No one really knows what happened that day when the sky closed over and started showing fakery. It was a (curse word) (curse word) Wizard War. That’s how that shit 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 as 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.

- -

- -

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 was outer 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.

- - - -

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 Erick 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 a part 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 and more.

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.

- - - -

Erick sat atop the mossy stone chair.

He breathed; in, out, in, out.

He spoke his Truth yet again, as he had many times over the last several days of meditation.

“For the good of all, and every individual, we give assistance to those in need and do what we must to prevent apocalypse before it happens, to found and cultivate an evergrowing cycle of less war, less horror, and more hope, for now, and for all always.”

Erick’s soul was a less-tattered mess and his mantra pulled that mess together just a little bit more. It had been days since Erick had started this accretion/cultivation project of True Wizardry, and while problems plagued the compound underfoot, they were all solvable problems. Everything was a solvable problem, including Erick and this ascent to True Wizardry.

“For the good of all, and every individual...”

He spoke the words and his soul aligned a little bit more. He was keeping every part of his mortal life, he had decided, which included a lot of the Script which had raised him to power.

This was sort of like soul surgery, but really it was closer to advanced healing. The pieces were all there inside of him, but they were muted and out of alignment, in the case of his Stats, or hooked up to functionality that didn’t exist, like [Cleanse], or hanging out pretty much fully intact but unable to be used at full power instantly like usual, like all of the his spells with costs in the thousands.

The way in which this was exactly like soul surgery was in how he was envisioning all of this stuff working in his soul.

The soul was mostly incomprehensible. Even the best necromancers only saw something like 10% to 40% of a soul. But the best necromancers, and even Erick with his [Reincarnation], had a trick. One simply had to frameshift, to recategorize oneself and how one viewed the world, in order to interpret the soul into something understandable and able to be operated upon.

And so, Erick was reorganizing his soul into something able to be changed based on need or want. Something that could grow with him, and change with him, that could categorize the magic he made and protect him from outside magics, like how the God Pact and the Script did for Veird.

Something like a personal Script.

Erick was still workshopping a name and the ultimate powers of such a personal Script, and how to make it truly categorize his Wizard nature… Which was pretty much impossible. All of these little spells in his soul only looked like spells, and only from certain angles. If Erick wasn’t focusing on the frameshift of his own mind into turning the unknowable into the known, then all these ‘tools’ in his soul and core would simply look like bits of benevolence-white fog, melding with each other, completely unable to be separated from each other into discernible things.

Erick wasn’t going to make something as robust as the Script, or at least not here, at the beginning.

At this new beginning, Erick was just going to transform his existence into an unassailable tree.

Poi had once spoken of the three ways that Mind Mages eventually grew. The Unbreachable Wall, shutting out everyone and everything else, becoming completely immune to the outside world. The Growing Tree, which took in good things and withstood the bad things. And the Perfect Gestalt, which took in everything, both good and bad, in order to become one with the people around them.

Erick would become an infinitely inwardly growing tree, with his heart protected by a density of True Wizardry, and with his Benevolence touching and influencing and being influenced in return by everything out here in this universe, or any other universe.

Nothanganathor was a great evil that must be killed, but to think that Nothanganathor was the only evil out there was to set oneself up to be blinded later. So Erick wasn’t planning for just that battle. He was planning for the unplannable, as much as could be done.

He repeated his mantra.

“For the good of all, and every individual...”

- - - -

Erick likely could have forced himself to True Wizardry the very second he was out of Veird’s Script. He was glad he had not done that. Everything could be made better, and that included his own ideas of Wizardry. Being truly alone for the first time in forever —and the slimes didn’t count— had done a lot to clarify a lot…

Erick looked behind, to the staircase.

A slime with a green tint to its white body was desperately trying to climb up the stairs, to get outside.

“Bartholomew,” Erick said, “You know you can’t come up here. You almost got sucked out of the room the last time you came out… Okay. I guess you’re rolling in my meditation space now.”

Erick probably should have cleaned up the mossy floor more than he had. These little slimes could climb up anything that offered as much grip as solid moss. Erick watched as Bartholomew plopped across the ground, toward the edge of the invisible shadow walls that separated the room from the vacuum. Bartholomew rolled forward fast, right to the Great Empty beyond, the Call of the Void drawing him right through—

Erick grabbed him back, pouring a little bit of Benevolence and Healing into the slime. The little guy looked dead, but he was not. Slimes only really had cores that floated in a water-like sack, and Bartholomew’s core was intact, even if all the rest of him was not. His goo had popped, though, and he rapidly turned into a puddle of luminescent goo, which was not good. Erick placed Bartholomew downstairs, in a divot of stone. He would heal.

As long as his core was intact, and the rest of him was mostly there, he would heal.

Erick would be a lot more impossible to kill than a simple slime, soon enough, but the idea was basically the same.

