Having breached into this realm of monsters, the first thing I detect is a sensory effect from the lord of this realm. Hard to tell if it is a skill at this point like mine are, but as I close the hole behind me it calms accordingly. I believe I’m being treated as one of his random events for today, and correspondingly the lord of this realm has tagged me as a potential raider. I suspect this is to have his troops attack me on sight without needing to consult up the hierarchy. Not great but as it’s a passive mark and I stay out of trouble the lord will leave me alone. Wait where am I?
I’m in a dungeon room with the void breach now sealed behind me. The room has one exit on the far side from where I am and would be fairly spacious if it wasn’t for the shade between me and the exit. I watch it watch me back as I shift to one of the walls to go around it, which doesn’t work and the monster decides to attack me anyways. We scuffle for a bit before the monster spontaneously decides to back off, howling and jabbering at me. After a few rounds of that I make it to the stairs to make sure that nothing is coming up. After that confirmation and discover that my shooting action has been incorporated into my plinker so I can have a stomp action instead. Dad said not to worry about your skills too much to start, as this adjustment process happens to everyone but for the natives the process happened in their childhood. Summoning my armaments, I proceed to miss a lot, when I shoot my plink at the shade. It actually doesn’t change its pattern of chagrin or letting up but, Its health bar shows up now that I’ve broken one of its shields, turns out that it’s odd behavior is because my aura suppresses its regeneration so strongly that it starts taking damage. It must have a damage regeneration skill because my stuns are adding up but the regular damage I would deal is degrading rapidly. Then by sheer dumb luck I slash it with my knife, and it acts like the stun just triggered even though it has way too much health for that. “Take good care of us.” it says before it jumps on my knife to its own dissolution.
The room is eerily quiet after that weirdness. I check my storage for essence and put the three I got from the thousand or so shades into essence cultivation. How do I know there are about a thousand of them? Beyond the fact the number is corrupted there are more than three digits of cards so It has to be in the thousands but there is also a random letter. It says mysterious in its label like I’m some sort of chump. I check the stairs again and my inspection skill tells me that the area will do damage to me over time and it’s faster than my regeneration. I look back at the area of the room for the damage my gun did from the misses, and first find the damage I must have been doing to the floor with my stomps as I pace the room looking for ideas. As I bend over and look at the ground to get what my damage looks like, it becomes increasingly apparent that my attacks are being diffused by the air. I pause and poke around with my realm more specifically how it feels, as it has been shattered into a considerable number of pieces considering my low level. I feel the essence generation I just received working overtime to keep the fragments from drifting further apart. I start trying to process the shattered components and get a bunch of essence for a resource called aerogen. I take in the essence and get the second of the three most common building blocks of a realm, and once I have it I start getting the final from the floor. With a mediocre amount of geolith, in hand my realm knits itself together, and it’s quickly apparent that my aerogen is being diffused across the entire realm. I go back to the floor to isolate the geolith and discover enough essence to get trace amounts of Anchorite essence. One aura pulse later and my realm has merged with this realm, which earns me another round of attention from this place's other lord. “Entreaty,” I hear from the bottom of the stairs.
Realizing that the Undead lord is here, I shout back, “I accept, though I have no hospitality.”
“I henceforth greet Lord Walker. As I know you have not appraised me in full I am Lord Laogou. I want to know your designs for your presence in my realm.”
“I was intending to start out in a low level realm that is not my own, and given what I’ve seen so far when I peered into the void I did not believe I would find one better than your own in the local area.” The undead lord regards me for a moment in response, as my answer showed why I arrived but not what I will do next.
