I let my will pass through my body and soul before encompassing the inner world but what I encounter there surprises for a moment. The entire volume is packed full of dirt, metal and roots. At first glance, it looks like there isn’t a single free square meter, but then I find the cracks for the living. A few larger clearings with one of them even approaching the size of a kid's soccer field amidst thousands of smaller and sparsed rooms for beings of all sizes.

With layers and layers of matter and more runes than I could have made in a few decades, I look for the inhabitants of the Inner World.

As my mind’s eye approaches the center, I cross ever more developed layers of runes with greater and greater density and rarer materials. From copper all the way to Mithril. Though as rare as Mitrhi is that last layer is tin foil thin.

I’m surprised to find a much larger group than I left in the inner world. And the ones do I recognize look… older. Not a lot, but enough that I noticed it. If before everyone had fully reverted to an age of 25 or were well in the process when I had left the instance, but now I see a few that look close to 40. A much, much larger retinue ranging from children to fully grown adults in their apparent development.

With the ease of owning the space I open a portal and call out:

“Hey everyone.”

All their faces turn to me with no surprise as a myriad of emotions plays on their faces.

“Finally, we can take a step out of this little cage without the system interfering.”

“Ahhh, about that…” I start but a chorus of groans drowns out my words and I don’t fight it.

“Let him bloody speak.” An engraver that chose to come back to help start building something stands tall in the center of the procession and everyone quiets down.

“I have a chance... a system reward that will only apply while I’m the only one to have returned. It is a bit of a gamble, but at least it is just a month … I think.”

I can see the ripples of desire for a dozen people to talk, their muscles get taut and they almost overcome inertia, but they still defer to the engraver as their leader.

“We will need to talk about it, but even if we don’t agree to spend the whole month, a few days won’t hurt. But I think I ask for everyone: what kind of reward?”

“You know how there are a few ‘first titles’ and stuff?” Almost everyone nods as I continue. “Any that I get now won’t interfere with anyone else and based on how I got it I think this reward is absurdly rare. Even if it turns out to be a bust I can’t not try. Now what I’m curious about is what exactly happened over here. You guys…”

“We look old?” He says with a chuckle. “I guess we are old. I mean we don’t have all the information and there are a couple of things in the air, but that is what a quarter of millennia will do to ya.”

“A quarter cent… MILLENNIA!!! THAT’s… that’s.. over 250 years!! How long since we left Earth?”

“Assuming a short trip to the instance and the 37 fold temporal expansion you calculated… around 290 years. That is time for a LOT of changes. We still don’t KNOW the exact time, but I think that while we are going to get a few advantages, we also got short changed. The system will have likely put everyone else in stasis, which stops them from growing older, but we messed with it and don’t get that benefit. While we slept a lot, like 80 or 90 percent of the time even with the runic protections pushing the system out, we were growing old at a normal rate for our level.”

For the first time, I stare forward and inspect another human.

Runic Engraver – Lv. 200

“And as you can see our inspection skills started working. If you were too low leveled in the skill and class I could have hidden it easily enough. I can show you how later.”

But as the revelations attempt to drown my senses, I take control of the reins and look at him.

“There is so much that I can ask you that I could sit here for days nonstop, and we may do something like that split in a few sessions, but for now… Where is all the knowledge you accumulated and how much of the priority list did you manage to accomplish without being able to leave the inner world?”

To answer that he snaps his fingers and mana folds in on itself bringing a sealed runic box from a dozen meters away. Then he takes a piece of plastic, glass and silver layered in a rectangular shape. Black glass on one side and polished silver on the other five while being completely covered in runes.

He extends it out to me.

With trembling fingers, my muscle memory takes over and I tap the power button on my old smartphone.

Nothing happens on the first try or the second try, but then I hold it down and it comes to life.

I can almost feel the electricity tickling with the perception field as it moves at lightning speed through the little device. A million states happen every fraction of a fraction of a second. The familiar logos pop up in the usual order, the music and then the drop in brightness in the last step before my home screen comes on.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Then I see the very picture I took of the grove in the background. But instead of staring at the picture, I rest my back against the real things and ask:

“How much data did you recover?”

“Depending on how you measure, a few petabytes, though more important than size is quality. A hundred thousand Blu-ray movies would be nigh useless, especially given that most would likely be copies of a few blockbusters. We managed to get to hundreds of factories, universities, research centers and the like before they were consumed. Even your house nearby was nearly completely gone.

“That is ok, nothing too important left behind beyond Pando.”

“I’m still not happy with our efforts because the system seemed intent on accelerating the destruction of anything that could even remotely be considered tech and modern building, but we came back in the nick of time to recover enough data. One more decade and we wouldn’t be recovering most of the data, we would be on the other side of entropy and scraping to see if we found anything at all from hard drives.”

I nod along and let him just continue to drone on.

