Ar'Kendrithyst

Chapter 254, 1/2, Start of Book 9

Chapter 254, 1/2, Start of Book 9

No one really knows what happened that day when the sky closed over and started showing fakery. It was a (curse word) (curse word) WizardWar. That’s how that (curse word) goes. Some people are telling me my father vanished months ago and they had no idea about the Black Gate rescues. Others are telling me they’re from worlds that were on the brink of death, being annihilated by Nothanganathor, and then they weren’t. The minotaur horde is the biggest example of that; there were like 500 and now there’s a (curse word) nation of them half a million strong. They got plans to migrate to the fourth sphere up there; the first empty one, you know. Solomon’s Genesis was more than what it appeared to be. A lot more. It’s all a (curse word) (curse word) mess and we’re still trying to solve it all, and Dad’s not back yet and that’s… That’s worrying.

I’m sure he’s fine.

(Jane Flatt goes silent at this point and this Knowledge Mage cannot help but wonder what she really knows and feels about her father’s disappearance, and how much she is lying to herself versus how much she is lying to the world in the manner that all politicians lie. But Jane is a good sort of person, so I doubt she is lying for any untoward reasoning.)

-excerpt from ‘The Great Genesis of Solomon’, Year One, interviews by Anhelia Kendrithyst, Queen of the Reborn Geode.

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My great, great, ten-times-great grandmother came to dinner on a sixthday feast after the end and rebirth of the world, like, five months after it all went down. She was quite pleasant, actually, even after uncle Wess tried to murder her. He’s an inquisitor so that’s his job, but he wasn’t very effective. ‘Auntie Cloverfield’ is basically a Breach Demon, though, so… I’m glad she turned out to be an okay person. She is a demon though— holy Host is she a demon— and our half of her living descendants —all of us at the party— are celestial-bound, so it was pretty tense for a while. Commiserating and celebrating over the Genesis and the knowledge of the Erased One was a pretty good wallbreaker for more conversation, especially when she broke out all that gold. Turned out we had a lot more in common than we thought, including our hatred of the demons.

The Clover and Cloverfield family gathering of human and incani two months later turned out okay, too.

-excerpt from House Benevolence Report on Angel/Demon relations, case #876 post Genesis.

Investigator note: Wess Clover is the inquisitor who walked with the Wizard Flatt through the Glittering Depths. See cases: Dungeons/Grand Dungeons/Glittering Depths for more

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From the Office of those devoted to the Divinity of Phagar, God of Time and End

In light of recent public events it is my duty as the Head Priest of Phagar to clarify a few things. Yes, the church is recruiting. Yes, we are starting to answer questions regarding the future, which is completely opposite of how we have done things for long, long before the Sundering. Yes, this is because of Nothanganathor and Elemental Malevolence infecting our land, and many other factors.

The main message I wish to impart with this missive is this:

Phagar will not allow Veird to suffer from Nothanganathor ever again, and he will be ensuring that the Unascended Dragon cannot touch our world, forevermore.

If you wish to be a part of that action, then sign up with us now.

- Xerixio, Head Priest of Phagar, God of Time and End, at the Grand Unified Cathedral of Candlepoint

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DUNGEON GUILD ALL CALL

The world is ten times larger than it was before Solomon’s Genesis. The wrought are busy making everything actually work, from waterways to air flows to everything else. They cannot handle the ‘smaller’ tasks, like the monsters, and they especially cannot handle all the dungeons popping up everywhere on those new lands.

We need people. We need you.

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House Benevolence, classified document #918, Post Genesis.

Overseer clearance or higher.

This is a copy of a blue box posted by Rozeta and gifted to certain individuals now and again ever since the Genesis of Veird.

You have been randomly selected to participate in a questionnaire regarding the Script, to see that your needs and the needs of the people you know are being met with regards to Script functionality.

Please pray directly to Rozeta in order to give your feedback.

You have 10 seconds to accept, [REDACTED].

This note and your memory of it will erase itself, either way.

We are unsure how many people this box has gone out to, but we do know that the person who gave it to us, ( [REDACTED] ), found the note laying on their desk, hastily drawn on a scrap of paper. This is not the only instance of such an event happening.

Rozeta isn’t talking about what this message means, but she isn’t denying she sent this message, either. Whatever the case, it appears that she doesn’t see the dissemination of this blue box as an operational security risk. It is possible, and highly likely, that she is fully aware that this information is ‘leaking’, and she is allowing it to leak on purpose.

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From the office of King Solomon of the Black Gate:

Please stop asking me about the location of Erick Flatt, Wizard of Benevolence.

I put him on FENRIR’s surface one year ago today, and though many of you expected him to appear because we are ‘over where we lost him’, that’s not how physics works in the universe. That’s not even how magiphysics works. As we’re orbiting FENRIR, FENRIR is also rotating, and the whole thing is flying through the Renew Galaxy, which in turn moves through the larger universe at a fast rate.

The current location of Veird as regards to the initial position of FENRIR’s surface is easy to work out for those of us with the initial sets of information regarding positions and velocities, but for operational security, those numbers will not be published. I can tell you this, though: We will not be over the location where I teleported Erick away for a very long time, and that is on purpose.

We’re still dealing with Nothanganathor’s infection even after all our purges and otherwise, for all the universe seems filled with Malevolence that is crashing down on our New Surface at all times. It might not be Nothanganathor, but it is still Malevolence. And yet, that’s only 25% of our current problems.

Mainly, there’s all these shitty little wars through all these colonies on the upper shells. Those wars take up quite a lot of my time, House Benevolence’s time, and everyone else’s time, too. So stop fucking fighting with each other. I really don’t give a shit if all your dead enemies came back to life. Avandrasolaro is far beyond the point where he is talking to anyone engaged in Forever War actions, and this is the official notice that I am beyond the point of talking, too. I will let you decide what that means for yourselves, but the meaning should be quite clear.

