Kalagar S. Sully now had a "Sect." It had four members. It had a three-story, self-cleaning, glowing pagoda for a Sect Hall. And it had... a sentient, silver jungle for a lawn.
He stood on the top-floor balcony, a cup of (miraculously-grown) hot tea in hand, and surveyed his new, nightmarish reality. He was a recluse. He had come to this mountain for quiet. He was now the unwitting, unwilling cult-leader to a quartet of reality-benders.
Down below, the new dynamic was already painfully clear.
"Princess Sylvie, please, allow me to fetch you a stool!" Valerius, the reality-cutting noble, was saying, his voice thick with a level of deference that bordered on panic.
"No, no, Disciple-Brother Valerius, I must tend to the new Grove," Sylvie replied, her voice like music. She was, at this moment, talking to one of the silver trees, which was politely bending a branch to offer her a piece of its glowing fruit.
"Then I shall build you a throne!" Boro, the Orc-artificer, declared, pulling out his runic-charcoal. "A self-leveling, temperature-controlled, fully-automated Throne of Life and Death! It is the least a being such as you deserves!"
Lila, blissfully unaware of royal-celestial protocol, just skipped over. "Hi, Sylvie! Your trees are so cool! Can you teach them to wave? Master loves it when things are... tidy!"
Kalagar groaned and sipped his tea. This was a mess. Valerius and Boro knew they were in the presence of celestial royalty. They were, somehow, more terrified of her than they were of him. And they all still believed he was the god who had casually cured her "divine curse" by calling her "constipated."
His life was a farce.
He was about to retreat inside for another hour of reading when a new sound reached him. Shouting. Desperate, terrified shouting from down the mountain path.
"Oh, now what?" he growled. "Is it slavers? A rival sect? A dragon?"
He was wrong on all counts.
A small, bedraggled group of people staggered into the clearing, their simple, homespun clothes covered in mud and... pulp. They were not adventurers. They were farmers.
They fell to their knees at the edge of the new, sentient, silver jungle, their faces masks of pure, superstitious terror.
"Mercy!" an old man in the front cried out, pressing his face to the dirt. "Mercy, O Mountain-God! We beg you! We will... we will sacrifice a goat! Two goats! Just... stop the plague!"
Kalagar, his curiosity piqued, leaned over the balcony. "Plague? What plague?"
The farmers looked up, saw him, and collectively screamed.
"It's him! The Sage of the Peak!"
"He speaks!"
"Please, Lord!" the old man wept, holding up his hands. "The plague! The 'Green-Death'! It came from your mountain! The night of the green-light-bloom!"
Kalagar frowned. The "green-light-bloom"... he looked at Lila. Lila, who had [Anthem of Life].
"Explain," Kalagar commanded, his "Annoyed Professor" voice cutting through the panic.
"It... it's the growth, Lord!" the farmer cried. "A week ago, our crops... they just... grew! We thought it was a miracle! The 'Sage's Blessing'! Our spring wheat... it grew to full-height... in an hour!"
Kalagar's blood ran cold. Oh, no.
"And... and then..." the man sobbed, "it... it rotted by noon. It grew so fast, it... it turned to black-slurry in the fields! Our chickens... they are laying eggs the size of pumpkins! The shells are too thick to crack! Our pigs... they gave birth to... to... monsters! Things with too many legs! The weeds... O gods, the weeds... they are like trees! They... they pulled down Jed's barn!"
Kalagar S. Sully, former botanist, instantly understood.
He wasn't a god. He wasn't a sage.
He was a polluter.
Lila's uncontrolled, Top-Tier [Anthem of Life]... now combined with Sylvie's [Samsara of the First Tree]...
This entire mountain was leaking pure, unfiltered, miracle-gro-radiation down into the valley. He wasn't blessing them. He was giving their entire ecosystem cancer.
This was, perhaps, the most embarrassing, mortifying moment of his entire two lives. He was a bad neighbor.
"This..." Kalagar said, his voice a low, cold, furious growl.
His disciples, hearing this tone, snapped to attention.
Lila, Valerius, Boro, and Sylvie stood in a perfect, terrified line at the base of the pagoda, staring up at him.
Kalagar descended the stairs, his face a mask of cold, academic rage.
He pointed a trembling finger at Lila. Then at Sylvie.
"You. And you," he spat. "My 'Life' specialists. Are you proud of this?"
Lila flinched. "Master? The... the garden is..."
"Not the garden!" Kalagar roared. He gestured furiously at the weeping farmers. "Your 'magic'... your 'life-force'... it is leaking. Everywhere. You are like children who have left the tap on! You are flooding the valley!"
He was, for the first time, genuinely furious. Not scared. Furious.
"This is waste!" he snapped. "This is uncontrolled! This is grotesquely unsubtle! You are drowning these people in 'life'! You know what happens when you have too much life, with no balance? With no containment?"
