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Erick had a few different directions he could go.

He left all of Lionshard’s conjured pastries there on the balcony table, for now, and decided to go for a swim.

The waters of his new home were deep and clear, feeling delightfully cool on Erick’s skin, with tiny fishes swimming in the depths and larger fishes hunting them. Erick knew practically all of these species, which was a trick of Yggdrasil’s for sure. There were the normal three reservoir fish that one would put into any lake on Veird to make a stable ecosystem all on their own; Rainbow Flits, Goldscale Slippers, Striped Silvertail. Over there were some bigger fish under some lifted geometric roots of Yggdrasil, with most of them being species Erick did not know. The scarlet kings were rather recognizable, though, their flanks flashing red as they ran from Erick, deeper into the roots. Some giant white fish lazily swam in the full open of the waters, its tails and fins looking like wavy smoke in the water. They were probably good eating, based on how utterly thick their flanks were, and how thin their bones were, but Erick left them alone for now.

For now, he backpaddled on the surface of the lake of his new home, staring at the blackhole sun high above everything and everyone, his eyes lazily shifting to the other suns now and again. It was all so colorful. Enchanting, really.

Erick conjured an inflatable ring and sat in it, enjoying the gentle wind upon his skin as he read Yggdrasil’s guidebook of Margleknot under the many suns.

The Fae Enclave was high on his list of places to visit; probably the top place to visit. He’d probably be doing a bunch of shit there with a bunch of asshole fae… But maybe the fae were simply unconcerned with lower worlds, and were therefore uncaring with Nothanganathor and Veird and the Painted Cosmology. That would be a charitable interpretation of them, and Erick decided right now to adopt that interpretation until proven otherwise.

When it came to higher powers shitting on low places, never attribute to malice what can be easily explained through ignorance.

“Obviously Nothanganathor is a deep exception to that rule.” Erick leafed through the book, adding, “And there are other exceptions, too… A lot of exceptions.”

All these ‘evil-aligned’ places were simply greedy, terrible places that deserved complete annihilation or alteration to make them better people. Normally, Erick wouldn’t go that far right away, and he probably wouldn’t if he had them under his power right now, but evil was evil, and he didn’t need to personally experience evil to know it was wrong.

The Dread Arenas, the Slaver’s Den, the Wraithborne Tower.

All of them were individually terrible. They seemed to form the basis of slavery in Margleknot, too, if Erick was reading this right. This guidebook explained that the Tower grabbed people, the Den captured their own people and sold people to all others, and the Arenas were one of the largest purchasers of slaves for their churn of bodies on the arena sands.

Slavery was prevalent among some of the ‘normal’ organizations, though.

The book had a whole section devoted to how all of that worked, because Yggdrasil would have known that Erick would want to tackle that problem even if he didn’t actually have the eternity it would take to end that horror… But he kinda did have eternity. He was a Paradox Wizard. He could solve this problem.

“I could get allies from all of that, too… Multiple ways, actually.”

Erick wasn’t going to buy slaves —fuck no— but he could easily break some of the slavery systems and benefit from that breaking. Free enough people, and inevitably some of them would want to work for you on the side of good. The Sovereign Cities of Veird were rather great examples of that. It took a while and there were still problems, but a lot of good came of that place once Erick and a coalition of nations and powers finally ended their various evils.

But as for Margleknot, the evils here were a lot more ingrained.

Apparently, when the Wraithborne Tower captured any soul at all, and if those people weren’t bought by any of the big-name buyers, they then sold those people back to their friends or patrons, but with bombs attached. Those soul bombs took many forms.

Some soul bombs were simple things that were disabled and disintegrated after paying enough mana/resons/whatever to the Wraithborne Tower. Other than that, those ‘bomb collars’ did nothing except hurt the afflicted person every day with a minor curse, like ‘you stub your toe on every corner of every door’ whenever the person fell behind on payments. If they tried to remove the curse, the collar exploded, of course, but many people simply lived with the curse, opting to wear strong shoes all their lives, or they’d simply cut off their toes, or other various forms of living-with-mutilation.

Many bombs were much more dangerous.

For important souls, like those directly under the command of any strong force in Margleknot, if the Wraithborne Tower captured those people in the resurrection line then those people got fitted with special soul shackles. As an example in Yggdrasil’s book, an underling for someone at the Celestial Observatory, one of the only Good Places in Margleknot, would expect to get slaved with a death collar and no exact commands at all. They would then be told, in person, that they were a forever-hostage of the Wraithborne Tower, and if they took actions against the Tower, then they would die. With the threat delivered and a forever-boot on their neck, they would be released to go back to the Celestial Observatory to simply go about their lives as normal.

Break the collar? Some people could. But not many. It took a lot to break those collars. The Observatory couldn’t actually do it on their own without killing the person and disintegrating half the soul.

Soul sundering was very illegal in Margleknot, as that was a form of killing that was considered ‘real murder’, but true-killing half of a person? Sure, that was fine.

Erick frowned as he read, because if he was reading this right…

“The Wraithborne Tower is clearly evil, but they’re probably the least evil form of evil?” Erick scowled as he had that thought. “They could be doing a lot worse? Holy shit. They could be doing a lot worse. This is why they’re allowed to exist.”

Erick kept reading.

“… And they have lots of money due to their low resurrection costs. People can opt to be resurrected by them for cheap and not wait in the Waiting Room of Margleknot? How long does the Waiting Room take…” Erick flipped through to the prices section. “A thousand resons for a normal res? A waiting period of 10 years?!” He exclaimed, “All they have to do is sign off 10% reson production per day to the Tower and they get free resurrections forever?”

Holy shit.

This was insidious.

The Wraithborne Tower probably had lots of people who approved of everything they did, and just as many who did not…

“Other evils are much more clear-cut.”

The Dread Arenas hosted blood and death sports. Slaves who lost the fights there were Sundered for their resons, as that sort of True Death was acceptable, as per old capital punishment laws. Winners of those slave fights were locked under even more Contract Magics beyond normal slave controls, to keep them fighting forever.

The Slaver’s Den actively went out and captured people and turned them into slaves of all kinds; they weren’t about passive collection of souls from the Waiting Room, like the Wraithborne Tower did.

… And apparently, if Erick went after any of these places, the Veiled Syndicate would send killers his way.

“Those assholes are probably already sending killers my way, though. Assassins gotta assassin.”

So he would murder all of the Veiled Syndicate, too?

Sure.

Why not.

… Erick breathed, and tried to keep his temper under control.

Erick flipped over to other parts of the guidebook, to read up on some good places for a while, to consider where he wanted to go first for help against Nothanganathor.

Eventually Erick set the book into the air and vanished it with a casual thought. It was still there, though, still inside of Erick’s soul. He pulled it in and out of his Benevolence a few times, just to see what he was seeing, and it appeared that Yggdrasil had tied the book to a wavelength of power that correlated to Benevolence, and since Erick was Benevolence, it correlated to him. When the book was dispersed, it was a fog inside of his soul. When it was real, it was in his hand, or wherever he wanted it to be.

It was loosely tied to his Health, it seemed, which was probably an emergent factor of how Erick had created his True Wizard form to be split between Soul, Body, and Mind. Health was physical integrity, and the book was physical when it was instantiated, and thus…

Erick scratched the book with a fingernail, and watched as his Health dropped a few points.

“So that works as expected.”

Erick watched as the book healed its scratch rather easily. He grinned.

“That works as expected, too.”

He put the book away and then hopped into the air. He had instinctively tried to dispel the floating raft with a thought, but that didn’t work because there was no Script to facilitate canceling. So instead, Erick focused on the floating donut raft with his Authority. He flexed his intent.

The raft vanished.

Erick smiled.

With a step and a wrap, Erick landed on his balcony and put his clothes back on. He looked at the various pastries from Lionshard, but he wasn’t hungry at all, which was probably a small problem. Hunger itself was an annoyance some of the time, but it was nice to satiate hunger most of the time. As for other physical needs, Erick wasn’t tired, either, but it felt good to sleep after a hard day’s work.

When Erick made himself he decided he would never be pooping or peeing ever again, but hunger and exhaustion… Hunger and exhaustion were normal, human feelings that Erick should have in order to remain human. He had built some physical needs systems into his True Wizard form, but those systems appeared to be a whole lot less necessary than what would have been considered ‘normal’ hunger and exhaustion.

Erick picked up the great big cinnamon roll from Teressa and took a bite. It was great, just like Jane’s baklava. Erick got a little bit of satiation from that bite of the cinnamon roll, but mostly the feeling passed. He could probably eat and eat and eat forever, and never get full. He was never really hungry, either.

He could fix that, theoretically, but for now, he didn’t and probably couldn’t concern himself with hunger and sleep. He had other concerns. Like whatever tracking system he had within him that Nothanganathor had used in order to drag him before that Wizard trap in front of the sun.

“It’s time to do some Script-tool cleaning, I think.”

How, though?

Erick looked down, through his castle, through the giant root that formed the ground of his property here in the Dragon District, to the line of tangled, darkly prismatic power that flowed through the very center of the kilometers-wide root of Yggdrasil. There were lots of Elements in that flow.

Maybe he could use some of those weird Elements?

Maybe something like Elemental Purity could clean up whatever problems were lurking in his Script Status?

… Maybe he’d use Purity if he found anything extreme. For Malevolence-derived problems, Benevolence should be enough.

“That’s where I’ll start.”

- - - -

Erick sat down on a nice pillow at the bottom of his new mage tower, focusing inward.

It was pretty easy to recognize all of his soul, now that he was a True Wizard.

Mostly, there was the Benevolence-fog. That was his entire being, after all. There were also crystalline structures inside of that fog, like multidimensional shards of purpose, each slowly moving around each other, some very slightly spinning, others more fixed in place, all of them arranged in some sort of hyperdimensional causality. It was all easy to recognize once Erick actually sat down to recognize it, though.

There were his spells, each of the basic spells of all types looking exactly as Erick expected; like multidimensional crystals in the shape of gridwork. Some were more complicated than others, of course.

[Force Bolt] was a relatively simple collection of triggers and joinings and intent.

[Cleanse] was an incredibly complex arrangement of Elemental Destruction and Book and checks and alterations everywhere. That bit of Elemental Book operated on at least a thousand, maybe 1500 different axes, but it was also not nearly complex enough for what [Cleanse] could actually do. Erick peered deeper into that multi-fractal Book and saw triggers for what appeared to be ‘live air’ and ‘bad air’, and ‘good water’ versus ‘bad water’. The Book had hookups for much, much larger systems, which Erick assumed was the Script, and he probably assumed right.

“Because ‘bad air’ and ‘good water’ don’t actually make sense at all,” Erick said to himself, “They’re actually more like conceptual, generic triggers.”

It was exceedingly interesting to see, exactly, what made [Cleanse] so special.

In fact… Within a moment of gazing upon [Cleanse], for real, for the first time, Erick decided it was a fucking masterpiece of magic. Erick had a hard time coming up with any other example of magic he had ever seen that matched the beauty of the 10-mana-cost-construct that was [Cleanse]. This little thing was useful under so many different scenarios!

