The rain had passed and the clouds had dissipated, leaving a clear sky with a bright half waning moon. With my night vision, it was as clear as day.

I flew for about five kilometres further into the Beast Forest, before gaining a couple extra hundred meters and scanning the surroundings.

“Good, nobody around,” I observed to myself, then descended down to the ground.

Using the laser drill, I sliced through all the trees within a hundred meter radius, and stored them in my inventory. As there were a number of different types, they took up quite a bit of space in my inventory; I would really have to see about selling them to the town at some point.

Once the area had been cleared and flattened, I reached into my world storage and pulled out a Mechanical Worm, a summoning item for a boss. Something I had mentioned several days ago to Tear had made me curious about whether boss summoning items would work in this world or not.

I activated it and the small metal worm in my hand came to life, leaping off my hand and burrowing into the ground as though its metal was red hot and the earth was butter. It left a neat round hole behind it, but no spoil from its digging. I sat idly for almost a minute, waiting for something to happen, then the ground started rumbling. With a loud boom, the Destroyer, a gigantic mechanical worm, tore through the ground in front of me. Dozens of glowing eyelike red lights shone along its segmented length, and it clacked its enormous evil looking mandibles and screeched deafeningly.

“Oh wow! That looks dangerous!”

Twenty seconds later it was dead. The Destroyer is a mid-game boss, and a worm enemy so it stood doubly no chance against the Solar Eruption which was an end-game piercing weapon, each of the dozens of blades along the length of the extending spear-flail being able to hit each of the Destroyer’s segments in turn. It also helped that it could phase through blocks and hit the boss while it was underground.

“That was anticlimactic,” I murmured, a little disappointed I had yet to have a good fight. “Maybe it wasn't too dangerous for Tear after all.”

As I leapt up and grabbed a large glowing soul that floated out of the dead Boss's mouth, I felt something within me react, and my cell phone pinged a notification into my mind at the same instant as an icon of a trophy appeared in the top right of my vision alongside my buff icons.

“Um, what?” I focused my attention onto the icon: New Title Received: Destroyer of the Destroyer.

“What?” I checked the notification.

“Feat performed, defeat the Destroyer in under 30 seconds. Title awarded: Destroyer of the Destroyer.”

“The heck is a Feat?! Why did I get a Title from doing one!?” I exclaimed. “They definitely weren’t things in the game!”

I concentrated on where I had felt the strange feeling inside me come from, and managed to get a rough understanding of what was going on.

It seemed like performing a certain task or ‘Feat’ caused a ‘Title’ to be awarded to you. Basically the same as Achievements in games, except with a reward beyond just the satisfaction of collecting them. I also could roughly tell that all of Terraria's Achievements had become Titles, though I wasn’t completely certain about their effects. Some seemed obvious, such as 'Not the Bees' making bees like me, 'Lucky Break' making me unable to die from fall damage, or 'Supreme Helper Minion' making me incredibly good at fishing. I couldn’t help but feel I was missing something though. 'Supreme Helper Minion' being present made me shudder at the memory of the 200 angler quests that I had had to trudge through.

“So glad I don't have to do them again,” I muttered, storing the Soul of Might into my inventory, where I noticed I could break it down into multiple fragments for crafting, then dropping back down to the ground. As I landed, I noticed one segment of the Destroyer still had lights glowing in it and approached it cautiously, reaching it and poking it with Daybreak. It didn't react, so I came closer and inspected it.

Suddenly I realised what it was from the knowledge the God had given me; it was an essence material! Essence materials were special materials formed when the dead monster's soul and remaining mana concentrated on a certain part of their anatomy. These materials were then refined and used for crafting weapons and other equipment. You could say they were this world's equivalent of mob or boss drops. For example, this essence material here could be refined into the component of the Mechanical Cart, the Mechanical Wagon Piece. Though I did wonder how the soul forming the essence material lined up with the Souls of Might. Ah nevermind. Questions for later.

