Henry refrained from entering the Overdream that night in case an emergency arose with Alex’s spawn. In the morning, the pair caught a plane back to New Zealand. The uncle, gifting the nephew a couple inappropriate phrases during the flight, offloaded the kid to the excited Wong family at the airport, then he ditched before the poo struck the fan.
Contacting his inner circle, he informed them that the speed-dating had been put on indefinite hiatus until tonight’s confession and wished them luck with holding Togavi hostage. Exerting his freedom from the game, he didn't return to his apartment in his guild HQ. Instead, he escaped outside the city to a remote rural townstead. There, under the guise of finalising the purchase of Caramel’s pony farm, he intended to lay incognito through the coming troubles.
He didn't know specifically how The Trickster God would arrange it, but, by this time tomorrow, Henry's little secret identity as The Tyrant of Saana will have been exposed to the world.
Out in the empty countryside, amongst the rolling hills of yellowy summer grass, before starting the next carefree day of duelling, he managed to sneak in a quick nap.
The Overdream, Riverbank Cabin.
A late winter landscape welcomed him back, the white banks of snow piled up to their annual maximum on the buildings of his farmstead. Over the estate hung a dead silence.
In the final years dedicated to preparing against Karnon, he’d put the rest of his life on hold. His fields had gone unsown. His livestock had first been put on automated in-door feeding; when the inquiry dragged on, he culled all his herds with the intention of reviving them at a later date from their stored eggs.
He returned to this dead scene with more clues into Karnon’s aims, with the anticipated futures reduced to a smaller sub-set. His Fleshbag half had requested him not to investigate whether his romantic ‘incompatibility’ was real, to spare at least this small, private part of his teenage self from the invasive dissection of analysis. Digital Henry, however, had never planned on checking that out. He’d already wasted two decades on this Trickster God fiasco. That’d been enough. He was finished.
A bunch of exciting new abilities also returned with him. The power-levelling of his Scholar Class from Tier-6 to Tier-8 by spamming miracles, along with the previous Spelltomes won from Karnon, gave him access to almost 60 spectacular new spells, many of which were completely broken.
At this level, magic expanded beyond individual combat to the larger field of war. Arcanist’s
Most broken was a set of ultimates from the various Arcanist specialisations. These ultimates were ultra-impactful spells that required several minutes to cast but, if allowed by the enemy to reach completion, would usually win a fight. Amongst these, Henry could now summon flaming tornadoes, storms of destructive arcane energy, small armies of illusions, giant earth golems, and he could even transform into a thunder cloud, zapping noobs from the heavens. The Proximicanist ultimate,
For Henry's solo capacity, the biggest gains were from Shaman utility spells.
Aside from those, there were a few other notable spells. One Tempicanist ability reset all his cooldowns except itself; another disabled Boost usage in an area aside from the caster. A Miracleworker curse caused nearby hostile magic to auto-lock on the target, and an assistive ability pulled an ally towards you.
In short, he'd gained a lot.
He’d gained too much, in fact. For sanity’s sake, he’d decided to forgo using any Spelltomes beyond Tier-6 on this Overdream planet - at least until his acquisition of further pieces of The Syncretist’s Armament enabled the summoning of stronger monsters. Like activating a cheat mode, the extra stats from Tier-8 Spelltomes would trivialise the present challenges, rendering the last century of exploration and development meaningless and consigning him to thousands of years of boredom. He would prefer for that not to happen. It peeved him a bit that the circumstances had pressured him to rush this at all.
After a day of reassessing his plans regarding The Trickster God—and no more than a day—he stored his research away and locked the barn where he’d been labouring on that matter. Then, he set the barn on fire and watched in delight as the evidence of this annoying tangent converted to smoke and ash. (This was more of a symbolic, cathartic gesture. The material could be resummoned at any time. But he refused to do so again within what should be the worry-free sanctuary of his Overdream planet.).
With that aside over, his next task was to begin the transition back to his retired life. The thrilling literary climb had to be thawed from the freeze of several years, all that allocated time being wasted writing a bunch of game-lore trash to spam miracle level-ups. His research into refining the Nature Energy Gathering Grass similarly had to be reignited.