Also, the Dark still gives bounty, and everyone wants a piece of that, and if you’re involved in any of those wars, you’re off the Black Gate lists.

Stop asking me about Erick’s whereabouts. He still has a year before we start to worry.

He is absolutely still alive; Yggdrasil says so.

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From the offices of Rozeta and the Pantheon:

ALL NOTICE:

It has come to our attention that the rise of the more intelligent Nothor Beasts is directly tied to a Full Status Reset. We’re still trying to understand how this happens, but for now all Registrars are forbidden from granting a Full Status Reset without Inquisitors and Paladins of Rozeta on standby. Full Status Resets will still be granted, but they will be done under strict controls and monitoring.

More information to follow.

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Reality was pain, and then it was something softer.

Erick did not open his eyes, for his eyes had never closed this entire time. He had been on Veird. The sky was closing over. And then Solomon had picked him up and threw him at FENRIR, at some distant part of it. Erick survived, somehow. He still wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at, or what was happening, though.

All was black.

All was glowing.

The land was a black expanse. The sky was a vista of stars.

Mortality returned in a flashing condensation of Benevolence turning to flesh.

Erick gasped—

He was a human in the vacuum of space. Every single part of him began to expand from within, as oxygen boiled out of blood and his eyes froze over. In that very same second Erick realized he was in outer space right now, so he rapidly transformed back into Benevolence. He did NOT breathe. He did not try to walk anywhere. He just adjusted his senses, to see what he could see.

He did not die.

Good start, all things considered.

Erick’s body was a nebulous flow of Benevolence, pouring out of his core, which was itself ethereal. The ground was black as adamantium, soaking in the light. In every other direction there was nothing.

Nothing above. Only adamantium plates below.

Erick could make out the individual hexes of the long cylinders which made up half of the plate. If Solomon had done the magic right, then a hundred kilometers below this surface there should be a sandwich layer of various platinum metals that acted as the main magical backbone of Fenrir. Beyond that layer there should be another layer of 100-kilometer-thick black adamantium worldplate.

And in there lay magic.

Erick knew the system was working, at least a little, because Erick was not dead due to the vacuum of space pulling him apart. In fact… Erick pushed off of the ‘ground’ like he was a giant slime extending a pseudopod downward… And yup. Erick went up, but a weak, weak gravity pulled him back down.

The better FENRIR systems were coming online.

It should also be a lot stronger than this.

Something was wrong?

Maybe something was a little wrong.

At least Erick hadn’t landed in outer space. He was on the outside of the dyson sphere, and the dyson sphere was beginning to accumulate gravity and other things because the collection systems on the sun-side of the sphere was beginning to work; to gather Nothanganathor’s power and transform it through a [Renew]-based system into mana of better types, and also [Duplicate].

It should be creating a few types of mana, too. Stone, Water, Air, Fire, Shadow, Light, and also Genesis, which would turn those Elements into real objects.

Looking in the distant sky, Erick witnessed Light cast down from a cloud-like structure far, far ahead; it was the only thing visible around.

How far was it?

Well.

Hard to know.

Erick was on a damned dyson sphere, he thought, giddily. Even if he flew up and up and up, he would probably never get any true perspective on the lands of this sphere and the size of the lights ahead of him, not until he got very, very high. Like, ‘orbital distance’ high. That seemed like a bad idea, though.

Erick noticed several things in the span of the next few seconds.

His body was a diffuse collection of misty light that was constantly drifting away, probably at the rate of 12 million mana per day, or 138 mana per second, which were the rough numbers associated with how much mana his soul and body naturally produced, as a Wizard. Without a connection to the Script, though, his mana was actually his own, and so here it was, flowing away from him because try as he might, this wasouter space and there was nothing holding Erick together except for his own concentrated thoughts. His Benevolence body wasn’t even properly shaped, for the pressures of this existence were too great for him to properly hold onto himself. He estimated his body was about… 5 meters wide? Based on the meter-sized adamantium columns underfoot— under‘cloud’.

His connection to the Script was completely gone. His Stats and such were already starting to fade, and it was getting fractionally harder to hold himself together, but he could manage. His Stats were soul-based, after all, so some of it would remain, even in this existence. This wasn’t the Glittering Depths, after all, where Stats were specifically minimized. His Intelligence was fading somewhat, but he was still smarter than a normal person.

He would be fixing his Intelligence for full benefit once he ascended to True Wizard.

And now that a few seconds had passed and there was no immediate danger of death, Erick recognized a few more facts about himself and his surroundings.

There was an atmosphere here. It was very, very thin. But it existed. It was kinda acting like a buffer against the absolute vacuum of space, too. Which was good. That buffer likely vanished higher up. Erick would not be flying up anytime soon.

There was no manasphere, though. Erick could tell that there was mana inside the adamantium ground, but that sort of mana had a… a ‘sucking’ quality? to itself? Erick wasn’t sure. Hard to sense that sort of thing, and being near the ground seemed to eat away at his Benevolence blob form a little.

The ground was absorbing mana, perhaps.

That seemed a safe assumption.

Erick had expected to land in a place absolutely filled with mana and atmosphere. Where was all the Elemental Genesis? The Elemental Benevolence? Was it already used up? Fighting an unseen war on the other side of the adamantium dyson sphere?

Probably.

Erick Shaped his Benevolence into a Bolt and a little jolt of Benevolence went flying for a grand total of 5 centimeters beyond his blob form before it turned into motes of light that broke and fell to the ground, sucked up like water into a sponge.

… Okay then.

Okay, Erick, he thought to himself, you have a few goals here, and most of those goals need a body in order to function, which means I need to make an atmosphere that can hold me, and some life. I’m not sending out a Call to the Universe until after I become a True Wizard, so that the Call won’t bring down Nothanganathor on my head, or some other thing I cannot fight in this blob form.

He made another few [Benevolence Bolt]s and other mana types, Altering them to suit his needs, before he sent them flying. Only the Benevolence ones lasted more than a few centimeters beyond his body; they lasted 5 to 7 centimeters.