I grabbed it and stored it away into my inventory, also storing the dark and now disconnected segments, as I spotted they contained Hallowed metal which could be extracted and refined into bars.

Then I paused as I thought of something. I checked the damage-per-second function of my cell phone and did a little calculation to work out the Destroyer had had around 120000 health.

“So, Expert Mode strength. I wonder if that's the same for all the bosses or even if there are differences between the same bosses?” I mused. Another thing on the list to test later.

I then walked to the edge of the gaping hole the boss had made when it emerged from underground.

“Didn't do that in the game,” I commented as I hopped over the rim of the Destroyer's tunnel and plummeting, the air rushing past. After about a hundred meter drop, the straight shaft began curving round, so I actually bothered to open my wings, but only just enough to follow the curve. It was now dark enough that I couldn’t see clearly, so I summoned my light pet, the Suspicious Looking Eye.

After another several dozen meters, I noticed that my minimap was now showing the level I was on. I mentally toggled it to surface mode, managed to get it to show the surface overlaid over the underground, then switched it back to the underground fully.

While I had been playing around with it, the tunnel had curved off, and was now only at a slight descending angle, so I landed and walked along it, the tunnel narrowing slightly as I went further.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

After about 500 meters, I came to a rockfall blocking it. I wasn't sure what I had been expecting, but this was disappointing. I activated my depth vision, but the blockage extended past the twenty meters I could see, and I thought it likely that it would continue being blocked.

I turned to leave with my depth vision still on and froze as I saw a thin winding trace of familiar blue light flowing through the rock past the side of the tunnel.

Concentrated mana! The same as that emerging from my mana spring but this one I could tamper with! As I was curious as to the source of the mana, I decided to follow it.

I summoned my laser drill mount and tracked its cutting units down, slicing easily through the rock several meters parallel to it. The laser drill and the laser drill mount weren't really lasers, they were more like spatial separators. The 'laser' beams shot through anything, marked out a specific space, the default being a 2m cube, but with a touch on the controls I could change that easily. This determined space was then sucked into my inventory and separated out into its components. As the beam could penetrate up to 10m, about half of the way I could see through solid objects (though if there was a clear space on the other side it would be like there wasn't anything in the way at all), I didn’t run the risk of accidentally chewing up whatever the source of the mana was.

Before long, by which I meant about a vertical kilometre below what I had already descended, I saw what looked like a vast ocean of mana taking up the entire bottom of my depth vision.

I tunnelled a bit closer and observed that it was flowing through the rock; this wasn't an ocean, it was a river! No, not a river, an artery. Hundreds of capillaries branched off, heading in all directions, but with the most going up, and I realised that the entire Beast Forest must be fed by this mana artery; this may be a reason why so many powerful monsters appeared there.

On my way back to the surface with my depth vision left on, I found various ore veins and dug them all up, pulling the materials into my inventory for processing later.

“I should really leave depth vision on when I'm underground,” I thought happily as I spotted some mythril. In this world it formed naturally, but rarely.

With multiple detours, I returned to the tower, my inventory filled with materials.

Anything I had crafted once, I could craft again at super-high speed. Now that I thought about it, that might be the effect of a Title… Either way it was very convenient for me. I could smelt and separate the metal from the stone at normal speed, I possessed all the information on how to, I just didn't see the point. This meant that it didn’t take long at all to process the metal into bars, which I then shifted into my world storage 'super stacks' which were the result of combining all my stockpiles into single stacks, beyond the max stack limitation of my inventory. They barely increased.

Nonetheless, it was an increase, and that was how I built up the stockpiles in the first place.

Since I had dug down to the mana river, an idea had been forming in my mind, and once I had finished emptying my inventory, I headed down to the pool at the bottom of the tower.

