Lightforge was learning the hard way that it was tricky to judge time while underground. The soft lights of his hidden lab never changed, and the thick walls of concrete and earth around him kept the place relatively cool at all times. Without something changing to keep track of, it was all too easy to get completely lost in his work and forget about those simple bodily functions that he technically needed to survive.

He was reasonably certain that it had been less than a week since he’d sealed himself into the lab. He had slept once, and eaten… at some point? He was pretty sure he had, at least. It was simply difficult to focus on when he had so much to work on.

The good news was that he was finished. Well, finished with the first step at least. The first step that he had figured at, assuming that he didn’t run into any more roadblocks the way that he had been for the last several days.

…The point was that he’d made real progress, and it was just about time to start some real testing.

That all started with the bizarre sculpture sitting on the table in front of him. It was a pair of concrete chunks the size of his head stuck to either side of a thin metal plate. It was a scaled up version of the item that had started this line of inquiry, just with metal in place of glass. It had been the object of his obsession that he’d spent the bulk of his time trying to recreate.

The thinking had been simple: a small version makes a small amount of system energy, so a big version makes a big amount of system energy. It was supposed to be simple, but it had been a lot more work than he’d been expecting. As it had turned out, the timing and precision involved in making the thing work properly was hellishly difficult to achieve.

It was such a simple thing, just a piece of scrap stuck between two other pieces of scrap. But, as it turned out, each individual piece had to be close to reuniting with the whole that it had come from when they got stuck together. If it didn’t happen within that slim window, then the pieces would slip past one another or simply refuse to stick.

But he had finally figured out the process and was pleased with himself. He had put his creation into the analyzer to check its output, and was pleased to see his hypothesis borne out in the data relayed back to him. It worked and the larger version did indeed produce more energy, which was the good news.

The bad news was that the increase wasn’t as much as he’d hoped. The large version was at least ten times bigger than the original, but its output was around two and a half times that of its smaller cousin. That wasn’t worth the extra effort of hauling around the giant blocks that he’d originally envisioned to make the system that he’d wanted.

Instead he’d gone back to the drawing board to do something a little more complicated. Instead of having a large device outputting a lot of power, he would make dozens of small ones that would work in unison. Of course, that meant repeating the tedious and careful process of making the little things over and over again. If he was going to do that, then they would at least need a name.

The system was annoyingly absent during the entire process. It had clearly never been designed to interpret the things that he was doing, and so it had fallen completely silent. Well, he’d also muted all incoming notifications so that he wouldn’t be disturbed, but it hadn’t been useful even before that.

After a few moments of thought, he decided to name the little devices “Restoration Distillers.” They weren’t truly generating the energy themselves, just pulling it from the world around them and putting it to use.

With that decided, he set to work making more distillers, an endeavor that was fraught with a slew of new challenges all on its own. His first plan had been to mass produce them with chunks from the wall and metal strips from various pieces of machinery and pipes built into the basement around him. The first two had worked perfectly.

As soon as he assembled the third, all of them started twitching and shuddering violently on the table in front of him. After a few seconds they snapped together, pulverizing the little strips meant to keep them apart. The result was not the original piece of concrete, but a disfigured mass that was slowly rearranging itself as the dust around it tried to reassemble into something recognizable.

Huh. Apparently tying up the restorative energy like that made it want to snap dangerously. He probably should have seen that coming, but instead he’d nearly pissed himself at the noise.

Then he sighed and began to rip apart everything in the lab around him. Instead of making a bunch of identical distillers, he would vary the makeup to keep them from interfering with one another. He was taking bits and pieces from walls, electrical panels, pipes, chairs, lightbulbs, and everything else that he could physically get his hands on.

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He was removing the exterior casing of the lab’s reactor when he’d had his next flash of insight. The reactor was designed to not just produce energy, but to channel and direct it to a useful purpose. It was the perfect container for the distillers, especially if he wound up needing to supplement them with extra power. He started adding small containers within the reactor to hold the distillers, hopeful that the complex device would let him focus all of their power together.

