Five minutes pass and still no solution to Aster’s problem pops up, so I put on another 4 and a half minutes on my mental timer and when that runs out I set just another 4 minutes. The cycle keeps going with me slowly growing anxious. But as a few more practical experiments fail and the low hanging fruit disappears into nothingness proving themselves to be just mirages, the reality of the situation sinks in.

The minutes of my supposed month relentlessly tick down and when an hour passes I can’t hide anymore in small additions. I don’t want to rush anything and commit myself to an irredeemable mistake. But I finally get myself to a place where I can spiral out of my uncontrolled descent.

I need to make the most of my time because although we likely aced the ‘tutorial’ phase of our integration, our situation was still grim. The problem was that even acing the tutorial usually meant that we escape being under the council’s thumb and instead would be under their pink finger.

I get the summaries prepared for me and the new maps of our region before even opening my book. With my endless book of knowledge updated with everything that they managed to recover, over a thousand pages are filled out in minutes and I start leafing through it.

Even if most of my attention for the first half an hour stems around how where and in what conditions I could acquire the first titles, doubt still creeps in over my course of action. While the instance wasn’t a place meant to give out many first titles, my misfortune of not gaining a single one felt like winning the reverse lottery given. Still, I can’t complain too much given how much I moved outside the system.

As I read something keeps calling my attention. So I stop and stare around me. I shuffle through the notes in my impromptu root table and chair combination, but they don’t seem to contain what was nagging me.

Then I pull out a hand drawn map supposed to represent our planet. I see something akin to what I expected. Very basic details, warped continents and the former oceans, now looking closer to rivers and lakes. If we had 70 percent water, now we were closer to 7 percent. A second look and I put that somewhere between 10 and 15.

“I guess we aren’t ‘planet water’ any longer.”

But there is something very interesting missing from the map: Pando’s domain.

I look away and send my consciousness into Pando’s roots, spreading myself not with the perception field, but simply trying to get an overview of his domain and understand which fraction of the globe he managed to cover.

That would be the most important thing to cover on a map like that, but apparently, the cartographer didn’t think so.

I keep going and growing my expectations as I head out hundreds of kilometers, then thousands until I approach the size of the instance. But instead of seeing limits, the network keeps on to infinity.

With a frown, I keep going and going growing ever more unbelieving. As I reach 20 thousand kilometers in both directions and the end is not in sight, I start to grow agitated. That used to be Earth’s diameter.

After flying over the different terrain, I expected some change… but this is unbelievable. I grow numb to the actual breadth of Pando’s network. There aren’t even real changes to different domains meaning that a thousand seeds didn’t grow separately before loosely joining. It is all his domain in which I see a few seeds acting as gardeners and protectors of parts of his domain.

The telltale signs of planted strings of trees dotting the map like Pando had teams of scouts going around but with the system putting everyone asleep, that was patently impossible. The solution he used implemented was obvious: the seed avatars.

A while later and completely numb from the experience, both of my will tendrils touch each other on the other side of the globe.

An unfathomably large ring surrounds it. So large that it rivals Jupiter.

Earth had grown some 20 times in diameter, 500 times in area and 10 thousand times the mass. But something is strange about this situation. If it was so, we would have collapsed into a black hole or at least be crushed by gravity.

“Tell me what is going on with Earth’s size, it’s… I… just tell me.” I pled to the engraver that had taken charge of the inner world.

“Nothing much to tell.”

“But the gravity.”

“Ohh that… The increase was subtler than what we expected from a twenty fold increase in diameter. That should have increased gravity by over 20 times but you can’t even feel the mild increase we actually got through the ‘anti gravity’ runes we have in place.”

“And how strong is gravity now? I mean without whatever you did?”

“Roughly the cubic root of 21 compared to the old value. Around 2.7 or 2.8 gravities.”

“And how easy is it to make those runes?”

“Fairly easy and they use very little mana for upkeep, even if they require days or weeks to activate. The change in the gravity well and potential energy takes time to overcome and the system doesn’t give this energy for free but after it is up and running we can plug a small tap in the village's batteries and forget it. I mean we don’t need it inside the inner world, but we were prepping to take a step out for a while. Ohh, by the way about your plan to get a bunch of first titles, we agree to stay in the inner world for at least 2 weeks. We will probably stay the whole 30 days, but I can’t promise that.”

His words and my plans start to come together in my mind. I need to come up with a schedule that would maximize both achievements should they get out in two weeks and a month.

My initial instinct to rush out as soon as I felt that Pando was safe was trying to overcome my need for information and a proper plan in place. But as I go back and forth reading my book, the updates, thousands of runes they have studied and the even few they invented I form my plans.

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A couple of hours are not nearly enough to get a deep sense or know how to implement most of what I came across, but it is enough to know my first step.

Even with all the dangers of choosing this option, I take my flying bicycle with the steam thrusters, carve space for a few extra ones to overcome the extra gravity and ready myself to hurtle through the sky to the closest landmark.

Wait

Wait…

WAIT!!!

Please, come with???

Hundreds of different voices call out from all around just as I’m disconnecting and about to take off. Hundreds of seeds consciousness return, most acting like puppies whining as they see their beloved two-legged ready to leave, except I have the inner world and so I pull all who want and aren’t engrossed in other work or simply too far away to even notice my absence.

Last but definitely not least, Aspen steps fully inside and like a big party in the inner world, I rocket through the sky with the biggest grin plastered on that I can muster.

