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Erick flew for three days, mostly as lightning and moving a lot faster than he ever could as a dragon.

Over those three days, Erick had toyed with the idea that he was on an infinite treadmill again, but that was simply untrue. He had run tests with leaving giant ever-glowing lights in the sky, one half of them yellow, the other half black, pointing all the way back to where he had started, each of them connected by a strand of node network. That line of connected lights was still visible, even now, stretching far, far into the distance. From this angle it looked like a string of gold-ringed black eyes, and each eye lay directly behind the other.

Erick had needed to move off of that center-line to see the vast distances he had already crossed, but it was all still there every time he checked.

The Margleknot sky looked the same this entire time. The angle of the sights up there hadn’t changed, so either the sky was fake for every single person, or those other surfaces were, like, a solar system away, or more. But that would make the sky fake, for sure, because Erick saw stuff happening on other parts of the cosmology up there. Either way, the sky was not a good indicator of distance traveled.

The desert seemed never ending.

Until suddenly it wasn’t all the same thing over and over again… Somewhat.

There were rocks on the ground now.

Over there was a tiny oasis of wet sand and no visible water at all. Grasses still grew in that wet sand, though. It was a spot of green in an otherwise empty world.

… Which gave Erick an idea of how to end the monotony.

Erick molded resons into a [Terraforming] and threw the storm into the sky, attaching it to the node network and an [Undertow Star], molding it all together into a self-sustaining system of mana-siphoning worldly transformation.

Instantly the sky clouded over, the horizons turning dim and grey. The only lights came from the line of gold-rimmed light orbs and the node network behind Erick, and the sudden appearance of a tiny star of power that flooded the world with tendrils of shadow—

The star pulsed and Benevolent lightning scoured the sky, ripping across the empty heavens, splitting here and there as it chained off in every direction, adding clouds wherever it split as it stretched out into the vastness of the desert environment. The clouds gathered more lightning.

And then came the rain.

Erick flew as a dragon for a while instead of as lightning, enjoying the cool rain on his scales and the strike of lightning on the ground here and there. Every time the lightning struck damp soil it scattered in every direction, spreading green here and there. Sometimes that green glowed. Sometimes it just blew or washed away in the storm as minor lakes popped up here and there. Flash floods raced across the desert as shadowy tendrils cast down from the sky in every direction, touching upon the new life. That new life fed the mana demands of the many spells he had tied together; the [Terraforming], the [Undertow Star], and the node network and all the giant light orbs attached to that network.

The storm wouldn’t go forward anymore because Erick wasn’t putting down any more network in that direction, but it would go backward, back to where Erick had started the network about two days ago.

Maybe there was life hiding out down there, somewhere, but Erick hadn’t seen anything, and probably because of that time worm. If the only thing living out here was the time worm then fuck the time worm. It could drown, new life could spread, and that would be fine.

Lightning crashed, as if agreeing with that thought.

Erick grinned. It probably was agreeing with him.

Erick flew for a long while as a dragon, just enjoying the rain. He even stopped at what looked like a brand new lake to take a break and a drink and to feast on some mushrooms growing and glowing on a broken new-forest, near the lake’s edge. He didn’t like the red mushroom he tried, or the purple one, but the blue ones were fantastic. He copied a lot of those and then grilled them on some utility cooking spellwork.

With a belly full of blue mushrooms and water, both of which were completely superfluous to him since he was a True Wizard now, Erick flew faster once again.

He left the storm maybe 20 hours later. It was hard to keep track of time since this desert world was full-sun full-time, but Erick thought it might have been a day of flying, both as a dragon and as lightning, to escape the [Terraforming] storm. He enjoyed the sun on his scales for a few hours, and then he turned to lightning again and began flying faster.

Another two or maybe three days passed before the scattered rocks and tiny spikes of stone in the desert turned into more than that.

It happened all at once.

The horizon led off into the infinite distance...

…. and then the horizon got closer.

Beyond the density of atmosphere that existed here, Erick saw something that was not the end of the desert, but it was something similar.

Obsidian shards, like mountains-sized knives, stuck up from the sands, like teeth cutting tan flesh. Those daggers had a lot of space between each one, and they edged from horizon to horizon as far as Erick could see. But as he really looked, and as he flew closer, he saw that those obsidian shards were ever-so-slightly curved away from him. As though they were the start of an arc of black knives jutting up from the desert sands.

There was some sort of magic on them.

Erick got closer and stopped a few kilometers from the encirclement, and it was an encirclement, for sure. It had to be ten thousand kilometers wide according to Erick’s guesstimations. He could only see part of the circle. He couldn’t even see the end of the grey sky pillar that pointed at one of Wraithborne Tower’s Layer 1 cities, but he was pretty sure it was in there. Somewhere. Probably in the very center of the obsidian dagger ‘wall’.

This was his destination, for sure. Erick checked his Lightning Path and saw that the Lightning was pointed in this direction, specifically to here, too, but only briefly. The real way forward lay beyond…

Over there...

Illusions, perhaps? Erick narrowed his eyes and tried to pierce whatever illusions might be laying on the other side—

He couldn’t see clearly, but he saw some sort of illusion magic encapsulating all of the land on the other side. It was still desert over there, but there were… buildings? Spellworks?

Oh.

Guardians on a wall, looking at Erick in the sky, wondering what the heck he was doing.

Erick spoke in draconic, which was his usual language these days, “Hello! I’m Erick Flatt, Wizard of Benevolence, and I’m coming into the Wraithborne Tower’s hideout. Make way, or I will make way. You have a minute to comply.”

He floated there.

A voice called out from the ‘wall’, “You can’t enter from here! The worm is too close and you are too large. Please fly around to the other side!”

Erick transformed back into a person, the transformative clothes that Lionshard had given him transforming with him, turning from jewelry on a horn to a nice white and black suit. Erick felt a little constrained by his human form, but that was normal. Being as a dragon for so long always had a few side effects, and the instinctive, disruptive feeling of ‘I don’t want to be this small’ was one of them.

Erick’s voice remained large. “This better?”

“… Yes! Please come through here, and fast!”

One of the illusions between two obsidian knives faded exposing a land that looked pretty fucking miserable. At first glance Erick saw soldiers that were dead, in the literal sense; they were bones and armor and dried flesh. There were a bunch of mostly-dead soldiers, too, in the sense that they were skin and bones and severely malnourished. The mages controlling the undead looked dirty and unwashed, with pit stains and worse in their white underclothes, while their over clothes were purple fabrics that they used to hide all the rest. Men, women, bug people, some person made of paper who might have been an elementassi of Elemental Book, goblinkind; there were all types beyond the wall, in what appeared to be a forward settlement on that side of the obsidian knife wall.

And for every person, there were at least two undead.

The largest of the undead were flesh golems 50 meters tall, both of them looking like sexless men, hanging out on both sides of the obsidian knife entryway, gazing at Erick with full-black eyes that seemed almost malevolent in their gaze. Not Malevolent, though; or at least not that Erick could see.

The entrance had only been open for a bare second.

Erick zapped right on through to stand near the person whom Erick suspected of being the speaker, seeing as how he was in a central position on a wall-like bulwark-building, but he was obviously not in charge of this entire land. He was simply too… unclean, really.

Erick started with, “Hello.”

The man in a purple robe bowed fast then he shouted to the side, “Close the Wall!”

The two flesh golems tapped the 100-meter-tall obsidian knives and sound rang out. A flickering mirage echoed into the space between the knives, and the desert beyond turned indistinct. Erick couldn’t see anything beyond maybe 50 kilometers. He had lost sight of his storm days ago, anyway.

He wondered if these people knew about the storm out there? They looked like they could use some water.

The purple man turned to Erick and did a proper, formal bow, going all the way down to his knees, pressing his head against the ground. “This one greets the honorable Ascended Flatt. How may the Wraithborne Tower be of service?”

“You all look rather miserable. Rise, please. Need any help with anything?” Erick thumbed back toward the way he came, saying, “I left a large perpetual storm about 4 days back that way. Barring shenanigans by the worm— and you do mean the time worm, right? When you spoke of the worm. Anyway. Barring shenanigans then that part of the desert is going to be full of water and life for a long time coming. And that’s just some of what I can do, so let me help you in some big way, and then you can point me toward the exit to layer 0.”

The man focused as Erick spoke, his eyes still cast downward as he thought fast.

And then he rose, as Erick had commanded, and said, “Water four days from here is a boon that cannot be overstated. We appreciate this generosity. The Endless and its time worm does not abide by such water creation, so we will send out skeletons to grab and return whatever water they can carry and hope that some is left by the time they can get that done.”

Erick smiled, saying, “Water is important then. I’ll consider making a storm here. Moving on: Who is actually in charge here? What is this place anyway? I came to this part of the Wall for whatever reason, and you look marginally in charge, but I don’t want to put you under any more pressure because I am sure that maybe Morbion will come down and interrogate everyone who speaks with me.”

The man tried not to show fear as he said, “We have been informed of possible actions happening around us because of your esteemed personage. If you wish to speak to someone in charge then please continue on to the main city, which is in the center under the big grey pillar, and go to the largest building with the biggest dome. It is there that Chancellor Eldawae holds his court. Welcome to Da’luwe.”