He sat back down on his chair, and considered Stats.

Erick was pretty set on Stats being the basis of his personal system. But what was a Stat, exactly? Well, the little slime down there had given Erick a good example of what a Stat was, considering it was pulling itself together right now and coming back to life where it had almost looked dead. Stats were like slimes in that way.

A slime was a confluence of mana that became magic in the living expression of a mutated bacteria into something more. When Erick accreted his core originally, he accreted for size and then density and along the way he gained Stats, because Stats were the expression of a life turned solid by magic.

Strength, Vitality, Willpower, and Focus were the original Stats of Veird; they were the way that the creators of the Script decided that living things would quantify themselves through magic. Then along came Melemizargo and the New Stats and the ways in which life could quantify itself doubled. Constitution, Dexterity, Perception, and Intelligence were not the end of quantification, though.

The original four Stats weren’t the start of quantification, either.

They were all simply the directions that the creators of Veird had decided to make life live upon.

Erick could pick entirely new Stats for his personal system, if he wanted. And he kinda did. Willpower and Focus meant nothing outside of mana well size and mana regeneration, but those were defunct variables in Erick’s new system. Strength still provided physical power, and Vitality recovered that strength faster, but there wasn’t a ‘Health’ unless he made Health exist.

Erick already had those original 8 Stats, though, and those were doing a lot for him already, so he wasn’t going to ditch his core and start all over again.

He could rearrange himself, though.

Erick liked being able to have a very large mana pool, so that was one of the foundations that he was going to build upon. He’d be using his own mana generation per day, all by himself, thank you very much. Sorry, Rozeta! Erick was using his 12-ish million mana per day now; not Veird.

A core was only naturally able to churn through around 500ish mana per second before it stressed and began to break, though. Erick was far beyond that because of a blessing from Rozeta, but he still had limits that he needed to eliminate, and the natural limitations of using one’s own mana was one such roadblock. So he’d Paradox himself beyond that throughput-limit, for sure.

He’d probably go for an infinitely deep mana pool that constantly filled with his own mana, and pushed out all other influences and manas. He would want to be able to open himself up and pour out mana to get rid of outside interference as well.

So that was part 1 of his new Stats. That would be his ‘soul’. Infinite depth, infinite capacity, constantly filling from his mana generation, constantly cleaning itself. His main source of clarity of purpose. This is where he would include all of the parts of him that the Script had given him. The spells. His Familiar Forms. His ‘dragon’ form. His ‘Erick’ form. All of his Class Abilities. The soul would be the main foundation for all the rest.

Soul, Body, and Mind; Erick had already decided that, but now came the organization.

Erick would put all of his Old Stats into his soul, so that they could be expressed through all the rest to come.

His body came next, and his body would be the physical expression of his soul. His ability to move a claw and slice apart steel, or to hold a cup of coffee and not break it while still being able to enjoy the heat of the mug. The strength of his scales. The power of his breath. The ability to heal completely and never tire.

Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Perception, and Vitality would be mostly expressed through the body. All of that would be rolled into one number; simply ‘Body’. All of that would create a confluence called Health, that would be the main shield protecting Erick from physical harm. That shield would be a lot harder to weaken than Health on Veird, too, because it would be a secondary infinite well of resources that could be used to keep the body running well.

No limits to Health, either, in this new True Wizard world, thank-you-very-much.

For the third Stat, Erick wanted ‘mind’. ‘Mind’ would be an expression of his body, and be his conscious self. It was on this level that he would primarily exist, but he would also exist in soul and body. Intelligence would mainly express itself here. Willpower and Focus had nothing to do with Mana Points or Mana Point Regeneration anymore, which were depreciated Stats under Erick’s True Wizardry, so Erick would roll both of those into a new stat called ‘Concentration’, which would also go here, and simply be a part of ‘Mind’. Concentration would be the ability to focus on goals and then get them. It’d be something he could ignore when he wanted to, though. No one wanted to be ‘on’ 100% of the time.

And on top of all that, what Erick had done to make this compound in the middle of Nowhere, FENRIR, was what he would do to himself.

His soul would create a mana barrier automatically, keeping control over his mana, and in that control he would become immune to all forms of spell and skill which attempted to battle him magically.

His body, meanwhile, would form a physical barrier protecting him from the vagaries of the physical world, and in that protection, keep his physical form intact. Erick imagined that his physical barrier would be the most tested of his barriers.

His mind would be the conscious control of the first two, and also have a ‘barrier’ against manipulation. Erick imagined that his mental barrier would be the weakest link here, since didn’t have any true mental magics, but he had been using [Telepathy] and such almost all his life on Veird. He knew what mental magic was, even if his ‘mind slime’ was ‘asleep’. And besides that, this personal Script was meant to grow eventually. Erick could figure out that functionality later.

