"We don't need as many for Abomination Kings," Shang said. "For all of Aterium, we only need about 50."

Kali frowned and looked at the ground. "50 is a lot. I only have enough for 15."

Naturally, King-rank Entropy Ore was much harder to get than Lord-rank Entropy Ore, and there wasn't a lot of that remaining.

Since Entropy Ore could only be created by Abominations getting destroyed without being able to detonate themselves, every piece of King-rank Entropy Ore only came from Abomination Kings, and those had only appeared in Lucius' time.

Naturally, there couldn't be that many.

"Gregorio has another 15," Shang said. "We only need 20 more."

20 cages represented two Mage Kings of Mana, and one Mage King represented about a thousand times more Mana than a Mage Lord.

"So, we need a total of 2,200 Mage Lords of Mana," Kali said.

Silence returned as Kali thought about the best way forward.

"Let's finish the Judgment Palace first," Kali said. "I will demand this Mana from the others when it is time."

Naturally, asking for Mana was far less suspicious than asking for Entropy Ore.

After all, Mana could be used for literally everything.

The next moment, several Abomination Lord cages appeared around Kali.

"Put them in," she ordered.

Shang didn't answer and simply summoned a couple of Abomination Lords.

As soon as they appeared, the Abomination Lords were unceremoniously shoved into the cages by Kali.

Kali siphoned out all the Mana from the cages and closed the door.

A moment later, she flew toward the ground.

Shang was pulled along, and the Isolation Barrier followed her.

Eventually, the Isolation Barrier was no longer visible.

Kali rapidly dug through the ground until she reached a depth of around a million kilometers.

When she reached that depth, she started to place the cages down one after the other.

Whenever she summoned a new cage, Shang summoned another Abomination Lord.

After a couple of minutes, all 200 cages had been placed below the Judgment Palace.

Since Kali wanted to keep all of this a secret, all the cages had been enchanted and hidden with several powerful Magic Circles.

Due to the Magic Circles, the cages looked like huge orbs with countless moving runes on them.

Of course, there were also protection runes on them.

If an Emperor wanted to learn what these Magic Circles did, they would need over 50,000 years to comprehend them.

Naturally, that was enough time since they only needed to hold until the Final Tournament, which was about 22,000 years from now.

Of course, the Emperors could just destroy the Magic Circles and look at what was beneath them, but that would immediately inform Kali of what had transpired.

With enough threats, Kali wouldn't need to fear someone breaking her Magic Circles.

She could just say that she had invented this method and that nobody was allowed to steal it.

If anyone did, she would deactivate all of the Magic Circles within someone's Empire.

Then, they would need to deal with the Abominations again.

Even though the Emperors were bound to be interested in how these Magic Circles worked, the price of breaking them and looking inside was far too high.

When the Abomination Lord cages had been placed down, Kali made a plan on where to put down the Abomination King cages.

She would put them down in a seven-by-seven grid, and due to the size of her Empire, she needed around nine of them just for herself.

Kali moved to the first spot and summoned an Abomination King cage.

"Don't interact with it," Shang suddenly said.

Kali raised an eyebrow at Shang. These were Abomination Kings.

If one of them detonated, even Kali would get seriously injured.

"Abomination Kings have a certain level of awareness and intelligence," Shang explained. "I can control them, but if you attack them, they might retaliate. Let me do this."

Kali didn't know a lot about the Child of Calamity.

She knew that the Child of Calamity was connected to the Abominations and that it was responsible for them appearing in the world.

However, she hadn't known that the Child of Calamity could control the Abominations.

She thought the Child of Calamity was only a gateway of some sort.

The fact that Shang could control Abomination Kings was terrifying.

If he summoned several of them in an isolated space and sent all of them to attack the world...

Sure, the Emperors would manage to kill most of them, but every single one that managed to detonate represented over 500,000 kilometers of the world vanishing. Shang's level of danger rose in Kali's mind.

Even more, if Shang could summon Abomination Kings now as a Sword Lord...

Could he summon Abomination Emperors when he was a Sword King?

An Abomination Emperor...

No one had ever heard of an Abomination Emperor.

But if those actually existed, one of them could probably even kill the Archivist, and it wouldn't even need to detonate.

Abominations were almost invincible on their level.

Probably only someone like Abaddon or Shang could kill one on the same level with a high level of confidence.

The more dangerous Shang was, the more uncertain the future seemed.

Originally, there had been three options.

Kill Shang.

Work together with Shang.

Capitulate to Shang.

Now, there were only two options.

Kill Shang and capitulate to Shang.

Working together became nearly impossible due to the power difference.

As soon as Shang became a Peak Sword King, assuming he could summon an Abomination Emperor, no one would be able to resist him.

At that moment, the power dynamic would shift to one side.

Cooperation was only possible between two similarly powerful parties.

But with an Abomination Emperor...

While the thought made Kali uncertain, she had also never heard of an Abomination Emperor.

So, maybe, the Abomination Emperors actually didn't exist?

What if Abomination Kings were the strongest Abominations?

Kali decided that she needed to talk to Abaddon some more regarding their plan.

How should they proceed in the future?