Chapter 170 Undead Scourge (3)
If not for Samiel's continuous usage of the Winter Ruler to create and frost waves across the entire city, which caused the city to start freezing up, then at least one-third of the buildings would be already set on fire by the Undead Scourge that tore its way from the main gate to the plaza.
This was another advantage of Samiel slowly freezing the entire city to one huge chunk of ice was that, once the city caught on fire, it would be like giving a signal to everyone in the surrounding cities that something was happening, which would cause them all to be on alert, meaning it would be more complicated for the Undead Scourge just to slaughter their way through.
Samiel wanted to kill as many people as possible and if the news spread too fast that something was happening here, he won't be able to harvest so many souls. And amidst all of that chaos, Samiel was just observing and observing everything, slightly thinking about the greater insignificance of life.
It was interesting enough that he came from a society that was built on the concepts of morals and human rights; the right to life and killing was considered the greatest taboo. And yet, Samiel considered all of that as meaningless... what was the reason? What was the reason?
The reason was that, in the end, only the power mattered as that was the answer to everything. Samiel didn't have any abhorrence to killing because in the first place, he always thought that everything was meaningless in the great scheme of all things...
A simple question was presented on the table... if he right now killed several tens of thousands of humans or hundreds of thousands, what would happen or change? The most straightforward one was... nothing.
Nothing would change and nothing would happen because it was not important from the point of view of the Cosmos. Even if an entire Principal World and its population were slaughtered to the last person, it was absolutely meaningless because, in the end, it didn't matter.
Sooner or later, everything will perish and only 'They' will remain because only 'They' are truly eternal in every sense of existence. The Worlds, Lower, Middle, High and Principal will undergo cataclysms and apocalypses; they will be destroyed, re-created or just remain dead.
The Floors of the Tower were subjected to the same cycle and underwent cycles of destruction and nirvana every Epoch. That was the sole reason why Samiel considered everything meaningless and only his personal goal had the reasons; for everything else, nothing had meaning.
Samiel felt that during these fifteen minutes or so since the invasion of the Grand West Mountain City started; he managed to collect several hundreds of souls who were all from the killed inhabitants of the Grand West Mountain City.
Samiel marched through the city, soon enough arriving at the central plaza of the Grand West Mountain City, where he started increasing the output of Mana that he was injecting into Level 3 Ultimate Ability Winter Ruler, as suddenly it started snowing and everything started freezing at a visibly faster rate.
Fortunately, nobody from Samiel's party wasn't bothered by the cold that he was inflicting onto the place, while he could hear some explosions from the City Lord's mansion. It appeared that the last bastion where the armed forces o the city guards were hiding had fallen. As usual, the City Lord's mansion was the most defended building in the entire city; such was the common situation with countless cities across Cosmos.
With Dharzug who was leading the attack, it was clear that it would end as soon as it has begun because there was no way there was someone who had the power to defend against the orkish champion and someone as powerful as him.
The Undead under the control of Negash were killing everything that moved, while at first, they tended to ignore the ordinary humans if they ran because they focused on hunting down and killing soldiers, city guards and anyone who was bearing weapons.
Others were of no importance for the time being... and after the military forces o the city were put down, it was time for the ordinary people to be killed, as the Undead all dispersed across the entire Grand West Mountain City and started rampaging all around, killing everything which had lifeforce in them.
When that happened, Samiel's soul count started skyrocketing, increasing by hundreds every minute, as the Undead Scourge was really efficient at killing humans and practically every living being that was in the vicinity, as they were like hunting dogs, who were sniffling life force and going after it.
Not to mention, the effects of the continuous usage of Winter Ruler started taking place because right now, after twenty minutes or so, it was a life-threatening cold in the Grand West Mountain City. Certainly, the life-threatening was only for the Iron-Tier humans, which was the maximal Tier of approximately 99% of inhabitants of the city.
"So many souls..."