Regarding this latter interest—with the grass's original purpose of fuelling his Elementosaur shapeshifting form to traverse the Bamboo Jungle of deadly Elementosaurs in order to follow the Flying Crabs to the end of their annual migration—the Flying Crab population of his home island seemed to have died. One spring while he’d been distracted, the little creatures failed to return from their winter journey. Several years later, they still weren’t back. Henry guessed the local flock had been eaten by the giant Pelican Griffon monsters, who swept through the migrating clouds like whales through swarms of krill - too many sweeps in a row against the same group, and an entire sub-population might go extinct. Logically, he supposed his island would eventually be repopulated by the flocks from adjacent areas.
This being the first opportunity for him to seriously ponder their absence, he was struck by an unusual amount of sadness for the weird, ugly crabs with wings. And anger. Both emotions swelling from up inside of him were massively out of proportion, and they continued to grow as he surveyed his shut-down farmstead.
He gave swearing a go - it didn't rid him of the feeling. He tried crying. That failed, too.
After some consideration, aside from the martial art climb, which needed to be finished before the tournament, he decided to prolong his hiatuses from his other ventures. He would use this dead silence as an opportunity to try something unrelated and, perhaps, cleanse his soul of the unhappy residue clinging to it.
***
The Faceless Prince’s Will.
His 43rd martial art and the first of his 7th Overdream session was The Faceless Prince's Will. The game’s second most popular sword style, The Will was practised by NPCs and players alike throughout Saana’s Western continent.
Prince Unukujateem, a.k.a. The Faceless Prince, had been one of Saana’s many tragic heroes. He’d eventually become the unifier and founder of the brief Neo-Rangbit Empire, formed a few centuries after Old Rangbit’s collapse following a certain figure's assassination of its matriarch. Prior to that, he’d been a noble’s son, a great-grandchild of one of The All-Mother’s commanders. Around the age of nine, however, the Prince had been abducted by a relative competing for his inherited seat. This relative, skirting around a protective death-curse, drugged the boy to erase his memories and mutilated his face - a Rangbitan punishment delivered to the family of traitors to signify them being demoted to the lowest caste of ‘Dutiless’. The Prince was then sold to a pimp.
A convoluted path of redemption followed. The faceless boy exploited the hazy memories of an eclectic aristocrat upbringing to practice medicine in secret, was caught for breaking his Duty and sentenced to a penal colony of dungeon farmers, transitioned from there to join the crusades in overseas Abhaya, rose up the military ranks, then, making his homecoming, slew his despicable relative and unified Rangbit. Thereby, the wronged Prince claimed a position far above what he would have inherited, becoming an emperor.
This entire backstory had likely been fabricated to legitimise Unukujateem’s rule. Nevertheless, Rangbit under his control had looked to be heading in a hopeful direction, The Faceless Prince dismantling many of the crueller cultural practices like face mutilation. Then, one evening, a strength-sapping poison got into his soup, and his closest advisors, seizing upon the Prince's momentary debilitation, disembowelled him. Thus, the empire collapsed for good.
Although Prince Unukujateem may have perished, his Will lived on today. (Sort of. The art's main sect had been wiped out by Henry on a battlefield six months ago when they'd sided with Rose’s brother in the war of defection. But, despite their destruction, their style had many outside adherents.)
Henry’s primary attraction in The Faceless Prince’s Will, beyond its popularity and his minor remorse, was its lengthy, technically-demanding combos. Rather than attacks themselves, the art emphasised the way attacks resided within the broader scheme of abilities that each Class possessed. Shield-spells, as one simple example, could be used offensively to cover a risky attack whose attempt would otherwise be fatal. Similarly, disabling abilities created opening windows for attacks that would otherwise be defended. A simple idea. But, when one had the entire toolkit of each Class, countless methods arose to combine, stack, blend, and thread abilities in order to arrive at that simple, direct moment of stabbing a person in the heart.