“And a fine welcome it is.” Erick gestured toward the grand city in the far, far distance. “That’s Da’luwe, then?” He gestured downward to the empty land between here and there, and then down even more, to the jumble of buildings and hovels on this side of the obsidian wall. Everything rotted and fields looked weak and terrible. Women and men tried to use magics to eke out tiny fruits from a meager orchard that was not getting nearly enough water. No one seemed to be getting enough of anything. “So what does that make this blighted land? A subsidiary? A torture? A relegation? Are your soul shackles chafing you, mister man in purple?”

Erick watched him, but he also mana sensed every single other person in the closest 500 meters. He counted 376 people, and maybe 1200 undead. The undead were harder to count because some of them looked composed of multiple bodies. Maybe 21 people were actively listening to this conversation. Every single undead was listening, though.

The man in purple’s body betrayed his hope even as his words came out, “We’re doing fine here. Your worry is appreciated, Ascended Flatt.”

Erick got to the point. “How much is your debt?”

“7,300 res—” The man stilled. His soul twisted just a little, and then relaxed. “My debt is my own, Ascended Flatt.”

“… Hmm!” And then Erick handed him a reson jewel worth 7,500 resons. “Yours.”

The man touched it—

And the reson jewel vanished from his hand, sucked into his soul, and then Elsewhere. Something broke inside of him as his soul relaxed, free of restraints. His face changed from subservient to joyful and then came rage—

Erick watched the man.

The man recognized that he was being watched.

The man breathed a bit of relief, and then he continued on as he had before, saying, “I accept the shackles of office, and no more.”

Instantly, the undead standing around Erick and the man, here at the center position of the village beyond the wall, flickered. Power passed into the air, into the man, and more soul shackles cloyed into the guy’s soul. Those soul shackles didn’t seem too arduous, but Erick didn’t really know—

The man asked, “Would you please pay the debts of our entire village? The total is 450,000 resons.”

… Ah. So he could talk about debts now? Openly?

Erick almost said ‘no’ because he only had 4.2m resons on him right now, but then he realized that this guy was probably thinking of him as the part-owner of a Margleknot Sun, which, yeah, that thing was probably making over half a trillion resons per day.

Erick asked, “How does such a payment work?”

“Pay the undead. Or me. Or the big guys over there. Any of them would do. We’re all linked by common bargain.”

Erick turned to the undead, who were looking at him. And then he used his aura to deposit orbs of golden crystal each the size of a torso, each worth 50,000 resons, onto the ground beside the nearest undead. As soon as the power touched that undead the power disappeared into them—

And some of the undead inside the city began to turn into real people again. Flesh grew around bones and people started to step out of their own rot. Some piles of dust in broken houses turned back into people that were rapidly joined by other people, all of them looking rather damned happy for a brief moment, but then rapidly falling into despair. Some of them openly cried out how they couldn’t afford this. They couldn’t afford to be alive.

The still-living relatives seemed to agree with them. Someone complained about how there wasn’t enough food or water to go around, either, which was a problem on top of their debt. Some were happy, though.

Erick finished paying off the debt that the purple man had requested and then he added another 50,000 reson crystal to the common cause just because he could—

A spring turned on in the village square.

A spring.

Turned on.

In the village square.

Why was it off at all? Who the fuck knew!

Erick added another 50,000 crystal to the undead network—

Three more springs turned on all around the village. The walls turned sleek and clean. A spring burbled out by the orchard field.

“Oh this is just fucking ridiculous,” Erick said, looking all around, judging the Wraithborne Tower’s policies. Or perhaps this was purple-dude’s fault? Hard to say and Erick didn’t want to get into it anyway, because... He just didn’t. Not directly, anyway. So instead, he said to the very-happy purple dude, “I’m going to make a water tower over there. I don’t trust whatever horrible Evil-water you got working under these sands. You can take from the water tower’s edges, but if you go inside and break the magic or harvest too much, it will break down.”

The purple guy said something about how that wasn’t necessary, but he was a mouthpiece of the laws around here.

Erick did what he wanted.

And soon, about a hundred kilometers away from the obsidian wall, in the middle of nowhere, Erick raised an eternal stonewood tree out of the ground, and then transformed it into a wide, wide tower. It was about a kilometer wide, and the main walls were 80 meters tall, but some things poked above that 80 meters, such as a grand dome of eternal stonewood that stretched over the whole thing like a latticework bubble. Erick placed a small [Terraforming] in the center, under that dome of latticework, and then he made the eternal stonewood do some illusions, to make the whole thing not really visible above 50 meters. Eternal stonewood could do illusions, after all, and Erick did not want to alert anything about this ‘tower’s’ presence.

Like the time worm.

Erick played with the spellwork in the ‘coliseum’ for a while, making sure that it was working right and that it would eventually fill with water and plants and such, and eventually life. A node network and a bunch of secondary spellwork would ensure that whatever Benevolent life grew here would overflow the coliseum itself to spread far and wide, and also deep. Only the stuff inside the central area would contribute to the stability of this place, but the life that would grow here should be able to do that five times over, at least.

And that would probably be good enough…

Erick spent another two hours adding some redundant systems to the whole thing, like extra [Terraforming] magics and a more robust node network and even a few [Duplicate]-based generators, like the ones he had used in his based on FENRIR.

“And that’s good enough,” Erick announced to himself, as he stood at the edge of the place. “Very good.”

Low waters flowed away from raining storms and flashing lightning. Mosses and grasses were already growing here and there, while lilies opened up petals and flowers atop pools of clear water.

The whole system was poised to grow and grow, and that was great.

This little side project had taken him around five hours. Erick turned back toward the grey pillar in the distance, and the city underneath that pillar. Five hours should have been more than enough time for Chancellor Eldawae and the city of Da’luwe to get ready for him.

- - - -

The city at the center of the obsidian knife wall was a rather nice city, though it was built a lot wider than tall. The sprawl was real at Da’luwe; nothing was close to anything else, and undead made getting around easy. The surrounding villages were all farming plots made of tens of small houses and lots of undead, all surrounding a central large flesh golem, just like the flesh golems at the wall. From pulling carts to farming the fields to cleaning the houses to sewing the clothes, the undead did everything.

Erick wondered how many of those undead were real people, trapped in their own bodies.

Erick stopped at the first of the largest villages he saw, setting down in the town square, to look up at the flesh golem in the center, which looked down at him. Erick stared at it for a moment, and then he looked around, checking out the hovels and the undead working the lands. Even for all the undead labor, the labor wasn’t doing much. The lands were not fruitful.

Erick took out a 50,000 reson crystal and rolled it over to the nearest ‘mindless’ undead.

The entire village turned into real people.

“OKAY,” Erick said, as people regained themselves. “That was too few resons for too much action and this is disturbing.” He looked up at the central golem, who was now looking down at Erick with flickering purple eyes. “What’s the point of having a people if you make them into undead slaves? They literally do more work if they’re allowed to simply live their lives. This is basic economics.”

The revived people in town did not like being awake. They were incredibly anxious that Erick spoke that way to the center flesh golem. And then just about every single one of them prostrated themselves to the golem. Each one said small words of re-binding, their souls re-shackling.

The flesh golem opened its mouth words flowed out in a language that was not draconic, but which Erick knew from his time in Margleknot anyway. It was a language called Frata, and it was rather languidly spoken, almost like French. “As per Tower Rules, you have paid your relatively minor debts and you are all forgiven of your crimes. We would have had you walk to the main city and resurrected you there upon the completion of your time served, and then laid out your options for your reintegration into society, but it appears you have a walk ahead of you. Those wishing to stay may kill themselves when Ascended Flatt leaves, and you will return to the Other World, and re-enter Da’luwe control, where your work and production are added to your balance.” The 50-meter tall flesh golem said to Erick, “I don’t control anything here, Ascended Flatt. I am merely a person working the fields, too. Please speak to someone higher up than me.”

… So there was a lot there.

Erick had stepped into a problem that he didn’t understand, paying off debts from people who didn’t want it, and maybe made it ‘worse’ by doing what he believed to be the right thing.

… welp! That’s fine. Erick was fine with doing what people believed to be harm to them in order to help them. He had gotten over that particular compunction a long time ago. These days he mostly recognized that compunction and listened to it sometimes, to make sure that he was doing the right thing.

It was the right thing to make people live again and then toss them into new lives free of soul shackles, especially if those soul shackles came with barbs that hooked into the person, and made them feel good about having the shackles around them.

Erick frowned.

This was not a problem to solve in one day.

Nor was it a problem to solve with absolute force, either physical force, or monetary force.

Erick simply took off into the air and headed toward Da’luwe’s largest dome, right underneath the grey pillar in the sky. He did not want to watch as the people behind him killed themselves on whatever implements they had available. He saw it happen, though, because his eyes were open in every direction.

As bodies fell to the ground most of those souls remained in those bodies, and new shackles turned them into drones. They got back to work. Erick wasn’t sure what was happening with the bits of souls that went away…

Oh.

Erick looked at the air again, remembering something he had heard about the places that the Tower kept in Layer 1. Erick couldn’t see it, he couldn’t feel it, he couldn’t sense it at all. But there it was, a manaminer in the air.

The entire city of Da’luwe and probably all the way to the obsidian knife wall, was under the domain of a manaminer. Or rather the ‘Authority’ of a manaminer, Erick guessed.

Eh!