This did not bode well.

If FENRIR wasn’t fully charged, then that meant that Nothanganathor was probably not fully contained. The FENRIR system should be more operational than this. Perhaps the Erased One was operating across different frequencies of this multiverse, trying to get to this God Pact universe—

Ah. Duh. It probably was.

Veird was safe, though. Of course Veird was safe. Or at least this version of Veird was safe.

If Erick had had a body he would have tried to breathe to calm down. Erick had no body, but he could get one… Probably. No. Scratch that. No ‘probably’. He needed a body. And so, he would get one. Soon.

Where to start?

He looked at himself and his fog of Benevolence.

That fog was seeping more in… that way? No. That way? No. The fog was flowing everywhere equally. Hmm. So that was useless for figuring out which way the air might be flowing in this thin atmosphere.

If Erick had had a finger he could wet and hold up to the sky to test the wind, he would have. But he did not have that. There was no way to tell where the wind was coming from, or even if there was a wind out there. But if there was a wind, then that’s where Erick should go, because where there was wind, there was atmosphere.

Presumably.

Erick prepared for some pain, to let some of his Benevolence Body slip out of his control, to see if the fog spilling off of him equally was because of him, subconsciously controlling it, or if there truly was no wind out there. With a certain amount of resignation to the pain, Erick let go—

It was like opening a hole in his soul. Everything flew out—

Erick put his barriers back up and regained himself.

His briefly uncontrolled fog… seemed to flow… Away from the planet-sized storm in the distance?

Welp! That made a certain amount of easily-understood sense. When in doubt, always run toward the planet-sized storm! Of course!

… Erick was hesitant to do that, for obvious reasons. He still needed to do that, though. He had the choice of either building a True Wizard existence out here in the near-void, or flying toward the world-sized magical storm and having at least some air pressure that might allow him a fleshy existence. Might just evaporate him, though.

Erick started moving.

If the storm proved to be a bad idea, then Erick would simply turn around and try to Wizard up a shelter solution somewhere closer.

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Erick discovered a few more things as he flew over the land.

Flying over the flat worldplate of FENRIR was an exercise in meditation, and concentration, for if Erick got too close to the land, or if his mind started to wander, he’d fall into the worldplate and get sucked into it, his very being subject to the Siphon of FENRIR. It was a lot worse once he got away from his landing zone, too.

There was no manasphere at all, anywhere, because of that Siphon.

Erick wondered if the only reason he had thought that there was a manasphere, was because the place that he had landed had placed him there with a great amount of mana in the first place, and thus it took some time for that mana to sink into the plate.

And so, because there was no manasphere at all, Erick’s edges were falling away, constantly.

Also, Erick could not benevolencestep forward, for stepping through any sort of Element required aligned mana of a stepping type in both locations, and there was nothing out here at all except for sucking death.

So flying was the only way.

But not too high! If Erick got too high then the complete lack of atmosphere made Erick’s blob body even harder to control and maintain.

Erick was already exhausted.

Also, that storm seemed smaller. Like it was flying away from Erick. It had seemed like a stack of clouds with various normal features, occupying a moon-sized bit of the sky upon the horizon. It seemed like a smaller moon, now, and Erick had been staring at it for a while, so he was able to make out a few things in the last three hours of high-speed flying, besides the fact that it was getting fractionally smaller.

The cloud had many layers, first of all. From far away it seemed like just a normal, perhaps 4 or 5 layered thunderhead. But it was more like a thousand-layer cake that bunched and stretched in a few places. Looking at those layers was like trying to count rings on a slice of tree trunk from a thousand-year-old tree; too many to easily count. The lightning looked like microscopic hairs, too, stretched here and there, barely visible until they were surely visible, as if there were little white cracks opening and closing in the cloud and spreading everywhere.

There was absolutely no sound.

Erick did not realize that being in the absolute silence of space was going to be the first thing to drive him bonkers. Obviously, in retrospect, absolute silence was pretty much torture to all normal beings.

All of that made Erick realize what he needed to do.

He couldn’t chase the storm.

He needed to build right here, right now, and fast. That meant Script-magic; specifically [Duplicate]. Using Script-based soul-implanted magic outside of the Script was not an easy feat. Erick had mastered this, though, because it was a necessary thing to master. Even still, [Duplicate] was one of those spells that used the Script to function properly, like Healing Magic and [Cleanse] and other incredibly precise spellwork with a ton of moving or very precise parts.

Before Erick [Duplicate]d what he needed to [Duplicate], Erick checked his Lightning Path. It was difficult and took him longer to see than normal. Erick’s Lightning Path to the best possible future wasn’t working at 100% right now, but it was working well enough.

Erick was 99% sure that using [Duplicate] wasn’t about to blow himself up with an accidental atomic blast.

Which was possible now. The Atomic Ban did not exist out here.

Erick gathered his Benevolence form into a proper body shape, concentrating his Domain and focus to bring forth himself from the vacuum. It wasn’t too difficult, but it was a lot like sucking his stomach all the way into his throat; not comfortable, and not something anyone could do without magic coming into play. He stuck out his bloated right leg. A flicker of intent and control on his right shoe was enough to dislodge a rock he had purposefully stuck into the tread, onto the ground—

The tiny speck of speckled-grey stone went flying into the near-vacuum, near zero-g ‘atmosphere’ of space. It pinged off the ground and Erick struggled to catch it before it flew way out of perception. He managed. And now a bit of granite the size of Erick’s pinky finger hovered inside of his Benevolence form.

With a concentrated flex of his soul and a mental harmonization with the sound of [Duplicate], long since memorized for this instance, Erick focused a Script-spell on the little bit of granite.

And now he had two bits of granite.

Erick almost giggled, but then he felt himself almost lose control of his Benevolence body in order to let that frantic emotion happen, so he focused again. No giggling. No joy until he was at least temporarily safe.