“Even the temporal store boxes and the best data recovery tools we developed would be useless on magnetic drives if we let the system run unchecked. Hell, we saw even a few dedicated data center losing all their the tapes after the system was done with the places. The only slightly more reliable media was the rare optical disk, but we found only a handful of them with actually useful data. Though I got to tell you, the dozen computer scientist along with the data recovery expert we brought were worth their weight in gold. We wouldn’t have gotten a percent of what we got without their help. And that is not even talking about your automaton seed.”

“I can imagine. I see you didn’t even have to change the ‘system exclusion runes’ too much to get a smartphone working.”

“In the start we were messing with it, but we grew to understand their limitations and there is something about the simplicity of your design that we couldn’t beat. For more advanced stuff we need better runes to divert the system's attention, but for most computers, this is the sweet spot.”

I keep the conversation up for a few more minutes trying to keep it only to brief and the most important topics, but while I’m thinking, a running rabbit hits my chest at lightning speed. A moment later he climbs atop my shoulder and begins to lick my face.

Awake.

Yes, who are you?

Aster’s grandson, well great great grandson… I think.

Holding a smirk down at the young pup, around 3 or 4 months old and already with such well developed speech patterns. And not just well developed, but encapsulated with precision I wouldn’t expect of a rabbit without a lot of practice. Even that is beside the fact that it sits proudly on my shoulder, exuding a sense of accomplishment about something.

I thought that the system had locked down their reproductive capabilities, but I guess things weren’t so simple.

But as a wave of white fluffiness advances from all around in my perception field, my smile becomes a frown and I get a hint of what they are all after.

I wait the minute before they are all upon me, leaping at the chance to imitate the first little bunny, but most are fully grown and a few have started to grow older. With the severity of the moment and one last look I take a deep breath and beckon the mass of rabbits surrounding me.

A competition ensues to reach me and then I start to drown in balls of fur, that are both stronger than steel taking no care of my physical integrity like they might for more fragile creatures. However, I do take care to not crush the little creatures by laying down or elbowing them, after all the very stats that let me survive the onslaught were also dangerous in their own right.

Everything around me becomes flashes of fur brushing against every square inch of exposed skin until they tire, but that takes a good ten minutes.

The entire experience relaxes me until something slows them down. Then I call down on my perception field to see what is going on being that my eyes were covered by a several layers deep bunny barrier.

A familiar form slowly makes its way to me.

Each step seems pained, even if I can feel the very nerves not carrying any such signals back to her brain. It’s not painful, just… tiresome. The hyperactive natural systems in the hundreds of other beings moving around me stand in deep contrast to the lacking regeneration I sense from the bunnies matriarch: Aster.

So this is what old age looks like within the system. I had read about it, but it was something else to see in person. No meaningful amounts of pain and suffering, just not enough resource regen to do much until all your organs fail to keep you alive. And after it sets in, it is a steep decline so… she doesn’t have long left.

With strength of will that I had seen in very few people. Her gaze doesn’t just slow the rabbits around me, it freezes them to their spots.

“You didn’t have to come all the way over to me.”

“Ohh, but I did.” She says with gravity to her mental images.

“How can I fix this?”

“These are just my limitations. We are the lowest of spawned creatures, never meant to surpass level 100, and that I reached soon after arriving on your planet.”

“That… that’s unfair. Isn’t Onix level 200?”

“And he can grow even beyond that, but he will eventually be stopped from progressing forward. That is the curse of his planet and race.”

“That’s… I have a thousand questions. But I’m back, so how can I fix this?”

I reach for a connection trying to understand and extract all the meaning from each of her words. She looks at me with that same stare as a kindly old gramma hearing that her grandson is going to build a rocket in the back of their garden. Warmth, kindness, a belief in my capabilities, but also an understanding of the monumental effort that cheating the system would be. She believes that even if I succeed, she would be long dead before seem the fruits of my labor. And that I want to accomplish something so beyond the ordinary that it may not even be possible.

Even without my class, she sees the reflections of her own thoughts imprinted on my face.

“So you understand now?”

“It is really that hard?”

“Try impossible in a dozen fronts. You may succeed in a few, but on all of them… in such a short time? You have other concerns.”

“You can use Vigor…. and I can make…”

“Don’t.”

That single word puts a halt to the hundreds of first steps that I could take to find one avenue to pursue.

She imperiously walks forward as the other rabbits all make way for her to sit on my lap, as a thousand thoughts take up momentum again and flit around my head.

A thousand questions give way to a hundred solutions, but none towards the one thing I cared about.

She leveled as high as she could and extended her life span as far as it would go. Well beyond the normal limits of the other instance rabbits.

They had left many of the restrictions of the instance like stopping their reproduction, but that was a hint of consolation compared to the end of her life, a life that I only shared in brief snippets.

I try to get myself to overcome inertia and keep going, but crazy oddball plans with my resources, especially Life keep bouncing in the back of my mind.

I can work on this for just 5 more minutes and then I will stop.