Erick couldn’t get his mind off of all the people he saw below. Some of them seemed to be truly mindless automatons, based on the amount of soul in their body. Most of the people this far out of the city were real, though, and their bodies were doing basic labor while their minds were elsewhere.

As Erick got closer the suburbs got better.

He started to see real people living their lives once again, and they weren’t working. They were laughing by pools and drinking wine. Reading books in comfortable chairs by the window. Have sex on rooftops. Painting murals. Conversing at cafes or eating dinner/breakfast/whatever at fancy restaurants. The undead were still there, but they were cleaning houses and emptying trash cans and flipping burger-like things on a grill.

It appeared the undead were the working class and some of them were actual criminals, or some shit. Erick had a hard time believing that the guys he had left under that flesh golem in that village had committed any crimes that necessitated thralldom.

… Maybe the guy by the wall had.

And yet, probably not.

Erick had encountered stuff like this before in the Fractured Citadels of Quintlan. They had certainly never gone into this sort of depravity, though. Slavery was against the Script, and anyone who caused a slave usually ended up either dead or waking up to find their slaves gone, because the anti-slavery Quest system issued Quests to slaves, to either empower them to kill their slaver, or to escape. Even with all that anti-slave stuff going on, though, slaves and slavery still happened. Even with the anti-Teleport stuff in the recent years, slaves got other options that were almost like a [Teleport] to safety. It was an evolving system.

What came before the Freelands was the largest example of real slavery shit going down on Veird, but even that slavery was gone now that the Freelands were there. Back when that land was simply the unincorporated slave houses of Nergal, years ago, House Benevolence, but mostly Destiny and Messalina, worked together to dismantle all of that down there.

… Erick wondered, with the Demons being real again, was slavery back on the table on Veird? Yggdrasil hadn’t spoken of that back when he had talked about what was going on back home, but the demons, even if they were incani, had a habit of doing the slavery-thing.

But in that case…

Entering into an Elemental Vile and Demon slave contract was the only way for an incani to die and end up with the house they signed up with, instead of randomly placed somewhere else on Hell, as like, a dretch or worm; the lowest lifeforms of demonkin.

And that was largely true. Demon slave contracts weren’t all that bad, in a technical sense. The new ‘slave’ became a member of a demon house upon death, and sure, there was conscripted grunt work, but they were treated more like little brothers or sisters, and not really like slaves at all. The Old Demons were all dead, and all that was left on Hell was generational family houses built by incani, and upon centuries of dead grandmas, cousins, brothers, fathers, etcetera.

The soul shackled slavery on display here in Da’luwe was not like incani slavery at all.

As Erick flew through the sky, looking at the ground below and at the people, wraiths and ghosts and other incorporeal flying undead began to lift up from the edges of houses here and there, all of them looking almost invisible against the rest of the world. They were the aerial defense force, of course. Some of them took to the sky to follow Erick. Some floated up in front of him, directly in his path, their eyes full of hate and their bodies turning partially real as they prepared to strike. But then their eyes would flash a different color, going from invisible to barely green, or yellow, or orange, or purple. Purple happened a lot. And then, when that happened, the undead would disperse, or move to the side, or ignore Erick.

Erick assumed that the ghosts were all on simple commands to kill anyone in the sky, and that it took work to make them not attack the people in the air, which was why Erick was the only one in the air right now… At all, it seemed. Everywhere Erick looked, nothing was in the sky at all, except for him.

Erick floated toward the largest, central buildings, which held upon a low mountain in the center of the city, looking like an Evil-Vatican-meets-Parthenon sort of place, and mostly grey with black accents. It was a land made of domes and spires and tall silver trees, sitting behind a high wall that separated it from the high-class parts of the main city of Da’luwe.

Some scary-looking undead, including what appeared to be a few ghost-alien-dragons, briefly appeared underneath as Erick crested the wall separating the central castle from the rest of the kingdom. But then those ghosts went back to total invisibility, soaking back into the wall and the land. Their eyes didn’t flicker in that redirection. They didn’t need to hear commands; they were likely intelligent ghosts.

Everything in the castle land was light grey stone with black accents, and it looked positively evil.

Still, it looked kinda nice.

Erick landed by a wide fountain in a large, central square, right in front of the gigantic domed building. This seemed like a good place for him to start, and his Lightning Path agreed with him.

Living people and a few liches, for sure, had been walking around down here, going from here to there, but they all scattered when it was apparent that Erick was coming down into this courtyard.

Erick faced the large domed building, and wondered at its closed doors. They were each tens of meters tall and wrought with imagery of city building, which was pretty good in Erick’s opinion. City building was a lot better of a theme than most undead liked to—

Huge, black, ghostly skeletal arms reached out of the air and gripped the doors. The metal doors groaned under the weight of themselves, and the skeletal arms pulled harder, opening them wide. The skeletal arms pulled the doors open all the way, and then faded back into the stone. The hall beyond looked like a grand central stage surrounded on all sides by low seating—

Horns trumpeted a clarion call of power from inside the building.

And then a man stood upon that central stage. He walked out of the large building, toward Erick. He was obviously a lich, wearing thin black robes that showed grey skin and a sexless body. Black bones poked through here and there. All of it had to be an affectation pointed one way or another, and Erick wasn’t sure what the goal of his affectations were, exactly. He was elven and about as tall as Erick, which was around 3 meters due to his own dragon stuff. Erick assumed this was Chancellor Eldawae.

It was probably Chancellor Eldawae.

Erick stepped forward, meeting the man halfway, in the sun.

The man stepped out of the meeting chambers, his eyes filled with silver light, as he regarded Erick. He gave a tiny, partial bow, saying, “Greetings, Ascended Erick Flatt of Earth and Veird and the new Father of Margleknot. I am Chancellor Eldawae. What brings you to our humble respite in the Endless? A way back to Layer 0, perhaps?” He pointed in the distance, toward a dim grey pillar on the horizon, to Erick’s right. “That is the correct path to the nearest portal to Layer 1, but that is not the full story. Go there, and then follow the next four pillars and you will make it to the way out of this land. It takes an ascended about a year to get to that first stop if you’re moving fast, but not too fast. If you move at the full speed of action you will get there in a minute, but about 14 or 15 years will have passed here in this land. The entire trip to Layer 1 is something that might take a person either 10 minutes and 75 years, or 6 years of simply moving fast.

“Or.

“I have a better option.

“Kill the time worm and we can see about funding the creation of a portal here, in Da’luwe. Falling to Layer 1 is easy. Leaving Layer 1 is only usually possible through walking, or dying. But we can make a portal under certain circumstances, for 1 person at a time. The only reason we don’t have one is because it’s expensive to maintain the wards, and every time the worm tests them we’re set back that much more.”

Chancellor Eldawae stopped talking.

That was all rather simple, then.

Erick said, “I want to install more Benevolence towers in your land to bring more bounty to your land, and to allow for a freer populace. I’ll see about killing the time worm afterward.”

Chancellor Eldawae had no response, except to stand there like a posed corpse, regarding Erick.

Erick remained silent.

Eventually, Eldawae asked, “Your purpose in those Benevolence towers?”

“My goal is the eradication of Evil from the Wraithborne Tower which would result in the eradication of a lot of subsidiary evils in the rest of Margleknot. I would desire for slavery as you know it to end as well. I do this because everything can be made better. The best way forward to a better tomorrow is only to kill what needs to be killed and then save all the rest, including the truly great evils. As long as people wish to be better, then I want to help those people be better.

“Take, for instance, the body you’re wearing. Is that for show, or because that’s what your magics allow for? If it’s for show, then that’s fine. If your body is that way because that’s the best option you have available —and I see that many undead around here are similarly corpse-like— then know that Benevolence can make for truly proper bodies. My boyfriend is an archlich and he put some Benevolence into his bodies a while ago, thus allowing for a much wider array of emotions and cohesion and power.

“A lot more power.

“And speaking of power, and going back to the towers I want to put up: you’re low on resources here, or something, and you need more resources. I have absolutely no idea why you have a water shortage at all, for instance. The tower I have already built is something I put up in 5 hours and will last forever, unless it is messed with. I’m sure I could do better if I had your cooperation in that.” Erick said, “In a more sinister way, I am helping how I can and proving that Benevolence can do what you cannot for whatever reasons, and extremely easily as well. That is how I can prove my power and the weakness of your current society.”

Some of that was bluster. Hard to say what parts, exactly.

Chancellor Eldawae was silent again, thinking.

Erick waited, but he was not idle. He gauged the reactions of every single person watching this exchange, from up in the nearby towers, to on the wall and preparing to strike Erick down with spellwork if the word was given, to inside the lecture rooms to the side, to those who mana sensed this conversation from inside hidden bunkers inside walls here and there. The soldiers among those here were all waiting for the signal to go, or to stand down, but the courtiers and sycophants and clerks and nobles all watched with a bit more worry, or hope, or absolute disdain.

Most everyone here wanted Eldawae to end Erick right here and now.

The smarter people knew that Eldawae would not have such an easy time doing to Erick what he had undoubtedly done to so many others in order to keep himself in power.

Eldawae was a smart person.

And so, Erick waited.

Eldawae relaxed a fraction and regarded Erick with dismissive silver eyes as he spoke in a pleasant tone, “I find it insulting that you think my body is not an acceptable form. Sex is highly overrated, Wizard Flatt.”

