Chapter 14: Resolution

Murphy, Seelie and Chuckles all watched on as Serious led the wolf through the forest towards a creek bed. Sitting along the creek beds sides were numerous big rocks that seemed to be balanced perilously and on the verge of falling. Murphy nodded his head subtly as he watched Serious lure the wolf into the creek bed and then suddenly jump down from a branch.

Although he had hardly any weight to his skinny little demon body, it was enough to move the rock slightly. Just as the wolf was preparing to jump out of the creek bed, the now even more destabilised rock got another push from Serious and rolled down the edge to smash straight into the head of the rapidly approaching wolf.

A sickening thud and crunching sound was heard along with a high pitched yelp. Although the rock wasn’t enough to kill the wolf, it was enough to daze it slightly.

Taking advantage of that pause, Serious leapt on its back and started stabbing violently with his jagged little knife. Blood pooled down into the creek, and the stunned wolf eventually collapsed into the sandy creek bed.

Seeing his victory, Serious let out a resounding roar, which was actually just a cute little shout, and then in time-honoured spawn fashion started biting into the wolf with great gusto. A tiny little experience orb popped up from the body and shot into Serious.

Although it was a tiny orb, it was actually equal in experience to killing a boss monster on Newb Planet. The general levels of creatures on 6 Star well and truly overshadowed anything from Newb Planet with only a few exceptions like the dragons, elf witch and a few other top monsters.

Seeing his descendant that was as weak as a sick kitten, actually killing something, Chuckles’ puffed his chest up with pride. His cleverest descendant was most definitely the cleverest. Most spawn had never imagined you could kill something with cleverness. Normally, just rushing in and stabbing it quickly was enough.

With this short battle played out, Murphy glanced at Serious once more, then tapped Morbid to head off. Serious would be fine for now, and he would keep an eye on him with the summoner link on the way back.

By the time they reached the portal, a number of spawns had undergone their 3rd evolution. Now that numerous spawns had undergone it, Murphy and Seelie were noticing a trend.

“Murphy, the 3rd evolution of your spawn seems to be like a job class or something. Chuckles became a Commander, which gave him the power to summon and command his own kind. That one spawn that is always hunting fresh meat for the others has gained the Hunter evolution. One of them even evolved into a Feng Shui Master. If this is only the 3rd evolution, what comes next?”

As they were observing the horde of spawn rushing through the forest to return to the portal, Seelie was using her identify skill and picking out the new 3rd evolutions in the group. Not that it was hard, considering they were surrounded by swaths of other spawn while they flexed their muscles and showed off to each other.

Murphy leaned his chin onto Seelie’s shoulder as he looked off towards the forest with glazed eyes. He was currently watching Serious make his way over and had somewhat unintentionally leaned onto Seelie creating closer contact, not that Seelie would complain.

“It’s hard to say. Chuckles is by far the most powerful spawn. He got my base stats from 3 different areas. Poison, Shadow and Body. Although they all get something different with every evolution, Chuckles has most of my body stats and is the perfect warrior.”

“Rah rah!”

“Heh, yes and my most trusted follower. However, until he evolves again, I wouldn’t be willing to guess what exactly comes next. He’s only level 18, and the 4th evolution isn’t until level 24. It’s still too far away to worry about.”

As he spoke, he suddenly pointed out his hand, and his spell tome appeared. He then fired off a fireball far into the distant forest. A few minutes later, Serious came stumbling out of the forest dragging the corpse of a hairless bear with a huge burning wound on its back.

With a great deal of exertion, Serious pulled the bear’s corpse all the way to the portal, where he finally placed it into his inventory, gave an exuberant wave to Murphy and Chuckles, then raced through to Murphy’s Domain.

Although one might think that Serious Spawn was an idiot for not having put the bear in his inventory straight away, it would then be apparent those people were the idiots. Serious spawn was a Clever Spawn and many of his inherited memories were about long lectures Murphy had given the spawn over their travels together.