The Faceless Prince's Will wasn't a worthless style, but it also wasn't revolutionary. Still, Henry did enjoy his years studying it. In accordance with its name, training in The Will granted him a feel for the will and well-travelled perspective that’d belonged to its deceased creator. By the end of this period, having drawn from previous lessons, he'd managed to refine the art a bit closer to the ideal sensed within it. Contributions came from the elegant grace of Wankalgalese Shortsword, the ridiculous forced elaborations of The Combat System, and more.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
***
Henry, after deliberating between various projects, from improving his ocean-faring capabilities to solving the mystery of his Overdream planet's fume generating mountains, settled on the much humbler challenge of cultivating a small forest farm.
Forest farming was a basic concept. Instead of crops in a field, one raised a grove of fruit and nut trees, supplementing them with edible plants at other levels of the forest like shrubs and tubers. Ideally, the variety would be arranged to provide produce throughout the seasons. It was a favourite agricultural practice amongst hippies, who Henry supposed felt a spiritual affinity in returning to their arboreal monkey roots.
Hundreds of forest farming methods existed in Saana. Naturally, he selected the hardest: Pliant Vine Farming, by an NPC tribe of the same name. The Pliant Vine tribe dwelled in an Imbahalaala-infested jungle, where they cultivated small patches of land interspersed between the territories of the deadly psychic creatures. Although the monsters never moved, the Pliant Vine farmers still adhered to a type of long-form crop rotation. A chosen patch could be built up for many years or decades, but it was always understood that, at some point, the patch had to be abandoned as the farmers moved elsewhere to start again; this readiness to migrate kept them eternally prepared to retreat at any sign of outside danger into the protective womb of the jungle. Through this culturally-enforced mobility, the tribesmen had sustained this lifestyle for what seemed to be tens of millennia, and the result of such an ancient tradition was an immense skill, the Pliant Vine forest farms, before their abandonment, resembling elaborate, living works of art.
Given the temporary design of the Pliant Vine forests, Henry thought it might be a valuable meditation on detachment, investing into something beautiful yet transient. His forest farm would be like the sand mandalas of Buddhist monks, which they laboured at length upon then destroyed as an exercise in accepting the inescapable transience of life’s passing forms. His forest farm would be like that, but more hardcore, Henry devoting two decades to his ephemeral creation instead of a measly few weeks or months. These last years investigating Karnon, his psyche had been constantly stretched between a past extending many millennia back and the multiplicity of the futures. It hadn’t been healthy. Now, through this endeavour in detachment, he would regather himself in the simpler, momentary timespan that humans were supposed to dwell in.
He spent the days before the snow began to melt in preparation. He read the secret manuals for Pliant Vine’s techniques and studied examples. He searched for a plot of land close enough to his cabin to return for occasional maintenance yet far enough to feel away. He selected an array of plant species, some local, others foreign but climate-adapted during his research on the Nature Energy Gathering Grass. He patched-up his cabin farmstead to ready it for the extended hibernation.
***
Palm of Emptiness Becoming Palm of Annihilation.
Known unofficially as the fourth dragon, Palm of Emptiness Becoming Palm of Annihilation, or Empty Palm for short, was a wrestling style for Arcanists, in which a practitioner grappled with the enemy while blasting spells into their flesh. Its region of origin, Hebat in Basindi, bordered Volefa, the home of the triple dragon Arcanist arts of Sea Dragon, Grass Dragon, and Wingless Dragon. Like Wingless Dragon, Empty Palm fused the magical knowledge of Volefa with the physical knowledge of Basindi under its God-Emperor, except Empty Palm leaned further towards the physical side. The art hadn’t qualified as a full-fledged Dragon style due to a lack of development - Empty Palm Arcanists tended to die before accumulating significant combat experience because not even the Proximicanist variant of their Class was suited for wrestling.