Even outside of the Script!

Erick checked out a bunch of other spells. [Grow] was barely anything compared to [Cleanse], but it had multivariable Book in there, too, in order to differentiate from certain types of growing intent. [Mend] was rather impressive, but it was nothing compared to [Cleanse]…

Not much matched up to [Cleanse], actually.

Erick’s big Particle Spells were all solid jumbles of Book and Force magic in a shaped mass that could be called ‘Particle Magic’. They were solidly-made crystal almost-spheres. They were all kinda… simple, really. Complicated in effect, yes. But simple in execution.

Take [Condense Oxygen], for example. There was some Book to designate ‘oxygen’, and the rest was Force and what appeared to be some [Ward] Magic.

“Ah. The spherical stuff is [Ward] magic. Yes. I see that now.”

The more Erick looked, the more he saw repetitions everywhere. Everything was built, at its base, upon a few different things. [Ward], for the designation of a space if a spell had space to it. Book, if the spell was complicated, and even if the mana was simple. And various different types of mana triggers.

[Stoneshape] was [Ward] for space, Book to conceptualize ‘rock’ as ‘rock’, and [Elemental Stone] for more general targeting. All the Shaping spells were like that, but different.

There weren’t many spells that had no Book in them.

Book seemed to form the basis of the entire Script.

Looking at his basic, True Wizard self, Erick was vaguely surprised to see that Benevolence had coalesced into Book-like shapes in order to allow him to have his current Status, giving him his three avenues of experience, of Health, Mana, and Psyche. He wasn’t too surprised at that, because that’s sort of how he had envisioned the whole thing. It was all made of Benevolence, but it functioned as Book here and there.

Erick left his Benevolence Status alone and poked around a bit at the multi-fractal crystals that were his Script Status.

Some of them were linked to others. [Force Bolt] had a base form, yes, but that base form was somehow also inside all of his various other Bolt spells he had made over the many years. [Fire Bolt], [Slow Bolt], and even [Inevitable Bombardment] had [Force Bolt]’s original spell at its center… And also off on its own, at the same time.

Erick smiled. “Just a little bit of paradox in the system.”

This is what enabled people to be able to use the same base spell to create higher tier spells without using up the base spell. Erick had long known, in a general way, the mechanism by which this happened, but seeing how it worked within himself was pretty awesome. It gave him some ideas for making his own soul-imbued spells.

“It won’t be as easy as simply casting a new spell and letting the Script make it up for me, though.”

He would need to force Benevolence into Book-like shapes on purpose…

Which was interesting.

Anyway.

Moving on.

Erick could stare into his soul for a long time and probably discover a lot about a lot, but he was here to figure out what Nothanganathor had put into him, through the Script. Erick had been drawn to that Wizard trap the very moment he Ascended, before his full ascension could truly coalesce, which meant there was a marker somewhere. It couldn’t be a marker from the Script itself, because Erick hadn’t been inside the Script when he Ascended. So it had to have been a marker inside his soul.

That was one of the main reasons that he needed to get away from Veird in order to ascend; to get away from any possible trap laid by Nothanaganathor. The trap was already inside Erick, though, and it had probably been there for a very long time. There was probably a trap in everyone’s soul on Veird.

“Now if I was putting a marker into someone, where would I put it?” Erick answered himself, “I would put it into the most complicated thing that was specifically meant to get rid of me.”

Erick looked to [Cleanse].

It was arguably his favorite spell. His very first spell, too. He had bought it after Melemizargo had thrown him and Jane onto the Surface of Veird, during Purodahlia’s chase of them across the sands of the Crystal Forest. Jane had theorized that ‘the dragon must have scent marked us, and that’s why there are no monsters’, and then Erick had taken that idea and run with it once Purodahlia seemed drawn to them, buying [Cleanse] with his very first point, because [Cleanse] read ‘Purge an area equal to the level of the spell in meters of all Toxins, Disease, Filth, and Corruption.’ and ‘corruption’ might have meant ‘dark dragon smell’.

It had been a gamble back then to buy this spell and try and use it to throw off ‘the black spiker’.

But it had worked.

Maybe that had been Benevolence fucking with the past? Maybe.

Erick peered deep into the Book crystal that was [Cleanse], looking for something Red—

He found it.

Almost instantly, once he was looking for it, there it was.

Erick inhaled sharply, his eyes practically slapping open. “Oh shit. It’s really there.” And then he closed his eyes again and concentrated, muttering, “It’s also odd that I can see my soul so much better now, too. That’s probably the Script purposefully fucking up [Soul Sight], and the unknowability of the soul.”

Or maybe Malevolence made it harder to look at the soul properly, too, and everyone assumed that was just how souls were in the New Cosmology? Maybe.

It took Erick a minute to get back into the proper frame-shift to see his soul again.

Soon enough, Erick gazed into the fractal-oriented-crystal that was [Cleanse], looking for the Red—

There it was. A single note in a long book of options…

It was the spine of the book itself. Half of the spine. The other half was normal Book, and maybe even a connection to the Script to expand that Book. Hard to say exactly what was going on there, but the Malevolence was there inside [Cleanse].

Erick wondered if this was why [Cleanse] was one of the spells that they told you to never experiment with at all, because experimenting with [Cleanse] was one of the easiest ways to kill oneself.

“… Probably.”

Erick wasn’t sure if he could remove the Red without damaging the entire spell. The crystal looked like it would just come apart if he touched it…

He could do this, though.

Maybe he could replace Malevolence with Benevolence?

Erick smiled. Yeah. He could do that.

Worst-case scenario, he could [Return]…

He paused.

Erick came back to himself and decided to run other tests before he mucked around with [Cleanse]. He stood up and grabbed the pillow and tossed it to the side of the room. Then he [Return]ed.

The pillow was back at his feet and he was sitting down upon the pillow again, half looking at [Cleanse] and half shifting back to normal senses.

So [Return] worked normally here? Sure. At this small of a test [Return] worked normally.

Erick went fully into himself and looked at [Inevitable Bombardment]; a rather complicated spell that would cast [Force Bomb]s into the sky and then take a while to rain them down onto a target, giving Erick time to threaten the target and make them give up before the spell obliterated them. It wasn’t an effective spell for multiple reasons. Erick didn’t like threatening people, primarily. He had used the spell a few times, though.

It would be okay if he fucked up this spell; an acceptable loss.

He tore the spell apart, releasing all the underlying spells below the top layer of crystal. [Force Bolt] and all the others he used to make the top layer spell seemed fine.

He rapidly came back to himself and [Return]ed.

Once again inside his soul, Erick looked at [Inevitable Bombardment], and it looked fine.

Success! He could disturb the spell and then [Return] and have the spell return to its previous form.

Erick concentrated on [Inevitable Bombardment], at the part which looked sort of like a multiplicative part of the spell, which came from the base form of [Force Crash], declaring 15 copies of the spell would rain down on a target from afar. That ‘15 copies’ looked easy enough to alter; it was just 15 tiny pips in the Booking.

Erick flexed his intent at the spell, adding five more pips.

It was a massive change.

For a moment, the soul spell crystal looked about ready to truly shift. Maybe even crack in half. But it stabilized. The overall spell cost of the entire thing felt like it was going to cost a lot more, though. The original spell was around 1475 mana. This one was maybe 500 more. Maybe only 400 more? Hard to say. Multi-dimensional crystals weren’t exactly easy things to completely understand even for Erick with his Intelligence and Perception and Concentration.

“This might work, though.”

Erick opened his eyes and went out to the top of his mage tower, to look out across the world.

He pressed the button that was the 1900-ish mana cost spell in his soul and [Inevitable Bombardment] splashed into the air high above, 20 sparkling orbs of Force and Benevolence hanging out in the air, doing nothing much at all.

The spell was a bit white with Benevolence.

It should not be white.

“… So there’s Benevolence in there now. That’s from me using Benevolence to add 5 more bombs, isn’t it.”

Erick attempted to cancel the spell, but that simply wasn’t happening. Canceling was a function of the Script. So Erick swiped at the spells with a casual tendril of Benevolence Body empowered with Mana Siphon. The first bombs burst, but Erick realized what he was doing wrong with the first ones, so he fully enveloped the rest and ate them like an amoeba eating pop rocks.

They tasted kinda forceful, which was an odd thing to both experience and realize that he made himself experience that. He was literally tasting magic? How?

Erick threw some more bombs into the air and purposefully thought ‘do not taste these’.

And he ate those spells without tasting them.

So taste is linked to anything I want to link it to, or to which I accidentally consider myself to be thinking in that direction at the wrong time. Not sure how I feel about that.

Anyway.

Experiment successful, and he discovered he could taste magic if he wanted.

Erick went back to his tower, sat his ass on the pillow, and dove inward.

[Cleanse] was a multi-dimensional jenga, Erick decided, as he really got down to the nitty gritty of the spell. This Malevolence infection was like roots spread all throughout the jenga tower. Removing half of the spine out of the Book part of the spell without collapsing the tower was simply too complicated of a task. Doing what Erick wanted to do would be like extracting the circulatory system for an entire person without killing them, and then putting down a new circulatory system also without killing them.

Pretty impossible.

Luckily, Erick was a cheater.

His first attempt was the fast one; the simple rip and tear and slamming of Benevolence into [Cleanse].

Didn’t work. Whole thing collapsed, half of it spiraling out into nothing, the other half coming up with Red he had tried to pull out.

[Return].

This time when he went to pull apart the Malevolence, he injected Benevolence into the very edges, like a hundred small tendrils trying to flow into the Red circulatory system and gradually replace it.

The Malevolence turned into a living thing, ripping and tearing apart the spell all on its own. It even tried to escape Erick, to get out into the real world, as if such a thing were possible. Maybe it was? Whatever the case, Erick had the solution to that problem.

[Return].

The Third attempt had Erick using a bit of Time Magic to freeze [Cleanse] in place. How did this work? It just did, okay. Erick told himself that much, and it helped solidify that yes, this was possible, and yes, this did actually work. Within a cage of immovable Time, Erick injected Benevolence into the Red, and the Red thrashed. It failed to do anything besides thrash, though—

And then suddenly it tried to escape, to pull away, to flow into the part of the spell that should have hooked into the Script, but there was just a hole into the real world there. Erick let the Red go. He focused on filling in the gaps the Red left behind with Benevolence.

The very second the Red fully pulled out of [Cleanse], Erick fully filled in the spell with Benevolence, replacing what Malevolence tried to break in its escape.

And then it was done. The soul crystal of [Cleanse] was intact. It would probably function more or less the same way, too. Erick imagined that what he had just done was sort of what he had done with his [Lodestar] when he made Benevolence; he had made [Lodestar] work off of Benevolence instead of Light through Establishing Wizardry.

This right here was more manually-done than through Wizardry, though.

Anyway!

Erick opened his eyes.

