Bloody Roam sat on a throne of rubble built from the shattered blocks of paving stone that had once served as the foundation of the elder hall of the prestigious Sword Heart Sect. He had destroyed that sect, personally, some twenty-five hundred years ago. He considered the stony wreckage a suitably vain monument to his achievements.

  Admittedly, it lacked the visceral impact of a throne of skulls, but he had utilized such constructs before and found that they lacked durability. A few short decades, less if he moved about a great deal, and they grew brittle and shattered at the least touch. Stone was a much better choice, on the timescales that mattered to him.

  He did not enjoy having to get up because his seat had decayed beneath him.

  The demonic cultivator, lord of all the world by virtue of the simple truth that he could, would, and had, swiftly slay anyone who dared to contest that statement – though he found the obligation to destroy challengers more tiresome than anything else – sat encased in his unmistakable oubliette of black plate metal armor and watched the world turn. He did so not using his eyes, which he'd not bothered to open in nearly a decade, nor his qi senses, which were extended outward to a vast distance under the management of his subconscious to detect any threats that might appear, but through the plague itself.

  The demon disease was remarkably thorough in its infiltration of the planet. The tiny qi-draining particulates that made up its composite body had penetrated every portion of the surface, sunk down to the depths of the oceans, and even found there way down into crevices that extended to vast chasms under the rocky crust. Very little was hidden from it, and, accordingly, to him.

  Certainly not the fate of cultivators linked to its immense power.

  Bloody Roam likened the plague to the coating of mold that formed atop a rotten fruit. Demonic cultivators were dense clusters of spores shifting about within that filamentous matrix. The analogy greatly disgusted most of his nominal allies, something he found thoroughly amusing. It would have been more delightful if most of them were not such deluded fools. Truly, they were a generally humorless and ridiculous assembly.

  When one of those concentrations of plague qi tore apart and had its energy absorbed back into the amorphous background of the overall disease it spread a sort of disruptive pulse through the background as the plague energy equalized across the globe. The final ripple triggered by a droplet's disintegration. He could not have missed this if he tried.

  Such losses triggered mixed feelings in the black-bound cultivator. It was not as if he mourned any of them. Truthfully, he was generally glad to be rid of such idiots. Despite that, those deaths did represent a drop in the overall number of demonic cultivators remaining, and this reduced the total strength he could, in theory, summon to form a host should the need arise.

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  So far there had never been much need for such things, and the losses where nowhere near consequential. However, the numbers were distressingly unidirectional. At some point, he supposed, he would be obligated to display concern about that.

  Far more important, the other demonic cultivators were a useful source of amusement. He would have to work somewhat harder to find ways to keep occupied when they were all gone. Not especially hard, the human capacity for violence was pathetic compared to that unleashed by ants and termites, but it would represent a facet of his interests eliminated. He was not notably eager to reach that stage.

  Three had been lost, this time. It dropped the total number down to fifty-three. Bloody Roam reasoned that it would become a problem when their ranks contained fewer than forty. At the current rate, he would probably have to do something proactive in a few hundred years.

  Annoying.

  Black Howl's death was no real loss. The brutish cultivator had been less interesting than any ordinary wolf. He'd been mostly notable simply in that he'd avoided death for so long. The Fuming Shade's demise was a far more substantial event. That one had been formidable, in his way, and among the most accomplished of demonic cultivators in the postwar world. Once a skilled lieutenant, he'd risen steadily to the point where he might well have thought he could be a threat. Bloody Roam was sure he would have had to kill the ashen cultivator if he'd ever reached the seventh layer. Otherwise there would have been an attempted coup.

  The Fuming Shade's killers could therefore be said to have done him a favor. Not that he believed in debts of that kind, or any other.

  Scoria Scorn though, that end was genuinely a surprise. He'd rather liked her, as much as he liked anyone. She was one of the very few, and it was a very small group indeed, who'd aligned to the plague yet still found the ability to discard pursuit of the great lie that was ascension and embrace the truly long view necessary for a proper immortal existence. She'd always been careful to preserve her self as well. That someone had managed to trap and slay her was the first truly unexpected occurrence he’d encountered in centuries.

  Well, not someone, Bloody Roam did not need to guess who was responsible. The Twelve Sisters had done it. He was absolutely certain of the conclusion. No other force still extant had the power to trap and kill three immortals, certainly no one as potent as the Fuming Shade aided by one as cautious as Scoria Scorn.

  It was hardly the first blow they'd dealt to the ranks of his nominal subordinates.

  He considered the possibility that it might be time to make it the last. He did not know exactly where their hidden realm lay, spatial dao was troubling in that way, but he had a general understanding of the region it must occupy. With the Fuming Shade gone, he could grant control of that territory to another, someone who would not dare to attack it on their own and would necessarily summon him when a horde eventually gathered by the gateway.

  The decision wormed at him, whether it was worth the energy or not.

  He dithered over the matter for many weeks before finally deciding that yes, there was nothing to be gained by further delay. A horde would not gather for many centuries, most likely, with the demon population continually falling, but that was more than soon enough. He was, after all, in no hurry. And what good was immortality if one rushed matters?

  Another five hundred years, or a thousand, these things made no difference. Perhaps the sisters might raise up another immortal or two in the interim, but that was far from enough. Doubling their number would not be. He could wait ten thousand years, and it would not matter.

  The war was long over. The world belonged to the plague.

  Nothing was going to change that.