Erick grinned. “I completely agree. But then there’s food, and warmth, and a whole bunch of physical things that are nice to have.”

“You may enact your towers. The limits of Da’luwe are from the tops of the Wall to the top of that central tower behind my grand meeting chambers. Your current tower is below this measure, so that is fine. Do not build higher than that, or the worm will see. Do not dig any deeper than that height below the surface of the sands, either. To be safe, simply do not go below 25 meters.

“We don’t have a lot of water or many other resources so we have to import a lot of it from side realities using resons. Everything runs on resons here, and everything is imported.

“Da’luwe is a penal colony, so please do not go freeing people from the crimes they have committed. These crimes include murder, rape, arson, warmongering, failure to pay, genocide, treason, drug trafficking, terrorism, fraud, grand assault, impersonation, and many others.”

Erick easily asked, “Are you a penal colony looking to hold people, or to rehabilitate them?”

“To hold until death. Rehabilitation is not what people get sent to Da'luwe for, but that does still happen from time to time.”

“What about all the people in the city who aren’t undead? Who are just living lives of ease? Or the people by the Wall? Are they all Contract soul-shackle slaves, too?”

“The people who are living in luxury in Da’luwe are either those who are born to those who are imprisoned here, or visitors from outside who find themselves stranded here in the Endless, who come to us like you came to us. Those who were born here, if they choose to stay past the age of majority, are the majority of those in the city. Everyone who lives here contributes all of their power to powering Da'luwe, though, and that includes those who are not prisoners. Excess power goes to paying off debts, if people have them. Most people do not have debts; they have sentences for offenses committed. Many people stay shackled past their payments in order to support others.” Eldawae said, “Those who have minor offenses, but which are still major in the eyes of the Tower, get to keep their bodies and intellect upon arriving here, if they work a job like ‘wall guard’. Those who do major offenses become undead shackled to the city until their debt is considered paid, and then they are allowed to die and join the Waiting Room waiting line.”

… Well that was a lot.

If some of it was true…

Erick decided he still didn’t like their system.

After a moment more of thinking, Erick asked, “How does one kill the time worm? Is it just the one?”

“There is only ever one time worm in existence at any point in time, and the only way to kill it is with extreme power, surrounding the entire beast and obliterating it down to the last iota of existence. Soul magic works well. It only ever stays dead for about a hundred years, though. Don’t worry about trying to stop it for longer than that.”

“Is it truly mindless? Unable to be soul shackled?”

“No, and no. It’s a very intelligent beast, but it wants to eat and eat, and that’s all it is good for. Killing it will open up Da'luwe to likely fighting a surface war in the near future against any number of unknown actors and a few known enemies out there, but there’s always more of those than anyone can count. That war will happen in 70 years if we’re lucky, 90 if we’re more lucky, or 30 if we’re unlucky.” Eldawae said, “Those who crash against our obsidian knives, seeking to take our bounty, often find themselves prisoners, though.” He shrugged. “It’s usually a wash.”

“… I’m going to go out and make some resources for you all, and then I’ll go take care of the time worm problem. Talk to you later.”

“Please keep your fight away from the city. Far, far away.” Eldawae stepped back. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Ascended Flatt.”

“You as well, Chancellor Eldawae. I’ll be back.”

“I look forward to properly welcoming you to Da'luwe next time.”

Erick flew up and out of the city, to the outskirts.

32-ish hours later, and after having created eight more resource towers all in a rather organized circle surrounding the main city, Erick flew out and away from the obsidian wall, back the way he had come.

Toward the lands that held the time worm.

- - - -

A journey of years versus the work of maybe two weeks; that’s what Erick was thinking of as he flew through the sky as a massive black dragon. He could either spend years journeying through the lands of Layer 1 to reach the way out or he could help out a penal colony achieve a better standard of living and maybe they could make a portal back to Layer 0. He was pretty sure that Eldawae was lying somehow, but if he wasn’t, then Erick would simply be helping people who needed help. The fact that they were prisoners presumably guilty of various crimes meant they needed more help.

… And yet.

Maybe ‘Evil’ people were fundamentally different from everything Erick ever knew, but most people only turned to evil when they had no other choice…

Probably.

It was what it was.

It took Erick a few days of flying, but eventually the land changed.

The storm Erick had cast was on the horizon, like a layer of grey filling up the mirage of the distance. It took Erick another day of flying to reach the greenery that the storm had left all over the Endless. There the desert lay, transformed with green and water. It was not a permanent transformation, though. Erick saw where mud had turned to dried, cracked land, and where trees had toppled over from lack of root support. The sand here was sand, after all. Sand was not a good holder of water at all.

And yet some grasses and cacti lived.

Erick had been toying with the idea of instantiating a crystal mimic into this land because those things were hardy animals that supported desert ecosystems very well. There were problems with that idea, of course. Majorly, Erick had no idea how to actually instantiate a crystal mimic and he wasn’t sure he wanted to try. Secondly, Erick had no idea what lay beyond this land, so unleashing one of Veird’s most virulent invasive plant species could be a catastrophically bad thing.

The time worm was probably bad enough—

And speaking of the time worm.

There it was. Or rather, there was its track.

The green land below was a threadbare carpet, except where the mountain-sized time worm had carved through that carpet, exposing sand once again in long lines and curved dots of tan. It was a good sign. The time worm wasn’t able to eat the greenery faster than the storm could make more, and that’s what mattered.

The worm itself was somewhere up ahead.

Erick transformed into his largest form and plopped down onto the ground in the way that an aircraft carrier would plop.

Sand went everywhere. The world thumped with the weight and power of Erick’s claws. His wings cast away the green surface, exposing the bare sand just below the thin life. His tail thrashed the land, sending up a wave of sand that would have drowned at least ten people, if this land had had people and if they had suddenly appeared in the way of his tail strike. Which would have been rather silly on their part.

… And no worm yet?

Erick stomped down with all four legs a few times and thrashed his tail again, and then he roared Benevolence across the dried desert surface. Lightning crackled kilometers out like a dread storm, crashing and breaking and reforming the world with cacti everywhere the lightning touched.

… Erick waited.

He waited.

And then he waited some more.

“… Where is that darn worm?”

The worm turned out to be having the time of its life another two days further along.

The sky rained hard and tendrils of shadow from an unseen [Undertow Star] pierced the clouds, reaching down from unseen heights above, to touch down upon most of the life below. Erick watched from that rainy, lightning-filled sky, as the time worm leapt in and out of the wet land, aiming for each puddle like the universe’s largest child, playing in the mud. The thing was easily 8, maybe 12 kilometers wide at the front end, and that bulk continued all along the entire length of the monster, of which maybe a few hundred kilometers were visible.

It stitched the green, wet ground like a piece of tan string, stretching out far behind Erick, and racing far forward. It crisscrossed itself. The entire length of it shuddered as it swallowed lake after lake, that water passing down through the entire creature. Where it ended, Erick could not see. Perhaps it had no end?

Looking at it from up here, Erick didn’t really want to kill it. That storm would last forever and thus this land would be green around here forever. Perhaps Da’luwe could find another horrific monster to use as a guard dog?

Hmm.

The worm was obviously having fun drinking all that water and probably plant life. It didn’t seem to care that Erick was up here watching it, either.

Erick knew this because it had eyes all alongside its length. They were tiny, near-invisible eyes, but they were there, and they were all looking everywhere, including at Erick up in the sky. The time worm kept on keeping on, aiming at the largest puddles of water it could see and then swallowing them whole like the world’s biggest suction tube.

Erick had guessed that the worm would have had some sort of reaction to the spellwork Erick had put into the sky. He had assumed the worm would have aimed for the center power of the spellwork, high above the clouds, in order to destroy that [Undertow Star]+[Terraforming]+reson combination. Instead, it merely enjoyed all the water everywhere.

The tendrils of that [Undertow Star] didn’t touch the worm, either. Erick would have assumed that it would have, but of course it didn’t, and seeing that it didn’t, Erick realized his blunder. The worm didn’t have Mana or Health, or even basic mana, and those were the things that the Star would drain. The only things that had mana around here were all the plants and stuff growing out of the [Terraforming]-changed wasteland.

In that moment, a bunch of different minor revelations of Margleknot combined for him.

He reevaluated a lot about the general power level of Margleknot and all the surrounding lands.

Those water towers he had put up in Da'luwe, with their node networks and draining spellworks, would only function by absorbing the mana generated from the life that the water towers grew. Those drains wouldn’t touch any of the people in that penal colony, so they weren’t a deterrent at all to anyone who walked in those lands.

No one had investigated the towers while Erick had been building them, and now that Erick was gone he expected them to be thoroughly investigated by a few elite troops, or whatever. Those who could survive the drain or ignore the drain would be among those explorers and takers.

But there would be no drain for those people at all. Therefore, those towers would rapidly be investigated and probably torn apart by every single person that needed anything at all, from plants to water to whatever, which meant that they would likely be denuded by the time he returned triumphant from this quest.

But also, maybe some people would start actively accreting Benevolence, and thus make themselves both vulnerable to the towers and also able to use Benevolence themselves. Thinking about that, it was kind of amusing that people would need to make themselves vulnerable to the drain of those towers in order to properly benefit from the accretion aspects of those towers.