But [Duplicate] had worked! Mostly. The second granite pebble wasn’t exactly the same as the first pebble, so that was a failure that Erick would need to figure out, but not right now. It was still a stone-like solid, so it was fine.

Two bits of granite fused into one as Erick applied pressure and focus, mentally tagging the crumbling, broken object as one object. It wasn’t much of a mental leap to do that, but the spell required 1 target, and Erick was already running without a Script here. He didn’t want to try any of his more complicated [Duplicate] variants right now.

One crumble of granite became a larger crumble.

Erick tried to apply basic heat to the crumble, fusing it into one crumble, but it cracked and shattered, pieces going everywhere in the near-zero-g environment before Erick gathered them up again. He stuck with the mental-tagging option, and when he got a brick-sized bit of granite, he tried a Script-based [Stoneshape].

It barely worked. The crumble of stone became sandstone with big bits to it.

Erick turned his frustration at inadequate magic into fuel for the fire, focusing hard. He had a reason for doing all this. All of Veird was counting on him to get help; not to fuck around out here playing with magic and getting mad that it didn’t work right in the vacuum of space.

Erick mentally took a breath, and then he focused.

Triggering Script-magic outside of the Script was already Wizardry, if minor. Now, Erick did something larger, mentally humming a little ditty about stone and purpose, doing real Wizardry.

The stone in hand protects because protection is as protection does.

The broken granite turned solid, suddenly becoming a meter-cubed brick of white and grey marble that silently popped into existence. Erick contained his elation as he lowered the marble to the ground, securing it against nothing, but it was heavy, and the ground had some gravity to it, so this was fine.

[Duplicate] made a second cube that was not nearly as good as the first one, but it was good enough. Erick started laying cubes next to each other, always copying the first one, and none of the secondary ones. This was already going to be a near-disaster that he’d have to fix with Wizardry, anyway, so he didn’t want to compound this disaster with [Duplicate]-copy degradation problems. Within minutes, Erick had a nice 10 meter by 10 meter square base, with half-walls all around.

And then one of the copied cubes in a wall cracked and that wall tumbled down, completely silent in its destruction.

Erick left that destruction and piled up more cubes until he reached ten meter tall walls. Some of those walls were truly just piles.

I can see through cracks in every wall and the roof is still non-existent, but this is a good starting point.

Erick focused on the entire structure, expanding his foggy body to touch every cube and to get between every crack. He filled up the space and formed a little dome of foggy Benevolence body on top. He probably looked like a muffin, baking out of its bread tin… Or bread rising out of a muffin tin. Wait. A muffin top? No. That meant something else. That’s not how the saying would go—

Erick focused.

He tried another reson-empowered [Stoneshape], to pull forth a protected space out of infinity and his own mana, as he hummed the same tune as before, but different.

The stone surrounds and protects because protection is as protection does.

The ten cubic meter little room plopped around Erick, like so much stone shell forming around a very large benevolence slime. Erick was completely in the dark under a dome of stone, now.

He almost flickered back to his human body, for the feeling of being surrounded on all sides by anything at all after being out in the Great Big Nothing was a palpable relief, even though Erick wasn’t wearing his biology right now. He maintained, though.

He flickered power, creating a common lightward that glowed in the middle of the room like so much ball lightning, softly sparking upon itself and sending warmth into the air. It would have died almost instantly, of course, if Erick wasn’t actively holding onto the mana in the space. None of this would have worked at all if Erick wasn’t struggling to maintain his very mind and—

Erick took a moment.

I am safer than I was before. I am fine. I can do this.

He had not known that this was how it was going to happen, but he had prepared for it, because this was the second-worst case scenario. He had hoped that the FENRIR system would have provided more manasphere so that he didn’t have to provide that himself, but something was obviously wrong with the system. It was brand new, after all… Erick had no idea what the fuck was wrong with FENRIR. Solomon had ten thousand Ericks helping him.

FENRIR should be up and running, dammit!

… Erick would figure this out and solve this problem. This was fine. He was prepared.

He would succeed.

First thing to do was to make an atmosphere, so Erick concentrated on his lungs and chest and did a complicated series of breathing movements to try and let out some air from his Benevolence body without bursting his lungs. He mostly succeeded.

Now there was a bit of CO2 and other gasses and blood splatter crystals drifting in the stone space. There was some atmosphere in the room because there had been some atmosphere on the surface, of course, but Erick wasn’t sure what sort of atmosphere that was. So he had used his own.

The next step was gathering that atmosphere as best he could, so Erick did that, leaving the blood to the side.

A lot of [Duplicate] later, and the air inside the marble room seemed thicker. Not atmosphere-normal, but thicker, for sure.

Erick tried a [Cleanse] and instantly evaporated 95% of what he had created, the thick air of it all instantly falling away into absolutely nothing, vanishing like it wasn’t even there.

Good news! Erick decided to think to himself. That means all the rest that remains is quality stuff!

Erick was not wholly correct.

It took him another hour and a few [Cleanse] cycles to make the atmosphere something that sort of felt like Veird-normal-pressure. All that thick ‘air’ did nothing for the manasphere in the area, though; all of that stuff fell to the bottom of the stone room and kept right on going, into the adamantium worldplate below. Zero manasphere meant that Erick’s Benevolence Body was still bulged out like he was a marshmallow in the microwave, barely able to keep himself together.

But this was progress!

Shell. Atmosphere. Now to make some Domain runes.

Erick had had lots of experience carving runes into every possible type of surface over the years. Metal was the best —and some would say the only— substance to enchant. But Yggdrasil’s eternal stonewood was great for everything protective, while magical stone itself was half-decent at holding a protective charge, and other certain kinds of charges. Runes that were specifically made to hold onto power and solidify a structure and do nothing more than that often worked well inside simple, nonmagical stone.

This particular marble had been [Duplicate]d and Wizarded inside Elemental Benevolence, so it wasn’t really ‘simple’ stone at all, and yet it had all been drained by FENRIR, so it was non-magical stone, now.

