Doomsday Imprint

I think these things can come in any form. Their abilities cannot be analysed by the power of time, because they exist outside the reach of the old dragon. I’ll explain more when we have time, it isn’t urgent.”[6;28]

In the depths of the void is a mysterious race. Some people call them pillagers, others reapers, but whatever they are they have been the death of countless planes. They completely invade their target plane and conquer it in a short time, breaking it away from the divine realm of the Eternal Dragon and pulling it into the Darkness. These things have been present for as long as we can remember, but we do not know much about them. They cut off the dragon’s connection to the plane so there is no way to tell what they do and how they do it.

“These Doomsday Imprints are precursors to such an attack. They only target one plane at a time, and every plane they target ends up with one or more such marks. It can be a piece of jewellery, a weapon, a piece of art, even a creature. So long as the law signature matches, we can confirm that they will appear to harvest it soon enough[6;67]

Ferlyn removes the outer shell

"The object was now a clear crystal ball with some sort of dark metal floating within, and it even responded to energy input unlike before. He didn’t know how Ferlyn had removed the outer shell, but it could now be studied.

After a few tries, he realised that there was no specific limit to what type of energy the imprint could absorb. The first bit of mana he inserted caused the metal within to quiver as though some sort of alchemical machine had been activated, and as he increased his output the vibrations sped up. By the time he was pouring a full grand mage’s worth of mana into the object, it started emitting an orange glow from the depths of the metal that was now starting to crack. The outer shell opened up like a flower, a finger’s worth of the metal floating out and starting to spread.

This was no metal piece, it was a machine! Richard’s eyes immediately lit up as he activated Insight, trying to capture every intricate detail of the machine’s working. However, it only maintained the flower form for a second before it started transforming once more, going through hundreds of different shapes in only a few minutes. Each of the metal pieces was made of dozens of smaller sections, and as he focused on these sections he found that they were subdivided further and further until he couldn’t even keep track. The components were also splitting up and rejoining at a rapid pace, so he couldn’t pinpoint what the smallest unit was.

This was a mysterious machine that seemed to have its own soul, switching between different forms at a constant pace. Richard could barely even notice the transformations at the smallest scale, and that was on the assumption that there wasn’t anything further below. Numbers filled his field of vision, the deluge of data so vast that he couldn’t find any pattern to it at all. He didn’t even know if his vision was precise enough to glean everything that mattered.

He quickly concluded that the doomsday imprint and so-called reapers followed a system of laws that was completely foreign to him, a situation somewhat similar to Sharon’s balance. " [7;72]