Strength through vulnerability was a nice idea.

No one was going to do that, though.

Besides that…

This worm was something of a conundrum. Here it was, eating and eating, and the storm would literally never run out. Did Erick need to do anything to it at all? Could this be a ‘solved’ problem?

… It was supposedly intelligent. Could Erick talk to it?

He checked his Status to look at his Psyche.

Over 200 million Psyche.

“It’s enough.”

Erick reached out with [Telepathy], touching the mind of the beast below—

Pain.

Ah.

Right.

Erick had a few different thoughts as he jerked from the unexpected sensation of pain ripping across his entire dragon body, causing his very scales to hurt and a headache to pressure his head so hard that blood gushed out of his snout. He snorted that blood away and blinked out more blood. Rain washed away the evidence of his misstep, and he resumed flight. He doubted if anyone watching would have noticed his pain, but he certainly did.

He hadn’t felt pain like that in a very long time, because it had been a long time since he had been rebuffed telepathically.

Unwanted [Telepathy] gave a blowback that was commensurate with the ‘no thanks’ from the recipient, after all. If the time worm far below had had any sort of reaction at all, then Erick didn’t recognize that reaction. The time worm didn’t change course. Didn’t scream. Didn’t do anything aside from pursue more bodies of water for gulping. It hadn’t been pained, after all.

Had it even felt Erick’s telepathic touch?

Erick needed to fix this.

Erick took a moment and he went into the sky, above the clouds, high into the air. The clouds were stacked up for kilometers upon kilometers. Flashes of white and tendrils of shadow occasionally illuminated the rainy gloom, like some monster lurking in the depths, which is exactly what the [Undertow Star] became when anyone got too close to it. It only took mana from its surroundings while someone was far enough away, but when they got closer it would rip their very bodies to shreds. Erick had seen a few people over the years try to get too close to one of his Stars without any Health or Mana to protect them. It was not pretty.

Maybe he needed to remake the towers in Daluwe with some [Undertow Star]s. Such an action might not protect the bounty on the ground, but it would certainly protect any [Terraforming] the star was attached to, and that might be enough.

Erick avoided the center of the storm, and went higher.

The rain thinned. The lightning disappeared below.

Erick popped out over a land of clouds both white and grey, looking like a slow hurricane of continental proportions. He took a moment to appreciate the sight, and then he cast a bit of Platform and Time spellwork in order to give himself a protected space.

Once so protected, Erick dove into himself to poke at the [Telepathy] spell, to try and understand what was going on with that particular Mind Magic. His goal was to take away the backlash part, or at least mitigate it somewhat. He wasn’t too sure if he could do that, though; he wasn’t a Mind Mage, and he didn’t want to be a Mind Mage. To hear Poi talk about it, being a Mind Mage was not for everyone.

Very few people wanted to know what everyone around them was thinking all the time, but born Mind Mages were able to ameliorate and understand what was going on with themselves and others in a way that wasn’t destructive to oneself, or to others.

Erick peered inside himself.

He saw his goal.

The [Telepathy] crystal was like many others, but there was no such thing as Elemental Mind, so it had none of that in there at all. What it did have, and what almost tossed Erick out of his meditation, was a nexus of ethereal soul-stuff that did not look like soul-stuff at all, now that he was looking at it again.

When Erick had checked out his soul for Malevolent Influences, there had been a little bit in all the Mind Magic, and he had carefully taken that out and eliminated the problematic Nothor Beasts that had come out of those fixes. When he had done that, the spell had looked like a normal crystal spell with some illuminated streamers inside. Those streamers were what Erick thought of as the tendrils that Poi always had around him, always out there and touching the minds of others. They had looked like a weird form of spellwork that he didn’t quite understand, which was pretty normal when it came to Mind Magic.

But here, a week later, and after obviously experiencing some natural soul healing, Erick looked at the [Telepathy] crystal and saw pinpoints of light that looked like the glitter-crystal that made up the Fae Enclave’s greater tower that ran through all of Margleknot, the denser crystal tower at the center of that main tower, and the very matter of the Fractal Fairy itself. It was soulstuff, all tendril-like and simultaneously made of dotted-stars.

It was the mark of this universe.

Just like how Darkness made a mark inside people, giving them Darkness that made mana.

The center of [Telepathy] was a spot of this Fractal Universe.

And since it was the mind that made resons, it stood to reason that this thing here was the thing of the Fractal Universe which allowed for resons.

Or at least that was a working theory.

Okay.

So.

This was a big deal Erick was seeing.

Erick’s ‘spot of Darkness’ was an ocean compared to this ‘spot of Fractals’, if that’s what this thing was, anyway. Perhaps this wasn’t a mote of this Fractal Universe. Perhaps it was just a creation of Melemizargo’s? Did Erick have another marking of this universe anywhere inside of him?

… He didn’t see any, but then again there was one spot of his soul that he couldn’t truly see, and that was the Darkness. That whole part of him was actually all throughout his entire soul, until he frameshifted himself into an observable mode, allowing him to make sense of the separate parts of himself. When he did that, his Darkness became like a floor, or a core, or something that underpinned everything else, but also not really that at all. It was rather indiscernible. Perhaps the ‘spot of Fractals’ was somewhere inside that Darkness? Who knew.

… Were all his ‘universal markings’ in there? ‘Under the floor’, so to speak?

Erick tried to frameshift himself into finding his ‘universal markings’, but even with knowing that he had one due to the Fractal Fairy implying as much in their speech, Erick couldn’t find it.

So he went back to his [Telepathy] crystal.

It was not just a spot of Fractals, it was also a Benevolence crystal, because Erick had remade everything with his own power when he transformed what the Script had given him into his own True Wizard body.

Erick popped out of himself for a moment and simply looked up into the sky, at the Layer 1 Fae Enclave up there. He recalled a story about how Melemizargo had made Mind Magic in the early centuries of the Script, in order to undermine everything and everyone, and to show them the truth of their cage. He had obviously taken a piece of the Fractal Universe itself and turned it into a superpower, because what Erick had seen inside of himself was not a spell that originated in mana at all.

Mind Magic was not mana-based magic at all, and yet it could be used like that by most people born to that power.

More than that, though…

Erick thought of sensing capabilities.

Mana sensing was what people with mana did. And yet, not everyone had mana, and not all manas were sensible in the same ways. There was a lot of mana in Margleknot, though, so everyone could look around with mana if they had some sort of capability in that way. And yet, mana sensing in Margleknot was iffy. Spotty. Not very sure. That’s what Erick felt in those oddities in the air when he mana sensed and felt other powers inside the air that were not the mana of the Painted Cosmology, or similarly comprehensible powers.

Even with all the varied manas out there: Anyone could mana sense and become one with the mana and sense the world through the mana. And through that sensing, they could make miracles.

Or at least sensing the world was the first step toward changing the world.

And so: What was telepathy, except for mind sensing?

Sensing was just the first part, though.

Through sensing came interaction, either on others, with others, or on one-self.

Erick reconsidered his goal of changing [Telepathy] to remove the backlash, and his history with Mind Magic.

He could probably break open the crystal that was [Telepathy] and integrate the Mark of the Fractal Universe into his very soul, ‘awakening the mind slime’, as it were.

He did not want to do this. He liked that people could express who they were without him knowing they were lying, or the fractions by which they were lying. Erick certainly didn’t need to know that this person or that person were thinking about horrific acts left and right, while in reality all they ever did were good things—

The fae mind controlled people all the time.

“Well that makes a whole lot of sense now, too, since they’re empowered by this universe and its mental magics.”

Erick thought for a minute more.

The next revelation came soon enough.

“Ah. You can probably use the mind slime to interact with other realities of the Fractal Universe in a more direct, concentrated way, than Wizardry. That’s probably what this Fractal Mark meant for. Communication across the— Hmm. Actually. No. Probably not. Maybe that’s what Melemizargo meant it for; for universal communication.” Erick said, “But anyone who actually managed that would have run into Nothanganathor and been killed. Therefore, the only thing that this bit of the Fractal can do is exactly what Poi has been able to do… Or actually... A whole lot less, probably.”

… Hmm.

Well.

Poi can contact people without them being able to say ‘no thanks’.

Could Erick change this spell in that way? To force a mental connection?

Yes.

That was his goal.

Envisioning the whole thing, Erick saw himself being able to contact another peacefully...

Which would require a bit of mental translations, actually, because speaking the same language was a big deal.

… Or could he just do some sort of ‘pure thought’ sort of thing, that would not allow others to lie in the [Telepathy] connection?

… Hmm. This was a big change, actually. Lotta moving parts that would open Erick up to attack because true interaction could allow for the passage of memetic threats, and people surely had a lot of those out here…

Hmm.

“… I’ll just see if I can remove the backlash part, or mitigate it somehow.”

Erick dove into himself once again and found the [Telepathy] crystal looking like a spot of glitter-crystal that was also made of tendrils inside a Benevolence crystal shell with a whole bunch of unknown little bits to them. Erick focused, and everything else vanished off to the sides. All that remained was [Telepathy], coming into superb focus.

The little bits and bobs connected to Erick’s Body and Mind most of all, like overlapping pieces of puzzles that would allow his physical mind to interact with his mental self.

