Chapter 11: The Universe is a small place after all

It’d been a while since I checked my status properly. Since Newb Planet, I’d only gained a few new titles and my traits remained the same. It appeared that the Newb Planet was as much a method to allow the system to understand us and assign talents to us as it was for us to understand the system and learn to use it.

From the discussions I’ve had with our new player residents, it’s rather rare for players to still gain new traits or titles after the Newb indoctrination. Which would explain why, even after weeks had passed since we left newb planet, I haven’t earnt many new titles and no traits at all.

Probably the only way to further develop new ones would be to invest a significant amount of time. I often thought it strange that the system was handing out titles and traits like candy in the beginning, but after we started theorising as to how it assigns traits, it was more understandable.

That said, I still managed to develop some rather disturbing titles even after leaving Newb Planet. Since we weren’t that busy, and mostly just floating around scoping out targets, I decided now was a good time to re-evaluate my stats and consider some proper training.

After Newb Planet I’d become rather lacking in my training. My stats when I left the planet hardly even moved until I went on that pointless romp through 6 Star, and even then it was all random and without conscious effort. I was really just absorbed in the game and not focused on my skills at all.

With that thought in mind, I opened my Status Space and started going through my stats, skills, spells and traits.

With some better understanding of how stats and skills were assigned and worked, I’d long since altered my Status Space to show me information based on the stat or skill class. Although it wasn’t perfect, it was mostly accurate in its assessment.

Things like Pain Mastery and Mana Manipulation weren’t specific to their category, being placed in Body and Soul respectively, but were more appropriate to those areas.

Pain Mastery, for example, was affected by stats in all three categories, and the special traits that used Pain Mastery also weren’t aligned to a single category. It used cement, endurance and wisdom to alter its progression and affected almost every growth rate, even things like mana.

However, it remained primarily as a body alteration skill, because that’s its most obvious area of effectiveness. As can be attested to by the monstrous level of my endurance stat.

Since the last time I actually sat down and properly surveyed my stats and skills, which would be back on Newb Planet just after I left the Thorny Tower, I’d now accumulated a few new skills. Assassinate, and Shadow Magic are both skills I didn’t actively try to create and were instead system rewards from quests.

Which was the only reason I had those, seeing as they both carry with them rather negative connotations.

In the case of Assassinate, that was earnt from clearing a dungeon. To date, I’d hardly invested much time in levelling this skill. This was because I honestly didn’t consider it to be much use and just the act of sneakily killing someone turns my stomach somewhat.

Skills like this often have certain ‘abilities’ attached to them. Which is sort of like the ‘body’ equivalent of spells. I don’t pay much attention to them because apart from some cool effects and power increase, they often cause the person to enter a channelling state or have some charge up time.

My Basic Weapon Arts, for example, has abilities like ‘Long Shot’ or ‘Cleave’. If I focus my intentions and use the cleave skill in battle, it causes me to lose focus on my surroundings and has almost a full second in which my body is somewhat frozen and has to build up energy.

I find active abilities like this greatly disconcerting and personally believe them to be a detriment in battle unless I could master them effectively.

It has nothing to do with the fact that physical abilities require me to be able to operate the Imbue skill, which I can no longer even learn or practice thanks to my Deprive skill. I’m not sour about that at all ... Really.

That said, many of these skills also grant innate passive effects which don’t require Imbue to operate. Deflect, for example, gives me the passive ability to sense the direction, speed and power of the five closest projectiles strong enough to cause me harm, making it far easier to deflect or dodge them.

In addition to Assassinate and Shadow Magic, there were two skills I’d purposely spent time practising and learning. Elemental Magic and Deflect. Deflect was a skill focused solely on defence, which with my body and traits was actually somewhat counter-intuitive. That said, there were still many things my body can’t survive from, such as a fireball or arrow to the face.

In reality, I only learnt this skill to protect my most vulnerable spots, which if I spent some time and effort on, could actually become absurdly more powerful than the rest of my body.

The only problem with that was, I didn’t have the strength of heart to stab myself in the eye all day in an effort to make my eyes indestructible, even though I knew that I would eventually have to do exactly that if I planned to take full advantage of my sickening traits.

Elemental Magic was also a skill I invested some time in studying and learning. This was a futile attempt on my part to try and escape the disturbing trend my magic arts were leaning towards.

I say futile, because even after learning elemental magic arts, for some reason all my spells were disparagingly violent. Seelie was of the opinion that it was because my mana was already severely skewed towards darker elements. Which also explained why I had so much difficulty learning light magic or holy magic to the point that it was nigh impossible.