After another twenty minutes, Samiel's soul count was numbering more than 70,000. The coldness that was freezing the entire Grand West Mountain City right now was already deadly because Samiel had long ago reached the point of usage of Winter Ruler where he could easily kill Iron-Tier Professionals indirectly, just by decreasing the temperature.
It took some time for the freezing cold to start killing people who were hiding in their homes, by freezing them to death, and only after some time, Samiel sensed the effect of Winter Ruler; while he was continuously freezing the city, Yvraine was looking bored and cast a few fire elemental spells on her to remain warm, because the coldness in the city reached the point where it was uncomfortable.
Juulius, meanwhile wasn't a bit bothered by the coldness because, as someone who grew up in the environment of Hall of Kadath, he knew how the Void felt because he was several times exposed to it or met people who were dabbling into the Void, not to mention, as a worshipper of the Outer Gods, he was graced by their presence and the coldness of the Void was on an entirely different level.
As time passed, the soul count kept only growing, going from the present 70 thousand to 80 thousand, hundreds of thousands and even more and more. It took another half an hour, for Smaiel to completely strip the entire city clean of life, with nobody remaining. After that was done, the only thing which remained was pillaging the city.
There was no way; Samiel was going to leave all precious valuables here for nothing; at least he would plunder the City Lord's mansion, manors of the rich people and merchants and other things. Even though he was aware that he would maximally get some things and valuables worth of tens of thousands of Credits, but old habits die hard.
Certainly, it would be most foolish to just leave it here for nothing. If such was the case, then it would most probably be found by demons who would obtain it, not to mention the fact that Samiel hated being wasteful and he loved looting, pillaging and taking everything that was of some value to be sold.
Undead were good at this activity because they were controlled by Ashimer and Negash, who were extremely intelligent, on the same level to be considered as a genius in terms of intelligence and were even wise. Through their connections with their Undead, they knew exactly what to search for and where to search for it.
And as expected, the City Lord's mansion had the biggest surprise as they found there 1 million Gold Coins, together with some gold, jewelry, gems and other things. There was even a Card link to Vaultbank, but unfortunately, there were only a few thousand Credits there, which was quite insignificant.
Still, it was nice loot and coupled with the other locations across the city which were being looted right now; Samiel was confident that he obtain a substantial sum of money and riches from the sole city. Of course, for average mortals or even by the standards of the Middle World, 1 million Gold Coins was an enormous sum of money.
In the end, Samiel managed to get around 3 million Gold Coins as loot from the Grand West Mountain City, which was a nice amount, considering that this was just a godforsaken city somewhere on the borders between the Western Area and the Northern Area of the Human Continent. For the standards of the Tower, such an amount of Gold Coins is considered moderate when pillaging the city on the Lower Floors of the Tower.
Indeed, only the Lower FLoors of the Tower were using the Gold Coins as some sort of currency because, from the 50th Floor or so, the Gold Coins were almost non-existent and were replaced entirely by Credits or Mana Crystals.
If placed in some random Middle World, then 3 Milion Gold Coins would probably be the wealth of a larger kingdom that was stretched across significant parts of the Middle World. So, it was still a lot of coins; for example, the average mortal family would in Middle World make a maximum of five Gold Coins a year or so... of course, that also depended heavily on the Middle World itself.
And the biggest gain of the entire massacre of the city was the number of captured souls he managed to collect, which was a staggering 256,458. This filled Samiel with absolute delight because it was an enormous number of souls, something that would greatly increase his power in the near future.
Samiel calculated that by the end of his tour in the region with the Undead Scourge, he would have amassed approximately around one million souls, which should be enough for him to start evolving his Undead to a higher form of Undead lifeforms, as well as sacrificing some of those souls to the Outer Gods and leaving some to him so he could eat his fill and quell the thirst for the souls.
For someone like him who was still at the Mortal Level, such an enormous amount of souls would be enough to sustain his hunger for a prolonged period, hopefully.