He pointed at the farmers. "You get plagues. You get monsters. You get rot!"
His four disciples stared at him, their faces pale. He wasn't just scolding them. He was teaching them. This was a new lesson. A lesson of... consequence.
"Life-magic," Kalagar lectured, pacing in front of them, "is not a bludgeon! It is a scalpel! What you have done here... is the work of amateurs!"
"Master..." Lila whispered, her eyes full of tears. "What... what do we do? How do we... stop it?"
Kalagar pinched the bridge of his nose. He had to make something up. Now.
"You contain it," he said. "You're leaking this energy because you have no... focus. No vessel. You've built a nuclear reactor with no walls! You need a fence. A barrier. A container."
He looked at Lila. He looked at Sylvie.
"You two. You will fix this. You will build a... a seal. A seal to hold all of this 'life-energy' on this mountain, where it belongs. You will weave your 'life' (Lila) and your 'death' (Sylvie) into a wall! A barrier of balance! I want this mountain to be a bubble, not a fountain!"
Lila and Sylvie, the comprehension-geniuses, looked at each other.
A 'barrier of balance'...
A 'seal' of Life and Death...
A 'bubble'... not a 'fountain'...
He is teaching us... Equilibrium. Control. A CONTAINMENT spell!
[System: Disciples 'Lila' and 'Sylvie' are attempting a [Combined Comprehension]...]
[...Lesson: The Bubble-Barrier of Balance...]
[...Comprehension: SUCCESS!]
[Disciples have comprehended: [The Runic Seal of Equilibrium] (Top-Tier Containment/Balance Art).]
The two women stepped forward. They stood back-to-back.
Lila, the vessel of pure, positive life, began to glow with a verdant, emerald light.
Sylvie, the conduit of balanced life-and-death, began to glow with a shimmering, silver light.
"We understand, Master!" Lila said.
"The Balance must be maintained," Sylvie declared.
They raised their hands.
"Life!" Lila shouted.
"And Death!" Sylvie echoed.
"[SEAL THE EQUILIBRIUM]!" they roared in unison.
A wave of energy erupted from them. It was not a "boom." It was a dome.
A vast, perfectly translucent bubble of woven green-and-silver light shot upwards from the mountain peak. It expanded, faster and faster, until it was miles wide... and then it vanished.
It was not gone. It had just settled.
Down in the valley, the weeping farmers suddenly stopped.
The old man, who had been kneeling, blinked. "The... the air... it feels... clean again..."
A woman pointed. "Jed! Your hand!"
A farmer, Jed, looked at his hand, which had been covered in 'green-death' rot. The black, sludgy veins were receding. The tumors on his skin were shrinking.
The "plague of life" was not just stopped. It was receding. The [Seal of Equilibrium] was acting like a giant, magical vacuum, sucking all the 'waste-magic' back up to the mountain, where it was recycled by Sylvie's silver-jungle.
In the space of thirty seconds, the "Green-Death" was over.
The valley was... normal.
The farmers stared at their clean hands. They stared at the clean, blue sky.
Then... they turned... and looked at the Sage of the Mountain, Kalagar S. Sully.
He was just standing there, his arms crossed, tapping his foot impatiently.
The old man fell flat on his face.
"HE CURED IT!" he screamed, his voice raw with pure, religious ecstasy. "HE CURED THE 'GREEN-DEATH'!"
"HE CURED IT... BY SCOLDING HIS APOSTLES!"
"A GOD! HE IS A TRUE GOD! HE TOOK THE PLAGUE BACK!"
The entire village delegation prostrated themselves, their foreheads grinding into the dirt, all of them weeping and chanting "Mercy! Praise! A true god!"
Kalagar S. Sully felt his eye twitch.
He had just cleaned up his own, embarrassing, magical "toxic waste spill"... and they were worshipping him for it.
"Yes. Fine. It's done," he said, his voice flat. "You're... cured. Now... go away. I am... meditating."
"Yes, God-Lord! Yes, Sage!"
The villagers scrambled to their feet and practically ran down the mountain, screaming at the top of their lungs about the "Miracle of the Mountain" and the "God who Cures by Scolding."
Kalagar watched them go, his shoulders slumped.
He turned to his four disciples. They were all looking at him with that same, familiar, terrifying look of pure, unadulterated awe.
"Master," Valerius said, his voice shaking. "Your lesson... it was... profound. We... we had forgotten... that all power... requires balance. Thank you... for scolding us."
Kalagar just stared at them.
He didn't say a word.
He just turned, walked back up the stairs of his glowing, three-story pagoda, went into his study, and slammed the door.
He was, he decided, going to invent a new "Made-Up Lesson" for Boro.
He was going to call it: [The Art of the Unbreakable, Soundproof, Disciple-Proof Lock].