This didn’t mean that I couldn’t level elemental magic as quickly as other magic. It only meant that I had trouble levelling certain spells that didn’t seem to align with the nature of my Mana. I had no trouble with completely destructive spells like fireball or water cannon, which were clearly designed for warfare.

In fact, spells like this were almost too powerful when I used them. Even with their lowest mana cost they somehow ended up as powerful as Seelie’s elemental magic, which was a magnitude higher in skill and spell level than my own.

The problem lay in the other side of elemental arts. Things like the Raise Earth spell and Gentle Breeze spell. Both normally completely harmless in the hands of other elemental mages, only to become an Earth Spike or Gale Winds spell in my hands.

This essential meant that unless I focused my efforts in this magic on purely destructive and less neutral spells, then my elemental arts skill would be far slower to increase than other magic skills.

Seelie and I both came to this conclusion after observing the growth in my summoning magic arts, which like elemental arts, is essentially considered neutral. It was obvious that this skill was growing just as fast as the other two magic arts I had and it was most likely because of the nature of the spells I was using.

Unfortunately, summoning required one of two things to create a spell. Either an innate talent born from your own nature and abilities and unlocked by the system, or something like a summoning contract.

Well, that is to say ... creating a safe summoning spell required these things. It was possible to learn other summoning spells by learning them from others, but that would result in the age old tradition of the summoned creature eating the moron that summoned it.

Amusingly, it was also the only method with which to meet a summoned creature and create a summoning contract with it. Which was more often than not the reason why so many fools still summoned these uncontrollable beings only to discover that it would rather eat them than create a contract.

After looking through my skills and making some personal observations, I determined what route to take in the training I was planning for myself. For starters, I had a few skills that only needed 1000 odd experience to level up.

Athletics was easy. I just needed load myself up with the heaviest things I could find and increase my inventory weight while I did my other training. After some running, jumping and throwing of things, it would naturally level up rather quickly.

The next closest was Sneak and Assassinate. Sneak was simple. I just had to move about like a creeper and try to avoid being seen by anyone. Assassinate was a little less simple to level, but that didn’t bother me because I had no intentions of levelling the skill up anyway.

In fact, if I hadn’t accidentally assassinated a few people already, I most likely wouldn’t have levelled the skill at all.

Memorisation and Alchemy were also both close to the next skill level. Memorisation was quite easy, but also very bothersome. To level this skill, I needed to spend an abusive amount of time remembering things.

Before now I’d never actively tried to raise this skill, and most of its levels and experience were gained from learning all the hateful amounts of scriptures and texts in the thorny tower or herb books for alchemy.

That said, I thought of a better method to help this skill level quickly. That was through the use of another skill, Mana Cartography. I would go to other worlds through the random portals to train my skills and use that opportunity to build maps of those worlds.

This required an eye for detail and the ability to remember clearly everything I try to recreate. This way I could quickly level 3 skills. Memorisation, Mana Cartography and also Mana Manipulation.

It just so happened that Mana Manipulation was also close to levelling up. It was actually the easiest to level because I would also be using it for casting magic and I planned to regularly play with my mana to try and learn better ways of using it, or even creating some personal spells of my own.

Alchemy was the skill close to levelling that I’d neglected the most since leaving Newb Planet. In order to grow it, it was best to simply concoct a slew of random potions and test them. This would increase my understanding of potion ingredients and also help me learn new recipes.

I hadn’t done this much since I started my domain and mostly only concocted things I had already learnt. This caused my Alchemy progress to slow down rather quickly, and I decided I would take some time aside and spend some more effort on this during my training.

The last two skills close to tipping over to the next level were Elemental Magic and Shadow Magic. Both were simple. I just had to practice converting my mana to the type used for these spells and also practice casting spells from these two schools of magic.

At the thought of spells, I decided to review the spells I had accumulated in my spell tome. By now, thanks to my numerous different types of magic arts, my spell tome had slowly changed into an even more evil looking book than before, when it only had sinister magic.

It looked like it was bound from various different human skins all stitched together and filled with disgusting pulsing veins. It was surrounded by a very ominous shadowy mist that seemed to seethe about the book in time with the pulsing veins, as if the book was breathing.

On the front cover bound in skin were four picture like symbols. The first was a dagger stuck into a bleeding heart, which throbbed in time with the book. The next were the four major elements, wind, water, fire and earth. The last two were of a creature standing in a summoning circle and a black moon.

Each of these showed one of the four types of magic I’d started learning. Sinister, Elemental, Summoning and Shadow.