My first goal, the Belknap mountain, didn’t end up too far away in the reshuffling. Just some 200 kilometers as the crow flies.

As I’m flying over I finish ironing out my plans. Picking the last option that the system gave me.

It is indeed a gamble, but a good portion of the lowest rung of these should be laughably easy to get especially if I have the full month.

My finger hovers over the button for a minute.

All first achievements acquired won’t affect other system users

Even if I had just 2 weeks to concentrate on the easiest titles, that could add up to something very interesting. I doubted those rewards were intended for someone like me with a whole month on their hands, even if someone somehow got the same first tier by ‘hiding’ somewhere during integration, then they wouldn’t have access to the system’s information. And if it was someone that managed to get in a little early, it would likely be just a few minutes or in the most extreme cases: hours. Similar to the difference when the system arrived and my greater Aether portion helped me unlock it a tiny bit earlier. Though I knew that most Aether wielders broke that mold.

As I leave direct contact with Pando a tightness clenches my heart, but in most of my stops my long lost friend would be there because his roots were almost everywhere.

Even if there were still vast swathes with only occasional trees, that didn’t interfere with communication. When it came to the areas he didn’t manage to make his way inside without active interference from someone else’s domain, those were the exceptions and not the rule.

Earth had grown unbelievably, but Pando was already in the perfect place to replace all the infrastructure we came to rely on in the instance and even improve on it given that now we had access to a decent portion of our tech tree before the system and enough tools to rebuild.

And best of all, as thoughts about technology flit through my mind and I page my book, tidbits about solving problems show up in my book. Nothing beyond our former level just yet, but I can almost feel the secrets of the universe contained in my book, if only I paid the price to obtain them.

Still, I was far away from even coming back to our former teach level and progress wouldn’t be quick, but now with runes to stop the system from interfering and our preserved tech seeds and an adequate population, we could be up and running in a decade for most industries and possibly even less time if most people returned to their old jobs though concentrating too much on tech would be counterproductive. We need the right tool for the right job.

As I approach the mountain, aiming at a nearby overgrown road which I guess is the closest I could land and still be considered to have climbed it. Even as I prepare my feet to slap the ground, I’m still not fully convinced that this is the right course of action, but taking the plunge, I tap the option in my system prompt.

Moments later, I put the flying bicycle in the inner world and with a roll on the hard packed ground, I bleed off the momentum. And even in the heavier gravity, I stumble only once.

After getting a mouthful of dirt, I slowly get up and try to get used to the different gravity.

The complex running calculation of what to acquire and how to best go about it gives way to the much more immediate task of not face planting that running is which is where all my concentration goes.

Putting one step in front of the other and slowly making my way up, at least when compared to my normal running speed, a thousand things start to compete for my attention. Usually running uphill would take so little of my stamina and concentration that I would barely notice the exercise, but each of my moves is just barely too slow as gravity pulls my limbs faster than ever to the ground.

Each meter up spends roughly 4 times as much energy as I would have to spend if gravity was still at a familiar level, but with training, it should go down to somewhere between 2,5 to 3 times matching the gravity increase.

Still, even the higher consumption still makes very little difference for a short run with Endurance well into the 300 hundreds.

Though as each step grows ever so slightly easier on my way up, my mind starts to run scenarios and my plans keep forming.

A message makes itself known to me a little more insistently and I’m glad that I did open it.

You are the first to visit Belknap Mountain. +1% to exploration.

With a look at the one right above it, I also see that my first step was counted.

You are the first to visit Pando’s Grove: +1% to exploration

So far those two don’t seem to affect much. It turns out we humans are getting a slightly different brand than the more common variety of titles. Or maybe the system sensed my plans and was changing the rules, but regardless of why that happened, the nebulous counter at 2% doesn’t provide anything. This is just deferring the reward instead of forgoing it altogether.

A few stronger and more focused titles would probably be a lot better than a hundred titles that gave me fractions of something useless.

You are the first to have climbed the Belknap Mountain: +2% to exploration.

My bare hands and feet keep going, with more surety as each move gives me a bit more confidence in my actions. A minute later I also take the staff that Blackwood gave me and I give it a good few twirls. Although I had it in the void, no matter what I did, it never felt right using it there, but as I hold it in my hand it slides like a glove.

With each step, as I dig my fingers in the soil, what he had told me about it and my experience from interacting with Merlin and Alex their words about level 100+ skills click in my mind. I reach out with my polearm mastery skill and the world seems to part before me.

Not a huge difference, but the air resistance when I even approached full speed becomes even so slightly more cooperative. The hints of force as I push on the soft ground sap away less of my strength and even my stumbles seem a little more fluid.

Although as I come to learn there are severe restrictions on anything that isn’t swinging my staff, so those differences end up being much smaller and sometimes the implement in my hand ends up being more of a hindrance in my climb. But it averages out to an improvement, and even in the quick exercise, I let it consume my mind.

You are the first to reach the Belknap’s Mountain summit: +5% to exploration.

Another two messages arrive in the next few minutes as I finish the roughly 2-kilometer track climbing the last couple hundred meters of elevation.

The actions that would have been impossible before the system even with the lower gravity we used to have are fast becoming the norm. While I can’t yet see what form the actual reward will take, the ease of my actions with flying and a hundred other advantages from the instance just build up in my mind. I won’t be settled with a lousy title for a lot of work.

Taking off yet again through the sky, I head for the dozens of other peaks nearby to try and extract something of value before flying to other mountain chains.