Inside the barrier is a silvery-white dragon; to all appearances, fast asleep.

Woah, that's cool. She doesn't think it'll be a problem, as long as she digs her pit far enough off? And make sure to do a diligent search wherever she does end up picking, to ensure she doesn't just move on top of another one. She should ask Dazarel once she leaves, though. Thankfully, there's not actually any suprise awakening or new arrival at the tunnel in the handful of seconds it takes her to leave again, so she can devote her attention to the questioning.

"What kind of dragon is that? Do you think there are a lot of them here, such that I should just pick out an asteroid?"

"I'm sure you saiyans had a word for it at some point, since you would fight anything that moves and always favored planets with moons, but I don't know it and don't care to learn. As far as dragons are concerned, moonsilver is the term if you're being polite, like if you're talking to one; otherwise I would just call them an ice dragon and move on with it. Judging by their psychic signature, though, they don't seem to have eaten any souls so I'm sure you could crush them without much difficulty."

Well, that's most of what she wanted to know, which means that was remarkably helpful as Dazarel goes. Maybe he really is taking grandfather's threat seriously.

"Are there likely to be a bunch more of them here?"

"Probably not, no. They're not that territorial, but they can travel through space almost as well as I can and there's frankly not that much special about this place to keep them here."

Okay, what about here? No energy signatures, no caves, no signs of a civilization... She should make sure there aren't any machines, either, actually.

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Alright, good. Then she can dig an enormous pit, cool off the edges, and return to lastwall.

What have they managed while she was out?

It's been 15 minutes!

If you think 15 minutes is enough time for a state to do much of anything, you are severely overestimating the responsiveness of bureaucracy and institutions, even on matters they consider of vital import. Lastwall's special nature allows it to evade some of the limitations possessed by normal countries, but this is not among them. Even a vastly expanded supply of Teleports doesn't really do it either. Certainly they decided what to do, and were able to relay that decision to the relevant locales, but the task of making room in your secure prisons is one where rushing has consequences, even if those consequences are still greatly preferable to not having the vampires and such in question in custody. Still, that doesn't mean nothing has been done; individuals can move far faster than that, so they have found someone with Death Ward prepared at a suitable caster level and gotten her a rod of extend spell.

There is, of course, one other way around this; if you prepare ahead of time, you can get things done after a trigger very rapidly indeed. They were not actually expecting the offer to imprison large quantities of undead, so that in specific was not ready, but they do have reports from their agents in Ustulav on the distribution of undead within and a signed letter from the king of Ustulav permitting them to deal with undead and necromancers that have official positions of nobility. (Such a letter is, of course, under normal conditions essentially worthless; the letter doesn't come with any ability to enforce itself, and Lastwall certainly lacks the spare forces to unseat them from power, but they considered the odds of that changing in the very near future to be worth paying the definitely-not-bribes to get him to agree to the request on short notice.)

That's... nice? She hadn't exactly been intending to refrain from saving people if she didn't get permission, but if it makes dealing with the repercussions easier on her allies that's for the best, she supposes.

"Are you the kind of not ready where I should start them off in small numbers, should be putting them in a temporary storage facility, or just ignoring them for a bit?"

"We're good to take a few thousand ghouls on a temporary basis, but only a few dozen vampires since they require more secure facilities; fewer of the stronger ones, since we'll have to force them to fail their flesh to stone save if we want to securely hold them long term. The more other undead you get, though, the better we'll be able to deal with anyone still in Ustulav."

Great! In that case, she can get an extended death ward from a 6th circle cleric of Iomedae and see about locating the undead.

It's surprisingly annoying to do it via the sight, but once she senses her first one doing it via energy sensing is triviality itself. They feel... wrong, inverted, like the exact opposite of what a person should be in her senses, but that doesn't make them stand out less. and her ki sensing has always been one of the best in all of recorded history. She can start with a cluster of weak signatures-

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and find herself in the middle of a group of skeletons, all so slow as to be unmoving from her perspective. A thorough look with the Sight confirms that the souls are indeed within the bodies in question and also not in control, which is a horrific way to do things and she immensely hates that some fact of magic she doesn't know made some person decide this was how they wanted to make disposable minions. She'll annihilate the bodies and any possible structure for the spells trapping them to hold on to, and watch the souls depart with some satisfaction. The next group is-

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right here, and it's mostly zombies from the looks of it, who have the same deal. Another blast will destroy them, making sure not to damage the surrounding infrastructure-

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Actually, considering the distances involved and the need to search and reorient between strikes, it's just plain faster to fly. Which is a weird thing to say about a method of instantaneous movement, and it's somehow kind of sad that within a day she's already had this be true twice, but that's just how it is sometimes. Pushing her power as high as she can without acting as an enormous glowing beacon to anyone in the postal code, Kakara will bounce from undead concentration to undead concentration, starting with the ones that feel like the skeletons and zombies and going from there.

The undead are, not, unfortunately, uniformly that accommodating. Sometimes the "groups" are actually spread out across hundreds of yards, or interspersed with other kinds of undead. Like these spectres here!

It's not actually an issue to change directions over distances that short, especially when she doesn't even have to and can mostly just make do with beams. As for the spectres, she can close to melee range and-

-not grab them, apparently, though she manages to cut herself off before her magic-and-ki enhanced hand just carves its way through them. Okay, what if she channels the Sight this time like she does to grab souls, and also slows down enough to make sure she doesn't do that again?