A Red beast made of Malevolence, like living lightning, roared as it brought claws of sparks down on Erick, trying to rend him apart. It had already caused some superficial damage to Erick’s clothes and the room itself. It looked like someone had released an explosion inside the room that then proceeded to scratch the hell out of all the stone it could reach. But it wasn’t doing any real damage.

It slashed at him again.

It accomplished nothing.

The Red Lightning monster reminded Erick a lot of Fyuri’s apocalypse beast form on the first floor of the Glittering Depths, but more lightning and less physical. It was actually all lightning. Living red lightning.

Erick debated with himself if he should trap the thing or kill it. Maybe he could… use it somehow? Maybe later for some reason? Or just kill it? He almost wanted to try his new [Cleanse] on the beast. But. No.

Erick sealed the room with a flicker of Authority. The windows were still open. The doors were still open. But the entire room solidified, the walls repairing. The floor unmarring. All Red lightning soot vanished, and the beast itself suddenly turned quiet and docile. It lay down under the oppression of Erick’s Authority.

Maybe it was intelligent?

“Can you understand me?”

The thing looked at Erick with eyes made of red lightning.

It said nothing. It did nothing,

Erick packed up his pillow and moved to the room above to check out his new [Cleanse]. The monster remained contained below.

[Cleanse] was looking pretty great. Erick had no idea what it was capable of, but he cast the spell on the air of his house, and on his left arm, and on the ground, and on the waters of the lake below, and he experienced nothing untoward. No bad effects. He scraped off some skin and copied it a bunch, making a mess of flesh and dust and oils that he spread out onto a stone parapet of the house, which he then [Cleanse]ed away. Thick, sort of whitish air, flowed away from the mess.

… White air?

Hmm.

Erick copied some of himself until he got a whole bathtub full of his own blood and flesh and ickiness. He floated the mess in a tub of [Force Wall].

He hit it with a [Cleanse].

The nastiness turned into whitish, thick air and flowed away onto the stone of the house. It didn’t leave any growing plant life at all, so it wasn’t really Benevolence in there, but the eternal stonewood that was the house seemed to soak up the fog rather well. Erick watched the entire trip of the white fog as it flowed into the waters, or into the root, and either spread out, or siphoned into the twisting intentless mana that flowed through the very core of the root under the house.

“So it’s mana, but visible, because it's thick… but why is it white now?”

It was not Benevolence. That much was clear. If it was Benevolence it would have caused plant growth.

It was just Benevolence... colored…

Well. One of the functions of [Cleanse] was to balance the manasphere. Was the manasphere more balanced now? Erick cast an orb of Benevolence into the air, along with several other overlapping and very much not balanced orbs at all. Fire, Water, Air, Lightning, Stone, Metal, and Blood, all hung in the same space as each other; each of them bright as shit and dense with power.

[Cleanse].

Every single orb that was not Benevolence was transformed, at least partially, into white fog that flowed away. Of the various orbs, they were rather balanced now, but they were all muted down from radiant power to something lesser, and more in line with each other. Other Elements were in there now, too. Erick easily picked out Shadow from the grouping, as well as all the various Shadow-ish and Light-ish Elements.

“… [Cleanse] truly balances the mana now, eh?” Erick looked at the balanced space of mana again, adding, “But Benevolence is still dominant.” Erick put his hands on his hips, saying, “Well yeah. I guess so. Fulfill the basic functionality of the spell, but also don’t let it be used against Malevolence…” And now Erick was furious, because a very evil truth of [Cleanse] was revealed in that moment. “[Benevolent Cleanse] is white because it uses Benevolence as a vector for mana altering. [Malevolent Cleanse] is made with Malevolence, so all we see is the thick air. When [Malevolent Cleanse] is used, it balances the world, but now Malevolence is the dominant mana in the air because now everything else is balanced to lesser functions. You literally balance to Red. Fuck you, Nothanganathor.”

Erick had to step back for a moment.

Because wow.

That right there. That was flooring him. Nothanganathor had managed to make [Cleanse] evil, and Erick had never noticed it. One of the best spells Erick had ever known and one of his favorite spells and the one spell that Erick would have given to Earth if he could have…

Erick breathed, then said, “Fuck you, Nothanganathor.”

Erick sat down for a while, thinking.

Then he went cleansing out more of his Script spells. What else had Nothanganathor fucked with?

A lot, probably.

- - - -

Among the spells Erick thought could be better, were all his Rift Magic spells.

Rift Magic was supposed to open actual Rifts into other planes of existence, but all the Rift Magic of the Script did was let loose with a pouring of mana. Therefore, there were artificial limits upon Rift Magic. Were those Malevolent limits? Maybe.

Erick found more Red in those spells.

Rift was not basic magic, though. It was higher tier magic. All of it came out at least tier 3 or 4, and that’s what all of Erick’s Rift spells were, too. The Script had injected Malevolence into Rift in order to make it not work right.

Rozeta probably didn’t even know.

Erick ripped Malevolence out of his Rift Magic and ended up with more Red Beasts. He did not fill up all the rest of his tower with more Red Beasts, but he did put a few down in the second floor of his 12 story mage tower. He used [Cleanse] on most of the littler fuckers, and it worked. The beasts went poof! A lot of white air from those guys.

Erick smiled at that.

Nothanganathor had fucked up [Cleanse] for everyone on Veird, but Erick’s [Cleanse] was great for fucking up Nothanganathor.

“Ahhh… It’s delightful, actually. Love it.”

He didn’t manage to make any Rifts into other planes of existence, though. Instead, when Erick cast [Major (Benevolent) Sunlight Rift], he got a brilliance of radiance and a solid wall of white beyond the rift’s surface that sort of reminded Erick of a certain tree son’s bark—

And Yggdrasil stepped into the room.

“Hello, Father,” Yggdrasil said. “You can only go into the realm of your own mana here in Margleknot. It’s the same-ish sort of restriction that is on Veird, actually, but a whole lot more stubborn. I directly oversee this. Please don’t go making gate networks, though.”

“Ah. Well. Okay— Did you know that [Cleanse] has Malevolence inside of it?”

“Yes. Rozeta discovered that maybe 6 months ago, their time. I figured it out right when you gave me that Gift.” Yggdrasil said, “Anyway! Gotta go. Go check out some of those places, Father. Do you want to give any messages to the people back on Veird?” He rapidly added, “But if you give them messages you will be in breach of laws you don’t know about, which will impair your ability to effectively fight Nothanganathor.”

Erick didn’t have to think much at all before he said, “They’ll be fine without me for a while, right?”

“… I can’t give you much specific news, but I can give you a lot of general news.” Yggdrasil paused, then said, “There are wars happening over the upper layers of the New Surfaces because many different people were rescued from side realities that were rather unique. The minotaur nation, in particular, is the largest example of that. They’re half a million strong now because they’re from a universe where you turned yourself into a minotaur to escape problems. As a minotaur, you developed [Reincarnation] along those lines, specifically. They’re basically a splinter of House Benevolence and they moved up to the topmost New Surface, below the Shining Layers. The you that was with them is four years dead. Minotaur Jane is dead, too.

“Avandrasolaro is going scorched land on all Forever War events. Solomon has joined him in that decision. Those wars have been minimized because of those decisions, reverting a potential world war down to the Quiet War again.

“Jane, Abigail, Beth, Candice, and Evan are all doing great… And that’s probably too many specifics.

“There are problems. They’re solvable.” Yggdrasil said, “Go solve them from here. You’re pretty much done with your Script spells, right? I can’t really tell anymore.”

Erick breathed deep, then said, “I did a first pass. I suppose… I could visit the Celestial Observatory?”

Yggdrasil grinned. “You’ve got a lot of options, Father—” He looked away. “You have about a million requests for an audience. I advise you to disregard all of them, or order them in a way that you wish. You’ll figure it out. Love you.”

And then he stepped backward and was gone.

Erick paused for a moment, and then he looked around his property, his senses going wide.

“Ah,” Erick said. Requests gathered upon the air around the gate at the front of the property, like individual stars, not a single one of them discernible from the other in any true way. “… I have to impose my own organization on them, then.”

He was mostly done with his Script searching. Or at least a first pass. He had cleaned up his Rift magic, [Cleanse], Time spells, and various protection magics. Not a single Benevolence spell had any Red in it, which was great…

Yeah.

First pass done.

Time to get moving.

Erick stepped out of the tower, down to the archway that led to the dark crystal lands and buildings of the edge of the Dragon District. The only things really visible beyond the gate were blurs of people walking this way or that and the solid buildings that they inhabited. It was the same sort of effect that Erick saw when he looked at the properties of his neighbors; he could see land and shapes, but not really people at all. Or anything that moved, really.

Erick turned his attention to the stars beside the gate.

There were a million of them, or some number close to that. Yggdrasil had been rounding when he said a million, for sure. Erick wasn’t about to count them all, and many of them were tiny balls of light centimeters across while others were mere pinpricks, and a lot of them overlapped as they gently hung there, waiting to be plucked.

He picked one at random to focus on. It was blueish and two centimeters across.

It was a construct of magic not wholly unlike a [Force Bolt]. There was a delivery system, and then a payload in the middle. The delivery system was the size of the ball of light. The payload was a… a very large message in the center, if Erick was reading that correctly.

He checked out a few more messages.

The larger the ball, the bigger the message.

Erick wasn’t about to touch the largest of them to experiment with, but he could pick out some of the smaller ones. He focused on a dim yellow pinprick of light, moving to touch it, and all the other competing messages swirled away slightly, like fish scared off as the hunter picked out a single one of them. He touched the message.

The message popped into a tiny light show with three short, green girls in coveralls and wielding hammers and wands. They happily exclaimed, “Congratulations to the new founder of Margleknot! Come visit Gombomblin’s Trading Emporium in the Aetherium Bazaar if you want some explosive power! Gombomblin’s! For all your pure-tech-based explosive needs! From finger-sized nuclear to antimatter worldbusters to other stuff, we got it all!”

A tiny map made of light populated the air with a glowing yellow star in the center. The map flashed and turned into a physical map which then folded itself down to pocket-sized, to hang in the air.

Erick smiled and plucked the map out of the air, saying, “Bombs are worrying, but that’s really cute.”

He could have used his Lightning Path to figure out which messages were the most important, or rather, which ones would be the best for him to answer to create good outcomes, but he decided to muddle through the search for a little while, just to see what everything was. A small blue star unfurled into an invitation to a gala at some ‘House of Lords’ in the mortal lands. A slightly larger pink star became a light show inviting Erick to come visit another shop, this one selling magical goods.

A grey star unfurled into a virus that tried to enter Erick’s flesh but hit his Health instead, draining a good 15,000 Health with a single slip of an attack. Erick crushed it utterly, and then [Return]ed. The grey star was there once again. This time Erick… Just crushed it, actually. His Lightning Path wasn’t pointed in that direction at all, so there was no need to care about the attack.

He moved on.

The next message Erick poked open ended up being a request for money. It was framed as an investment opportunity, but if random solicitations were the culture around making business connections in Margleknot, then Erick wanted no part of that culture.

