All I had to do was draw the rune! Why didn’t I think of that before? It was so simple. I spun into existence a thread of golden light and set about spinning it into the form of the connect rune. That was easier said than done though, the image wouldn’t stay still in my mind and constantly unfurled into streams of multicolored light.

Man, why did it have to be so hard? I gathered all my willpower and summoned the rune once more, as soon as it began to flicker I slammed my will into it, commanding it to stay in place with everything I have.

The rune suddenly went still and I felt a new sort of connection form between me and it, existing on a deeper, fundamental level than before.

Finally! Hopefully the next phase works.

I summoned the character screen and began weaving golden threads into it. The shape of the connect rune gradually began to take form as I wove more threads in. I didn’t know how much time had passed but it felt like forever. When I was finally done I realized only an hour of subjective time had passed.

What? That can’t be right? Did I just enter a hyper-focused state?

I mean that really shouldn’t be surprising considering the fact that I had a decent amount of processing power and storage that seemed to be limitless. Well, I hadn't reached the limit yet, but I was sure there would be one, it only made sense.

But anyway, success! I finally did it. Seconds after drawing the rune the character screen glitched and updated itself and a new option popped up.

[Connections]

Interesting!

I clicked it and watched as the screen flash blue and a seemingly endless number of golden threads of all sizes suddenly became visible to me. They were so numerous that they looked like a swaying ocean of gold, shifting and twisting rhythmically.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

Millions of entries popped up on the blue screen that constantly updated and deleted themselves. Wow! So much detail, who knew that I was connected to the very air my monsters exhale? Or the millions of magical bacteria that filled my first floor? I didn’t even know those things existed until now!

This was truly a fascinating turn of events, the character screen just gained the ability to record and keep track of every single connected thing made within my dungeon, even if it was so small that it was insignificant.

How was it processing all of this information? I don’t know, but it was cool as heck! Now I didn’t have to worry about frying my soul with too much information. I could just plug it into this wonderful blue screen and call it a day!

Wait, didn't this make me fully omniscient? Well, not me but you know! As long as something came from me I would know, in exact detail. There had to be a connection first, which was a huge limitation but I’ll take what life gives me!

My mind spun witn questions, could these connections be severed or tampered with somehow? If I could see them and manipulate them surely someone or something else could, right? That was just useless speculation though, worrying about that right now would accomplish nothing.

This would once again speed up my plans. All I had to do now was design some special rats that would infiltrate the city for me and my intelligence network would be complete, I was itching to do so too but held off for now. I wanted to get a look at the other runes.

I shifted my attention towards the wall of half-complete rune fractals and gazed upon the five balls of golden light. They weren’t actually golden, but my mind was trying to cope and I let it. I peered closer, hoping to see them in more detail but they winked out of existence as soon as I got too close.

Huh? What?

I tried again, only for my entire soul space to shudder and twist as a massive amount of foreign concepts and conceptual ideas poured in from a popped rune fractal.

I reeled back and the barrage of information stopped almost instantly.

Alright alright! I’m not ready, I get it.

Yikes, my soul and mind felt raw and fragile, I felt as if my sanity almost slipped there. These rune fractals were no joke! Still, I wasn’t expecting that, I thought they were just being hard like the connect rune but apparently not.

Subjective time passed, and my mind slowly repaired itself. I had no idea where the eldritch knowledge contained by those fractal runes went, and I had no plans on finding out for now. It was getting painfully clear just how underprepared I was to deal with anything related to the system, it was beyond me, how I managed to defeat it still puzzled me.

Was it that it didn’t know how to fight back properly, because it certainly tried, or was there something wrong with it? I had no idea, and maybe I’ll never know because it's dead now, bummer.

Or was it? I hadn’t ignored the ominous message it managed to get through before I killed it, it implied that there was more of it, or them. It did say we, so were there multiple systems running around out there that I didn’t know about?

I certainly hope not, I didn’t have anything against systems, well that was a lie. I do have something against systems, especially the one that tried to kill me. But I felt like that hate existed even before this life, which was weird.

Why would the past me hate the system and systems in general? My entire life was a mystery now that I think about it, where did I come from?

I now wanted to find a way to get back my memories, well, on the ever-growing to-do list you go!

Anyway, it's time to make my intelligence gathering network!