Broken Lands

Chapter 389 – Imperial Adherents

Sophia watched the Pending label for a long moment, then backed out to see what else was there. She didn’t know if the Guide could do what it implied and talk across the Origin to another universe. If it could, it might take a while.

The next interesting category was Imperial Adherents. Sophia could come up with a number of possibilities for what might be in there, but they all had one thing in common: they would all be about people. That ought to mean the Broken Lord’s people, since he was the last Emperor. Well, the last Emperor before Sophia, at least.

Spoiler

Empress Sophia

(Imperial Sigil)

Imperial Oath

Imperial Emblem

Imperial Spheres

Imperial Spheres Available

Basic: 89 

First Upgrade: 253 

Second Upgrade: 961

Third Upgrade: 2648

Fourth Upgrade: 73

Fifth Upgrade: 14

Sixth Upgrade: 1

Imperial Spheres In Use

Basic: 23

First Upgrade: 23

Second Upgrade: 17

Third Upgrade: 14

Fourth Upgrade: 0

Fifth Upgrade: 0

Sixth Upgrade: 0

Imperial Stratification

Change Sphere Categorization

Change Stratification

Current Stratification:

Emperor: 1

Imperial Council: 0

Regional Lord: 0

City Lord: 0

Hierarch: 0

Hallowed Leaders: 0

Ambassadors: 0

Imperial Commander: 0

Registry Commander: 0

Grantholders: 0

Adherents: 3,984

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Sophia wasn’t sure what she expected out of the category, but a list of Spheres and a list of titles that each had no one assigned definitely wasn’t it. There were several interesting things about the lists; the most obvious was that there were Imperial Spheres that went all the way up to the sixth upgrade. That made the requirement that heirs to the throne … er, sword, had to be at least fourth upgrade look a lot more reasonable. 

The fact that there was only one sixth upgrade Sphere made a point that it wasn’t common, even though it was possible.

Other than that, it was obvious that this wasn’t a functional government, not when the only positions with anyone in them were Emperor and Adherent. Sophia wasn’t sure why the word was Adherent instead of Citizen, but she was confident that there were a lot more than 3,984 people in the Broken Lands. There could easily be more people than that in Mazehold alone, and she was pretty sure there were more people than that in Izel as well.

Adherents probably meant the people who had an Imperial Sphere. Sophia wasn’t sure what the difference between those Spheres and others was, but it certainly sounded like they weren’t Hallows. Maybe they were a similar category, Spheres granted by the Imperium instead of the Patrons? That was symmetric, at least, and made as much sense as anything else.

Somewhere in here there ought to be a way to stop Broken Lord’s schemes from ruining any more lives. 

Sophia started with the Imperial Oath. The basic oath, called the Adherents’ Oath, was fairly bland. The person taking the oath swore obedience to the Emperor and to uphold the laws of the Empire. There were a number of additional oaths, so Sophia took a look at a few of them. None of them held anything surprising; instead, they all looked a lot like the Adherents’ Oath with a few additions based on the position the Oath was for. The most common extra clause she saw was an oath to protect the people of the Empire.

Since that clearly wasn’t it, Sophia had to try again. 

There were a lot of Adherents but only a handful of Spheres in use, even though there were a lot more Imperial Spheres available. Maybe that was a place to look?

The In Use Spheres all started with the word Temple, like Temple Evoker, Temple Bravo, and Temple Craftsman. The names seemed to be the same as she went up the upgrades, too. Sophia vaguely remembered something about the Broken Lord’s Spheres being supposed to be more powerful but also more limited in the number of Spheres you could progress into, and she guessed she was seeing that. 

It clearly wasn’t necessary. There were more second and third upgrade spheres than basic and first in the ‘Available’ section; those just weren’t in use. Sophia gave them a spot check as well, and it looked like they had a similar naming convention but with several different first words. They didn’t mean much to Sophia, but she was certain that Rabbit, Mouse, Scorpion, Beaver, Peacock, and Bear all meant something to the Imperials. The prefixes Sword, Shield, and Balm made sense. 

Sophia started to dig into them to see what they were about. Even a little bit of looking said that both the prefixes and the name itself seemed to set the general structure of the Sphere, while the prefix seemed to have something to do with which Ability Sets were assigned to a Sphere. All of the Rabbit Spheres had a Movement Ability Set and a Collection Ability Set somewhere in the list of Ability Sets that were available for their basic Sphere selections, while the Balm Spheres usually had both a Healing Ability Set and a Concocting Ability Set somewhere on the list.

Sophia was certain that if she really dug into it, she’d understand spheres in general a lot better. She’d also waste a lot of time; she’d already spent at least half an hour on Spheres and she’d barely scratched the surface.

Sophia moved back to the In Use Spheres and immediately saw that they were different. They didn’t have a common Ability Set; instead, they had specified Abilities they started with: Whispers of the Broken Lord, A Broken Silence, and four Sphere Abilities that were based on only the Sphere, not the skills or preferences of the person who held the Sphere. There were no options at all.