The next hundred messages were all pretty cute, or daring, or an attack, or just some random ‘congrats!’ from some people he didn’t know at all, but which his memory locked on to, in case he did need to know them in the future. He probably didn’t, though.

Erick decided to use his Lightning Path.

107 little stars lit up, some of them looking like major groundings for Erick’s Lightning Path. Most were small strikes for his Path, that seemed to be less powerful options.

… Erick tried something. He waved a hand, exerting his Authority over this space—

The messages separated into groups and all the ones he picked out were suddenly organized from top to bottom; most most-important to least most-important.

Authority was rather nice.

… Erick turned back toward his house, and looked at the sky.

With a wave of his hand, the sky of Margleknot vanished, and a blue sky with white clouds appeared.

“Oh yeah. That’s… That’s pretty nice. But…”

Erick simply willed the sky back to showing its true nature—

“Ah. The suns were a false sky, too, eh?”

What appeared was not the black hole sun and the rainbow of other suns that had been up there. What appeared were ten thousand lands, all of them jumbled on top of each other, cityscapes intersecting other cityscapes intersecting mountain ranges and oceans and deserts and skies beyond. Waterways flowing at odd angles. Wind moving this way and that. Planets of cities that looked like something Escher would draw rather than any real imagery of any real land.

He saw some places that Yggdrasil’s guidebook mentioned, though. There was the ‘towering, crystalline palace’ of the Fae Enclave, looking like a shard of countless perfect crystals all lined up in a single direction, spearing through all of the non-euclidean space; a bar of white and blue crossing all of Margleknot.

Spearing perpendicular across that Fae Enclave was a solid line of silver with countless etchings upon its surface. Could that be the Quantum Nexus Hub? The guidebook had mentioned the QNH as a ‘sprawling, futuristic tower at the center of Margleknot’. And here were two towers at the center of Margleknot? One was the Enclave, so this one had to be the QNH. Sure, why not.

At the crossing of the two opposed lines of power, there were worlds.

Erick stepped away from the gate to his house, to go up his property a little. He laid down on the soft mosses and grasses.

Erick stared at the sky for a long while.

There was a lot to see.

A while later, maybe an hour or seven, Erick got back up and went to the messages. He had seen a lot in the sky, and his Lightning Path had shown him how parts of it connected to the messages right here. Erick plucked out one of the bigger messages and let it play.

It had been a bright grey and red star, about two centimeters across.

And now it was a cry for help, depositing 8 different books onto the ground, 34 different folders filled with tactical information of various entities, and thousands of maps, a few of which were very large and rather intricate. A message played in the air in the form of a lightward, as though it were a Screen spell. A rather average-looking elfin woman with long ears and bright red eyes and hair appeared in the image.

“Hello…” The woman paused, looking at someone off screen. She whispered, “Is it on— It’s on. Ah. Fuck. We can re-record it.” The woman looked at the camera, breathed, then said, “Hello, Father of Margleknot. I represent an organization of mageknights of the world of Abarial, a former nexus world located on Layer 172,287,913.

“We are very far from Margleknot, I realize this, but until very recently, within the last thousand years, our worlds were doing fine. Better than fine. We had 7 colonized planets in our Abarial system and had begun to expand throughout our layer. We were a nexus world at the further edges of Margleknot’s roots.

“And then something broke between The Great City at the Center and propagated to us, and Margleknot broke connection to our world and 187 more worlds in our nexus in order to preserve the whole. We do not begrudge Margleknot their decision. It was a normal enough decision that happens to lands without world trees, which are only tenuously connected in the first place. It happens.

“It can also usually be repaired.

“We thought we could repair the problem on our end, but we cannot. The pillars are crumbling. The fountains are running dry. The storm is dying, and we have no fuel for the fire. We have only been able to send out this message because of the vast changes of Margleknot into this new form have revitalized a small part of our connection. That revitalization will not spread. It is already fading.

“Our nexus is dying.

“Our billions of people face extinction, and we have thus-far been unable to reconnect to Margleknot except through these most expensive of messages. We have no idea what the problem is. A thousand years have passed since the Degradation began, and none of our people have been able to find out anything solid; anything more than what we have in the books and papers we are sending with this message. With a prayer to the Universe, we hope and pray this message finds you in a charitable mood, for we have had to empty a world of life, evacuating all the people we could, in order to pay to bring this message to you now.

“Please help us, Father of Margleknot, and our gathered worlds will become your staunchest allies in all of your needs, forevermore.” The woman paused in prayer to the camera. And then she said to a person off camera, “That was good, but I need to do better. This thing could actually work, couldn’t it?”

Another voice said, “It could work; if this isn’t some old cousin’s tale. I’m not convinced we’re not deluding ourselves.”

The woman laughed. She smiled, and then she focused, saying, “Okay. Going again.” The woman breathed in, and then looked to the camera—

The message cut off.

Erick said to Yggdrasil, “She wasn’t able to make a different message?”

Yggdrasil stood beside Erick, frowning at the stilled image on the message. “I suppose not.”

“They seemed to think this wouldn’t work… But it did? Do you know what happened there?”

“No. My memories of this problem are fragmented. Abarial was never properly connected, and they liked it that way. Their original settlers of that distant land were like frontiersmen, building where I specifically was not, just so that they could have their own say in everything. Part of the problem of making decisions like that is that sometimes… Systems fail. I’m looking at the connection right now, though…” Yggdrasil looked away.

Erick waited.

“Dead line. Anything past layer 50,000 is rather far and they were all the way past layer 172 million. The problem there broke at a world on layer 102 million which was little more than an outpost for Margleknot. Someone destroyed it. Still hasn’t gotten repaired. These mageknights needed to send their message using… Ah. They sacrificed some mages and an entire world—” Yggdrasil said, “A moon. I think. Hard to know.” He looked away. “They used Rituals of Sacrifice to get the message to Layer 0, but it was an imperfect Sacrifice. I believe… They didn’t Sacrifice anything. Ah. Yes. That’s the problem. They used a catastrophe to send the message. They didn’t actually Sacrifice anything. They had lemons so they made lemonade.”

The scale of it got to Erick again.

“You deal with problems like this all the time?”

“Yes, and I need to get back to them. This particular problem is a systemic problem, and is very much better solved systemically. Maybe talk to Lionshard about it? I would advise against trying to pop over to their layer. It only takes a second to get through layers, but that’s crossing 172 million layers, not to mention part of the universe, too. That would take centuries. You could always go back in time once you got there, of course, but time would still pass here in Margleknot.” Yggdrasil warned, “Time always passes in Margleknot when a person is not here. No one can ever come back here right after they leave.”

“Heard and understood.” Erick asked, “How does anything get around at all in any reasonable amount of time?”

“It doesn’t. Everything gets around very slowly, father, or not at all.” Yggdrasil said, “I have to go—”

“Before you do that— Are you raising Benevolence slimes? For more elemental Benevolence?”

“By Foundational Decree, I cannot raise monsters for mana. I have to raise people.” Yggdrasil said, “There’s nothing stopping you from making a Benevolence Dungeon except for the lack of Dark here, and dungeon slimes, and all of that. Want some space to make an old fashioned dungeon?”

Erick easily said, “Yes. I’ll take that space.”

Yggdrasil smiled. “Good. I’ve added ‘The Benevolence Tower’ to the guidebook. Only you can get there right now, or until you open it. I ask that you don’t open it until we talk when you’re done, though— And now I really do have to go. Talk to Lionshard!”

And then Yggdrasil turned and vanished.

Erick collected the various books and stuff on the ground, set them inside his house after reading them, and went to go see Lionshard.

- - - -

“You’re here so soon! I’m so delighted! Come on in, come on in. My home is your home.”

Erick walked past a doorway that hadn’t been there until just now, freshly delineating the space between Erick’s lake property and Lionshard’s regal-looking property, with its small hedges and fountains and white castle in the distance. Lionshard stood beside a fountain, smiling brightly, looking pleased as a cat with the chicken. Some gardeners were working on the hedges. Some other people were clipping down branches from the trees to shape them better.

“Thank you for the invitation,” Erick said, looking at all the people, and then at Lionshard— and then at the sky. It was a dual-sun sky, with one sun bright silver and the other gold. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a gold or silver sun.”

Lionshard smiled, saying, “They’re from my home world. One is Fate, the other Choice.”

Erick looked to the suns again. He said, “The one back on Veird is Malevolence, but I didn’t know that until recently.”

Lionshard nodded. “Unless I am deceived, you appear to have discovered a whole bunch of new stuff since last we spoke. I do hope you stay in Margleknot for a long while, before you go back. Or at least you come back as quickly as possible. We could use a man like you around this place.”

Erick chuckled lightly, some of his nerves fading. “Thank you for making this conversation happen quickly. I wasn’t quite sure if it was proper or not to just go for the information requests, or if we needed to spend a few hours talking about the weather first.”

Lionshard nodded. “Let’s at least move to the tea room, and then we can talk about everything you wish to know. Usually I like to walk places, but I can step places, too, in the interest of haste, for I am rather sure you wish to be hasty?”

“Please.”

Lionshard nodded, and stepped to the door of his castle, moving a kilometer in a flash.

Erick joined him.

The great platinum doors opened and Erick walked with Lionshard to a nice room in the suns, overlooking the gardens. A servant walked by and delivered tea and cookies to a table and Lionshard sat down and sipped the tea first. Erick joined him. The tea was brown, but also gold.

It tasted literally divine.

Erick’s eyes went wide. “Fantastic tea?”

Lionshard chuckled. “It is quite good. It’s sunglow tea, and I have played a very small trick on you. Most people can’t enjoy this tea because it would burn them up with power, but True Wizards with entire worlds worshiping them have the capability to become gods, and to test for that, we have this tea. It’s either explosive or bad or delicious or truly the best thing ever, depending on how close you are to godhood, which is why I have done this test; godhood is not great.” He added, “It’s obviously not truly delicious to you; you would know if it was.”

Erick looked at the tea again. He sipped it again. “Pretty good. I give it an 8 out of 10.” He set the tea down, saying, “It seems that you know everything about me, now.”

“Not everything, but I did look you up a lot after I left. I am glad we got to have our first conversation untainted by knowledge, but there’s a lot of knowledge here now, and so we must as we must.”

“So what’s this godhood test about? Veird, or…? Not Veird, then.” Erick scrunched his face. “Yggdra— Margleknot?”

Lionshard said, “A deep set of truths, first.

“Gods are rather powerful, but limited at the same time. A god can do practically anything that their believers can believe they can do and a whole lot more within specific Portfolios. Gods arise from collective belief given solid form. They affect the universe to stabilize the universe around them.

“Ascended arise from individuals, and are therefore able to act on their own.

“Margleknot turns every power that touches him into resons, into foundational strength.

“This includes divinity.

“Margleknot is like a god, but not actually a god. Margleknot is technically Ascended. In practice, he is the best of both powers. He can act outside of what people believe of him. That’s what world trees do.

“Margleknot, because of his base ability to turn everything into solid resons, will never become a god.