In this case, Serious remembered that putting something into your inventory actually reduces its weight slightly. He then also remembered that Murphy had told them the best way to increase a stat was to constantly be using it.

Serious wanted to get stronger, and so that meant that he needed to use his strength as often as possible so that he could build up more strength stat points.

Murphy figured that Serious probably forgot about how the inventory system gave a much more uniform weight to help with strength training and decided that when they get back, he would take Serious under his wing and teach him as much as he possibly could.

With his hunting over, and having finally reached level ten in his Spawn summoning, Murphy now had to finish getting everything in order for his invasion of Eden. Having watched the hellhounds playing about earlier, very much contradictory to their normally violent and solitary nature, he chose to de-summon the other hellhound before passing through the portal.

From his and Seelie’s observations, when under the effects of his summoning, the demons tended to act in a manner that would facilitate the master’s control over them. This was obvious from the actions of his spawn when he first ever summoned them and they killed the extra summons outside of his control, despite how they normally have no aversion to each other, at least not to the point of instantly killing one another.

However, his domain either had no summoning limit or was considered as a homeworld for the demons. He couldn’t be sure if they were still technically considered as summoned under his command while there. If it was a case of the former, then the demons had nothing controlling them and the hellhounds would probably end up in a death match if they couldn’t separate from eachothers territory.

Naturally, if it was the latter, this wouldn’t pose a problem at all. Nonetheless, Muprhy decided not to take the risk of having two huge almost uncontrollable beasts going beserk in his domain the moment the walked through the portal.

With their return, naturally all the spawn madly rushed off to have another sex party ... err ... fertility festival, in honour of their victory over the Orcs. The new 3rd evolution spawn got a great deal of attention and were almost raped to death under the influence of the endless sinister mana pouring from the sky in the form of curses.

Seeing this seen off in the distance the moment they returned, Seelie pushed back as close as possible to Murphy while squirming about. Having Seelie’s bum pressed up directly against his crotch and purposely massaging him to rise to the occasion, Murphy had no choice other than to blush...

And then very quickly redirect Morbid to his huge barn-like dog house.

The first step in his preparations was complete. If he wanted to hunt on Eden, then he needed to be able to summon a significant portion of his troops. His next step, although unnecessary, was to finish up with Baron Von Boff.

A very solicitous Rock Skin from the church of darkness offered to humanely extract any information the Baron might have. Although the Rock Skins were amongst the more normal of Murphy’s player citizens, being just humans with skin as hard as rock, they all creeped him out a little.

That was because they all followed the church of darkness, which didn’t actually worship a god or deity but instead worshipped the vast stretches of nothingness between the domains. Murphy was pretty sure they were all nuts and were suffering from something like Space Madness, but they were mostly obedient citizens and didn’t create trouble.

They also followed the rules of his domain and only sacrificed volunteers. Although Murphy had half a mind to simply outlaw blood sacrifices and the like, he felt that within the game no one was really getting harmed that badly by it. His only stipulation was that they had to be volunteers.

This led to a rather unique cross belief integration in which different belief systems would volunteer one of their own to another system in return for a volunteer from them ... that they could then sacrifice. Every 3rd day was especially strange, as all the major belief systems met up in the middle of town and debated their beliefs then traded sacrifices with each other.

In the few cases were a belief system required an unwilling sacrifice, they only needed to visit Murphy and he would pay a player with good acting skills to fill that role for them. It was rather unnerving for new players that happened to witness a very public and vocal abduction of some poor stranger who was then eviscerated on an altar right in the middle of town.

However, the system worked. Even though the majority of these religions were vastly different and often came to loggerheads, they were still drawn together by the fact that they all believed in openly killing people for their beliefs. Of the two religious groups that didn’t sacrifice living beings, one was a pacifist group, and the other was very out of place in Murphy’s domain, being the Order of the Holy Light.

This faction actually only had a single person in it. A do-gooder knight that was drawn to Murphy’s domain by the stories that he rescues innocents from oppression and fights against the tyranny of pirate domains. Despite the population distribution in Murphy’s domain being severely skewed towards ‘evil’ races, Sir Fanny insisted on staying here.