Sophia remembered being told that Hallows, or at least the Broken Lord’s Hallows, were supposed to be extra powerful at the cost of loss of flexibility. She could easily see the lost flexibility, but the Paths didn’t seem powerful at all. She could see that they had quite a few Abilities, but there were fewer Abilities than she had and they definitely didn’t look any more powerful.

It wasn’t until she actually started looking at individual Adherents and saw that almost everyone had a level that was one less than a multiple of four that she understood the “more powerful” comment. It wasn’t because the Spheres were more powerful; instead, the Broken Lord boosted his followers to the top of their current upgrade immediately and capped out their Abilities as well. 

In some ways, it was similar to the boost Sophia, Dav, and Ci’an received after Sophia stole the Hilt’s Broken Sword. It was also a blatant attempt to game the system as much as possible by making his followers as powerful as they could be without crossing the upgrade line where the Guide significantly reduced the number of Wisps you could gather. Sophia hadn’t played that game, but she knew it was fairly common in places like Casterville.

Sophia tried searching for the Broken Blade specifically. She knew the woman was third upgrade, but she didn’t know her Sphere. She did know her name, at least. 

There was only one problem: there wasn’t anyone named Amaryssa Seuvarin among the third upgrade Adherents. Despite the fact that there were almost four thousand Adherents, only fifty-two were at the third upgrade, so Sophia was quite confident she hadn’t simply missed her. Six of the fifty-two people had names similar to the Broken Blade’s, but Sophia could easily believe that she was using a name that wasn’t her own, which meant she could be any of the twenty-two that Sophia was pretty sure were female. There were only fourteen Spheres used by Adherents at the third upgrade and only ten of those were used by the twenty-two possible people, but that meant Sophia still couldn’t narrow it down as much as she wanted.

Sophia looked up and realized that there was a mug of tea cooling on the table next to her. Dav must have brought it. The tea was a good reminder that there were people here that she really ought to keep updated on what she found.

Jax had her write out all fourteen of the In Use Adherent Spheres. He seemed a little horrified that they were all the same; apparently they should have had some variation from when the Grand Talent was completed and matched to the Anchor and Signature, but they didn’t. Sophia was able to confirm that the Anchor and Signature weren’t identical even when the Grand Talents were.

Sophia wasn’t going to object if her opponents were weakening themselves by being forced into rigid Grand Talents that might or might not fit their Anchor and Signature.

Sophia went over everything she learned over dinner. Whispers of the Broken Lord was probably the way the Broken Lord controlled his Adherents, while A Broken Silence sounded a lot like the reason they didn’t talk about their Spheres. Sophia found the customization screens while they talked. They were far more than she wanted to deal with, but she figured she’d need to deal with them if she wanted to free the people the Broken Lord trapped from the Spheres he imposed. Some of them might not deserve it, but Mo’ra’s experience proved that others needed the help.

It wasn’t until Xin’ri asked that she realized she’d missed an important piece: how did the Broken Lord actually move the Wisps? It definitely couldn’t be his local representative doing it, even though the Broken Blade offered to give Sophia a faster and “better” third upgrade. The Hilt wasn’t there for the Hallowing ceremony and the broken blade recognized Sophia as Hallowed immediately when she touched it.

The answer turned out to be in the Imperial Emblem section Sophia skipped. It held the specifications for a broken blade to be used as a physical emblem and also included the detail that “enspirited” blades could be used to store and redirect Wisps. It was very expensive to modify a Sphere, far more expensive than the normal upgrade cost even when an upgrade was all that was happening. The cost for changing a Sphere in any way that wasn’t a fairly direct upgrade was even higher.

Sophia wondered if the upgrade the Wanderer performed for her, Dav, and Ci’an counted as an upgrade or a Sphere change. It didn’t really matter, since he did it with the stolen Wisps, but it was an interesting question anyway.

There were 41 enspirited Broken Blade Imperial Emblems scattered across the Broken Lands, almost one per third upgrade Adherent. That clearly meant that most third upgrade Adherents held the sort of position of power the Hilt and the Blade did, probably one to a city. The rest were probably people who were useful if they were at the third upgrade, like the offer the Blade made to Sophia and her team.

Sophia couldn’t see where the Broken Swords were, but she could control what they did. The first thing she did was cut off their “passive Wisp draw” functionality, immediately followed by canceling all of the criteria for the selection of new Adherents. 

After that, Sophia looked into changing the Imperial Sigil in the hope that it would completely stop the Templars’ plots. The design process was really easy; the Guide had a proposed design based on her symbol already prepared for her. The only thing that stopped her was the note that implementing it would disperse all Wisps held in the previous enspirited Broken Blade Imperial Emblems to enact any queued Imperial Sphere updates. If she wanted to change the Adherents’ Spheres, she needed to determine what the changes would be before she changed out the Imperial Sigil.

When Sophia shared that bit of information with the others, Ansuz told them that the use of an Imperial Sigil to update an Imperial Sphere was normal and that many people in the Kestii Empire carried a Sigil if they planned to be away from a city … but that you had to supply your own Wisps. He’d never heard of an “enspirited” Imperial Sigil.

It was clearly not new to the Guide but it was also clearly not standard practice in the Kestii Empire. All Sophia could think was that it had to be an edge case the Broken Lord developed because he wanted a way to control the outside world despite his own death.