“People like you and I need to be careful, or else we might become gods and have the weight of a universe telling us who we ought to be. This is the Curse of Power. It has other names, but that’s one of the big ones.

“It’s easy enough to forgo godhood for most people. Just put on a different set of horns every time you go out into the world to do good. Or never actually show yourself to people, properly. I choose the second path.

“This business with Abarial, located on Layer 172,287,913, if you would do the work to reconnect yourself, has the capability to change you into a god whether you wish for it or not. This would strip you of all your individuality and you would be making choices based on the ideas of you that people have in their heads.

“Or at least you would be subject to that, if you were a normal Ascended.

“While you are here in this city, Margleknot siphons off all of your divinity from you, turning it into resons. It’s the same sort of system he has for all us Old Dragons here in this district. We can all hide out indefinitely while our homeworlds and layers either move on, forgetting about us, and the Curse of Power goes away, or simply gets stronger and we are practically confined to this land.” Lionshard said, “This siphon of your proto-divinity vanishes if you step out of Margleknot, or Veird, in your case.

“If you helped Abarial, as yourself, then you become even more subject to this Curse of Power. But if you worked the backpowers, and no one knows that you helped them at all, then you can avoid the Curse of Power altogether, and you can remain yourself. Whatever way you choose to move forward, since your reveal as the Father of Margleknot, leaving the power of Margleknot is probably going to have you brushing up against godhood rather fast, so just stay within the first thousand layers of this universe and you’ll probably be good. If you help Abarial as yourself, then you won’t be able to step past the first 500 layers of this universe, and since you’d already be at layer 172 million plus, then you would ascend to godhood rather fast.

“Save several places like the Abarial nexus and you become a god as soon as you step out of the Old Dragon District; you can’t even visit the main city.”

Erick thought.

Lionshard sipped his tea.

Erick said, “Okay. That sounds like good advice. How do I work the backpowers? I don’t want to become a god.”

Lionshard grinned wide. “I’m glad you asked! The first lesson is this: We Ascended help each other without telling the mortals about our community help. So if I help you, you never tell anyone I helped you.”

“… Sure. I can do that— Okay. This is weird. I am usually a very open person.”

“I know. I read your biography.”

“… I have a biography?”

“Would you like to read it?”

“… Yes.”

Lionshard pulled an expensive-looking tome out of the air, handing it over, saying, “Here you go. I have my own copies. I’m sure a lot of other people have lesser ideas of who you are, too, though they didn’t get that knowledge from me.”

The tome was platinum-bound with beaten metal that read ‘Erick Flatt, True Wizard of Benevolence, True Father of Margleknot/Yggdrasil’ in fancy script. The inside pages were thin as light, and strong as steel—

“That one updates in real time based on edited observations of Margleknot. I ask you to keep it in your private collection here in the Old Dragon District, in your deepest vaults.” Lionshard stood. “But for now, would you like to see how to change the universe for the better without leaving your house?”

Erick suddenly laughed, the idea of being a hermit and helping the universe anyway kinda hilarious, and then he stood, saying, “I already planned on making a Benevolence Dungeon for Yggdrasil here in Margleknot. I assume, since you’re head of mana mining operations here in Margleknot, that your suggestions would fall along some path like that?”

“Oh yes. Resons make the universe,” Lionshard said, nodding. “But let’s go see what that actually means.”

- - - -

The orrery was a massive room of stone walls with a dome ceiling that was absolutely filled with glowing lights and twirling flows. It reminded Erick a lot of the orrery inside the Wizard’s Tower inside the Core Lands of Veird, but different. The core orrery was a gravestone made of solid metal. This here was a place of magic and mana and things that didn’t feel like mana at all. There was power here, and only parts of it contained particles at all. Half of the room was awash in not-particles, and not-mana, and Erick’s eyes felt like they should have hurt to gaze upon the unknowable thing he was now staring at.

And then Erick looked to the side, where Lionshard was looking at him, softly grinning and looking quite relieved.

Lionshard said, “A lot of people can’t handle looking at this. I knew you could, though. Sometimes people try to break in here, and sometimes they actually get here, trying to see That Which They Are Not Meant To See, and I find them exploded on the ground from Forbidden Knowledge. Sometimes they survive only partially dead. I do what healing I can and send them on their way. You should know that this is not the heart of Margleknot, but some people consider it as such. I am not one of those people.”

“… I’m not sure which part of that is more worrisome. People can break into your home?”

“People can do anything, Erick. They can even get where they shouldn’t get.”

“Ha. Fair.”

“I advise you, when you make your defensive systems of your home, to add in some resurrection magic like I have here, or make it a lot harder to get into your house. Margleknot is personally looking over your house right now so invasions shouldn’t be an issue, but he’s busy.”

“Good advice.”

Lionshard nodded, then gestured to the map, saying, “Now then… The nexus world of Abarial, located on Layer 172,287,913, is not on this orrery at all. It never will be. It’s simply not important enough. A few billion lives that far from the countless people here in the center is simply too distant of a problem for this map. So we have to set the stage to make it important.”

Lionshard spread his hands at the map, and the whole thing shifted, blossoming outward until the entire thing was beyond the edges of the room and out of sight. In a flashing instant, there was nothing.

The room looked completely empty. It was a void, both in mana sense, and in a particle sense.

Lionshard said, “This leads the way to Abarial. Now, we just need to connect it to the power of Margleknot, which means we direct a flow of power in that direction. It’s as simple as that. Now, how to pay for that power is another question entirely. That is the question that needs real answering.”

Erick nodded. “I’ll be paying for it with my Benevolence monster dungeon, soon as I get it up and running. Can Yggdrasil really not make dungeons himself?”

Lionshard nodded. “Yes. By ancient decree, Yggdrasil is allowed to siphon from people and the things people make for him, but he is not allowed to grow his own power base. People contribute to him, and he stabilizes everything in return. He can bend a lot of rules in a lot of ways, but the base rule must be respected.”

“Do I need to come back here and ask you to hook up the tower to this land later?”

“A small message is telling enough. Mostly it’s all automagic, anyway.” Lionshard said, “Imbuing of power into specific directions in the universe is not a fast thing, but when the people of Margleknot actually try to make things happen out there, it is very easy for us to make things happen. You will be throwing money into the void, though. What you’re doing is helping people, but you’re not getting anything out of it if you do it this way.”

“That’s fine. I’m good with that, if it helps people to live.”

Lionshard nodded. “While I am unsure of what Benevolence can do at scale, I am rather sure that the cost of saving Abarial, which seems like a simple re-hooking of connection, would be measured in the billions of resons. There’s an opportunity cost for helping them, instead of helping yourself, and there are literally infinity problems out there, Erick.”

Erick said, “I will help people at personal cost; this is fine. My own home is stable for now. I have time to learn and to grow and to help a whole lot of people along the way.”

Lionshard smiled softly. “This issue might take several years to solve in a satisfactory way, or shorter, but I have no doubt that you can solve it. When you wish to help more people who request your help, let me know. If you wish to take tasks from me regarding places that need help, I can give you that work, too. The work is literally never-ending, and there is always good to be done.”

Erick felt warmth in his heart at that. He looked at the empty map, and then he asked, “Can you zoom back out?”

Lionshard glanced at the map, and it was back to its full picture.

Erick asked, “What sort of tasks— Ah. I’m getting ahead of myself. Way ahead of myself. Let’s scale back, please. What is a reson? I feel like you all might actually know that. I am not actually sure what they are, myself.” He held up a finger and a tiny dot of Benevolence appeared. “Like this is one mana of Benevolence. Are resons similarly quantifiable?”

Lionshard laughed. “A strange question! I am surprised you don’t already have an answer of your own. But as for an answer that is from me? A reson is a drop of multivariable Fate; not a simple directed Fate. A Fate can only go one way, toward one thing, affecting cause and effect and possibility all along the way toward a goal. But a multivariable Fate can become anything at all. Personally, a reson is a confluence of Fate and Choice. Your answer will be different.”

Erick’s eyes went wide. “A drop of… Prismatic mana?”

“Ah? Hmm.” Lionshard paused, then said, “I suppose, if that is how you would want to name it, then yes. That could work— Well. It’s more than that. I know of the manas. Prismatic mana is one part of a reson. If you go wide enough with mana possibility then you can make a reson. Mana is possibility. Resons are undiluted possibility. A refinement, maybe? … Sure.” He gestured to the bit of Benevolence hovering above Erick’s finger, and said, “That is about a hundredth the power of a reson.”

… Erick got a crazy idea.

“Do you have any magic that can turn mana into resons?”

“Yes. Very complicated systems. Margleknot has the best efficiency, though. Most people just donate straight to him. Margleknot is about a 10 mana to 1 reson system. The most efficient magics a person can cast are at a 50 to 1 basis, and that’s not even taking into account when a person uses actual resons for actual magic. That sort of creation is an instant instantiation of resons that have already collected within a person’s everything, only to come out and be used in the moment of activation. That’s where the name ‘resons’ comes from, you know; as in ‘Margleknot’s resin’, or the ‘sap of a world tree’. Thick and slow but powerful stuff.”

Erick nodded, and then he changed his words slightly as he asked again, “Do you have a stable magic, in a contained space, that uses a well of power to make resons?”

And the very fact that Lionshard didn’t seem to know what Erick was getting at told him a lot. Maybe Yggdrasil hadn’t written about [Renew] in the ‘Book of Erick’ that Lionshard had handed him?

Lionshard raised an eyebrow, saying, “Sure? I can try one of those magics— Let’s step into the hallway out there… Unless we should go further?”

Erick said, “The hallway should be fine. Maybe a bit further would be good.”

Lionshard led the way to a side room, far down the hallway and with several bookshelves and a nice reading nook by the window. He lifted a hand and cast a spell into the air, making a platinum sphere of power that slowly turned gold at the bottom.

Lionshard said, “I threw a good thousand mana at this. It takes about an hour for the Fate inside to turn to amber— Ah. Amber is what I used to call resons…” He looked at the spell, and said, “I haven’t cast this is a very long time.” He looked at it for a moment longer, then gestured toward it. “Your go.”

Erick flooded the thing with [Renew], Benevolence slipping into the Fate Magic and transforming from silver to gold, becoming like thick honey, to fall off the bottom of the platinum sphere like tiny crystals—

“Oh! It’s that [Renew] spell.” Lionshard said, “Yes, we have that here. I thought you were going to do something else.”

Erick had a moment.

Then he laughed. “Bah!” Erick stopped the [Renew]. “I thought I had a trick there!”

“Oh, it's a good trick. Don’t get that wrong.” Lionshard said, “But you’re using my base spell to make the resons and the efficiency there is still around 50 to 1. Fate Magic is decent for this sort of conversion. Fate can do a whole lot, after all. Benevolence, however, seems great for this sort of conversion. If you studied this magic you might be able to get down to Margleknot-levels of conversion; 10-to-1... 20-to-1 might be more realistic.”

“I suppose I didn’t just break the reson-economy, then.”