I couldn’t help but let out a dejected sigh as I tentatively reached out and flipped the disgusting cover open.

During my training at the witch’s tower on newb planet, I learnt a great deal about magic that I really wish I hadn’t had to. For starters, it quickly became apparent that many spells had a spell type. Of the spells I had learnt to date, Single Cast and Channelling were the most prolific.

Even of the spells I’d only read about and never bothered to learn, these two casting types were the most commonly seen.

Single cast spells were generally a spell that only needed to be cast a single time and had no channelled effects. For example, I could cast fireball and generate hundreds of fireballs or even just a single huge fireball, but I would only need to cast the spell once.

Channelling was different in that I had to choose a target or target area and then it would cost me mana at set time periods to maintain the effects of the spell. Ain’t No Rest was a perfect example for this.

Of my spells, the curses in my sinister arts were most prolific. This was a result of the elf witch’s tutoring and the spells that were easiest for her to teach me. I actually didn’t learn anything in other magic groups while I was studying with her and really only learnt about other spells from books I’d gathered since then.

Both my summoning spells were innate spells, which meant I could cast them with the best effects simply from willing it and didn’t even need the spell patterns or chants from the book. I planned to work on getting some more summoning magic later, but for now was still a little apprehensive about it.

This was mostly because I was afraid the things I wanted to summon would most likely eat me before forming a contract, as is the age-old story of most summoners.

In the end, the spells I actually found the most useful were the shadow arts and elemental magic. The shadow arts made it easier to move through the chaos of the battlefield and also had the void prism spell which was perfect for locking down strong enemies for a moment during combat.

Unfortunately, I still managed to pick up a weird spell for this magic type during my travels. Shadow Tentacles. Why anyone even invented such a perverted and vile magic is beyond me. That said, most of my curses weren’t any better, and these sorts of spells remained mostly unpractised.

For starters, the embarrassment I would feel if Seelie caught me waving shadow tentacles shaped like cocks all about the place would probably kill me. Not to mention things like the ‘Ello Poppet’ and ‘Don’t Mind’ spells, which controlled people against their wills.

Of these most sinister spells, the most disturbing was the ‘12 disasters’ which required me to sacrifice a virgin just to cast on someone. I can still remember the face of that sweet, heroic girl that got crushed under the weight of a Gryphon I was doing battle with.

Luckily she turned out to be a player, and my guilty conscience was slightly more assuaged thereafter.

Because I have a sinister spell requiring a virgin sacrifice, every time a virgin dies because of me, I get a sacrifice point. The experience was something like keeping her tormented soul trapped within a mana bubble and stored away inside my mind.

I could ‘feel’ and ‘see’ her soul stuck inside me, trapped in a little bubble of sinister mana. We could even easily communicate. In fact, I had trouble blocking her out. I could just imagine the torment a truly evil person who trapped hundreds of virgin souls would have to suffer through from the wailing and crying of so many people.

Because I couldn’t bear to keep some innocent virgin’s soul locked up inside me, I immediately raced off to the nest of the Gryphon King and told the virgin’s soul that I would avenge her. Then when I cast the 12 Disasters on the Gryphon King and hid back into the shadows, her soul was released and returned to the resurrection cycle.

She didn’t seem that appreciative that I went out of my way to help her out. Well, if I’m honest, she almost seemed disappointed I was releasing her soul.

The most disturbing part of the whole experience wasn’t even the fact I’d accidentally killed a sweet virgin girl. Nor was it the fact that we both had to endure her being trapped inside me.

No, the most disturbing part of the experience and the part that made me so amiable as to immediately release her soul and use it to cast the 12 disasters, was because she was a huge pervert and it was a wonder she’d even managed to remain a virgin.

The whole time she was trapped inside me, she rolled around moaning and doing dirty things I’ve only ever seen Seelie doing. Except, in a far more shameless manner. I’m not sure if it was something to do with the nature of my mana or the sensation of having her soul trapped, but she was very verbal and explicit in her ... self-comforting?

Anyway, the whole point is that she was the reason my 12 Disasters spell was level 2 despite it being a rather sinister spell which I greatly disliked the cost of casting.

However, despite being a spell beyond redemption, it was incredibly powerful. I almost pitied the huge Gryphon King as I watched him be inundated with tornados, falling rocks, plagues ... That was about the limit of what I managed to witness though.

By that point, I was already rapidly evacuating, because the entire mountain range of the Gryphon’s Nest was being engulfed at the same time as the Gryphon King, including my unwitting self who happened to be hidden in the shadows.