A ‘mind shield’ would protect him from mind damage just like a Health and Mana shield would protect his soul.

… yes. That seemed good.

The main purpose of splitting up everything like this was to make it so that he could build himself up more, later, and also for what came next.

Erick envisioned 3 forms of ‘Health’ in his personal script. There was mana, which was his main fuel and also a Mana Shield of protection for his soul. There was Health, in the traditional sense, for his body. Maybe ‘Psyche’ could be the name for the mental shield around and composing his mind.

Splitting them up like this would also allow him to understand anything that attempted to maliciously interact with him. Whichever ‘health bar’ started decreasing in the face of various threats, be they magical or environmental or mental, Erick could look at his personal Script readouts for his various health bars and understand better the threat he was facing.

“Maybe I don’t need an exact number readout either. Maybe a stability meter would be more than enough. The numbers could go from -100 to 0 to 100. Any positive numbers would be me gaining resources while anything negative would be indicative of an attack of some sort.”

Of course Erick still wanted some actual numbers, but he didn’t much care for knowing if he had 21 billion mana in the tank, versus 22 billion. Once the numbers got that high then there was no practical way to spend them except in Grand Wizardry. For that, Erick would want actual numbers. But after 100 days, Erick would already have 1-ish billion mana in his core.

… He would likely have to adjust the displayed numbers when life proved his choices as inadequate to the nature of his future needs. Erick’s goal in this part of his personal system was to be able to experience a threat and categorize whatever primary threat it represented through the depletion of his… Existence Points? Like Health Points?

Sure. ‘EP’. That worked.

… Or maybe not.

Erick threw a lightward image into the air, displaying a possible… ‘benevolence box’? Instead of a blue box? Maybe.

- -

Erick Flatt, [timer for age goes here, make it subjective age] [timer for current age goes here; needs update from sources to be determined]

Overall Stability: [-100 to 100]

Mp: mana pool, [-100 to 100]

Hp: health pool, [-100 to 100]

Pp: psyche pool, [-100 to 100]

- -

Erick thought for a moment, then said, “I like that. Simple. And I can accrete for stronger versions of body and mind— Ah. Wait. I should account for that. Soul is infinite and impossible to accrete for… but it still grows based on actions. Hmm.”

He tried another display.

- -

Erick Flatt, [timer for age goes here, make it subjective age] [timer for current age goes here; needs update from sources to be determined]

Soul: [-100 to 100]

Body: [-100 to 100]

Mind: [-100 to 100]

Overall Stability: [-100 to 100]

Mp: mana pool, [-100 to 100]

Hp: health pool, [-100 to 100]

Pp: psyche pool, [-100 to 100]

- -

“Soul would grow as the Darkness in my soul grows and my actions become more renowned and influential, so while I can’t grow that directly, it will be growing… usually? Usually. Body is something that will degrade if I don’t keep it up, so that needs to be tracked and improved upon… and people can surely attack my soul directly, and this sort of degradation should be tracked.”

… And yet, was this redundant?

And not even indicative of anything, really. Did Erick need to keep track of the exact amount of mana his soul produced per day? Well… Actually. Yeah. But this didn’t do that. This showed him his rate of growth.

So let’s change that.

And the body would be refining or degrading based on the Hp number down there. Not some nebulous ‘body’ rate of change.

That should be a number, too. But what would the number even mean? Nothing, really. Not when everyone else’s systems of measurements were different.

How was he supposed to change his Mind, anyway?

And there was something Erick was missing from this readout. Probably a lot of somethings.

Erick changed the readout again.

- -

Erick Flatt, [timer for age goes here, make it subjective age] [timer for current age goes here; needs update from sources to be determined]

Mana split; Soul, Body, Mind: 34%, 33%, 33%

Soul: [some number, use mana production per day; New Hidden Stat (Darkness)]

Body: [some number, use average of all hidden body stats; Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Vitality]

Mind: [some number, use average of all hidden mind stats: (Willpower+Focus= Concentration), Intelligence, Perception]

Overall Stability: [-100 to 100]

Mp: mana pool, [-100 to 100]

Hp: health pool, [-100 to 100]

Pp: psyche pool, [-100 to 100]

- -

“Ah! I need to do this, too.”

- -

Erick Flatt, [timer for age goes here, make it subjective age] [timer for current age goes here; needs update from sources to be determined] [CURRENT REALITY]

Mana split; Soul, Body, Mind: 34%, 33%, 33%

Soul: [some number, use mana production per day; New Hidden Stat (Darkness)]

Body: [some number, use average of all hidden body stats; Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Vitality]

Mind: [some number, use average of all hidden mind stats: (Willpower+Focus= Concentration), Intelligence, Perception]

Overall Stability: [-100 to 100]

Resons: ??? [-100 to 100]

Mp: mana pool, [-100 to 100]

Hp: health pool, [-100 to 100]

Pp: psyche pool, [-100 to 100]

- -

“… Or maybe not include resons? They’re rather impossible to measure… But I should include them…. Somewhere— Ah! Let’s put them under Mind, because resons are the precipitation of reasons-for-being-and-doing.” Erick smiled, as he understood something deeply. “I might not have a mind slime but I surely have resons.”