I stripped off my clothes and swam down to the bottom of the pool, then blocked the water off several meters above using bubbles. I placed an inlet pump at the bottom, then used the Rod of Discord and my depth vision to teleport (with a cloud of pink sparkles) to the surface of the pool. Interestingly, all the water soaked into me and my clothes was left behind, leaving me bone dry. At the edge of the pool I set up an outlet pump and connected the two with a wire and linked both to a one second timer. The 'pumps' didn't actually pump the water, the inlet converted it into magic, sent it along the wire, and returned it to normal at the outlet, though for some reason it always created some extra. Absorbing ambient mana maybe?

I teleported back into the rapidly draining section and winced as a seventh of my health drained evenly from across my body with stabbing pains.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot about the rapid teleport penalty on the Rod of Discord,” I said as my Shiny Stone started regenerating me rapidly.

Once I was fully healed, I studied the mana spring through the dropping water level. Now that I knew a bit more, I could tell the concentrated mana was emerging was emerging from a column of mana permeable rock surrounded by fully mana infused rock, which resisted the absorption of more mana, directing the mana further up, and eventually to here.

After the water had completely drained, I pulled my laser drill from my inventory. Then I thought for a moment and decided that 'the more the better' and summoned my drill mount.

I cut straight down through the rock along the track of the mana was flowing through, completely destroying its previous path, and leaving a smooth circular shaft about a two metres wide behind. I suppose I should be glad that the leaking mana had reinforced the stone, as I didn't want any cave-ins while I was down here.

Eventually, after about one and a half vertical kilometres, I reached the point where I could see where the 'capillary' reached the massive mana 'artery', and tunnelled down excitedly to meet it.

As I got closer the rock seemed to become harder and harder, though the only practical change was that it took a few more milliseconds for the drill mount's laser to carve out. I noticed that it was filling a new stack of blocks in my inventory labelled 'Mana Infused Stone' next to the stack labelled 'Mana Permeable Stone'. Testing mana infused materials went on the to-do list.

The instant I breached the side of the mana river the concentration of the mana hit me almost like a blow, rushing round the drill mount as it flooded up the hole, the mana sinking into the rock above the impermeable region and being completely absorbed before it travelled more than a few meters. I fancied I could see the rock becoming harder, then realised I actually could.

The mana flow stabilised around the new exit, even more and more mana pouring through as the flow became smoother and less turbulent.

“Bloody hell!” I exclaimed as I dismissed the drill mount and the mana hit me directly. It felt like being in a sauna with how concentrated it was in the shaft; this was more intense than I had thought it would be. The icon in the top right of my vision seemed to agree, the previously sedate pixelated outwelling of mana now a veritable fountain. Buff: Extreme Mana Density. Mana regeneration and growth of mana pool massively increased. This was awesome! The other effect of the new icon wasn’t so positive however: Debuff: Extreme Mana Density. Losing life due to oversaturation of mana. My large health pool and passive regen was keeping that at bay for the time being, but I could feel the mana still soaking into me, further increasing my oversaturation.

“I guess that means I’m up against the clock then,” I muttered as I got to work lining the shaft with 5cm of Lihzahrd Brick, the hardest substance both in the game and in this world, which I had discovered earlier was a perfect mana insulator. It was actually hard to work in the mana concentration, and I stopped regularly, both to rest and regen my health with the Shiny Stone and to allow the mana to soak into the walls of the shaft to strengthen the rock before placing the Lihzahrd. Not that it needed supporting, I didn't think anything short of a major asteroid strike would even crack the Lihzahrd.

After several hours and surprisingly few blocks of Lihzahrd, only about 250, I reached the top of the shaft. While I was there, and the water wasn't, I also replaced all of the surface bedrock under the Hellstone and marble with obsidian, expanding the foundations in the process, then capped the top of the shaft with a two meter thick chunk of mythril, which had close to 100% mana conductivity. As usual with my building materials, it melded onto its surrounding blocks, forming a water-and-airtight seal that the torrent of mana simply poured straight through. I then demolished the temporary barrier blocking the water, as well as the pumps and the wire linking them.

The raw mana spread in hazy glowing blue streaks through the water. I judged the output to have quadrupled or quintupled from before.