He actually got along very well with many of the other citizens until he witnessed someone being dragged into the town square to be sacrificed. His attempted rescue led to him joining said sacrifice. Luckily for him, Murphy had the spawn keeping an eye on the situation around his Domain and quickly learnt that they planned to throw Sir Fanny out into the darkness of space as a sacrifice to the big black nothing.

Although Murphy tripped on his way and failed to arrive in time to rescue Sir Fanny, Sir Fanny wasn’t even mad. He simply respawned 48 hours later and continued on doing whatever it was he did before. Murphy took that chance to talk to him about how religion worked in his domain, which lead to a very awkward chuckle from Sir Fanny.

The truth of the matter was, he actually did succeed in rescuing the sacrifice from the jaws of death, only for said sacrifice, a Banshee lady, to berate him half to death. Having realised his mistake at the time, he quickly agreed to atone for it and asked to be sacrificed as well.

Murphy had no words. He simply couldn’t understand the kind of people that were starting to gather around him, and chose to simply ignore it unless he absolutely had to.

Returning from that digression, Murphy was now in a dungeon located below a very simple shop owned by the Rock Skin’s leader, Skin-Like-Granite. Don’t ask about their naming sense, even they don’t understand it.

At this moment in time, Baron Von Boff’s hoarse sobbing and moaning could be heard as Skin-Like-Granite handed Murphy a large pile of parchment inscribed with all sorts of information that the Rock Skin’s had extracted from the baron.

When Murphy saw him, he could tell the Baron had been treated very well, and his imprisonment so far had been extremely pleasant. Seeing him like that, Murphy simply couldn’t understand what they’d done to him. He had steeled his heart and was prepared to walk in and see a complete mess of the man.

The moment the Baron spotted Murphy, he crawled across the hard stone floor like a dog and grabbed onto Murphy’s pant leg while begging and sobbing.

“huhuhu ... p-please young master ... huhuhu. Sp-spare this ... sniff ... spare this lowly ... huhu ... lowly scumbag. I ... I can’t take much more. If ... huhuhu ... if they talk about my mother like that ... huhuhu ... I ... huhu ... please young master ... sniff ... huhuhu.”

Murphy could only glance sideways at the ever stony-faced Rock Skin standing nearby. He just smiled back when he saw Murphy’s sceptical glance.

“As I said, not a scratch. We only deal in the most gentle and honourable methods for breaking a person’s will. This fellow broke on the same day you brought him here. We just spent the last few days buttering him up for you.”

“I see ... um ... thank you?”

“Certainly M’lord. Consider this one, and any future troublemakers on the house. For your assistance in rescuing my clansmen from that forsaken Holy Eden, you have our undying gratitude.”

Murphy scratched his elbow somewhat awkwardly as he looked at the very humble acting Rock Skin.

“Undying ... isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

Murphy then turned his gaze to the very pitiful scene of Von Boff. Whatever the Rock Skins had done to him, it really had messed him up. They didn’t even need the chains on him to prevent him from being able to injure himself and log out. He just grovelled about the place and cried endlessly.

Despite how pitiful he looked, Murphy remembered how brutally beaten and tortured all those people were that Chuckles had rescued from the Baron’s City. He couldn’t put all the blame on the baron for that, after all most of it was done by the church. But he could certainly blame the Baron for sitting by idly and not only doing nothing but also raking in the rewards from it.

With that, Murphy reached out and focused his mind. His Deprive skill fired up to maximum as his hand touched onto Von Boff’s head. To his great surprise, he felt absolutely no resistance what so ever. Normally, even a tree would resist when he was trying to Deprive from it.

The moment his hand came into contact with the Baron, his other hand started glowing with a strange light. One by one, skill books started materialising out of nowhere. Dozens of different skill types started materialising into books and dropping from his hand onto the floor.