Empty Palm's techniques centred around a philosophy of passivity switching to abrupt aggression. Meeting the opponent without a weapon, the empty-palmed practitioner was advised to act like the seeds of the Volefan Mengangin plant. The seeds, light and fluffy, were dispersed by the wind, able to float tens of kilometres. Likewise, the Empty Palm Arcanist would hover outside of the opponent’s range, flowing along with their attacks, never making full contact. Then, just as the Mengangin plant waited for the wind to settle it down, upon which it rapidly took root and grew so quickly as to disperse new seeds within hours, so too the Empty Palm Arcanist awaited for the crucial opportunity. Seizing any path past the opponent’s weapon, they would unleash a flurry of dizzying clinches and devastating magic. Henry—who’d already practised plenty of hand-against-weapon combat during the Mutambi Death-Grappling passivist period, who’d already gotten his fill of impalements and beheadings—immediately removed this dumb philosophy. He replaced the initial passivity phase with baiting the enemy nearer through spell-kiting, and he filled the empty palm with a shield when closing the distance. These alterations drastically improved the style's efficacy.
Many other holes in Empty Palm were patched up with insights from the previous martial arts. Following his fixes, it could rightfully rank with the three Arcanist Dragon styles.
Those three combined with Empty Palm encompassed every range of combat an Arcanist might face. Henry, having now learned the four, synthesised them together. The transitions between the points where each thrived best were blended with the lessons on combat flow from Laughing Sons and the weapon-swapping of Twenty Tools, the essential techniques of each were taught with Death-Training-like drills, and so on. The synthesis was an all-round style that would prepare an Arcanist for any range of challenge, giving them ease at both the tactical distances of the furthest reaching spells and the rushed proximity of the melee.
He then created an analogous range-generalist style for every other Class in the game.
Finally, this research culminated in a comprehensive section of A Thousand Tools dedicated to mastering the art of distance.
***
He selected an island 760 kilometres south-east of Riverbank Cabin for his forest farm. A Tier-2 area around the size of Manhattan or San Marino, it had soils similar enough to his home to grow the species he was familiar with. The island was conveniently located for gathering higher-level materials, resting within a gulf of his planet’s main continent, 15 kilometres from one mainland peninsula, 29 from a second peninsula, the two pincering around the island. The coastal route along the gulf back to his farmstead was also well-mapped, Henry having sailed it many times while harvesting resources for his Nature Energy Gathering Grass research. (Although, at this point, travelling back home was quicker by land, his juiced-up Elementosaur form covering the distance in a day).
It only took two trips to ship 19 years-worth of supplies of seedlings and equipment. During his previous resource collection efforts, he’d developed a method for sailing multiple vessels at once, using The Pendant of a Thousand Mind’s extra minds in conjunction with an Arcaneworker rig for remote control from a capital ship. This complicated set-up was inoperable during most seasons due to disruptions from monster ambushes; the winter migrations and hibernations, however, removed all but the occasional, manageable sea-beast.
Arriving at his new island, he marked out a 4-acre plot for his forest farm - the size choice, much larger than those preferred by solo Pliant Vine farmers, was made to prevent another Floating Leaf episode of hallucinating from a lack of mental stimulation.
Racing against the dwindling winter, he cleared the plot of snow and chopped down the existing forest, storing its seeds for replanting the area at this project’s end and using its timber for a makeshift dwelling. The island’s natural water supply would be insufficient in the dry summer month; he improved its capacity by digging out ponds and piling up above-ground ice-stores. To save the hassle of always sailing to the mainland, Henry’d had a grand idea of connecting his island to it through a chain of island- and atoll-hopping bridges. This plan was interrupted by a giant seaweed Cthulhu thing bigger than his chosen island rising from the ocean depths and eating one of the bridges.
"Are you $&#*@&% kidding me?! That took me two days to install, you $&#*!"
Henry proceeded to engage in a noble struggle with the seaweed monster, but the match-up on the open water wasn’t close. Having no protective cover, he was obliterated by a dense rain of poison darts mixed with undodgeable bolts of psychic-lightning.
Against such an unfair foe, a pettier, weaker-willed individual might have resorted to his Tier-8 Spelltomes to even the odds. Henry, however, embracing the sublime order of nature, accepted that it was not his place to topple every one of its beasts. Exercising the Pliant Vine ethos of detachment and mobility, he relocated his forest farm operation off the cursed archipelago, onto the adjacent mainland.