It would work.

Erick would need to keep the domainwork out of the influence of FENRIR, though, but he could handle that.

Carving into the marble shouldn’t be that difficult either, and this stone was a meter thick in all directions, as evident when Erick poked his Benevolence body through the stone. Erick doubted he could actually dig too deep, or crack the marble at all. Erick had no adamantium knife with him, which was a problem, but that was easily solved.

Erick simply allowed one of his fingers to become real again, and then he let out the dragon a little, turning a plain fingernail into a bright white claw. With an atmosphere in the room he probably could have turned his whole body back to flesh and bone, but he refrained for now.

Best not to wager comfort now against a potential catastrophic loss of atmosphere.

And then he got to carving runes of Benevolence and Renew and Domainwork.

There was difficulty. He was outside of the Script and all the magic he carved was 100% on him to both create and imbue with meaning. The vacuum of space was ripping away at everything he wrote at all times, which was difficult. And everything was death out here. But Erick kept his power focused.

He drew perfect lines all across the inside of the stone space. He kept his intent honed. He knew what he was doing, and though he had to rewrite areas a few times to make the power stick, he did exactly that.

It was like drawing a sketch in a very large space that was constantly erased. And yet, if one drew enough lines fast enough, the sketch remained. It could be improved upon. It could be made real.

Every bit of Domainwork that managed to stick around made all that came afterward easier.

Gradually, a manasphere began to settle. Erick’s Benevolence form began to calm. Slowly, a two-armed, two-legged, one-headed body emerged out of his bloated mist, while even more Benevolence mist clung to words and symbols on the stone walls.

And still, Erick carved.

Some amount of time later, Erick was still carving stone with his claw going over a line he had already gone over 127 times already. And he realized something. He was in his human shape, in his human body, breathing freezing cold air that was starting to seem stuffy, and all the walls were lined with power. The power was still fading. It needed to be reinforced.

But Erick could do that.

Erick shuddered, his muttered voice echoing under the stone dome, “Holy fucking shit that was rough.”

But now he had a place that wasn’t absolute death.

Erick took a platinum button from his shirt and then he [Duplicate]d it inside of his Benevolence form. One bit of non-magical metal gained a twin that was infused with mana; it shimmered white and glinted with lightning depths when looked upon from certain angles. His domainwork was holding. This bit of benevolencesteel would stay benevolencesteel.

Erick made more.

Stone was great for a start, for a foundation, but Erick wanted multiple redundant systems, automatic air creation, and a whole bunch of other stuff that would make this area truly secure. He would likely be here for a while, rebuilding himself.

As Erick worked, he occasionally stuck his visual senses through the stone, to look for threats.

There were no threats anywhere, and that planet-sized storm was still moving away.

Everything else was black adamantium, or the star-filled silent void of space.

Erick rushed through the first runic web, and then went on to another very necessary creation: A little water fountain that tumbled water down some stone pillars, into a tiny pond.

A jolt of Benevolence created some water plants, too, so that was great.

There would be no concentrating on rebuilding himself into a True Wizard until he could at least relax enough to get a proper look at his soul, to reorganize himself into something unassailable, and it was much easier to work on the incremental advancements needed to secure that concentration when the world wasn’t complete silence, with death just on the other side of a thin stone shell.

As a nice side effect, the air gained some moisture. It was still cold in here, but it wasn't as dry as desert air anymore.

Erick would work on a better air-water-warmth system once the walls weren’t so damned weak. Such a system would probably be a mini-[Terraforming] spell locked into a metal frame and working off of Benevolence mana. That storm outside and still slowly, slowly headed away, was almost for sure a [Terraforming], but on a much larger scale. Solomon and Erick had specifically not discussed all of this FENRIR system in perfect detail, but they had spoken around the plan many times, and Erick wasn’t wholly certain what Solomon’s Elemental Genesis was truly capable of, but he knew that Solomon had all the same spells as him, and that included [Terraforming].

Seemed like Genesis was manifestation-based, too.

An Element specifically designed to make things without all the intermediary steps like Erick was doing now, with this rune carving? Yeah. Probably. Safe bet.

Erick tried to mana sense through the floor and into the adamantium worldplate again, and all he could truly feel was the worldplate sucking him down, draining all the loose mana around into itself.

Something was wrong with the FENRIR system, and Erick would solve it after he ascended to True Wizard.

Erick continued to work without rest, creating Benevolence-infused platinum and stretching it out into networks that encircled the room. He had to replace the air a few times when it got musty and he needed to [Cleanse] it. He needed to fix the water fountain twice.

But eventually, the room was more secure than it had been.

Theoretically, Erick could have slept right now. He was exhausted. But he couldn’t rest. Not with only one layer of protection.

And so, Erick extended the mana containment domain field using specifically shaped runic webs, extending a three-meter-wide tunnel of controlled mana off of the side of the grey marble building. A quick jaunt out into the Empty had Erick almost panicking again, but he maintained and added on a tunnel of granite to the main structure, located a few meters off of the ground of the black worldplate.

Erick would build the rest of the structure off of the ground, supported by pillars that locked onto tiny imperfections in the hexagonal grid of the ground, wrapping around edges and locking into place as much as possible. The first building was practically unsecured, compared to what Erick would build next. A strong wind could just blow the whole thing off of the ground.

Of course, there was no real wind out here.

That world-sized [Terraforming] in the distance was certainly doing something, and there was an atmosphere out there, Erick had been at this for 2 or 3 days now, and something was wrong—

“Stop thinking about that, Erick,” Erick told himself. “Do what you can, and leave the rest for later.”

When Erick finished his second big building, beyond the tunnel that led to the first, he went back and revisited the little fountain in the first building, and changed everything about it.

