give me a bit of territory, which I claimed as both a God and a Dungeon, and then I built my shrine and portals using Dungeon magic. Because they were part of a dungeon, trying to break or alter the portals was incredibly difficult, and I would be instantly aware of it if someone tried. And portals which folded space to bring two points together were harder to throw off than teleportation which moved things from one point to the other. Basically, my power base was as safe as I could possibly make it, for the moment.

Which was nice, because I just got a message through GodNet, letting me know that some deities wanted to chat.