- -

Erick Flatt, [timer for age goes here, make it subjective age] [timer for current age goes here; needs update from sources to be determined] [CURRENT REALITY: God Pact, etc; needs update from sources to be determined]

Mana split; Soul, Body, Mind: 34%, 33%, 33%

Soul: [some number, mana production per day; also New Hidden Stat (Darkness)]

Body: [some number, use average of all hidden body stats; Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Vitality]

Mind: [some number, use average of all hidden mind stats: (Willpower+Focus= Concentration), Intelligence, Perception]

Overall Stability: [-100 to 100]

Mp: mana pool / mana shield, [-100 to 100]

Hp: health pool / health shield, [-100 to 100]

Pp: psyche pool / mind shield, [-100 to 100] ; Resons: ??? [-100 to 100]

- -

Erick was happy with that.

… Except Resons were probably uncountable since they were the form of Wizardry in this universe, and Wizardry, while based in numbers somewhat, was also a lot more than numbers.

But this would do for now. When Erick got some real learning about resons he’d fix up that part of his New Status.

What came next was Grand Wizardry, to impose this personal Script.

… Erick was going to wait on that until his soul was fully healed to do that. Maybe in a few more days.

His Lightning Path wasn’t too active at the moment since there was nothing out there to interact with, but his Lightning Path was telling him that there was something coming the moment he passed this gate. Erick would need to be absolutely ready for that.

And so, he planned for the worst possible case: At the very least, he needed to be prepared to abandon this outpost at a moment’s notice, and that meant securing his mana and body and mind against outside influences, like the vacuum of space, and Primal Lightning.

There. That was the worst possible case of becoming a True Wizard; being able to ignore the dangers of the world.

And then Erick planned for success. What did the best possible version of this endeavor look like?

This Personal Script would allow him to fire off countless spells outside of the Script Second. With a pool of mana that was as deep as he regenerated, and with full access to his own mana, he’d be able to fire off spells faster than he could ever before. It’d be like that time he got to use that [SSS] spell from Rozeta at the end of ‘Last Shadow’s Feast’.

Other benefits to setting up these various permanent accretion and protective magics inside his body included being immune to Mind Control and Soul Control and Blood Magic, too.

If Erick could make this work, and he was pretty sure he could, he would get all of the benefits of the Script, but with none of the controls imposed by the Script.

It seemed like a good base to start.

- - - -

Two days later, and after expanding the compound a few times, Erick decided to try opening a [Gate] into Benevolence Itself, because he hadn’t tried that, actually. He opened a hole into a very small part of reality that was foggy as shit, and empty as could be.

Erick rapidly closed the entrance into Benevolence and decided not to do that ever again, for a few reasons.

If he did that, and if he decided to make a Gate Network here on FENRIR, it could possibly connect back to Veird, and that would make Veird vulnerable to whatever fuckery is happening here on this adamantium land. However, if he did need to get back to Veird —more like ‘when’, not ‘if’— then making a gate network here would be the way to create that path to Veird.

Opening up that hole to Benevolence Itself did clue him in that the various upgrades to the compound’s domainwork were making a Benevolence-capable space in this small area. What Erick had done here was pretty much exactly what the Script was doing when it held on to Benevolence on Veird.

Good to know.

… Which gave Erick a great idea for an upgrade to his future Status.

“Or at least a potential one. I could make a personal gate space that I could always carry around with me, inside my infinite depth core… Hmm. That might not work out how I want. I should workshop that, first. Put it on the list for potential future upgrades.”

So far that list included:

The Luck Stat. His Lightning Path might work well when quantized into ‘Luck’

A personal ‘inventory’, which Erick had been considering to place inside his soul. This was probably unnecessary. A personal inventory could go right alongside an extradimensional gatespace.

Various other Stats, like ‘Reality Sense’, which would be great for using to figure out where he was at all points in time; he just had to actually figure out how the heck such a ‘stat’ would even work.

“… And yet, that opens up the problem of me accidentally making a path back to Veird. I probably don’t want to make a gatespace right now, for any reason. Not only could it be used to find Veird, but someone could attack me through that dimension… probably… Hmm. I’m probably going to get attacked from a lot of weird angles. Dimensional attacks? Yeah. And yet...”

Part of successfully fighting an enemy was deciding how the enemy was able to attack you.

Like, sure, people could come through the walls to get you, but most people came through the doors and windows.