The least interesting, but the most useful spells were all from the elemental magic. The uses for this magic were uncountable. The only problem was, if I planned to use them for anything other than destruction, I had a great deal of effort in controlling them.

After going over my spells again, I determinedly started to build a training plan in my head, so that I could fully display the might of all this crappy magic I was forced to go through the effort of learning.

Although what the Witch said was true, and personal power isn’t as important in the Domain Wars as the power of my overall forces, that didn’t change the fact that I treated this as a game and wanted to play.

Where’s the fun in a game if I never actually got to participate?

The last thing I did in my Status space was go through my titles. I had no new traits, which by this point in time I was rather thankful for, but I did have a few new titles.

Of the new titles I’d acquired, two of them just popped up one day out of nowhere. Blind Optimist, I had no idea what it was supposed to do. Its effects simply remained empty, even after I tried using identify on the title.

I had no idea what it actually did or if it did anything at all, but it seemed harmless enough for now, so I wasn’t too worried about it.

Demon Tamer also appeared out of nowhere, similar to the Optimist title. I suspect it had something to do with my demon spawns having reached more than 6,000 in population, but at the time I received it I was on my romp through 6 Stars, so I can’t be sure.

Its effects seemed mostly positive, and I didn’t mind it too much. From what I could tell, it was the least troublesome of my titles.

The Unlucky was easily the worst of all my new titles. It appeared one day after a huge accident involving a necromancer and a whore house, and it was something I tried very hard to forget about every day. The worst part about it was that it increased the frequency that bad accidents happened nearby, and more often than not resulted in huge luck penalties.

The incident involving the Gryphon’s was especially bad and dropped the 60 odd luck I’d accumulated at that point all the way back down to negative 6. This title was also the curse that seemed to hold me back from building up too much good luck, almost like some twisted mechanism of the universe to keep me from ever having too much good luck.

Iron Stomach came about during my 14 days of romping about on 6 Star. It was a title I earned as a result of my now habitual manner of eating everything I see which I can’t identify on sight.

Thanks to my taste tester title, it’s rare for me to not be sticking things in my mouth that I have no idea regarding the origin or purpose of. Of all the parts of my body that have high endurance, I’m pretty sure that my stomach may have the highest.

Especially considering that most of the things I stick in my mouth were rare herbs with normally fatal powers. Flaming Flowers and Poisonous Leaves. Hell, I’d even started sticking items into my mouth.

It wasn’t unusual to see me sticking a rock in my mouth or chewing on a rare looking weapon. Because it had become so habitual, I almost couldn’t control it.

Even more worrying was that even if it shattered my teeth or ripped apart my gums, it only felt good and my mouth’s endurance quickly rose to the point I wouldn’t even realise I’d eaten something I shouldn’t have. At least ... not until I was trying to force out a nugget of 10,000 times refined steel from an enchanted sword in the little boy’s room the next day.

After eating a few flaming swords ... well ... let’s just say that my eating orifice wasn’t the only hole in my body that had recently undergone a shocking rise in durability.

The last one was fire starter. I was awarded this title when I was first learning elemental magic. Naturally, the first spell I tried to learn was fireball.

At the time, I was staying in a little village on newb planet and my first few attempts at the spell ... well, let’s just say the village isn’t there anymore. When the raging fires that just seemed to appear in the forest out of nowhere consumed the corrupt Treant that had been terrorising the villagers, I, unfortunately, didn’t get a quest reward.

Not that it mattered too much, because by that point in time I was already a dozen kilometres away and still running for my life from the angry lizard tribesmen.

This title wasn’t too bad in theory ... it just meant that my original 6% chance of ruining someone’s life when I touch them increased to 7% ... well, provided they weren’t an orphan, who had an extra 50% chance on top of that.

Having spent some time reviewing his spells, stats and skills, Murphy started to work out a training schedule. He decided that now was the time to start getting stronger.

His domain was strong enough at the moment to enjoy some peace and quiet for a few weeks. With the spell model hiding his domain, they were mostly free to travel around unhindered.

This was only temporary though. Eventually, someone was going to figure out how they were hiding themselves, and those gangs of thugs that he’d just pissed off were going to track him down.

Although the Domain Space was immeasurable, the laws of the universe were strange. Despite how huge the universe may seem to be, it often turned out to be a small place after everything was said and done. Not to mention, Murphy had a pension for falling into unlucky mishaps, and it was only a matter of time before some accident happened and he was discovered.

Before then, he was going to train himself and his citizens to the point they could take on just about anyone. He wanted them to become the best and be untouchable.