By the time the new site was finished, the spring sun had baked the soils warm enough to begin sowing.
***
The Gladiator’s Duty.
Amongst the hundreds of Old Rangbitan ‘Duties’ or—without the euphemistic language—castes, one caste had been the Gladiators, whose birth role had been to fight and die for the people’s entertainment. Like the other Rangbitans, the Gladiators devoted themselves to their job with a singular, religious commitment, all in the hopes that they'd be rewarded in the next Cycle with a less horrific station. The Gladiator program lasted for over two millennia. During its heyday, a massive, immaculate stone venue for hosting matches had been erected that’d been the planet’s largest stadium - until some lunatic Offworlder commissioned a shoddy wooden eyesore in Suchi. The program's dissolution coincided with the death of The All-Mother, whose in-fighting successors reassigned their gladiators from the wasteful pastime to the more pressing field of war.
For Henry, The Gladiator’s Duty wasn’t about any individual art but a case study for exploring the meta aspects of duelling. He was interested in the ways combat mutated in accordance with the unique rules and conditions of a 1v1 environment, how certain restrictions determined the viability of Classes, builds, and styles, and the complex strategical evolution of competitors within a duelling system refining their techniques against each other. These adaptive aspects were a feature of all martial arts. Nowhere else, however, were they more pronounced than in the arena, where one battled repeatedly under a controlled, uniform environment, scrutinised by countless eyeballs. Of Saana’s arena traditions, the Rangbitan Gladiators were one of the prime examples. Its expansive history yielded millions of matches between combatants using thousands of sub-styles.
Given that over a thousand years had passed since its termination, Henry had to investigate The Gladiator's Duty entirely from writing, from the manuals and biographies of prominent gladiatorial dynasties and commentaries by enthusiasts. This was much less of an impediment than one might assume. With
Slowly, he came to see how the gladiators were moulded by the conditions of their arena. Some trends were constant - e.g., because Gladiators could be gifted equipment, they dragged out their fights to stir up the excitement of potential patrons in the crowd. Some came and went - when an arena was under the management of an impatient magistrate, kiting tactics vanished as the gladiators resorting to them got executed.
Within these conditions, the gladiators were moulded by each other. Throughout the millennia, styles were created by daring innovators whose success begot imitators, and styles died as others innovated their counters. There was a constant, shifting internal evolution, the fight for life and glory spurring a desperate scramble for advancement. In the snapshot of any moment, one would often encounter gladiators performing bizarre and counterintuitive manoeuvres, only to discover, upon broadening the perspective, that this manoeuvre was the product of a century-spanning chain of manoeuvres, a response to a response to a response to a response.
Following his study of the meta qualities of The Gladiator’s Duty, he applied a similar analysis to Saana’s other major duelling traditions. Among these were The God-Emperor’s promotion system, The Death Training, the amateur player scene of Saana II, and the modern player duelling scene that included The Company’s recruitment tournament. Each tradition, according to its unique conditions, had produced its own divergent modes of combat. Each also had its strengths and weaknesses. Saana II’s amateur scene, for example, had failed to apply reasonable equipment restrictions, allowing some joker with the reaction speed of a turtle to cheat his way to number one by amassing overpowered items.
This section of his investigation stopped here in the flawed, public version of A Thousand Tools. Henry listed methods for exploiting the duelling conditions and meta-game, along with a mixture of correct and incorrect predictions for the future evolution of the existing scene in response to A Thousand Tools itself. Beyond this stage covered by his supreme art, however, was one subsequent step, whose exploration he would have to leave for other obsessive nerds in the future. After the manifold ways had been deduced in which the form of combat could adapt to better fit a duelling system, the next logical step was reversing this formula: creating a new duelling setting adapted for a better form of combat.
For his private amusement, he spent the last months allocated to The Gladiator’s Duty on this final synthesis. By tinkering with rules, maps layouts, and equipment, he engineered a duelling system conducive to a more dynamic, varied, balanced, beautiful, expressive mode of 1v1 brutality.