This was unnecessary, from what Erick was seeing. Through some more frameshifting, Erick saw that the tendrils of the glitter-crystal were wholly attached to his Mind. He didn’t need the Body connection at all…

Did he?

Erick came halfway out of himself and summoned a spell he hadn’t used in a long time.

[Imaginary Work Animal].

A large toad appeared and then it started singing which was about the easiest thing for Erick to imagine an animal capable of doing, and Erick liked the sound of frogs in a rainstorm. Even though the rainstorm was far below, the big frog sang anyway. It sounded pretty great.

The animal was a normal animal of its type —giant rain frog— and therefore it had a rudimentary mind.

Erick poked at it with [Telepathy] as he watched the spell work inside of his soul.

A tendril connected to the frog and the frog sent an inquisitive question back up the way, almost as though it was asking ‘what’s up?’.

Inside Erick’s soul the spell functioned ‘normally’. Or at least Erick supposed it did. Erick sent out a tendril of thought, and a bit of some odd tendril came into Erick, allowed inside by his own [Telepathy] extension. The frog’s return signal brushed through the part of [Telepathy] that touched Erick’s Body, which acted as something of a check. Then the frog’s signal passed the Body check, and went into Erick’s physical body, whereupon Erick understood that the creature was asking ‘what’s up?’.

Erick guessed a few things about what was happening there, but he chose not to explore those guesses too deeply at this moment.

All Erick really understood was that he needed to keep the Body check in order to understand the frog. Perhaps a more trained Mind Mage would not need to use the Body to understand anything, but Erick seemed like he needed that right now.

Erick braced himself and sent a [Telepathy] questing down below the clouds, to the time worm far below—

The return signal was a reverse river that crashed into the pipe that was Erick’s tendril outlet, to strike the Body check, and then crash outward, like a river hitting a dam, harming everything in that crash of a return signal.

Erick sighed out blood, dripping red onto the platform underfoot.

The only thing Erick understood at this particular moment was that he had no idea how to fix this problem at all.

The Body check was used to check the incoming signal for ‘no’, and also used to send the signal to Erick to allow for that connection, and thus connecting Erick’s physical mind to the other physical mind at the other end of the spellwork.

Perhaps the ‘physical mind to physical mind’ was itself a check, in that ‘connecting to a non-physical mind’ usually simply killed a person. Erick could easily see that connecting to an eldritch mind could go very, very bad.

And so, changing any part of that stuff right there would allow for anyone to directly attack his mental resources, and possibly break the [Telepathy] crystal itself…

… Hmm.

“The only thing I actually understand is that this [Telepathy] spell is a work of curated art, specifically created in this way to both make it a strong spell, and to disallow anyone messing with it… I guess this is why they didn’t want anyone taking more than one or two Mind spells in most places back on Veird, either. If I had a few tens of Mind Magic spells to poke around with, I could figure out how they all worked and do some reverse engineering.”

Even on Veird, though, no one had access to their soul like Erick had access to his soul right now; the Script obscured the soul. But, Erick supposed, multiple layers of obfuscation were simply good security practices.

This particular [Telepathy] crystal was likely the public result of generations of iterative changes, too.

All the initial glitter-crystal-empowered people on Veird were likely long dead.

… This [Telepathy] crystal probably had a bunch of safeguards to disrupt the power within if anyone ever fucked around with it too much. Erick had likely removed those safeguards, though, when he removed the Malevolence inside.

Once again, Erick considered simply breaking the crystal. Could he break this thing open and ‘awaken his mind slime’ instantly?

Maybe!

Erick didn’t want that, though.

So thinking in another direction…

Erick dove into himself, and checked out how the damage from the [Telepathy] crystal was processed. He might not be able to muck around with the crystal itself, but he could certainly change some wires on the back end—

Ah ha!

There they were. The False Damage threads of the [Telepathy] crystal. They attached directly to his body, bypassing much of his Health barrier—

Oh.

Erick saw how the Fae of the Fae Enclave had been able to muck around with him mentally. The entire [Telepathy] crystal had some lines going directly into his Mind, Body, and Soul, bypassing, in small ways, all of his various pools of power.

Well that was an easy fix.

Erick switched out all the transfer lines of influence onto their correct paths; into his millions upon millions of Mana, Health, and Psyche. With a final ‘Yes’ to the changes, they took hold.

Erick sighed as he came back to himself.

With a quick [Telepathy] toward the time worm far below, Erick felt a return stroke against his Psyche and Body. No False Damage equivalents happened at all. No bleeding. No headache. Just a wash of power against Erick that drained a few 10,000 Health and Mind in the return ‘no’…

Oh!

Erick could probably shunt that power directly against anyone who said ‘no’ to him.

He could make the ‘return the False Damage’ go right along his initial questing tendril…

“… Nah. That seems… wrong. Very wrong.”

An idea to keep in his back pocket, though.

Actually.

Erick could copy spells inside of his body and use the second one just fine. He had done that with [Reson Gathering] to make [Reson Wallet]…

But that had been done using mana. This [Telepathy] crystal was not wholly mana. This was Fractal power, or something like that. Erick had no real idea how to copy this spell, or he would have done that and made [Offensive Telepathy].

All of that was something to keep in mind for the future.

For now, Erick dismissed the little singing frog—

He couldn’t dismiss the frog that easily. Right. He forgot he couldn’t do that.

Erick looked down at the little frog, chirping along, doing what Erick had created it to do. The ‘little frog’ was about 3 meters tall and so it made a lot of noise. It seemed really happy, too. Erick found that he truly did not want to kill it.

… Welp. Here’s another experiment, then.

Erick whispered to the frog, lacing his voice with resons, saying, “You get to be a whole bunch of genetically diverse and compatible vegetarian frogs to inhabit all these stormlands. Live well in the lightning, little terraforming frogs.”

Benevolence crackled from Erick’s draconic lips to the frog’s body, breaking it into ten thousand smaller frogs in every possible color of glowing pastel that all rolled away from the main body, all of them singing and chirping and spreading.

Erick dismissed the platform underfoot. The frogs fell alongside Erick, all of them chirping and spreading and trying to fly, but finding themselves unable. They were just frogs, after all. With a flicker of power Erick cast bubbling spellwork across the entire pastel release. Colorful frogs in little bubbles, two or three or four a pop, filled the sky, falling down like illuminated balloons. They’d spread far and wide in all the many, many new marshes down there, scattering on the wind in their little bubble parachutes. When they hit the ground the bubbles would pop.

And Erick fell through storm clouds, leading the way for the frogs to swirl down behind him.

Erick hadn’t gotten far with the [Telepathy] work, but he did learn something deep, and the spell didn’t hurt now when he aimed it at an unwilling target. That was good enough for now.

It would be great for poking at the mind of someone to get their attention.

It was good enough for what he planned to do next.

- - - -

Erick floated a few kilometers above the devouring maw of the time worm.

And he poked it with [Telepathy].

The poking did nothing that Erick could see. He got the return signal, of course. That knocked out a few 10,000 in mostly Health and Psyche. It didn’t do much else. And so, Erick poked. He poked—

The worm eyed him strongly, and then kept worming through the various lakes of the new stormlands.

Poke.

Poke. Poke.

Poke. Poke. Poke.

… Poke.

pokepokepokepokepokepokepoke—

A return signal blasted into Erick’s mind, flowing alongside his outpouring rivers of Psyche and Health and a bit of his Mana, too, sounding like rage and hate and nothing intelligible at all. Far below, the time worm eyed Erick with a bunch of its surface eyes. It continued on into the next lake directly ahead, most of it looking at Erick, but when Erick didn’t do anything else the creature fully focused on the water ahead. It swallowed that lake and then the next.

Erick telepathically poked the worm some more. A lot, really. Well beyond what could possibly be considered good manners for any normal sort of interaction at all. If Erick had left the channels open for [Telepathy] to throw False Damage directly at him then Erick would have fallen out of the sky for the pain, but this sort of return ‘no’ only cost a few hundred thousand Mana, Health, and Psyche so far

Eventually the worm stopped eating water and went after Erick, flowing into the sky like the sky was sand and easily able to support its weight.

Erick allowed the monster to get close, to try and eat him, and then Erick sent a telepathic ‘No’, of his own. That sort of call for ‘no’ went uncared for. The worm wanted to eat him now.

And so came the [Luminous Beam]s.

Nuclear fire exploded along the entire length of Erick’s strongest spell as the spell and all the coincidental damage ripped down the mouth of the monster and out the sides. The time worm instantly realized it was way over its head and retreated, reversing its personal time, even as Erick followed the beast with his nuclear beam. Erick cut off the spell before the monster reached the ground.

And the time worm seemed to consider something.

Erick watched. He poked it with a few more telepathic touches.

This time the time worm ignored him completely as it went about eating the next lake in sight.

Erick poked it some more.

pokepokepokepokepokepokepoke—

“NO TALK MEAT! NO TALK. GO AWAY!”

So the time worm could talk.

It had also thrown some sort of world-shaking [World Quake] at Erick, using some sort of innate power over all the world around it that it seemed to have. [Quake] was a rather versatile spell and Erick doubted the time worm had that spell for so very many different reasons, but what the monster had done was very similar to [Sky Quake] and other variants of that particular high-tier Thunder Magic.

Erick smiled. The beast was intelligent, just as Eldawae had said. That was one point in Eldawae’s favor. Not lying was always good for a point.