“Can I do that with Wizardry? Enforce the avenue of attacks upon which someone can harm me? Decide how I’ll let myself be harmed? A good enough Wizard could overcome that… But… No. Maybe not? Could I…?”

… Erick wasn’t so sure such a thing was possible...

But as he considered that particular thought…

“Oh. Shit. This is a Big Thought, isn’t it.”

And then.

“Wizards should be able to define avenues of attack quite well, actually. Especially Paradox Wizards. I need to incorporate this. This is like… foundational— Oh! I can use my Class Ability Failsafe that triggers [Time Stop] and [Return] and mutate that into anti-egress magics and also…”

Oh.

Oh yes.

Erick began drawing out plans in the air out of light.

Fifteen hours later he had filled the compound with all of his ideas and their follow through with runic notation and full wording. He ended up forcing himself to take a nap and then he woke up refreshed with even more ideas.

He worked on his True Wizardry, taking his time, figuring out his future.

Gradually, Erick refined his lightward ideas scattered across the whole compound into words lightly etched onto platinum chalkboards. He ate as much as necessary, he slept as much as he could, but the ideas flowed, and they had to be transformed from soft light into hard truths, and sometimes refined yet again.

It took him another 17 days before he thought he was ready to actually ascend.

This personal script had a lot going for it, and a lot of expansion opportunities for the future. It was mostly made of Benevolence, but it also had a lot of Book Magic involved everywhere, for that particular element was great at ordering the impossible into the solid. This right here was sort of like the Identinomicon that Erick had never made on Veird because he had simply never needed to organize his thoughts and identification magic like that, thanks to Intelligence. But the Script was surely Book Magic, and this would be Book Magic, too, because he would be ordering ten thousand thoughts and feelings and magics into clean lines of intent and power.

As he worked, Erick lightly chided himself for never truly interrogating every single person who made the Script on how, exactly, they made the Script. He forgave himself, though, because he had asked those specific questions now and again, and the answer had always been a variation on a theme, ‘We got the original Script from the dwarves and back then it was just a manaminer. Only with the Sundering and the help of people on Veird at that time did we transform it into the Script. Rozeta did a lot of the hidden work.’

Rozeta had better answers than that, but she wasn’t willing to give them up to anyone. She had promised Erick that she’d talk about all that with him after 70 years of peace, but they never got there.

Quilatalap had not known the full details of the Script, even though he was there at the Sundering helping to make it. Farix, the Professor Shade who had manaminer classes at his arcanaeum, had only the largest, most broadest of ‘insider knowledge’ as to how manaminers functioned. Other people were not much better. Kirginatharp was more like his mother than anyone else when it came to answering those specific questions, and forget Melemizargo.

Erick had enough details to work with, though.

He was pretty sure that this thing he was creating was going to be a personal manaminer in effect, and maybe also in truth.

“Still don’t know what to call it, though,” Erick said, as he continued to write down every spell he had ever made, putting his full status on the walls of this particular room, just so that he would be able to make sure it was all there when he was done.

As he got to Rozeta’s Recovery, which made all his regen add together and apply to both his Mana and Health, Erick was truly starting to understand how much of these grand abilities were superfluous in the real world. ‘Recovery’ was built upon systems that did not exist for Erick, or even naturally. Multi Ward, the ability for Erick to have multiple Personal Wards, was completely useless, as the ‘only one Personal Ward per person’ was a limitation of the Script in the first place. Erick had already cast ten layers of [Unbreakable Form] on himself, just to see if he could, and he could.

The ‘absolute damage reduction’ of [Unbreakable Form] was even a lie, too, because what was ‘damage’ but a categorization of the Script’s interpretation of standardized damage?

As Erick kept pulling apart lies from truth, he mumbled, “Well maybe the lies are truth when under the auspices of the Script.”

Minutes later, Erick said, “The ‘definition of damage’ is certainly something that needs to be put into my personal Script, though, that can be the thing that allows enemies to harm me in certain ways, and closes off all other ways… Could I actually cut off all damage? This is Wizardry after all… But no. To be a person living in this world or any other is to be vulnerable sometimes, otherwise life is shit… Yes. That is more correct than making myself immune to damage. ‘Immunity to damage’ surely does not exist—”

And then he realized something.

“The dimensional ban of the script is a limiting of harm done to Veird through dimensions. This is most likely the source of the various Elemental Bands of the Script. This also correlates to my own planned route of making Soul, Body, and Mind the only avenues in which I accept damage, but I can still interact with all sources of everything out there, just like the Script.

“The infinitesimal ban of the Script seems like it’s the true foundation of the Script, though. The Script is at the underlying everything of Veird, and everything builds upon that, sort of like how I’m going to make my core infinitely expanded inward, and constantly pushing mana outward to get rid of all unapproved influences.