With that in mind, he went and found Juwan. Even though he wanted to give a rousing hero speech and bolster his men into a long training montage with some corny background song playing the whole time, he recognised his greatest failing and so called in someone that could do those things for him.

With Juwan present, he would be able to convey himself to his citizens without any of those long awkward conversations.

Even though that was what he thought, he still had to spend 4 hours explaining properly to Juwan. Once that trying experience was over, Juwan called a town meeting and pulled in all their player citizens to the spawn’s sacred courtyard.

50 people of different races, skills, backgrounds and personalities were seated together. Dark races, halflings, monsters, beast men, even demons. The assortment of people that had started moving into Murphy’s domain were all evil looking, but kind hearted.

Once Juwan had gathered them, Murphy wandered off to find his foster father. As was rather normal now, Calligso was busily wrestling with Morbid. It was hard to pick out the monster between the two of them, especially when he watched Calligso grabbing Morbid by the scruff of the neck and flinging him nearly 20 meters away, only to moments later collide with him again.

While Murphy was busily getting his domain in order and preparing everyone for some training, things were starting to spin out of control back on Earth.

People were screaming about the second apocalypse or the second coming of the great sage. All sorts of crimes were now being committed by people with seemingly ‘supernatural’ powers. However, just as people lurked about in the shadows to commit sin, others rose up in the light to smite them.

Real life heroes and villains started emerging from the woodwork while the governments in control of the colonies all raced to try and figure out what the hell to do in this situation. The people in power were flustered.

Seated in a very lush and extravagant house upon a hill, overlooking the central city of Gastalberg, was an aged man dressed in a black suit. He sat on a cushion at the edge of a balcony and peered out towards the city down below.

His hair was silver white and cut short and neat. He had a bushy moustache which covered his mouth, and his eyes were closed into slits.

He was the Captain of the Secret Enforcers, Gustov. As he sat and observed the city, he couldn’t help but let out a sigh as he thought back to when he’d been sucked through to some other space after visiting the strange black box in the city centre.

It wasn’t just him, all the heads of state and leaders of the colony had been pulled through. When they first appeared, the black box was a mystery. After their security had investigated and was abducted by some form of teleportation, they were naturally called forth to discussions with the being that had left the boxes behind.

To their great consternation, they all realised that it was almost impossible to determine the power of the individual named ‘James’. He was some kind of monster, or God, or perhaps both.

It didn’t matter though, because they had no way to oppose him. Whatever he was, he was beyond their ability to fight against.

He also didn’t seem to have evil or good motives. From the very short conversation, in which he simply stated his boredom, the greatest minds of the planet all agreed he was simply some passing alien creature with unmeasurable power that thought to play a game with them.

Although the indignation of being played with like toys caused no short number of blood vessels to burst, the fact remained that it was impossible to stop him. And so, they had no choice but to acquiesce and relinquish their security over the boxes and allow the populace to participate.

Naturally, Gustov didn’t feel the same as his compatriots. First of all, having something like this outside of his control went against his nature and all of his training. Making it worse, was that one of the first to determine how to step into the ‘game world’ was a target he’d been watching for a long time.

Gustov was mulling over his thoughts as a man donned in a tight fitting black bodysuit, with a sleek black masked helmet, suddenly appeared out of the shadows.

“Master, we’ve established a foothold in the Domain Warz. Unfortunately, we appear to be receiving a significant amount of resistance, and just as quickly as our domains are forming, we are losing them. More so, it appears we are very late. There are hundreds of other human players from Earth that have already established themselves.”

Gustov scratched at his moustache and pondered for a while.

“What of the target?”

“Captain, it would seem that he has already made a name for himself. Some of our agents have heard rumours in our star sector that he has already reached an island rank domain and has no few number of enemies or supporters.”

“Fine then, gather the Lab Masters that have finished the tutorial world. I’ll party with them, and we will consolidate our resources on my domain. We must hunt it down quickly, before it’s too powerful to stop. If we can just get that thing back to the real world, we may have the opportunity to capture or kill it.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“If we can, try and get in touch with other earthlings that have had good success. If we can draw them in, then we may be able to use what they’ve learnt and increase our chances of success. The top 100 players, if we can’t convince them in the game, then find their families out here and coerce them. If that thing turns 18 and goes through the Madness, we may all be doomed.”

“As you wish, Captain.”

After acknowledging his commands, the black solider slowly merged back into the shadows and disappeared. It was clear that either the technology he was using was very powerful, or he’d already started mastering shadow magic from the game world.