That had been hours ago, and he was confident that he now had enough of the distillers to get a solid stream of system energy coming out of the reactor. It was, in theory, the perfect setup to restore consumable items or restore broken things. And, if he was very lucky, it would be enough to refill revival batteries. Of course, he would have to figure out how to carry the setup around, but that was a problem for later.

For the time being, he carefully connected the revival batteries to the reactor. It would be a perfect proof of concept if he could get all of them refilled with the basic setup that he’d put together here. It was an exciting opportunity, and he was nearly ready to hit the button and get everything started.

That was about the time that he realized just how much danger he could potentially be putting himself in. After all, he’d just seen the destructive potential contained within just three of his distillers when they were within close proximity of one another. Now he had a whole lot more than three packed into the reactor.

In hindsight, that might have been a poor decision after all. If something kickstarted a reaction between them and they went shooting through the reactor, losing power to the lab would probably be the least of his worries. A potential meltdown leading to a massive explosion seemed like a distinct possibility now that he was actually thinking about it.

Well, maybe not a meltdown. It wasn’t a nuclear reactor, after all. Actually, he only vaguely understood the principles that made it function. It had included a number of components that had struck him as extremely videogame-like, as if they’d been programmed by people with as little understanding of power generation as he had. At the very least, he was confident that it would have never worked in the world that he had come from.

Of course, to be fair, almost nothing about his current situation would work in his old world. Super powers, fantastical technology, self-repairing buildings? Nothing around here was realistic, so he really shouldn’t be surprised that the science he was using was equally sketchy around the edges. And he was most definitely out on the edges of even this world’s science.

The point was that his current set of experiments was definitely dangerous, and he needed to do something about that. He turned his attention to the other projects spread out throughout the lab. He had several, though he hadn’t much time on them recently.

Originally, his plan for the underground lab was to develop protective measures for the buildings around his shop. Force fields, turrets, drones, all the sorts of things that would make villains think twice about attacking the area. It was the sort of thing that he should have thought about before antagonizing people, but that wasn’t exactly a short list.

It had been a rude awakening for him. He realized that, even with all the changes to this world, he’d still been treating it like a game. As if the rules or the system were the only things that had changed. He should have known better than that, but he’d ignored the signs.

In the back of his mind, there had always been the belief that none of this was truly real. In particular, that the NPCs around him were just that: simplistic NPCs who could be comfortably ignored unless they were relevant to the task at hand.

That position had become impossible to maintain when he’d seen the furious, grief-stricken families of the people who’d died because they had happened to be near him at the wrong time. The anguish, horror, and fury had been too powerful, too real. Their vitriol hadn’t been the result of some clever programming, but true disdain.

That had been when he’d decided to change the way that he went about his business. And while the primary purpose of his latest experiments was to protect his friend, he liked to believe that it would help him protect other people as well.

Of course, the first person that he needed to protect was himself, which brought his mind back around to the matter at hand. He went through the lab and pulled out one of the force field emitters that he’d constructed.

They were surprisingly simple to make, as it turned out. They only had a handful of parts to them, and putting things together in this world was generally pretty straightforward. The hard part was that each one produced only a small shield, maybe big enough for a car to just fit inside. Great for a personal shield, not so much for covering entire city blocks.

As it turned out, such protective items were simple, but they had never been designed to work together to form a large force field. And as he had found time and again, stretching the limits of the crafting system was where the actual challenges presented themselves.

For his purposes at the moment, a single emitter should be plenty. He dragged it over to the reactor and started wiring it up to the power source. Was that a bad idea? Would it fail if the reactor itself went up in flames? These were good questions, but he needed something to power the thing, so this was the option at hand. If it blew up, he would just have to hope that the shield stayed up long enough for the blast to pass.

It would be more troubling to him, except for the fact that he also had his personal shield power as a backup. Between the two, he was confident that he would be able to keep himself safe.

That confidence lasted until the emitter was fully hooked up and immediately started buzzing with power. It wasn’t supposed to do that. And it most certainly wasn’t supposed to start sparking in a rainbow of colors that didn’t match the smooth light blue of the force field that it was meant to produce.

He had just enough time to realize the danger that probably represented before he was surrounded in brilliant light and the world around him vanished.