“Not yet, anyway.” Lionshard smirked. “You know? It is rather hard to read your future. I find it rather delightful— On you, that is. Not being able to read the future of good people is fun. On others I would be appalled.”

“Ha! I never really got into the future-reading thing for similar reasons— Say. I have a wild question, since you read my biography. Do you know what would happen if I were to shoot backward in time to where I fell to Veird with my daughter?”

Lionshard nodded. “In a non-god-world, you could simply do that, but you would be creating another infinity and that infinity would be the one you would live within. For a god-world like Veird, you would end up in your original slice of reality and change everything from then on; gods make the reality solid, after all. In that case a lesser version of you might simply cease to exist, because of paradoxes, and the gods don’t like paradoxes, so you would erase yourself, or the gods would erase you first. However, as an ascended you’re immune to that sort of godly control, so your old self would still exist and the gods will complain and fight you, but you would likely… Well. Likely be forced to either abandon that world or make some pacts with those gods, or fight them to the death. Could go any sort of way.

“If you actively chose to slide into a different slice of infinity at the beginning, then you’d leave the gods behind.” Lionshard said, “That’s for your specific world of Veird, here in this cosmology— Ah! ‘Universe’. I meant ‘universe’... Or multiverse, if you want to call it that. Everyone has so many different names for these things, I swear.”

Erick smiled. “That’s really good news.”

Erick had known the God Pact world was special.

Lionshard nodded. “As for getting to Veird, you have a few different ways. Yggdrasil will get you there in a flash, if I understand the situation right. Otherwise, crossing through layers is how you get from one part of the universe to another without needing to cross the intervening distance; it’s like using your Benevolence gate space, but easier and everyone can do it if you know how.

“It takes about a hundred resons to cross through layers, if you understand my meaning.”

… All of that was incredible news, for sure, but Erick wasn’t sure he did understand what Lionshard was getting at, exactly.

A backdoor to Veird? Reachable under his own power? One that didn’t go through Yggdrasil?

Ah.

A path that Yggdrasil could say that he had no knowledge of Erick doing.

That was it.

Erick wasn’t going back yet, though. Not without an army behind him and the weight of law or power, whichever one worked better.

Lionshard saw when Erick realized what he was saying, so he moved on, “It only takes one reson to flicker through the individual infinities of a layer, or to bring something from a different part of the individual infinity to your person. Less than one, really. Resons really are the best form of mana out there.”

“Do you have a book on resons conversions?”

“I do, but you should look up more examples than my own. Yggdrasil would be a better teacher than I for that, by far.” Lionshard said, “You’ve already got the gist of it; prismatic mana with a bit more oomph would qualify as a reson.” He stood tall, and asked, “Now, would you like to discuss the problem of Nothanganathor?”

Erick steeled himself, turning more serious by fractions. “I would like to discuss him, but I get the distinct impression that you can’t interfere with that.”

“This is true; I cannot interfere with him. Nothanganathor is on the list of approved evils.”

“… Excuse me what?”

- - - -

Erick stood upon the surface of an asteroid-sized white sphere that was Yggdrasil’s designation of Erick’s Benevolence Tower space. The sphere was maybe 30 meters in diameter, and it floated somewhere high in the skies of Margleknot, maybe multiple planets away from every other thing in the sky. Probably further than that, though. Distance in Margleknot was a funky thing, because while imagery was allowed to reach across an infinite gulf of space, there was still an infinite gulf of space between this floating land and all the other lands out there.

A simple rock floating in the escher-drawing that was Margleknot might actually be the size of a sun.

Erick came here to start on his Benevolence Dungeon, with plants and slimes and water and all that shit.

But now he sat down on the white sphere, and simply looked across the lands of Margleknot.

‘List of approved evils’ was really getting to him.

Erick probably should have stayed with Lionshard for a much longer conversation, to understand everything about Nothanganathor and ‘the list’, but after hearing just a little bit about how Nothanganathor was ‘approved’, Erick had to leave. He tried to be polite. He might have actually been polite. But he had been sparking blackening Benevolence on the floor of Lionshard’s house and burning up the carpet.

Lionshard had excused Erick’s anger. He had already seen that coming, of course; Fate Magic and all that.

And so, Erick left Lionshard’s house without knowing much more about Nothanganathor at all.

Erick sighed out, “I should send him an apology gift and a thank you gift.”

Erick laid down on the surface of the white sphere, floating in the skies of Margleknot, and thought.

He had pretty much known, before meeting Lionshard, that there were acceptable evils within Margleknot. Yggdrasil had told him that much. This entire land was a land of balance. Raise up a strong Good, and here came an Evil to stop it. Raise up a strong Evil, and soon some Good would come to disrupt all of that Evil.

Erick imagined he was the solution to Nothanganathor’s Evil.

Was he the ‘hero’ in this shit?

Maybe.

“Balance fucking sucks,” Erick said to the world.

Yggdrasil sat down beside him. “Sometimes, yes.”

Erick sighed, and then he sat up. He looked at his son. “There are other problems to address, too. I want to never ascend to godhood unless I absolutely need to.”

Yggdrasil held out a hand. “All that takes is a handshake.”

Erick shook his son’s hand—

The world flickered gold and then faded inward, falling into the space between their hands, Erick feeling weaker in some unknown way. He let go, and Yggdrasil held a glowing dot of gold power. Like playing a coin trick, Yggdrasil twisted his hand and the gold dot vanished.

Yggdrasil twisted his hand again and handed over a small book, saying, “This is the theory behind some Power-to-Reson spellwork that you will find useful.”

Erick took the book and held it to his chest. He didn’t read it right now.

He laid down on the surface of his asteroid. He stared at the sky, which was currently the crisscrossing Fae Enclave ice crystal and the cylindrical silver Quantum Nexus Hub. He breathed.

He asked, “Why are there so many places named ‘nexus’?”

Yggdrasil chuckled. He laid down beside his father to stare at the sky, too. “Because everyone thinks they’re the center of the universe, or whatever thing they wish to be at the center of. The Quantum Nexus Hub is the only one that actually counts as ‘actually central’, though, and only marginally, because they managed to pierce the Fae Enclave a very, very long time ago, and the Fae Enclave liked it, because the crossing makes an actual center at that hub. Before that piercing everyone used to argue if the top of the crystal was the center, or if the other top of the crystal was the center, or if the center was the center. A lot of wars were fought over that.”

“… You have wars here?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose that makes sense.” Erick thought for a second. He asked, “Could I get some people from House Benevolence up here? I think I want to make this Benevolence Tower an actual place; not just a dungeon.”

“Sure. Five people. It’s a bad idea, though.”

Erick looked over at Yggdrasil. “… Really? You can do that?”

“I can. But people will try to kill them and they’re not powerful enough to live here… Maybe Destiny could. But not even her. Who were you thinking of?”

“Ah. Forget it, then.” Erick said, “Everyone is beholden to someone in power here, and they’re locked to those people, which threatens them and otherwise… and all that.”

Yggdrasil laughed. “That’s one of the least coherent things I’ve heard you say.”

“I made myself unable to get really tired, but the scale of it all is getting to me.” Erick thought for a moment, then said, “Aisha, because wrought would be strong, I think. Destiny could come, unless she’s busy. I’d love to get Zolan up here for a hundred different reasons. Mox, of course. Poi because yes. Teressa would be lovely, but she’s a new mom, or at least she should be. The girls and Evan are probably busy… Everyone is probably busy a lot, actually… Ophiel is too young. Gods. I miss them all.”

Yggdrasil asked, “Want me to tell you all about all of them?”

“Can you?”

Yggdrasil said, “We made a pact for your continued divinity gains. I can do a lot more now than I could earlier.”

Erick huffed a laugh.

Yggdrasil smiled, and then he lost his smile, saying, “One month after the Sealing of Veird, which is just one name for it, that’s when the Nothor Beasts started to fall to the First Surface and crawl out of the lands below. It was a very small infection at first. Barely noticeable. They’re that red beast you discovered in your soul. When uncontained, Nothor Beasts are like Moon Reachers but worse. People were disappearing and no one knew why, and no one recognized most of those disappearances, but meanwhile your Benevolence dragons were going on rampages that no one quite understood, because they could see them. The Nothor Beasts stayed away from me and Ophiel, so we couldn’t see them either. The world at large didn’t even understand they were there till several months ago…”

Erick listened to problems 789 layers away and wished to be able to help more than he already was.

Home was doing well, though, and Erick was doing good here.

Or at least he would be, soon enough.

- - - -

Yggdrasil departed with a hug.

And then Erick stood upon the surface of the base of his Benevolence tower, hanging in the sky of Margleknot.

With a tap of his shoe, Erick brought forth a bit of dirt under his feet that hadn’t been under his feet at all. With a breath, Erick made air, filling the atmosphere of this empty space with some wind. It had been a complete vacuum while Yggdrasil had spoken with Erick, but they were both Ascended, so ‘lack of atmosphere’ didn’t really matter at all, for any reason. With a flick of a finger, some red blood appeared on the ground, spilled from a wound that did not exist. The blood rapidly turned black in the lack of air. Some froze into ice for the lack of warmth, hitting the ground and then casting off into the air above, for lack of gravity. Erick caught what he felt like catching.

Breath, road dust, and some sort of liquid that contained water. Those were the ingredients for Erick’s next creation.

With a twist of Benevolence and aura, Erick flowed [Duplicate] over the components of life. Black blood boiled out of itself, frozen blood shattering out across the spherical surface of the solid Benevolence that was the start of this land. Erick turned up the heat with some Particle Magic, turning black ice and dirt to black liquid that washed across the white surface of the sphere. Dust and dirt became mud and mess. The air whipped out and away, like a grasshopper’s fart in a hurricane of void.

The sky of Margleknot was far, far overhead, but the sky of this particular land was about 2,500 kilometers up there. That was the space that Erick had to fill… Or at least half of it. Maybe 2000 radius of it? A 500-kilometer-tall sky on both sides of the future ‘Moon Benevolence’ was enough sky.

Erick stepped onto the wash of black blood and dirt. When the white core had vanished behind ten meters of black mud, Erick threw his improved [Cleanse] down at the mess.

White fog blasted out of the black, all the black mud shooting away as though Erick had detonated dynamite. But the core was fine. Black blood stayed in the air, for gravity was still pretty weak.

Erick layered some [Gravity Ward]s that would eventually dissipate with time; they wouldn’t be necessary when Erick filled the space enough.

Blood and mud rained back down as water and mud, and a whole lot less of it. There was more air in the atmosphere, but the level of air inside this space was at ‘grasshopper farting in space’-levels. Erick repeated this copying and [Cleanse]ing process several times, rapidly creating a 50 meter ball of dirt with another 15 meters of water on top of that dirt.

Erick stepped into the air and opened his [Duplication Aura] wide. There wasn’t much air around him, since he was in the middle of a very open space and air filled its container. But as moments stretched and small bits of air became two bits of air, and then four, a small nothing became a breeze which became a flow. Wind whipped at the waters below, making a very weak sky.