The Baron’s eyes rolled back into his head as a huge pile of skill books started to accumulate around them. There was so little resistance that Murphy felt his mana quickly depleting at a rapid pace while his Deprive skill pulled out almost everything.

‘Ping! Murphy’s Law has caused an Unhappy Accident. -15 Luck.’

It was so fast that he failed to stop it from reaching absolutely nothing. Murphy then suffered a crushing pressure as he went into Mana Overdraw and his soul shrivelled up and cracked apart like a brittle and dried up piece of paper. Then, just as all those little pieces of soul were about to scatter apart, a huge force came from every little piece and pulled them all back together.

It was like the little pieces of his soul refused to be separated. If Murphy had to guess, he would say this is most likely due to his Undying trait and was fuelled on by the Mana Demon title he gained way back when he first reached the thorny tower.

Thanks to the Undying Mana Demon title, he couldn’t die from backlash or overdraw, and his soul would reform 4 times faster than normal. The only problem with it, was that his mana then went into flux. Normally, that isn’t so bad. Until now he’d never had anything too drastic happen when he went into overdraw.

On this occasion though, Murphy felt a tiny bit of mana slowly replenish and then almost immediately activated without his will. It simply evaporated out into his body and the surroundings. The issue being that if he didn’t purposely control it, his mana had the default nature of his deprive skill.

The moment the faint purple mist spread out from his body, the Mana of the surroundings was rapidly sucked towards him. With gritted teeth, Murphy pushed the Rock Skin backwards towards the stairs.

“Evacuate the town! Right now! Get everyone as far from here as possible!”

With a very worried look on his face, and feeling the huge fluctuations of mana happening nearby, the Rock Skin man raced up to the town screaming for an evacuation.

The Baron, who was half out of it, suddenly grew pale and then very quickly his body began shuddering violently. At first, it was somewhat slow, but as the mana that was in flux around Murphy rushed into his body and fed the cycle of fluctuating Mana, more and more deprive natured mana flowed into the Baron completely unchecked.

Murphy had been expecting to see it suck out all of his mana, but instead watched on stunned as the Baron’s body slowly started disintegrating into a fine powder, only to start reforming into shining gemstones. At a single glance, Murphy knew that these stones were Stat Boosters.

Not only that, random equipment started just popping out of nowhere. Presumably, it was sucking equipment out from the Baron’s player inventory. On top of that, more skill books started to form around them from floating purple lights.

Murphy didn’t have time to be worried about that for the moment though. All of the Mana being drawn in from the world around him was almost instantly evaporated the moment it was absorbed by his soul. It would then spread out into his body and the nearby area and suck in even more mana.

With all his might, Murphy focused his attention on his soul and used all of his willpower to slow down and stop the process from continuing.

With a great deal of effort, slowly, his mana started to settle down and stayed within his soul. Once he gained control of it, and it was no longer feeding back into the cycle, all of the Mana still being sucked towards him from the wayward mana that escaped rushed into his body like a surge.

Murphy very worriedly watched on as his mana almost instantly reached the maximum he could withstand and his soul popped like an over-inflated balloon. It then just as quickly reformed itself as the oncoming wave of mana continued to pour into it, blowing it apart all over again.

Hurts So Good was now rather powerful since he’d gone from Masochism to Pain Mastery, but still not powerful enough to dull the pain of having his soul shatter. All the veins on Murphy’s body bulged out as his teeth grit together so hard they started to crack.

Blood poured from his mouth as the sheer strength he had somehow mustered up while tensed in pain liquified his insides. His muscles were ripping themselves apart, and the forces going out of control inside his body were ripping his skin to shreds.

His heart was beating so rapidly and furiously there was almost no way to discern between each individual beat and it instead sounded like the purring of an engine spinning at dizzying speeds, which no normal heart should be able to produce, let alone withstand.

Again, Murphy’s soul shattered apart like a plane of glass being dropped and his eyes bulged out of his head as his knees buckled and forced him onto the ground. This was even worse than the time the Elf Witch blasted him with Soul Fire.