He turned that thing into a powerhouse of Benevolence, making it resemble the start of his Benevolence space, where he had placed his very first node for the Gate Network. Water pushed up and out of the center of a collection of pillars that formed a fountain and cascaded down onto mosses and multiple levels, before the water settled into a wide pool, five meters across and filled with Benevolence-generated water plants. A runic web in the center kept it going strong, automatically attuning to drops in water level to create new water, or drops in air pressure to create new air, or drops in ambient temperature to stoke the warm fires that hovered above the fountain, warming everything. A tiny bit of [Cleanse] magic in the waters and in the air above those waters would end up draining air and water both, turning it to thick air in order to keep the water clean and the air breathable. That mana-as-a-side-effect would keep the manasphere stable, too, because Erick had put some Mana Siphon [Renew]-work into the domainwork in his runic webs. The manasphere in this place was mostly Benevolence, but [Cleanse] was a spell that balanced the manasphere, and it was adding all sorts of other types of mana to this space.

Not in any measurable quantity, but there was still some Stone in the stone, and Metal in the metal, and all the other Elements inside all the other things that resembled them.

No Elements in the bottom-most floor, though. FENRIR still sucked up that loose mana all the time.

This was not a perfectly safe hideout at all.

There were way too many holes in Erick’s systems, either in leaks in the domainwork or leaks in the stone itself, for Erick had needed to repair a few cracks already, but with the life in that pond growing… Perhaps the system would be a net positive soon enough, and if not right now or even in the next few days, as soon as slimes started spawning, then the system would actually start growing, and fast. Or at least becoming less of an existential worry.

What Erick needed —and what he was building for— was a little bit of home. He wasn’t sure how long he would be here, and if Nothanganathor could find him at all, or any of those larger questions. But he was sure that if he didn’t have some space to walk around in, unworried, that he was not going to make it. Or at least he wasn’t going to make it well.

“Let’s not go insane, Erick,” Erick said to himself, as he began working on the runic web expansion for the next tunnel, and the next building.

- - - -

Erick had made seven large buildings, all of them turned homey and nice, all of them redundant several times over. Three different fountain systems kept the space all livable. Multiple atmospheric failsafes. Multiple domainwork manasphere failsafes. The entire thing was even buried under black dirt to obscure it from casual observation.

The storm in the distance was getting smaller and smaller, but it was still planet-sized, so Erick had no idea how big it was, or not. Observation through a telescope showed that it wasn’t shrinking, though. It truly was just getting further and further away.

Nothing else was on the horizon at all.

Erick had checked everything four times over. He had eaten several meals of various water plants and he had even randomly lucked into a bean-like plant which provided for the bulk of his food. He needed to try for mushrooms, for sure, but that would require more biomass to start, and Erick simply hadn’t gotten there yet. He had made himself a very comfortable bed using a whole lot of [Duplicate]d cloth that he wore, though.

And the panic was calmer, now.

Calm enough for Erick to collapse in that bed and attempt to allow himself to sleep. He had tried twice already, but both times he had barely shut his eyes when he realized he needed to secure the place better against this or that threat. But now… There wasn’t anything else for Erick to do. Not right now, anyway.

And so he shut his eyes.

The Wizard of Benevolence drifted...

Elemental Benevolence had never stopped pouring out of him, but as consciousness failed him, that continual mist of expanding mana began to do more than that. It twisted with dream. It flickered with lightning. Moss grew upon the stone where it touched.

As the Wizard slept, little white orbs began to grow and glow upon that moss, like mushrooms sprouting after a rain.

- - - -

Erick woke groggy and miserable—

And then he noticed the glowing white slimes rolling across the mounded, mossy floor, playing with each other in water puddles. Erick just lay there for a moment, watching. He rapidly decided he was good with this. Very good with this. It seemed slimes happened a lot faster than Erick had expected.

And a fountain was miscalibrated, or something. Flooding? In outer space in the middle of nowhere? More likely than you might think.

Erick simply sat up in bed, and looked at his room.

The walls of the room had been a simple cream-colored stone, which Erick had painstakingly gathered and made more of, just so he could have a room that didn’t seem so stone-like; it was more drywall-looking than stone. That stone was now half covered in moss. The ceiling had been shaped like exposed rafters in a log cabin, which was, again, to make the room seem less cave-like, but now there were mosses and vines and air plants with flowers growing up there, dripping down into the room. Some of the air plants glowed.

Which was nice.

Glowing plants? Awesome ambiance.

Erick’s bed was growing mushrooms in the wooden frame, which was… okay? Sure. Erick wanted mushrooms for food, anyway, but these mushrooms were a bit too glowy and tiny for eating purposes. Slimy, too. At least the wood he had managed to [Grow] from a water plant was real enough wood for mushrooms to treat it as such. Erick could work with that.

Make some more calorie-dense wood; make some better mushrooms.

There were slimes all over the floor, though.

And the water puddles. Don’t forget about the water puddles.

Erick got out of bed and didn’t bother with his shoes or even his shirt and pants. Boxers were fine attire for fixing a space station. It let him really feel the temperature in the air, too…

“Why am I rationalizing anything to myself?”

“Oh. I’m going a little crazy.”

“Well at least now I have slimes to talk to. This is fine.”

“I will name you Betty. You can be Bernie. You can be Bertha. You can be Bertrand… And that’s enough of that.”

“It’s only been a few days— a week! At most! I’m not going insane.”

“You’re going insane, little Bertha, if you think I’ll let you eat my beans. No! My beans! There. Now you can’t get to my beans… And that makes you sad, huh? Well yes. I’m sure they smell good… Well. I suppose you can have some. As a treat. Here.”

Erick fed the slimes quite a lot of copied beans.

The slimes were kinda cute. Like grapefruit-sized night lights, rolling across the mossy, half-puddled ground. Erick copied beans over and over and fed the slimes until they didn’t want to eat anymore, and then he got to investigating the problems with the fountains.

They all had problems.

The walls had problems. The runic networks had problems. A tunnel had collapsed due to faulty [Gravity Ward]s, but the other systems saved the place. Mana jettisoned out of a leak in the floor of the original building, because it was too close to the adamantium worldplate and its Siphon power, so that needed adjustment.