Erick lowered down toward the waters, and to the dirt.

Water rushed up to meet him, flowing away, piling atop itself and then out into the rest of the space, fountaining high and fast and dropping down when it hit [Gravity Ward]s. Dirt below became a volcano of wet mud. Slowly, and surely, Erick flew away from the surface, dragging out a very small world behind him. Mud spilled around and to the sides. Wind crashed. Waves pounded.

[Cleanse] erased half of his work here and there, but soon that white wind stopped flowing, and all Erick was left with was deep, clean water and a thin atmosphere.

Erick stepped below the waters’ surface and focused on pulling the mud upward, making it deeper. The mud was a collection of fine sand and not much else, so that would not do. You couldn’t build a world on dust, after all. So Erick grabbed some mud and twisted it with Wizardry, creating a pile of various stones, most of them simple quartz sand, but also a few bits of aluminum, iron, nickel, copper, gold, silver; the list went on and on, and it would form the good basis for a stable particle-based foundation, with all the essential minerals for life and a whole lot extra, just because. Erick concentrated on that pile of proper soil, with a bit of clay and loam, and began copying that.

Floating above the waters of his mini-world, Erick became a very tiny beacon of creation, spilling out dirt and wind and some water, when needed. He had literally never done anything like this ever before, except as a mental exercise, but he made it work. Eventually, he didn’t need to make any more [Gravity Ward]s, because gravity was starting to work on its own.

That’s when Erick smiled, knowing this was going to work, eventually.

- - - -

It was maybe a day or five later when Erick floated above a 6000 kilometer diameter moon made of dirt, water, and air. Yggdrasil had increased the size of Erick’s allowed space long before Erick reached his original goals.

Clouds rolled across the sky, held within the edge of this miniworld by a hexagonal grid of a node network. That grid touched down upon several different ‘continents’, where the land was layered and ready for things to grow and thrive. There was no tectonic activity in this land, so Erick had needed to create some upways for water to flow and make rivers to keep those continents watered. Lakes abounded, and a winding ocean tied everything together.

Right now, Erick’s mana was supporting the whole place, and he still had a lot of mana to spare, but the node networks extended their tendrils into all of the land and water awaiting other donors to the cause. The drain on the life to come wouldn’t be too much, and it was capped at enough to keep the whole place stable, so as long as life thrived, making mana, then this would work fine.

Erick wasn’t quite sure if his [Terraforming] would make slimes that made mana, though, since it was an imbuement of Darkness that made mana, but since he had made slimes on FENRIR, where Darkness did not exist, this would probably work.

Erick cast a [Terraforming] into the skies of his mini-world.

Storms gathered. White lightning crashed to water and to stone. Water plants sprouted while grasses and flowers spread. A massive slam of lightning struck the coast of a continent, flash-[Grow]ing a tree into something large, white, and slightly glowing-green of canopy. Erick chuckled at that, as he watched with his Authority as that entire tree worked a root all the way to the center of the planet, where it touched the core and the core touched back—

Yggdrasil stepped out from the side of the tree, waving, and then he vanished again.

Erick smiled at that.

And then he went to other parts of his mini planet and cast more [Terraforming]s.

Platinum rains fell upon a brand new world. Plants tried to grow, and while most survived the churn, some could not. They died, and formed the basis for other life to grow. Gradually, rapidly, plant matter joined the barren stone and water, while the wind turned to something more conducive to life.

Erick contented himself to sit upon a spit of land that was a beach, near the white tree of Yggdrasil at the edge of a new forest, and watch. Erick wasn’t sure when the fish appeared in the waters, but he was pretty sure Yggdrasil had done that.

A day later the first slimes crawled out of shallow pools that were filled with muck and dead initial plant life. They gorged on the dead things. They grew. They multiplied.

And soon, glowing balls of Benevolence slimes tumbled across the mini-world.

This was good. This was great, actually.

- - - -

Shadow sipped her beer, watching the sky for the tenth day in a row. When she stopped sipping her beer, it automatically refilled. The Black Crystal Tavern was good like that. When day 10 turned to day 11 of watching the sky, Shadow mumbled to herself.

“That fucker decided to build a planet before coming to talk to me.”

- - - -

Erick happily watched as slimes generated from low pools of soupy, plant-choked waters and started eating the dead stuff. Trees grew tall in new forests, making dark spaces for glowing mushrooms to consume and grow on fallen trees that had grown too fast, and then faltered hard. Platinum rainstorms followed glowing lines in the sky on clockwork schedules, breaking the weak old life and leaving behind new, hopefully stronger growth. [Terraforming]-and-more storms would eventually trace across the entire planet over the course of a year, and then start again, bringing their transformative, creative bounty to every part of the world.

It was a larger world than it had been a few days ago. Erick had pumped it up from 6,000 kilometers in diameter to roughly 7,000 kilometers in diameter. It was more like a small planet, now, than a large moon. It was a bit larger than Mars, actually, but a whole lot smaller than Earth; it had about a third of the gravity of Earth now. It had needed that extra gravity.

Erick had canceled the gravity magics and the water cycling magics once the planet got big enough to sustain itself and have its own water cycles, which was pretty great.

It had six towers on its surface, now, each of them simple eternal stonewood things that were wide at the bottom and tapered at the top, each reaching 150 kilometers into the sky. Each was a copy of the other. A tower stuck up from each of the northern and southern poles. Four stuck up from the equator, equidistant from each other and the poles. Three were located in the ocean, while three were on land.

And slimes were everywhere.

The whole planet was making Benevolence mana, all of it siphoning off into the [Terraforming] storms, which had [Undertow Star]s and [Benevolence Cleanse]s attached to them, now. It was a self-sustaining cycle that filled the air with mana of all types, making the manasphere of the little world rather thick.

It was still mostly Benevolence mana, though, because [Benevolence Cleanse] balanced all types of mana and left Benevolence alone.

The whole planet was still way too fragile and it needed proper upkeep from people who could truly maintain the systems, but Erick had done enough to get it settled. He needed to actually turn it into a powerhouse for reson collection, now.

And for that, he needed to do some Wizardry.

Atop the northern tower, in a room open to all directions and with a [Benevolent Storm] lashing the coasts a hundred kilometers to the south, Erick stood upon white eternal stonewood. He prepared his mind, collecting and organizing the lessons of the mana-to-resons book that Yggdrasil had given him, while adding in his own thoughts on the subject that he had collected over the last few days. Finally, he took the form of the old poem that he had used to make [Renew] in the core of Veird, and made it into something different.

Erick focused inward, looking at his crystallized soul, preparing to form Benevolence into a shape of power like all the other tools that the Script had given him long before today. Erick was doing Wizardry, yes, but he was also making that Wizardry into a button he could push in his soul to do more Wizardry later.

Erick opened his eyes.

He spoke with Authority to his little planet, and to his Self,

“A dot of power, sky-gathered true

“flows with purpose; a saving breakthrough.

“A longed-for gift of healing heavens.

“A transposed version of my Renew.

“Benevolent, prismatic resons.”

The air flickered.

Something gathered in the air of the tower, at the very top, the entire eternal stonewood tower turning brighter white for a moment before that whiteness faded—

Erick captured the flow of everything that was happening with his absolute Authority over the space, and then copied it into his soul, like taking notes from a professor that was writing as fast as lightning and then erasing the notes right after. It worked. He would look at that later.

—The air flexed in the uppermost room in the northern tower of Benevolence and power twisted into a glowing white ring with a broken top. It was the glowing white symbol for [Renew]; an arrow with a pointed front and a sweeping back, curled in on itself. That symbol slowly rotated, and the air around it turned darker, as though it was sucking up the very light around itself in order to reach a saturation point.

Erick cast an extension of the node network hanging out above the tower, dropping down a connection of the planetary node network to the symbol, drawing a line of light that faded into the spreading darkness of the—

Erick’s status flickered at him.

Congrats! I managed to make a new spell! How long did it take us? Weeks? Days? Whatever the case, amazing accomplishment, Erick! Hope you’re still yourself. I sure hope this message doesn’t repeat every single time we make a new spell, but it might be nice?

Reson Gathering, instant, close range, ?????

Make a reson gatherer. 9 mana to 1 reson.

Erick smiled at that.

He hadn’t managed to fix that part of himself that gave him that ‘congrats’, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

He had actually made a [Force Sword] the other day along with a bunch of other, much simpler spells than the [Reson Gathering] he had just made, just to see if he could do the soul-spell-imbuing on his own. One doesn’t go into the big magics without testing things first, after all. Erick had succeeded in creating a [Reson Gathering] through normal mana shaping and altering, too, but this one was the one that truly worked, the one that he was proud to have accomplished, and the one that he put into his soul—

Erick stepped back, because this version seemed to be… Maybe doing more than expected.

The brilliant Renew symbol was an indelible white most-of-a-circle upon the darkness of the rest of the world. It spun lazily, implacably, under a line of light that went right to the empty space at the top of the circle. That line became less of a line, and more of a bolt of lightning, jagged and splitting, as it reached down into the golden space between the ends of the Renew—

Something connected to something else within the existence of the entire planet.

The darkness faded, the symbol remained, and a root of Yggdrasil now hung down from the roof, twisting geometrically around a node network straight-line connection, both of them attached to the [Reson Gathering]. The [Reson Gathering] would be powered by the node network of the planet, and Yggdrasil would be taking that gathering.

“Good. It worked.”

Yggdrasil stepped out from the walls of the tower, saying, “Wow, father. That's some really good conversion rates.” He chuckled. “You did better than me.”

Erick laughed. “It makes me glad that I still have some tricks I can show you.”

Yggdrasil smiled as he stared at the [Reson Gathering], his eyes peering deep. He blinked, then said, “You made Benevolence split itself into Light, Shadow, Fire, Water, Stone, Air, Illusion, Sand, and Steam, and then you combined them all using a central tenet of Benevolence Itself; to help people.” He looked to Erick, impressed. “An evergreen desire. You’ll never run out of resons doing that. Benevolence itself would stop existing long before it stopped trying to give assistance.”

Erick grinned. “I’m glad it worked. I considered going smaller with the elemental-pseudo-shifts, leaving out the confluences of the Big 6, but those confluences would get everything closer to the idea of prismatic mana, and so I went for it.” He breathed in, then out, and said, “And now I’m pooped! Just gotta cast the spell 5 more times, and hope that I made the spell correctly in my soul so it won’t blow up like that [Force Feather Bed] spell I tried. That one was just sloppy.”

Yggdrasil looked to Erick, and said, “I think you understand some of what you’re doing here in Margleknot but not completely. You really should start trying to recruit some people. Get out there. See the city, Father.”

“Ehhhh! I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it.” Erick stepped to the southern tower and Yggdrasil joined him. Erick cast [Reson Gathering] into the tower and connected it to the node network. The spell didn’t explode! Success! The world turned dark, and then another connection passed, revealing Yggdrasil to have dropped another geometric root into the top of the [Renew] symbol. Erick smiled. “Ah! It works. Amazing!” He asked, “How long do you think it will take for this to help with that Abarial situation? That dying nexus world?”