“The propagation ban of the Script is another limit of damage done, saying ‘nothing can make more of itself’. Seems like a good way to prevent corruptive influencing, so maybe I’ll steal that base idea, too...”

Erick wrote and rewrote ideas.

And then he got to experimentation with infinitely-dense mana crystals.

Infinitely-dense crystals weren’t hard to make at all, outside of the Script.

- - - -

Erick felt that maybe he was already primed to go a day later.

He had planned some experiments with a second and third core, and so he created a second and third core that he poured mana into, transforming them into densities beyond the norm. Both experiments were basic creations of his final idea, like mockups of a prototype. They didn’t function how he wanted, because they weren’t actually his core; they were separate cores.

But they still worked how cores normally worked; each one held his soul, and each one allowed him to cast more mana into spellworks faster and easier, with less stress on the structure of the core itself.

More experiments had Erick opening [Gate]s into Benevolence Itself, inside his experimental cores, and he had room on the other side. One 5 centimeter wide sphere had 10 meters of space on the other side. Erick had no idea what the heck was happening there, but he was pretty sure that with this experiment he was witnessing what it meant to not be subject to the Dimensional Ban.

He plopped a slime over to the other side, left it for a minute, and then brought it back to this side, and it was safe.

Erick wasn’t going to play around with Benevolence Itself here and now, but it was good to see that his various theories about what he was doing were already checking out, even if the experiments revealed nuances that Erick wasn’t able to deal with right now.

Five days later, Erick thought was actually ready to make this happen.

He had even come up with a name for his Personal Script, and it seemed appropriate.

His personal Script would be his Path.

Just think of all the jokes he could make once he returned to Veird and Rozeta was all like ‘why aren’t you back in the Script, Erick?’ and he could say ‘I’m on my own Path now, Rozeta.’

Erick chuckled at his own jokes as he read over his platinum walls to make sure it all looked good.

If nothing terrible happened during his ascension then, in the following days, Erick would refine his Personal Script. He’d clean up all the stuff that didn’t matter to him anymore or figure out how to make it apply again, like Clarity for 50% mana costs or Intelligence for even more mana efficiency than 50%. Erick already had a pretty good idea how to make Elemental Mystical work for him again without needing to actually spend the mana he Altered to Mystical and thus end up back at square one. The idea involved automagic mystical infusions to cast spellwork, and it might not work. All that stuff was beyond the scope of the initial instantiation of his personal Script, though, which was pretty much Benevolence-based.

And when he was done with that refining, he’d send out the Call to the Universe, like he had during that Star Mapping ritual. Erick was absolutely sure that he hadn’t actually mapped the universe at all when he had done that. He had tapped into some other power that was already there.

He had to tap into that power again. Simple stuff, really.

Erick breathed deep, taking in the scent of water and plants and moss and mist, as he listened to the burble of the fountains and the plopping of the benevolence slimes all around.

“Yup. I’m ready.”

- - - -

Erick stepped onto the roof of the center of his compound.

Everything below him was black, everything above him was stars.

The nearest life was right below Erick’s feet, and also millions of kilometers away, or more. That storm on the horizon was gone now, having orbited away days ago, making everything out there truly dark. Was Melemizargo here, in this moment? Probably not. If he was, then he would have said hello by now.

The slimes surely said hello. They had also tried to suffocate Erick in his sleep three times, too, but that wasn’t really their fault. They were just blobby cats, looking for warmth in the night to share. They had been good company over the last month and some change and Erick would try to save them if he could.

But it was time to move on.

Erick’s original platinum ‘chalkboard’ workboards rested downstairs in a stack against a wall. The slimes were already playing on them. He’d keep them around for a while, but he’d likely destroy them as soon as this worked out. They had served their purpose; they had helped him to make 3 more platinum tablets, each deeply lined with words and intent and power, each of them sitting on stone platforms around Erick in what might have been the North, South, and Western directions. A fourth tablet held a carving of Erick himself, and nothing else. That tablet sat in the Eastern position.

It was the same sort of arrangement he had made with Melemizargo, Rozeta, Fairy Moon, and himself, twice already; the God of Magic, the God of Ordered Magic, the God of Unbound Fairy, and the Wizard.

Only one of those designations was correct, but Erick didn’t imagine that any of them would mind the designations that Erick had given them.

Erick took a deep breath… And then he turned and watched as inquisitive Bartholomew managed to overcome the ridge that Erick had put by the stairs. Erick had tried to block the slime from coming up into the open. It hadn’t worked. With a gentle nudge, Erick put Bartholomew back down the stairs, much further down, and then he put a slate stone over the stairs, blocking out the light from below.

Now it was truly dark.

Erick turned to the tablets.

And then he turned inward.

“It’s really quite simple,” Erick rhymed, to his mana.

“We start with a dimple, that expands to nirvana.