“The Shades then?” Clearly the undead lord knew about the shades that were here. “Currently in card form in my storage, their idea not mine, I have no idea otherwise, but given enough time I intend to use their essence to regulate their presence in my realm.“ I pull one out and do exactly that. And the rest follow. The undead looks down at me now that the surge has knocked me over, before continuing, “I think I shall leave you be for now, as the Inky the shade has sworn its allegiance to you, to join Blobby the slime as your loyal servants. I have to go fight off the dragon’s attempt to claim what remains of my realm after the dragon molested it the first time.” Not long after he left, a yellow slime started oozing out of the walls. Then the other realm just buckled under the strain. Blobby’s yellow slime turned the shattered components into one whole thing storable by my knife’s trigger, and I’m just in the void again. I use my aura to figure out which way is down and go back down to the bottom of the first layer. Eventually after a harrowing journey, of what amounts to sneaking in the void I make it back to the bottom. And with my loot successfully extracted time to take an inventory. I open up my storage and it’s all a mess. Except for the fact that this was all caused by one troublesome letter whose title has changed from ‘mysterious letter’ to ‘that letter that you are currently regretting not opening.’ Well as I have a mess to clean up I do not have any time to read any such letters. I start by generating the building blocks of my realm. I end up getting the schematic for a material called kenogen and after that the realm knits together into one contiguous whole. My geolith is currently phasing in and out of existence, and I’m getting no water, so I was mistaken by assuming I already had some. Once I expose my geolith to kenogen long enough to create kenolith, my realm finally stabilizes into a physical shape, albeit one unfit for any use whatsoever.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
I use my aura to slowly fill in the cracks in my realm and when there is enough space for a card that is not that troublesome letter to be placed down I do so. Most of the air cards come first and they mostly give me a reduction to cost per unit volume. Intermixed with the clean air cards are necrogen cards, so now I can use the damaging effect that was on the stairs. Next was the components made out of rock, like alcoves, tiles, bricks, door frames, stairs, walls, or countertops. All of the getting the base components into place took two days, Finally was the rooms that took days to get through. Making the generation of certain sized rooms cheaper was inspired, as it means that If you always use the same size room you can get a discount, though my set was done on a per room basis. Removing the unnecessary redundancies was what took up most of the time that was mentioned for the rooms, but earned me an extra cubic foot of space. Having watched the letter be an even bigger problem over the course of the week I decided that I’ll deal with it while in the chorus. The chorus occurs once a week and is when holy energies are the least hazardous to interact with. They are still hazardous, but on this day they will not actively try to test you. Yesterday was the actual holy day as per the commandments, so the energies are actively trying to test your worthiness in following the way things should be. Suffice it to say that most do not meet the high bar, but that also isn’t the point, as the difficulty is to provide an incentive for introspection into your failings for improvement. Most do not bother and foolishly pick up what they should be doing by cultural osmosis, instead of thinking about why the commandments are what they are and how they are prioritized.
Still the chorus arrives and I transition with the letter in tow, to a confluence of song and joy. The lesser angels with their layered spirits are restrained off in the distance, while the songs reverberate throughout the entire confluence. The entire space is awash in bright lights of different colors making the entire area appear in a pastel patina, for I am told that if you can withstand the energies that occurred yesterday this is darker and more somber. Surprisingly there are clouds but those clouds are skotogen set up in such a way to break seeing too much too quickly, with large amounts of its gaseous inverse giving even the most nearsighted greater vision. I think the vision bit is supposed to be more symbolic than literal but as one of the gasses does exactly that in the physical realms it’s use here is supposed to be suggestive. Unless it’s a we think it’s supposed to be here and therefore it is, with enough circular logic to make my head hurt. Still this is one of the safest places in all of existence and anyone who acts foolishly here will earn divine retribution. So I pull out the letter’s card and eject it into the chorus, and it explodes into a display of lights and colors. Then the songs distort in its presence and my defenses start screaming while I am immobilized. I do not understand anything. The songs are devoid of their joy. Wrongness pervades. Comprehension deludes. Dirge continues. Then silence. I awaken in my realm down a point of durability and up a half that in holy resistance. I am also correspondingly down three shields and three health. I test my armaments ability to remove effects on me and all of that is removed. I resolve to tell no-one about how it just summarily succeeded. I also discovered that the access to the chorus has returned to normal so it must be at least Monday. I have no Idea how long I was out, and that fact is increasingly apparent as I have accumulated a marble of anchorite and several common card packs. The only other thing of note is that I also received my first class level, and that the class is dungeon master. Okay so I’m technically level two in dungeon master but it also triples the amount of space I have along with letting inky and blobby roam freely. I’ll still succumb to a stiff breeze but I will do my best to go down fighting.