“Now that someone is caring enough to actually pay for it, then not too long at all. Two or three years to reconnect to the hub world that broke. Shorter after that to connect to Abarial. It’ll be a slow connection, though. That’s what you get when you go through Lionshard's and my slow, background-ways. It’ll be stronger for that slowness, though. Once we connect to Abarial, the people there will likely do some magics of their own to widen the connection and we’ll likely get refugees, but ideally, they could stay there and grow there. They probably will. People tend to like where they grew up. Benevolence will take to that land very well, I think, because Benevolence is the one making the connection, and I bet it will be making itself known in the solving of many small systemic problems. People will see that. They will start to accrete it, and produce it themselves… probably.”

Erick’s eyes went wide. “Is that what will happen? I thought they’d just get a connection. Not that they’d get Benevolence… I find myself happy knowing that they’ll get Benevolence.”

Yggdrasil said, “The injection of new mana types into other world systems is a very large topic. I expect whatever mana systems they have will be rejuvenated by Benevolence and a small subset of people will switch to Benevolence entirely, since it can replace practically everything else. Our last records of Abarial have them as a reson-using society, with very little mana. Now, they’ll get Benevolence, which is way easier to use than resons.” He said to Erick, “If you want to make their connection happen faster, then you have to make a House Benevolence here, or recruit help that can connect to these worlds faster than I can. That’s just one solution, though.”

Erick thought…

And then he stepped over to another tower and cast [Reson Gathering]. Yggdrasil dropped a root down into this one, too. Erick repeated the process with the three remaining towers.

And then he sat down before he crashed down.

“Holy crap,” Erick said, feeling lightheaded. “I didn’t think I could feel lightheaded again.”

Yggdrasil smiled softly and sat down with him. “You need to make a reson pool in your status or simply hook up that reson creator spell you made to your status so you don’t have to make a reson pool; you can make resons on demand. They’ll come out slower if you make them on demand, but not much slower.”

Erick grinned, then said, “I think I’ll meld the reson pool with my existing pools, like how it’s supposed to be. That’s how you do it, right? You just have resons as the blood among all the rest of yourself? Like how people have it in the Space Between.”

“It’s my preferred way of using resons, yes. It’s the natural way, too, so it’s easier to enhance that system that is already there.”

Erick relaxed for a moment.

And then he half-glanced inward, at the spot of Darkness at the center of his soul. “Is Melemizargo’s Darkness a reson generator? Or a mana generator, based on resons transforming influence into mana?”

Yggdrasil smiled, saying, “I have theories, and you hit the big one right fast, but that theory is provably false if you want to get into it. The truth is that every universe has their own powers, and they’re all rather unknowable. You could ask Shadow if you wanted to know about Darkness, but even so, she didn’t make that ‘Old Cosmology’; she found pieces of Other and made something New out of them.”

Erick thought for a moment, watching the stormy sky, asking, “Should I find some gods and invite them here? Would that be a good idea? … Rozeta?”

“They’re still part of the Enclave lock on the Painted Cosmology.” Yggdrasil said, “Every single person you desire to bring from there, to here, I can make that happen, but they can never go back until you solve the Nothanganathor problem. Gods are not part of the offer; not happening. There are, however, some gods in this land who you might get along with. I think I put a few in the guidebook.”

“… Huh. Yeah. Cascadio, the Radiant Sun. Veird needs a new Sun God anyway. I suppose I can see why you included him in the guidebook.” Erick smirked at his very largest son, asking, “You’re pretty crafty and sneaky with your influences, aren’t you.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, Father,” Yggdrasil said, though his facial expression told a different tale.

Erick smiled and looked away, across his mini-world. “Can you look over this place for a little while? Or at least until I can talk to some people to take over maintenance… Maybe the Celestial Observatory for some good hires? How rich does this land make me, exactly?”

“It’s still growing right now and your half of the benefits of this land are being funneled into the Abarial situation, while half are going to me, to Margleknot, as per normal agreements. My half is already being used to noticeably clean up smaller issues here and there, and so I have a vested interest in keeping this land solid and usable, so I’ll be looking after it for the foreseeable future. You can still certainly hire people to live here and work the land and make it more productive, but you don’t have to do that.” Yggdrasil said, “So you’re not actually richer at all; it’s all going off into the void of infinity.”

Erick laughed.

Yggdrasil nodded, and then dropped a bomb, “In fact, I would suggest you simply leave this land alone, and let me put it behind a time displacement and speed up the whole place by a good century or seven. Right now, since there’s no intelligent life here, I can do that. You’ll have enough resons and Benevolence to solve the Abarial situation in a few days.” He added, “As soon as intelligent life is here then I cannot do that sort of thing.”

Erick’s eyes went wide. And then he huffed a laugh. “Every time I think you’ve told me the extent of your powers you pull out another one and solve an issue I was working to solve myself, and a lot faster.”

“I could tell you everything right away, but it’s better if you discover it on your own.” Yggdrasil smiled. “You got most of the way here on your own, which is great, but I’ve been at this for a very long time.”

“I suppose you have.” Erick sighed, and looked out across the world. Clouds rolled across blue waters and green continents. The edge of the sky held hexagons and curved lines of node network light. Mountains collapsed under shifting weights. Magma boiled in small spots around the core as things heated up from pressure. Water eroded river banks that Erick thought were fine. Storms killed forests that looked sturdy, but were all hollow strength, breaking at the first heavy winds. Slimes spawned in stagnant pools and died on dry sands that should not have been dry. One of the ocean towers looked like it was tilting a little. Erick frowned at that last one. Erick said, “I haven’t been at this for very long at all.”

“You’ll get better. Don’t worry about that ocean tower. I’ll keep it from falling. I might make the planet a bit bigger, too, to help with gravity, and alter some of the timings of things.” Yggdrasil said, “When I gather enough resons and Benevolence to solve some long standing issues you’ll have a much better world to come back to, and then you can populate it with people you wish to hire to make it better. By that time, though, you’ll likely have a whole slew of other issues you wish to solve with this mana battery, and I can keep the Time going for those issues as they pile up.”

“… Ah. I see the shape of this whole thing here now. I won’t get to have a little planet at all, will I? Not that I’m complaining, mind you, but infinity has a lot of problems to fix.”

Yggdrasil nodded. “Yup. This has happened in some form or another tens of times before. When you get back to your house in the Old Dragon District, you’ll understand a lot more.”

“… Huh. Well then.” Erick looked around again. “Shouldn’t we import some, like, lizards and bees and cats and dogs and other basic animals? Or will slimes really be enough?”

“Slimes and elementals and plants are more than enough.”

“Sounds like you have experience with that.”

Yggdrasil laughed. “With how varied and powerful Benevolence is, I doubt I’ll get more than a few million subjective years of use out of this place before actual intelligent life develops and I have to release it into Margleknot.”

Erick was stuck looking around at his little planet. He had only been here for a week and he hadn’t done anything except build, but it already seemed like some sort of home.

Yggdrasil hurried him along, “When you get home check the rest of your messages and line up whatever problems you want me to solve behind the scenes. Lionshard will probably have some requests for you as well, once everyone sees what you’re going to see. He already knows what is about to happen, though.”

“Right right right right.” Erick went over and hugged Yggdrasil, asking, “And no gate networks of my own?”

“Nope. I’m the only one allowed to have one of those here. Sorry, father.”

“It’s fine. I understand. Love you.”

Yggdrasil hugged him back and a portal opened to the side, leading to Erick’s house.

Erick hugged his son tighter for a moment, then he let go, took one more look around, and nodded.

He walked through the portal—

- - - -

— And stepped onto the balcony of his house in the Old Dragon District.

As the portal closed, Erick waved to Yggdrasil and Yggdrasil waved back.

And Erick looked up.

The cityscape sky of Margleknot was the same as before, with the great icicle of the Fae Enclave piercing through the center, the silver cylinder of the Quantum Nexus Hub piercing the Fae Enclave, and all the layered lands of other places stretched out in every direction, like this entire land was inside of a heavily-layered dyson sphere / escher painting.

A few lands floated around the space in the center, looking like planets, or free-floating spires, or diamonds, or water worlds.

‘Benevolence Tower’ was one of those floating lands. It was spherical and blue and green all underneath a hexagonal net of node network, a few hundred kilometers into its sky. [Kaleidoscopic Radiance] and other light sources held on every joint of that node network, making the planet rather brilliant. Spires poked out from the north and south poles and equidistant on the equator, their tops barely reaching the glowing network, but they did reach. A trail of a curving node network spiraled from the southern pole, around and up the southern hemisphere, to the tops of the equatorial towers, up and up the sides of the planet to the northern tower, forming a year-long track that the [Terraforming]-[Benevolence Cleanse]-[Undertow Star] storms followed.

Even from here, the brightest lights of the new planet were those storms, and the tiny dots at the top of every tower, where [Reson Gathering] pulled excess mana from the life of the planet, transforming it into resons.

It was beautiful.

And then time sped up.

Erick saw the change of time in the turn of the hexagonal grid, and in the rotation of the planet. He had set the world to rotate slowly, to give it natural weather, and now it spun. The node network and the movement of the planet underneath showed the whole thing spinning. And then Erick saw the storms moving. Instead of moving slow and plodding and predictable, the storms moved as though they were hunters who had spotted prey. They began jogging, almost. And then they started running up that spiraling track—

Erick could make out every facet of the speed of the planet, as one month passed over the course of an hour, and as a year passed in the course of the next hour. But when a year passed in ten minutes, there was a shift. The sky darkened around the planet, the node network growing stronger, more brilliant, and less visible beyond the stretch of time. The lights of the equatorial towers began to meld into each other, looking like a line of solid white lightning, while the lights of the poles were stock still.

The twisting node network that spiraled up from the south to the north was still there, still visible, as one year passed in one minute, making the whole planet look like a spiraling top about to spiral too fast to see.

And then there was light.

The planet sparked and washed out the entire rest of Margleknot’s city sky in brilliant white flash that spread like the shockwave of an explosion. That light crashed against previously-invisible spheres in the sky that Erick had turned off in order to see the city. As that light passed those spheres, those spheres revealed themselves.

They glowed.

And then they shone.

“Ah,” Erick said, as he saw.

The multi-sun sky of Margleknot had gained a new sun, joining with all the other colors above, with the great big black hole sun in the center, upon which all the other suns orbited. Erick’s Benevolent sun was brilliant, iridescent white, and it sparked at the top and the bottom. The other suns each had little nuances to them that Erick only now recognized as shapes spinning below the surface too fast to truly see, and poles that held relatively still among all the other light. Each one was a mana battery of a different, probably balanced source.

Erick wondered about the big black sun with its white corona.

… And then Erick looked down to the little messages gathered near his gate like tiny stars, waiting.

“Yup. Knew that was coming.”

The number of messages suddenly grew, like fireworks exploding.

Erick said to himself, “I really ought to get a better idea of how this economy actually works before I do more of anything like this.”