Strangely, no matter how painful or tormented he felt, he simply couldn’t pass out. After suffering through this continuous barrage for nearly 15 minutes, the surrounding deprive mana that had left his body had finally run its course, and the huge amount of mana that had been streaming into Murphy slowed down and then eventually stopped.

Seelie was the first to approach when she realised the mana flow had calmed down. She rushed into the underground chamber at full speed to see a weak and barely still breathing Murphy collapsed on the floor. Surrounding him were piles of skill books, stat boosters and enchantment gems. Fine dust particles from the disintegrated equipment and the Baron were floating about in the air and covering everything.

Without regard for anything else, Seelie raced to Murphy’s side with a tear stricken face as she started pulling out recovery potions by the dozens.

After the very generous use of recovery potions, Seelie pulled the weakened limp body of Murphy into her embrace.

“You idiot! What the hell are you doing?! You worried me half to death!”

Suddenly, Murphy rolled to the side and spewed up a huge mouthful of a sickly black tar substance. Then without warning, his stomach rolled again and he continued to vent its contents until only the clear stomach acid was coming up.

He wasn’t sure how, but Murphy ‘knew’ this stuff was all the corruption that had sat idle in his body. This sickly black tar was everything in his body that wasn’t ‘actually’ a part of him. Most of it was preservatives and chemicals that would normally just remain dormant and locked away inside the body until they eventually added up and killed a person.

For the first time, Murphy felt a strange euphoria overcome him as if a huge burden had just been lifted from his soul. In the black sticky mess that he’d just vomited up was a little black gemstone. Just looking at it, Murphy felt like he recognised something he never wanted to admit even existed.

His identify skill fired up and a little overlay appeared in his vision.

The Madness

Born from the fruit of a forbidden love, a creature, dark and heinous, arises.

*When consumed, undergo the tribulation of Madness. If you can remain sain afterwards, you will gain your birthright. If you fail, be consumed by madness and lose yourself in a world of torment.

Murphy fished it out of the sickly goop and held it up to the dim torchlight.

“Man, that sure is ominous sounding.”

Kneeling beside the crouched and weakened Murphy, Seelie looked at the strange black gem with worry in her eyes.

“Murphy ... what is that? It feels ... so evil.”

Murphy kept it away into his player inventory with some reluctance. His body was very quickly repairing all the damage he’d done to himself, along with the help of a great many recovery potions. He pushed himself to stand up, only to be caught and have to lean on Seelie when his legs became unstable.

“It’s ... my Day of Madness ... and my birthright apparently.”

“Birthright? What the hell is that supposed to mean? You don’t actually plan on keeping that thing do you? You’ve just dodged a bullet that you’ve spent your whole life running away from!”

Seelie’s face couldn’t seem to decide if it wanted to be worried and upset or frowning and angry. She felt that little black stone was the cause of everything bad that had ever happened to Murphy and the last thing she wanted was for him to actually use it.

At the same time though, she knew deep down that Murphy had escaped having to face what was once inevitable and at the same time, a cornerstone of his entire life. If he didn’t undergo the Madness, he would perhaps spend his whole life never knowing what he was and knowing Murphy that would eat him up inside.

This was especially true considering he was now basically immortal. Although the ramifications of that hadn’t fully sunk in for these two, especially since they were still so young in comparison to forever, they had nonetheless discussed it many times and already sussed out that it wasn’t going to be all rainbows and sunshine.

If Murphy was going to live forever, then that was a very long time to regret not having explored this more.

Eventually, she could only sigh and shake her head. It would be an understatement to say that Seelie was a very understanding young woman. In fact, she probably already understood far more than Murphy had bothered to think about yet.

For him, it was a link to his parents and his real family. Apart from that, he hadn’t fully thought about anything else just yet.

After waiting a short while, and chatting a little longer, Murphy was finally strong enough to stand on his own. With a wave of his hand, the contents of the chamber were swept up into his inventory. He was a bit sour that all of the expensive equipment the Baron had been using was turned into enchantment gems, but everything else they got from this escapade was still quite valuable.