Erick let loose a ‘[Quake]’ of its own, shaking the entire sky and a lot of the world beyond with [Physical Domain].

“I can talk louder.”

The flesh of the time worm and the grassy, lake-filled ground, and all the sky and the rain itself, pulsed away from Erick as he filled the world with his own declaration of presence. And then he spoke softer,

“Or we can talk like normal people.”

The time worm glared at Erick. It stopped moving.

It turned its lamprey-like, mountain-wide face at Erick. Or rather, its tiny eyes all around that maw. The maw closed a little and the creature looked at Erick, moving higher in the sky to look at him from his own level.

“WHAT?”

“Do you like my rain I made?” Erick hovered, easily sweeping a wing outward, gesturing at the sky. “I made this rain. Do you like it?”

The mountain-sized creature closed its lips a little. Perhaps it was a ‘brow furrowing’ gesture? Erick wasn’t quite sure. The thing opened its mouth a little more, though the mouth had never been closed completely at all.

“FINE.”

And then it turned around and went back to the ground and ate some more lakes.

Erick flew overhead, getting closer, asking, “If I put some people here, would you eat them?”

“YES. MEAT MEAT.”

Erick did not sigh, but he wanted to. He gestured back to Da'luwe, saying, “That’s the way to the city. Meat there.”

Erick had no idea what he expected the thing to do. Perhaps it didn’t know where the city was? Therefore, pointing it out would show it the way. If the worm turned around and went for Da'luwe then Erick would kill it. Or maybe the beast wouldn’t care, and then Erick wasn’t sure what he was going to do next.

The worm surprised him.

“DEAD MEAT NOT MEAT.”

“There’s meat there. Lots of meat.”

“NOPE. NO MEAT AT GREY LIGHT.” The worm stopped. It looked at Erick specifically. “I KNOW MEAT MEATS.”

“How?”

“BOUNCY BOUNCY. BIG FLAP FLAPS. SHAKY SHAKY IS MEAT MEAT. HARD FIND MEAT MEAT IN WATER WATER BUT WATER WONDERFUL. I DRINK DRINK.”

Erick flew forward, ahead of the beast, and then he grabbed a whole bunch of water in a sphere around him and said, “Water here. Hold open.”

And then he used [Duplicate Aura].

Water exploded out of him, gushing in every possible direction like he was the center point of a release of an ocean. The time worm squealed loud enough to shake the sky as it opened wide below Erick, and then wider. It tried to swallow him, but Erick increased the [Duplication Aura] and the time worm simply could not drink that fast. It certainly tried, though. Erick held out some solid aura above him gradually increasing the flow pointing downward instead of having it flow everywhere. The time worm could not keep up, but it tried. It faltered, falling down in the air—

It stuck itself there in the sky, using some sort of odd Force magic, holding itself open.

Erick wondered who would give out first.

The worm’s eyes rolled back all along the rim of its maw. It seemed really happy. Erick watched with all of his senses…

And it was dying.

The time worm’s soul was gradually fading in strength, like the soul of anyone who was near the end of their life and about to exit their mortal coil. Erick almost felt bad about that, but the worm was happy. That much was obvious to anyone. So Erick kept the water flowing.

Five hours later the time worm died by fractions. Here and there the eyes rolled back and did not roll ever again, as the soul around those eyes dissipated into the rest of the universe, like cotton candy disappearing into water. Those parts of the creature turned solid, like something freezing in the air, locking it into place. Gradually, and then rapidly here and there, the time worm died, half of its soul evaporating into nothing and the rest of it following in the next ten minutes.

Erick kept the water going for a little while longer.

He kept going after the entire ‘hose’ of the worm’s body filled up and water poured out of the top, unable to get anywhere else inside because the worm was full. Holes popped here and there all along the time worm’s body, water pouring out of those holes—

Suddenly the monster’s maw broke away, crashing to the ground, turning to meat itself as its freezing-in-death magic began to fade.

Erick turned off the water.

The worm crashed to the ground, dead and gone. Its body began to crust over in the [Terraforming] rain, lightning striking here and there, erupting the body into glowing mushrooms that grew too tall by far. Erick sighed as the creature’s corpse littered the land.

Growing to full size to allow him to use all his senses to search the body, Erick flew low and slow back the way he had come, toward Da’luwe, sensing the worm’s body for survivors. If the thing came back every 50 to 100 years, then it had a life cycle of some sort.

Or maybe it was Da’luwe’s weapon, to keep the hordes of civilization at bay, and it resurrected it every so often as needed.

Probably.

Erick searched for eggs for 2 days, or something like that. He even spent some time with [Cascade Imaging] to try and find eggs, and then he spent some time working on [Cascade Imaging] itself, to figure out how the spell worked inside of him and also in the world out here. [Cascade Imaging] was a huge spell inside his soul. One of his most complex, but also one of his most simple Particle spells.

Complex in effect. Simple in execution.

Erick either supplied something physical to search for similar things, or he supplied an idea, which was tougher to match for. There weren’t any real adjustments he could make to the spell because of that, too. Sure, he could probably hook it up to his little Mark of the Fractal Universe, and go off of some sort of ‘universal-consciousness-aided’ search, but that seemed ill-advised for reasons that Erick couldn’t quite articulate to himself at the moment. Mostly, he had no idea what would happen if he tried that.

So he left [Cascade Imaging] as is.

And he didn’t find any eggs, or worms that would become big, or anything like that. He spent a full day trying to dig the entire time worm out of the ground, like a cable, but it snapped somewhere far, far below the ground. The entire thing was already disintegrating from being dead, too, and the parts further underground were somehow almost exactly the same as the stone all around it.

The part of the worm up top was meat, and then meat/ground after several hundred kilometers of twisted worm, going all up and down and all around in the stormlands, and now it was simply ground/ground but with slightly odd-colored parts. It was also mostly washed away.

Hard to find anything in this mess.

Erick called it quits and took to the sky of the stormlands, where mushrooms grew tall on the various remains of the time worm, and tiny, pastel light frogs hopped and chirped and ate mushrooms and plants and made a lot more little frog tadpoles in the watery land.

There were several tens of giant lakes now, too.

And the rain kept on, keeping on.

Erick flew toward the grey pillar in the far horizon, far beyond the edge of the stormlands.

- - - -

A few days later, from high, high in the sky, Erick spotted Da’luwe’s obsidian illusion wall like a line of black dots on the horizon. Those dots rapidly resolved into 100 meter tall obsidian knives, each several tens of meters away from each other. Erick didn’t have to wonder if they saw him because the illusions covering the top of the large space beyond flickered. A large hole opened up in the roof defenses, showing the greening land beyond. It was a lot greener than how Erick had left it, and the hole in the roof was Large enough for Erick to fly on through as a large dragon.

So that’s what he did.

The roof of the land was only a hundred-ish meters from the sandy surface where he had been let in, so Erick had to duck to get all the way inside the space. Ducking wasn’t becoming of a dragon, though, so Erick transformed back into his human shape with black horns. His sunglow and nightglow robes reformed from their holding positions on his horns, onto his body, and soon Erick was flying with clothes fit for his power directly to his very first Benevolence tower…

Which was a smoking ruin.

“Not an auspicious start.”

Erick zapped across the land, rapidly checking the other towers he had made. 7 of the 9 were broken, everything stolen out of them, the spellworks that could be removed had been removed, the [Terraforming] storms simply erased. Even the duplicator stations had been taken, but those were surely non-functional without the node network to power them. The node networks were simply gone, as though they never existed.

In the 2 remaining towers, though, everything was working as intended, but only because some standing armies guarded those towers.

One of those armies looked strong and getting stronger, with wraiths in ethereal chains bound to spires around the tower, protecting it from all oncomers, while giant flesh golems protected it further. Inside that wraithbound benevolence tower (ah! That’s where ‘Wraithborne Tower’ comes from. The ghosts! Duh) everything was exactly as Erick had made it. Benevolence slimes grew and prospered. Trees and duplicators made resources of all kinds, from Benevolence to matter.

The other tower had been taken over by the inmates of Da’luwe. People lived inside half of it, cutting down trees as those trees grew to build houses outside the central place, and to burn for firewood. They took the water and made fields of plants out of it. There were four more duplicators outside of the tower itself, but someone had jury-rigged some sort of metal spellwork to attach those duplicators to the node network of the tower. Those captured and relocated duplicators now made gold and jewels and weapons, and everyone living in the shantytown that spread all throughout the second tower’s land looked to be having a… a life. Not a great life, but they looked more lively than before.

There were 20,000 people here, easily.

Some of them saw Erick and they waved. Some bowed. Some prostrated. One guy carved his chest with a knife, saying something about pledging his undying life to Erick, if only Erick would ask for it. He used a lot more colorful language than that, but Erick didn’t feel like hearing all those particular words—

And there was purple-robe. The very first guy Erick had seen inside this land. He was an elven-sort, and he stepped out of a covered staircase onto a platform atop a building, saying, “Greetings, to Ascended Flatt!”

Erick landed next to the guy. From the words he was picking up all around him, he learned this guy was named Nilton. “So. Nilton. Care to give your side of the story why 7 of my towers are down, and why you have some extra copy machines that were obviously looted from the destroyed towers?”