“Into this peace we are our own system,

“Into prosperity we make infinite wisdom.

“A foundation of might washes out all opposed

“From this benevolent land, this power enclosed.

“Send out a path! Soul, to body, to mind.

“Rend evil inroads! Forever declined.

“This is a life, cultivated, secure.

“If I should falter, I am my own cure.

“Here I walk, up a path of ascension.

“Show me myself, my growing progression

“A paradox of benevolent wrath

“A True Wizard on his own Lightning Path.”

The air of the compound sparkled.

Erick’s core went from simple white to white on the edges, to a shade of blue, to something far, far more brilliant with depth than could ever be grasped. Mana poured outward like soft lightning, grabbing hold of the platinum tablets, disintegrating them, and then flashing inward. The iridescent depths of Erick’s core turned iridescent black, becoming a perfect sphere marked with edges of brilliant white.

And the Lightning expanded.

His voice never faltered as his throat and chest exploded, revealing the darkness in his core to the star-strew darkness of the universe. There was no pain as Erick’s flesh evaporated into red mist, revealing light underneath it all. He was not dying. He was Becoming.

Brilliance appeared out of the death of self, becoming something stronger than flesh, replacing all that was lost. Like a dragon shedding his skin, Erick shed his mortality in full.

His All-Seeing Amulet, with Yggdrasil’s secret attached to the back, broke into two pieces. Yggdrasil’s secret fell to the floor, a shining beacon of power revealed to the world. Erick’s All-Seeing Eye turned from physical power, to purpose and possibility, the eye of Melemizargo becoming a tiny bolt of Benevolence that sunk into his core.

The magic was 95% done.

Erick felt like himself. He did not look like himself. He stood in his body as though he were a Benevolence Elemental, shaped in the manner of flesh and standing nude against the universe; a person of white light among the black. He saw the world a little differently right now, but not that much different.

He would help Veird. He would see Jane, Abigail, Beth, Candice, Evan, Solomon, Poi, Teressa, Destiny, all the gods, all the people of home, soon enough. But for right now, he had one more step to take.

The magic was 95% done.

He saw his Lightning Path calling him; the final bit of magic, the final step toward Ascension.

Erick took a Step that was not in any visible direction, but he would be hard pressed to call it any way other than Forward.

- - - -

Erick did not breathe. He did not need to. He did not panic at his new surroundings, for that would not be useful. He did check his Lightning Path, though, because it was leading him forward, to speak to the man behind the desk up there.

He was in an office room with bare grey walls, fluorescent bulb lights that buzzed angrily, and grey carpet. And there was a desk. And a man. He looked bored.

Erick had no idea where he was, but the man at the desk looked like the kind of guy who knew what was what, and so Erick felt that maybe he should talk to the man, and ignore the fact that his Lightning Path was actually branching out in every single direction around him, telling him to get away, while only one direction was going forward, through the man at the desk—

Suddenly, writing appeared across his eyesight, and Erick felt like himself again, but different.

- -

Establishing Path Protocols.

Welcome back from death, Erick Flatt.

The Ascension was successful. Your soul is now your own to do with as you desire. Here is the initial Status readout that you built (And here is the code that you gave yourself to make sure it was you that was doing this: ‘I am the very model of a modern major scripted system’)

Notice: Some parts are missing. Fix them, Erick.

- -

Erick Flatt, [60ish?] [Current Year: This one?] [CURRENT REALITY=BAD!!!]

Mana split; Soul, Body, Mind: 34%, 33%, 33%

Soul: 14.8m per day, [Darkness Level = ???]

Body: 207

Mind: 304

Overall Stability: ↓↓↓↓↓ [+171, -1062] Directed attack (ALL). Time to death 2.5 seconds (Health>Mana>Psyche)

Mp: 2327/∞, ↓ [+52, -339] Warning: Under directed attack. Time to death 8 seconds

Hp: 1671/∞, ↓ [+51, -634] Warning: Under directed attack. Time to death 2.5 seconds

Pp: 1298/∞, ↓ [+51, -89] Warning: Under directed attack. Time to death 34 seconds

Resons: ??? [???]

- -

Erick recognized many different things in that eternal moment when his Path came online.

His Intelligence was fully online now and working overtime, as was his Perception and All-Seeing Eye. Everything was working in conjunction with each other to show him the Truth of his surroundings, and that truth, like his ‘Current Reality’ readout, was bad. He was in a room that was not a room. He stood upon a blasted, molten land, filled with Red Lightning that was constantly striking him like a thousand lightning strikes a second, and the guy at the desk was a figment; an illusion.

This was a trap of Malevolence, made for Wizards who ascended.

Erick would find out the rest soon enough.

