Chapter Thirty: Intermission

Darren was looking at blueprints he had drawn out as he held Jenny in place on his shoulders with one hand. She was laughing and ruffling his hair.

“Daddy?” She leaned her head down, hair falling past her eyes as she regarded him.

“Yes, dear?” Darren said as he ran a finger over the lines.

“Are we gonna build a house like we had?”

Darren closed his eyes briefly as his heart felt the lance of grief pass through it. Flashes of him and Jenny at the dinner table, him reading her a book as he put her to bed—all passed through his head like ghostly memories on the winds of thought.

“Would you like us to, sweetheart?” Jenny bobbed her head up and down.

“Yes!”

Darren tapped the blueprint with a pencil.

“Let’s build this, and then we will work on the house. Sound good?”

“Mmkay!” Jenny said brightly.

Darren reached up and took her off his head so she could run about the shop. There was nothing overly dangerous in the place. Misaq had brought them here after imparting his profession to him.

“You’ll find all you need to level your profession here. I’ll be by in, oh, a few weeks or so. Food and water are in the pantry, and there’s also a sleeping area and a bathroom for your very…human needs. I’m off!”

The devil had popped out of existence, leaving them in the wide room filled with boxes and boxes of materials. Darren told Jenny not to touch anything without asking first and set off to make her some food. After eating, Darren considered his profession. He was an Arcane Builder. Basically, he built things with mana. He still required the materials of whatever he was going to make. The process was simple; he drew out a blueprint from his imagination, and the System told him what he needed to build it. If he didn’t have the level, mana, or materials required, he would either have to tweak it until he did or make something else entirely.

Right now, Darren was trying to make a dollhouse for Jenny. He had to start somewhere, after all. He didn’t want to make it from plastic because that seemed… cheap. He put some pieces of oak on the table beside him and held up a hand.

Misaq hadn’t explained how to find his core; he just told him to “Look inward,” and Darren had found the advice utterly useless—at first. He wasn’t much for meditation or self-reflection. Despite that, he had closed his eyes, still standing, and allowed his mind to wander through himself.

It didn’t take him long.

The clear blue swirl of light was the size of a small ball. Once he found it, he could tap it and flood mana into his skills. Darren did not have a single combat skill. He had [Arcane Planning-Rare] and [Arcane Building-Rare]. That was it. Planning allowed him to put together a blueprint if he had paper, and building allowed him to form structures, again, provided he had the materials and mana.

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Five pieces of wood and an infusion of one hundred mana would be required for the dollhouse, which was nearly everything Darren had. Mana did restore naturally, unlike health, but it took a long time. Darren would have to wait a solid eight hours for a hundred mana to recover it. There were no potions or anything he could find to restore it, either.

Darren closed his eyes once more, picturing the old dollhouse that his daughter had and how much she loved it. His resolve firmed, and he trickled mana into his skill. The wood lifted into the air on flows of clear blue mana and began to warp and shift. It was as if he were watching an invisible woodworker in action at hyper speed.

Before long, a dollhouse was on the table before him. It looked as if it were painstakingly carved, every detail clear, and every part of the house was polished, standing out like a master had worked on it. Darren was not an expert on dollhouses; this was just for his daughter, but even he was impressed by how it looked.

[You have created a [Dollhouse-Uncommon] and have advanced your profession to level 18.]

Before the System, he wouldn’t have been surprised if he had to pay a couple thousand dollars for such work. With the System, it had taken him about an hour’s worth of planning and a couple of seconds for the house to form.

“It’s beautiful!” Jenny bounded up to his side, eyes wide as they wandered over the dollhouse.

Darren smiled at his daughter,

“It’s yours, sweetheart.”

She crashed into him, wrapping her tiny arms around him tightly.

“Really? Thank you, Daddy! I love it! I love you!”

Darren rested a hand on top of her head, his heart filling.

“I love you too, honey.”

The System had ripped away their lives. Darren’s job, his career, was gone. Their home was gone. The world had become a nightmare filled with monsters, dark things, and a new, or albeit more open culture, of might makes right.

Maybe, though, the System hadn’t taken away the one thing that would allow humanity to not only live but thrive in this new reality.

Hope.

Thomas was an old man. He had tried to deny this for a long time. Back in that cave, though, he was knocked against the wall, and blackness had overcome him. It had been a wake-up call. He was no longer a young man.

That was a far cry from him being useless. The devil had helped him realize that by giving him his profession, Mana Smith. His profession allowed him to be a blacksmith without needing all the bulging muscles or know-how to do the job.

All he had to do was use his skills by putting mana from his core into them, which was as easy as thinking about it. His skills were [Sense Ore-Rare], [Mana Pickaxe-Rare], and [Mana Forge-Rare]. Sense ore was self-explanatory to Thomas; it allowed him to sense any ore within the earth up to a few hundred yards. Mana pickaxe was the fun one for him. His mana constructed itself into a spectral pickaxe that mined the ore he sensed, which automatically plopped itself before him.

It was limited in that Thomas had to be able to see it. But since the ore sense led him right to the ore, that wasn’t a big problem. Thomas liked walking and exploring. The devil had dropped him off in this massive cave and told him to get to work, leveling his profession.

There was a lot of ore here, and Thomas had gathered much of it. Using mana forge, he could smelt the ore, making it into ingots, and then he could make it into objects. Thomas could use other materials to enhance the things he made.

What astonished Thomas was that it was all done through wizardry. It just happened with nothing more than a thought. When Thomas had used up all of his mana, he began walking the cave, poking at rocks, humming to himself. He had an area where he could generally sleep, eat, and care for his needs, but Thomas mostly spent his time just wandering.

When the System came, he had been a wanderer, flitting from place to place. It hadn’t taken much from him, personally. For Thomas, it was a new walk. If a more dangerous one.

He just had to stick to not getting into that danger himself.