Nilton had an odd look about him when Erick asked that question.

A lot of things had probably happened in the last, what, 15 days?

Instead of being cowed at all, Nilton had a fire in his eyes as he said, “The nobles stole from all of us! They took your bounty and your power, but we were able to save this one! We guard this one with our lives, and the wraiths cannot have it! But we are not as strong as you. Could you expand this one some? Your people need the strength to come, and we cannot defend so many locations against the predations of the Chancellor and his soul shackles!”

Ah.

So Nilton was a con artist.

Welp!

This wasn’t the first time Erick had been taken in by a guy asking for nice things. It would not be the last. As long as he tried to help people, some would take advantage. He certainly wouldn’t stop helping people because of one bad experience, though.

Oh well.

Erick flew away without another word.

He went to the center city.

- - - -

Erick sat down at a nice table with Chancellor Eldawae as some ghosts served chilled wine and little cakes and expensive meats. It was all rather delicious, and Eldawae was not using his other, more intimidating body. He was wearing a simple elven-looking man today, and he enjoyed the treats alongside Erick. Normally, Erick would try to get down to business, but Eldawae had respectfully asked for Erick to sit down and have a little snack before they got down to it. Erick agreed.

And so, he was here, under the center dome, spying and eating, because Eldawae had plotted this well.

Stacks and stacks of information about all of Da’luwe sat on a table just to the side of the eating table. The table of paperwork contained a whole bunch of log books and histories and timetables and everything anyone running this city would ever want to know about this city, from reson production/consumption, to how they handled inmates, laws, and otherwise. There were even dossiers on all the infamous inmates out there.

Erick had joked when he saw the pile, “You’re the ruler here, but the Tower is the bigger ruler. Should I be seeing these books?”

“What books? All I see is some stuff I have to get through today, and you’re also here at the same time. Don’t go spying now please, Ascended Flatt, though there’s nothing I could do if you did. Now tell me: Have you ever had tri-berry tarts? Those are these ones right here. They’re actually a single berry, but everyone tastes them as the perfect combination of whatever three berries they love the most.”

The tri-berry tarts were a delicious combination of strawberry, purpleberry, and blackberry. Ophiel would have loved them.

Erick was mostly focused on the paperwork.

He finished off the paperwork long before they were anywhere near the end of the food. It was all rather grim.

Erick thought. It could all be propaganda, of course, but some of those books were old. Or they had been thrown in a time chamber for a really high time-dilation coefficient. Erick didn’t believe they were magic’d into existence, though.

Soon enough, Erick finished off half of the plates before him, while Eldawae finished off the other half.

When there was only one tri-berry tart left, Erick got down to business, saying, “This has been a wonderful meal. I apologize that my towers got taken down that easily. I do wonder at how much of that was purposeful negligence on your part, though, or active destruction on someone else’s part. Obviously, the inmates have destroyed a lot of all that out there, for there’s something like half a million of them to the 50,000 in this city. I’m surprised that the true power only exists in a handful of people though, and not in these 50,000 people here.”

The 50,000 in the city only existed because of horrific reasons, as far as Erick could tell. Not ‘horrific’ as in mutative, corruptive. But rather from a sapient-rights perspective. From what he was reading, Eldawae was a good caretaker from a monetary perspective, but awful in every other way possible.

Sometimes inmates had children so that they could pay off their debt faster, dumping the child in the center city so that they could grow up raised by undead who didn’t care for them at all. Most of the kids born here ended up awful people themselves, and thus inmates after they committed this or that crime.

Eldawae nodded, then began, “There are 475,000 inmates here at Da’luwe at the moment. 135,000 of them are alive in the traditional sense. For the most part, all they have to do is live here to serve out their time and then they can die and end up in the Waiting Room, and then leave Layer 1. It is a harsh existence that doesn’t teach anyone how to be a better person, and we really don’t care if they are better people at all, because they are all dropped here because they are terrible, and if you spend long enough trying to fix that, only to reach some great new milestone that is torn down by the next tyrant to fall into your lap, you’d stop trying, too. Or maybe you wouldn’t. Probably not, really. You’re young.

“And because you’re young, you tried to put more Good into this land and none of it was cared for by these people. We protected one tower from those people out there, though. That one tower is now supplying everyone here in the city with so much more than we have ever had before. That is why we were able to have this little feast; all because of you. As for all the rest of the towers, number 2 through 9, all we did was give them to the inmates.” Eldawae said, “What happened to those towers is exactly what the inmates made happen to them.”

Erick had already seen a lot of that out there, but it was still disheartening. He sighed. “I know you’re Evil, but why not try to eke out better margins? You could eat like this all the time. You could have a positive reson flow, instead of having to take from the Tower—” Erick realized what he was saying even as he said it. “Ah. If you’re not dependent on the Tower then you’re a threat. Right.”

Eldawae smiled slightly. And then he outright lied, saying, “I don’t know what you mean, Ascended Flatt. We’re doing the best we can here.”

Erick Looked at Eldawae.

Eldawae shrugged. “Would you like to discuss Da’luwe making a portal to Layer 0 now?”

“How about you keep the two towers I made, and you ensure that the inmate tower doesn’t fall apart. They’re using it way too hard and I saw caravans trailing across the land out there, toward the inmate tower. Their population is going to boom and then bust hard.”

“Easily done. It shall be so.”

Erick moved on. “That one guy. Nilton. The one in charge of the inmate town. So he’s a professional con man?”

“Oh yes. That Nilton fellow is one of the worst forms of Evil in the Tower or any other Evil organization. He’s the destructive type. I let him do what he wants and he gets himself and several people killed every few years, but he always has plans to come back from the dead through the sacrifice of others. I’m amazed that people believe anything he says at all, but his Truth is rather insidious in that it only affects him, making him the perfect speaker to anyone who would listen, for one cannot normally and easily detect those sorts of internal magics. You did wise up rather fast in that second interaction, though.”

Erick frowned at that, but it was a fair assessment of what had happened. “If I’m ‘spying’ on your information right: Now that Nilton is not indebted he’s allowed to act as a normal citizen of the Tower out there. I see what is written there, but… He could come in here, to the main city, couldn’t he? Why doesn’t he?”

“He is a tyrant fallen from grace, guilty of soul sundering 16,756 people in order to pay his gambling debts. Of course he wants power. It’s the only way he gets to get his kingdom back. If he can convince enough people to support him then he’s going to buy his way back into a portal to go to Layer 0, which is a mere 1,000,000 resons. Your support of him at the beginning of your time in Da’luwe granted him 300,000 resons of that particular price tag.” Eldawae asked, “Would you like to buy passage back to Layer 0 now? Once payment is accepted, all it takes is a day of preparation and we can have that formation ready to go.”

“Later. I’m going to fuck Nilton up, first. I just need to decide how.”

“Be my guest. When you grow tired of dispensing the justice they all deserve, then you can simply leave them to make their own abyss. That’s what I do.” Eldawae asked, “Will you be staying with us for a rest? Or will you head right back out?”

Erick stood, saying, “I appreciate the repast. It has been very enlightening. I would like to know if the worm is a weapon of Da’luwe, though. You hinted as much, but I would like to know.”

“When the time worm comes back it comes back completely devoid of all intelligence and filled with the unending desire to eat. And so, we graft souls onto it in order to awaken an intelligence within the beast so that the beast can understand certain things, like friend or foe or ‘not worth eating’. It’s not a weapon we control, but it is one we influence so that it cannot be used against us.” Eldawae said, “The time worm has been here in the Endless long before I was mortal born and it will be here long after I finally fall to some nefarious or Good plot— Ah. I was born 17,000 years ago. Most people who live here know that, but you might not. I expect to live about that much longer, but ideally forever.”

“… Want to be a Benevolence Dragon?”

Eldawae grinned. “Not for myself, but I do have some brilliant young persons who could benefit from immortality and power, who have not been able to grasp at power themselves and who are unwilling to dive into Evil to do so. It is a common arrangement inside the Tower for the Talented among us to support the growth of those mortals who are less than capable of being threats to our power.

“I have a city administrator, born of the inmates, who would make a wonderful dragon. There are a few different guards who have been begging me to let them stop the rampaging of the inmates, but I won’t let them go out there and get themselves killed. Those few people are mostly former inmates. And then we have several bound revenants who saw what could have been of this land they love, and who are disheartened by the backslide to anarchy and predation. I wager their feelings on how this whole Benevolence tower event has happened are a lot stronger than yours.”

Erick skipped over how Eldawae had insinuated that he was merely Talented, and not an actual Power. Perhaps it was a simple act of humbleness, but the man was very much not a simple ‘Talented’ on the scale of ‘Fae’, ‘Power’, ‘Ascended’, ‘Talented’, and ‘Mortal’. He was Ascended, at least. Perhaps he was simply being humble, though, in order to hide his true thoughts from whatever spying magics lay all around this grand hall.

Morbion and the Wraithborne Tower were certainly watching this, if not right now, then when Erick left, for Eldawae was a low man on the Tower and he certainly reported to those above him. Eldawae’s goals were to be here, in his city, undisturbed and relatively happy.

Erick’s goals were bigger than Da’luwe.

Erick said, “If I support those people, they would be capable of becoming a threat to you and yours.”

“Doubtful.”

“… I would meet them without the overview of any others.”

“Of course.”