Erick instantly focused started Mana Siphoning all of his surroundings—

It was like turning on the air conditioning and slathering oneself in aloe after a day of dying on a beach of sun exposure, and it was a lot more effective than it had any right to be. The Script had obviously screwed with the power of Mana Siphon in the name of ‘balance’. Erick realized he would likely be discovering a lot of little things like that for a long time. For now, Red Lightning crashed into his fleshy body and instead of ripping apart anything, it soaked in, absorbed like water into a sponge.

Erick hadn’t even turned on his sunform yet. He was still nude, too. This was just him, standing under Red Lightning, atop molten something, soaking in the lightning and feeling mostly fine.

He flicked on his Status with a mental command.

- -

Erick Flatt, [60ish?] [Current Year: This one?] [CURRENT REALITY=magically delicious]

Mana split; Soul, Body, Mind: 34%, 33%, 33%

Soul: 14.8m per day, [Darkness Level=?]

Body: 207

Mind: 304

Overall Stability: ↑↑ [+1233]

Mp: 3590/∞, ↑ [+52, +354] Warning: Under directed attack.

Hp: 2886/∞, ↑ [+51, +354] Warning: Under directed attack.

Pp: 2,483/∞, ↑ [+51, +354] Warning: Under directed attack.

Resons: ??? [???]

- -

Erick would mentally simplify that later, but for now it seemed to be telling him that while he was under attack on all sides his Mana Siphon was working well.

Very well.

It was negating all damage and giving him resources instead.

Nice.

His eyes confirmed what his soul was telling him.

Erick stood under an assault of Red Lightning and soaked it in, turning it into power for himself. The soaking would increase with more surface area, though, so Erick transformed into his sunform, his fleshy body becoming Benevolence that snapped and crashed and joined with the Red Lightning all around to suck it down into his personal Script, his Path, like a greedy Drain Ward, or rather more like the spell that he eventually made out of his Drain Wards.

Erick became a tentacle Undertow Star, with a thousand limbs and each of them soaking up the spellwork all around.

He was the light in the dark, tendrils soaking into the Red, pulling down all the power of this trap into himself, transforming it into his own mana. It was a glorious sort of feeling to consume an enemy who had laid this [Teleport Trap] for Wizards, and who Sundered the Old Cosmology. It seemed poetic, almost. Erick wasn’t sure how the [Teleport Trap] worked, but now that he wasn’t dying, and he was, in fact, doing very well, he saw the trap for what it was.

Erick mentally asked for a simplified Status before he got into the nature of this casual horror all around.

- -

Overall Stability: ↑↑↑↑↑ [+8917] Time to Death = never

- -

“Yup,” Erick said into the Lightning air, “Looks good.”

Erick’s Mana Siphon probably wouldn’t work this well with many other types of magical assaults, but for this trap, in this location, wherever this was, Erick was doing just fine. Benevolence was the perfect counter to Malevolence.

Overcoming this trap did have one unintended side effect, though.

Erick was trying to decide if it was time to panic, or not.

Erick stood atop a blasted surface of land, scoured in every direction by Red, pools of molten metal and rock laying in the open under the light of a sun overhead that was closer than Erick ever imagined it could be. The Red Sun took up half the sky. Somehow, some part of Erick’s ascension had taken him not only inside the FENRIR system, but to a planet near the sun.

Close enough to see.

Close enough to know.

There was Nothanganathor, resting in the sun’s surface like someone had taken a black hose and left it to float in a glowing white puddle. It was too long of a body. It was too big of an enemy. A thousand Jupiters would have been smaller, and by a lot. Erick noticed many things at that moment. Nothanganathor was white. Not black. Not red. But he was pressed against the sun and backlit hard. From a distance, he looked black. In the shine of him, he was red. But from this close Erick could see his edges, and know him as a white dragon, tens of millions of kilometers long, and probably longer.

And his head was right there, laying with one side against the sun, one eye pointed outward, staring at Erick, here on this inner planet of Veird’s system.

Erick bolted away, flashing white and vanishing fast, trying to circumnavigate the planet in a jolting second—

The Malevolence of the solar system gathered, crashing into Erick, as Erick left the opposite side of the inner planet, rushing into the sky, flying fast and faster, trying to keep the planet between him and that baleful eye. It was only when he was far, far beyond the gravity of the ‘planet’ that he realized he wasn’t on a planet at all, but on a thousand-kilometer-wide moon, or something.

Erick kept flying away, trying to keep the moon between him and Nothanganathor—

Red Lightning flickered the void. The moon between Erick and That Eye suddenly slipped to the side.

Erick locked gazes with something he did not know how to fight.

Something like a voice came to Erick, all casually hateful.

“Time to die, Erick Flatt number 17,212.”

Uhh—

And then Erick caught sight of the rest of space, and he saw stars. No eternal blackness. No adamantium plates locking in Nothanganathor. The FENRIR system was gone. Erick was not near the God Pact world at all.

Lightning and worse descended.