By the time Erick got through the first round of repairs another maybe-two days had passed.

And Erick realized he needed a time-keeping device.

A waterclock? Sure.

Erick killed an hour making a clock, which gained him a measure of hours, days, and weeks, or at least an approximation of that sort of temporal change. He didn’t have a watch or anything like that with him when Solomon booted him off of Veird, so Erick just mentally counted ‘one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi’ and hoped for the best with his timing. The water clock, with all of its gears and wheels and flowing water, was decently accurate… Probably.

Erick went back to bed.

He woke up to much bigger slimes and a mossy floor that felt good underfoot, and great big orange mushrooms growing out of big wooden logs that smelled like feet and tasted really good once they got tossed in the flame. Sort of like an airy chicken-taste.

Erick felt much better after that particular meal.

After checking the walls again and finding all the systems working as they should, Erick did a check on the 47 slimes that currently bumbled and ambled throughout the compound. The slimes were exuding mana, too. Only about 1 every few hours… Maybe. Hard to tell. They were definitely making mana, though! And so were the plants. When Erick’s mana senses were closed, everything looked kinda spooky, with the slimes glowing like radioactive, toxic things, the mushrooms looking more intimidating than the slimes, and everything looking way too cave-like for comfort. But when Erick’s mana senses were open, everything was kinda ethereal, like someone had rubbed bacon grease over the camera lens, like they used to do on old movies to give the same sort of effect…

“I could really go for some bacon-grease-fried shrooms.”

… Erick looked at the little bit of fat on his body…

“Nope. Not cutting off parts of myself to eat. That is… way too far. Now that would be the actions of a crazy person.” Erick looked to the slime passing by, plopping at Erick’s leg before moving on, like some sort of cat. “It’s crazy to eat oneself, right, Benny #7?”

Benny #7 continued to amble away, searching for something to eat.

Erick put his hands on his hips, and considered…

“I am not eating any part of myself, even if I can grow it back. There! Decision made. Now for the other Big Question.”

He was pretty much ready to start really going for this whole True Wizard thing, wasn’t he?

“Yeah. I think I am.”

- - - -

Erick ascended up a staircase to a special-made room in his compound that was unlike all the rest.

It was open to the outside.

The roof of the tallest structure in the compound was a hexagon of black stone, ten meters across. Thin streamers of shadow lifted from the edges of the roof, to form a dome-like lattice of power that held air and mana here, upon this location. Those thin shadows were the only visible part of the compound, here at the top, at the peak of a black sand mountain. All of the runic web that held the magical structure in place was in the room below.

Erick could step right through the ‘walls’ here, if he wanted. He’d be in the vacuum of space, just like that. He’d do that, eventually. Not right now. Not until he could truly survive such a thing.

Erick took an uneasy breath of comfortable air as he gazed up at a fraction of infinity.

There was no sun. There was no moon. The only real source of light was that storm in the far distance, and the ocean of stars overhead.

It was quite beautiful, really.

The darkness necessary to see stars like this did exist on Veird in many different places, but there was no real atmosphere between Erick and eternity in this place. Like glowing dust, and points of bright light, the heavens were revealed. It was awesome, in the old, biblical sense of the word; almost too grand to put into a coherent thought.

“Really helps to chase away the existential dread of it all, doesn’t it,” Erick said, as he turned his attention back to the land around him… To the ‘walls’ and the death that awaited beyond...

Erick walked to the side of the wall-less room. He put a finger through the invisible barrier that held in the atmosphere and manasphere. His fingertip was okay for a moment, and then it started to hurt. He pulled back, and shook out his hand. Blood vessels had burst but they were healing already, under Erick’s gaze.

“… I guess that’s the Call of the Void for you.” Erick mumbled, “Of course it was going to hurt; why did you think it wouldn’t.”

… Anyway!

Erick walked to the center of the space and sat down on a semi-comfortable stone chair. It was just a normal chair, unconnected to anything. In fact, this space at the top of the compound, at the peak of the black sand hill, was about the most disconnected part of this entire structure. Runic webs supported invisible walls all around, but the center was empty of all magical influence.

It needed to be that way.

Becoming a True Wizard was mostly about deciding which parts of yourself you wanted to keep, and which parts you wanted to discard, and it was pretty much impossible to do that in areas of great influence, like on Veird with the manaminer of the Script having influence everywhere. ‘Achieve emptiness to divine the truth of oneself’ was such a simple concept, but like many simple concepts, it was in the doing that the true difficulty showed itself.

In that difficulty, becoming a True Wizard was kinda like the concept of relationships.

Chemical reactions in brains and physical love and circumstances were all great starter foundations to a relationship, but going the distance to everlasting love required a lot more than that. Relationships required active choice to be with a person, and an adjustment of self and circumstances and a whole bunch of other factors that many people never figured out, and most could only ever muddle through.

Which was fine. Love filled in the final magics of a working relationship some of the time.

Erick supposed that becoming a True Wizard was much the same as declaring a relationship with the self, and then deciding that nothing would tear that relationship apart. Mana could fill in the rest.

‘Erick’ was only part of such a relationship, though. There was also his soul, and his mana, and the need for constant communication to change everything on a whim, to make the trajectory of ‘Wizard Erick’ go where he needed to go. Most of that communication would be directed outward, at the world around Erick, but some would be directed inward, to check on his Self, to make sure everything was going as desired.

Erick had already done almost all of the coursework to become a True Wizard, now he just needed to put it all into thought, and then action. He needed to actually write the thesis of himself.

First, Erick needed to decide what he wanted.

The concept of ‘need’ was not a part of True Wizardry. True Wizardry was a culmination of desire, and the coordination of the decision that ‘needs’ like sustenance, shelter, and even a continuance of self, were all apart of one’s wants. He could be a True Wizard that was a simple block of crystal that never tired, never hungered, never wanted, and always worked hard. But Erick did not want that.