Many of the skill books and stat boosters were freely given back to those who Murphy had rescued from the baron’s city. Although it was a far cry from what had been taken from them, the action was very humbly accepted and many of the citizens who only chose to stay in Murphy’s domain to retrain their stats decided to stay behind and apply for permanent citizen status.

By the end of the day, the permanent citizens of Murphy’s Domain numbered over 300. The diversity of life in his domain rapidly exploded as he now had almost 20 different species living in all sorts of different places about his domain. Although the smog didn’t have many new residents, a town was starting to form on the hillside in the green land and the town already in the sinister lands suddenly started seeing new construction.

After the incident with the Baron, Murphy and Seelie went to visit the Grey Dwarf Blacksmith, Alton.

As they stepped into his workshop, which was actually one of the largest buildings in the entire village, they were immediately engulfed by the smell of fire and hot metal. It seemed Alton had agreed to share his forge with a few of the other craftsmen that had moved into town. Not only that, more than a hundred spawn ran about the place chaotically, assisting one craftsmen or another and some of them even practising their own craft.

Murphy was surprised to see Serious very diligently following Alton around the workshop as Alton pointed at this or that or showed Serious a new skill or technique for crafting.

When Alton spotted Murphy and Seelie walking over, his usually always angry and frowning expression made a rare smile.

“If it isn’t the young Lord. I heard you selflessly gave up everything you sucked out of the Baron back to those poor individuals that suffered under him. I knew I picked the right place to come!”

As he said that, he waved Murphy towards the back of the workshop. They soon found themselves in a little offshoot building that was more or less Alton’s home. It was probably more accurate to call it an office because it was covered in half scribbled designs and various formulas of every kind. Little test benches were set up about the place with what looked like experiments of various sorts.

Alton nodded towards Serious to go prepare some tea as he swept all the books and scrolls off a table and sat down with his guests. He then looked somewhat expectantly at Murphy.

Murphy could only smile wryly when he saw those expectant eyes staring at him without a word. He rolled his hand and a huge sack filled to the brim with enchantment stones materialised onto the table. Alton’s eyes glistened as he reached out and snatched the sack then took out a magnifying glass to start inspecting them.

“Truly magnificent. That Deprive skill of yours is completely abnormal. Great Gaia! You even have some rare attribute stones, and oh my! A level six durability stone. Oh and they’re all so pure. The things I could do with these. If only ... oh?”

Alton then looked at Murphy with a strange look.

“What?”

“Nothing much, it’s just ... how much time have you spent researching this power of yours? I was wondering if you can ... hmm...”

Alton then reached into the sack and pulled out two small green gems.

“If you can Deprive both of these enchantment crystals and make a single gem?”

One of Murphy’s eyebrows lifted up quizzically as he thought about it. Honestly, he’d hardly experimented with his Deprive skill at all. Mostly because it was still only level 6. The higher the level of a skill, the more you intrinsically know about it.

It’s not that you particularly discover it yourself, but simply understand that it can be done. At level 6, Murphy knew he could deprive mana, faith, vitality, enchantments and even skills and stats. That was all he really knew at an intrinsic level. However, he also now knew that he could not only deprive just objects, but even the world itself.

During his spasmodic flux of mana, he hadn’t been depriving the air or the buildings or the land of mana, although in his very near vicinity there was a little of that, as can be attested by the now dead Baron. Instead, his deprive skill had been sucking Mana out of the universe. Like it was drawing it out from nothing.

Not only that, when the mana was sucked into him, it seemed to be replenished from the void with a little bit extra, as if the act of taking mana away from the atmosphere led to the universe pouring even more into it. The area in that chamber was now a mana hotspot, with more natural and free mana just floating about the place than even the wizard towers, which were designed to cause that effect.

Thinking about just how little he truly understood about anything in this strange place, Murphy was tempted to simply ignore it. He’d rather stay ignorant than have to learn more about this crappy magic stuff.