Ashley

I purse my lips ever so slightly before selecting the new icon. Making a new screen appear that has dozens of small tabs on the left side of the screen, each with some sort of subject line and a name. Kind of like an email service.

There’s also a very small scroll bar that seems to go on forever when I start scrolling it.

Yeah, that’s too many.

My eyes turn towards the corner of the screen, where I see the outline of a star. And out of curiosity, I focus on it to see if it does anything.

The star immediately lights up with a pale crimson light, meanwhile the list of messages narrows down significantly from the over five thousand to a mere couple dozen.

A quick glance through the messages proves that most of them are from some organizations contacting me to make a connection. Some of which are also trying to use me to get to Val.

I quickly check the forums to research some of the organizations in question. And what I find is that every one of them is a major organization in the universe at large.

The Adventurers Guild. A Guild in charge of managing the people known as adventurers. Which for the most part are just hired mercenaries that tend to take jobs from people.

The Hunter’s Guild. A Guild in charge of managing famous ‘Hunters’. Higher level people who are known for frequently participating in Official System Events and have become celebrities across the universe for doing so. Or, at least, it’s the top guild for them. There are also other smaller guilds that do the same.

There’s the Tower of Chaos as well, which is an organization that just plain worships Chaos and everything he stands for and does. It’s also the group Chaos mentioned to me not too long ago, saying I could do what I wanted with them.

And just reading the subject line of the message explains exactly what that means.

Because they clearly seem to be treating me as some sort of chosen one of the Primordial. Which I guess isn’t entirely wrong in a sense.

Creepy. Gonna ignore them.

After them is The Order, which is pretty much the Tower of Chaos’s counterpart in that they worship the Primordial of Order. And they don’t seem to be friendly or aggressive.

It’s more like they’re just making contact with me to be polite.

And they’re not the only one as pretty much all of the other Primordials followers are all doing the same thing. Although they’re a little more polite than The Order.

Then after the messages from organizations are the messages from some important users. Largely consisting of incredibly high level Successors who are greeting me.

Fortunately for me, I’m not as antisocial when it comes to messages. What with me not seeing them in person, and it not touching on that unknown trauma.

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So I draft a short message.

Hello, I am Ashley Sinclair, the Successor to Chaos. It was nice to meet you.

Goodbye.

I give a firm nod of my head before sending that message out to all of the starred people who sent me messages.

There. Now they can’t say that I ignored them.

Even if I didn’t read all of every message. Just skimming over them to make sure they didn’t say anything rude.

All that said, there is one message that I don’t reply to with that response. Instead I begin to write an actual message for them.

Simply because it’s the dragonborn I met in that System Event I just won.

For this message I give him a brief greeting and tell him that the event was fun, along with wishing him luck in his next System Event.

And with all that done with, I go ahead and leave the Hub, returning to Val again. Just to find it still raining as I reappear on the top of my Spire.

Just how long is it going to be raining?

I stare at the rain for a few seconds before opening up the Forums once more and trying to see if I can find anything on the subject of the rain. A process that doesn’t take long before I find something.

Hmm.

The climate’s changed on Val due to the System and the Gates?

I glance at the rain again before shrugging, deciding that it doesn’t matter to me so long as I know what’s causing the rain.

After that, I go ahead and research the next subject. Something the Rewards menu mentioned.

The Spire Controls Menu.

Another thing that doesn’t take long to find.

And when I do, I quickly turn around and walk up to the glowing crimson crystal at the top of the Spire. Then I place my hand on it, making a screen appear on my interface.

There we go.

The screen shows a map of the entire Spire. All fifty floors of it. But out of the floors, every last floor is grayed out except for the first ten floors. With the first five floors being black in color and the second five being crimson.

A quick glance at the notes alongside each floor tells me what they are for. The first five being public floors for anyone I let into my Spire with System facilities set up automatically, and the second set of five floors being personal floors for me.

Living space floors.

Also set up automatically.

Except I can change anything I want to my own tastes as I please.

But since I don’t care, I just nod my head and close out of the screen. Deciding to deal with that later.

Not like I’m planning on letting anyone in anytime soon anyways.

I walk over to the edge of the Spire, where I find even more people gathered outside of the door.

My eyebrow twitches ever so slightly in irritation.

At this rate I’m going to have people building a city down there just waiting for me to come out…

The thought of that possibility sends a chill down my spine.

I turn around again and head downstairs, towards those personal living space floors.

Only to realize there are too many floors in this place before I even get a quarter of the way down, making me shift towards flying down the Spire instead. Heading inside a lower floor’s balcony.

When I finally manage to make it to the tenth floor, though, I find myself rather startled by the sight greeting me.

The floor is still rather basic, but it has a kitchen area, living space, bedroom, and the works. All set up with furniture and even some appliances like TVs and a computer.

It even has a stocked fridge.

I feel the corner of my lips twitching slightly upwards at the thought of having real food for the first time in ages. And after grabbing something from the fridge – just a few slices of bread – I head over to a random couch and begin focusing on the new magic skills I got while eating.

It should be fire magic and decay magic.

Just like with my gravity magic, I can only use the three fundamental runes. So I should be able to shoot out a little bolt that’ll decay what it hits and a little firebolt, should be able to… actually not sure what I can do with the second rune for them. Maybe make a barrier around myself that’ll burn or decay something I touch?

And the third rune should let me put a burning or decaying effect on a weapon. Or just an object in general.

The first rune is the one that I care about the most for fire and decay though.

So after I eat, I should go ahead and test those out on monsters.

But for now it’s time to relax.