He wanted everything he already had andmore.

A lot more.

“Ten thousand moving parts,” Erick said, “That’s what this is.”

This was not unlike Quilatalap making himself into a lich, where he decided who he was and who he wanted to be. That was why Erick had tried the phylactery approach to Wizardry that one time with Quilatalap, during the [Onward]. That methodology hadn’t worked back then for the obvious reasons of Erick not really knowing what he was doing, not being there in the moment, or maybe Nothanganathor had fucked it up for him...

Or maybe even Benevolence had stopped him from ascending, because then he would have triggered the Red Storm way too early. And yet, maybe a version of Erick had succeeded in True Wizardry back then. That one had died, for sure. Grand Wizardry could certainly negate the Script’s controls, after all, and if Erick really needed to become a True Wizard than he probably could have, but he was glad that his Lightning Path had taken him here, to this place of peace and contemplation.

Erick wondered what happened to those other Ericks. Solomon and the ‘failed’ Ericks was just one possible endpoint. Surely some of him would have succeeded a lot more than the version of him that was here, now, and doing this contemplation.

But even if such a Wizard version of Erick had lived… What would such a half person look like? What would they do? Erick hadn’t known about Nothanganathor back then, and so, could such a Wizard have changed tracks and adjusted to this new threat? How would such a True Wizard have handled the Wizard of Anarchy, or the Blue Wizard? Erick hadn’t even known about the infinite multiverse of this New Cosmology back then, so surely a Wizard Erick from back then would have been at a loss when it came to these sorts of major threats.

Outside threats were always a big problem, because those threats were hard to guard against.

This was infinitely more true for threats that could hide themselves, and strike from absolute seats of power, just like Nothanganathor had done to the Old Cosmology in the Sundering.

If a threat knew, fully and completely, a Wizard or a Lich or even god, then those victims were easier to plan around and take down, simply because that’s how people got when they were smart and capable. Even if everyone knew everyone else, and everyone was a perfect actor, sometimes enemies simply won because they had started planning earlier, or they had a better plan, or whatever.

Life became games of chess when everyone was a perfect actor, and games of chess didn’t always end in draws—

Erick would revisit that thought in a moment. For now….

Erick breathed, cleared his mind, and focused on the proper order of events.

1. Find the foundational Truth.

2. Build upon that Truth, but don’t build for a specific goal, or you will find yourself unable to adapt to all problems you face, or worse, you will complete your goal, and then want to die. Build for later additions, and changes, and yet, to do that was to invite disaster if someone could attack you from ways you didn’t plan.

3. ???

4. Paradox the Wizard-self into being Just You, but with an endless power source supporting you for all eternity. This would help with the ‘too rigid’ problem of Wizardry and other high-powered beings who lived their Truth to the max, outshining your truth, but it would not solve that evergreen problem of outside threats.

5. Learn to live with what you have done to yourself.

That was a pretty normal chain of thoughts for becoming a True Wizard.

Erick was going to follow that normal order… But he had some problems that were not problems. They were nuances that needed to be incorporated into his final form.

All normal Wizards ascended to True Wizardry with the tools they made for themselves along their Wizardry career. Erick was not very tool-rich right now. The only magi-physical tools that Erick had with him right now were a pair of All-Stat rings that functioned within almost every environment, and also his All-Seeing Eye, hanging on a chain around his neck. The rings operated at maybe 25% because there was no Script to piggyback, and they really needed a Script to piggyback, while the All-Seeing Eye was operating at around 95-ish%.

The Eye was working a lot better, for reasons of Wizardry.

He had other ‘tools’ that Erick had made for himself over the years, but they were not physical. They were his spells, which the Script had taken and turned into magical buttons that it then planted into his soul. Every single basic spell he bought for a point, every single Class Ability he made himself or Wizarded up or otherwise acquired, every single nuance to [Polymorph] and his [Greater Dragon Body] and even his Stats in his Status, all were tools implanted and twisted and colored into his soul.

And his soul was kind of a mess right now.

Erick had looked at himself before now, of course. When he had landed on FENRIR his soul had been broken and cracked and everything was a mess. There was still some damage. A lot, actually. He had expected this.

From the birth of Ophiel months ago, to Yggdrasil last month, both of which had mostly healed, to then Erick’s bequeathing of Rozeta’s Kill Switch and his Second Status to Solomon there at the end, his soul had taken a pretty deep beating.

So there had been some damage.

That damage was healing. Which was great! It wasn’t healing as fast as it would if Erick had been inside Benevolence Itself, but being sequestered inside this Benevolence-infused compound was helping to heal his soul, too.

And so, his soul was healing. Which was great!

But, as Erick sat there, meditating and looking inward, as his body softly exuded Benevolence like a cloud around him, he saw that the damage was extensive. At least the stone chair under his butt was getting a nice, soft layer of green moss to it.

Erick needed to meditate on everything going forward, anyway. He could let his soul heal as he tried to make sense of his ethereal self.

“… Maybe I should make a Gate Network here, too. Plant a node? Hmm.”

Erick lifted his hand and tried to form a [Gate], as per normal operations.

Benevolence swirled into a disk and then opened up into the vacuum of Elsewhere.

It was like opening a window on a spaceship.

Bad.

Erick tried to shut the [Gate] with a flick of concentrated intent but he ended up needing to destroy the [Gate] with anti-Benevolence countermagic.

It was a minor loss of atmosphere and manasphere. No slimes were hurt in the process of that experiment. The Benevolence fountains, noticing a drop in everything, kicked into high gear and started rapidly pumping out atmosphere, half of which was turned into thick air because the copying magics weren’t perfect, and soon, the manasphere was stable, too.

Erick had to go rushing downstairs when one of the fountains started fountaining way too much water into the air, though. He had no idea what had caused that malfunction, but it ended up taking an hour to fix. Erick spent the next 12 hours fixing other minor problems in the compound, before they became major problems, because spreading moss was fucking up the runic web, bending it out of position.