That'll work, though if she slows down that much and then stops to transmit it it'll have enough time to notice her and start to react.

Only start to, thanks, she's not moving that slowly. Does it come with her to the moon?

Yep, although once it notices it's probably not going to be happy about it.

Believe it or not, that is not in fact actually her primary concern here. The rest of the spectres will take the same trip whether they want to or not, and more quickly this time once she knows what she's doing.

In that case, they will thoroughly fail to offer any meaningful resistance.

Great, then she can add power levels (power antilevels?) that feel like the Spectres to her search too. Kakara was a bit worried about pulling this off in practice, but this seems surprisingly relaxing; she's pretty sure she could do this all day.

Those look like ghouls. Not what she was looking for, but if they're en route to the next batch she's not going to ignore them. She'll grab them, remembering to be careful not to injure them by exerting too much force, and instant transmission inside one of the cells at a prison Lastwall said they had extra room at. It takes a few transmissions to get exactly the right location, so it's not as easy as transporting the spectres to the moon was, but it's not really an issue just yet and future dropoffs at this prison should be faster until she needs to start using the next location.

Given the ease of this task so far, one might be forgiven for wondering why nobody has ever done this before. Certainly neither Lastwall nor Ustulav nor any of their other neighbors have ever had a saiyan before, but it's not like ordinary adventurers can't go through skeletons and zombies like a scythe through wheat, and they certainly have a lot of those. What gives?

There's a lot of answers you could give there, frankly. A cynical man might guess that the answer is as always money; by and large, the wealthy and powerful in Ustulav are safe from the dead, and even those merely nearby or with collective wealth like cities are well fortified against the low-level dead. It's mostly those without that feel the privation. A more economically minded sort might point to logistics; even if a team of 5th level adventurers could cut through one of these groups like a hot knife through butter, they couldn't go through all of them. A pessimist might ask you what the point even would be, if you could; in Ustulav, it's not like whatever filled the new power vacuum would be likely to be any better. 

All of these are, to some extent, true. The city of Absalom has, at varying points, had an undead problem of it's own, but dealing with this issue has always been well funded and benefited in no small part from the glut of adventurers in the area who figure they might as well see if they can afford that new item or go up a circle. Likewise neighboring Lastwall, with its functional institutions and ability to distribute high level good adventurers at rock bottom prices, has done a far better job of keeping its own issues under control despite occupying Gallowspire itself. And it is undeniable that Ustulav has no shortage of horrors that would happily claim any new real estate that opened up. Despite their truth, however, these answers fail to grasp at the main point. The restless dead in Ustulav are primarily one of the symptoms of its problems and not the cause; simply destroying them, as has been attempted a few times in the intervening years since the Shining Crusade's own go at the issue, will typically result in them being replaces and typically filling their own power vacuum without doing more than mildly alleviating the country's woes in the process.

So it's the necromancers that are the real problem here? Well, them and the various greater undead like Vampires that don't need the aid of magic to reproduce, plus all the overlap between the two categories?

Colloquially, the individuals thereof are typically referred to as the whispering way, although it would be a mistake to ascribe too much of an organization to them. They aren't all out to free Tar-Baphon either, allegedly or otherwise; most of the older members have fought each other at least once and only loosely cooperate insofar as they have shared goals. But the one thing that has managed to mostly unite them is putting a stop to anyone dealing with Ustulav's undead problem, and towards these ends they can devote a dizzying array of resources, minions, magical firepower, and so forth, while being hidden enough that tracking them down to deal with them is an ordeal in itself. Also complicating matters is that if it was easy to make killing them stick, they wouldn't still be around anymore.

None of this would be enough to defeat another shining crusade, or even the lesser efforts the forces of Good and Law have deployed to issues like the worldwound. But despite Her best efforts and those of Good in general, Golarion has yet to produce another Iomedae, and even if it did they'd be unlikely to aim their efforts at Ustulav. The fact is, there are bigger, more active problems out there than a localized necromancy problem, so as the centuries passed it has slowly entered a similar spot to Nidal, Geb, and the varying other minor hellholes that dot Golarion, where as long as everything stays at a low simmer there are perpetually bigger fish to fry,

(Iomedae had never intended this to last, and Lastwall had mustered its armies in unheard of numbers to act as the tip of Aroden's sword during the Age of Glory. When instead he died without warning, victory once more had to take a backseat to triage.)

Which all adds up to whole cabal of liches, vampires, necromancers, and so forth all ready to come down like a ton of bricks to stop someone from doing just this!

...in theory, anyway.

In reality, both being undead and being centuries old have a tendency to make people set in their ways and slow to react to events outside their expectations, and Mind Blank is categorically sufficient against divination from anything short of a demigod. Between this and the lack of coordination and information sharing, in reality the first hostile encounter between Kakara and a member of a the whispering way will come from 6th circle sorcerer and would-be lich Oana Rusu, who, pissed off at what she assumes is one of her rivals taking a swing at her by targeting one of the mustering points for her current army buildup, dons her ring of invisibility, hides herself from divinations, and stakes out her main staging area to either fend off the critical blow or make whoever dares pay a dear price for crossing her.

Taking out the lesser undead is surprisingly relaxing, when you get down to it. Kakara might not love fighting like most of her people, but that doesn't mean that this kind of exercise doesn't have the same physiological effects on her, and there's something really nice about seeing the positive effect of all these people freed from torment in real time. The relocation business for the smarter ones offers a break to help keep it from being monotonous, too.

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