471 To Empty the Mind

What about a psionic one? I had no damn idea how this even worked. I was a clueless, floundering puppy desperate to not drown. Taking a second, I wondered if pulling out of my body would help. Doing so, I found the virus rampaging all the same, but I had far less mental energy for it to infest before I perished. I shrank into a kernel of myself, only a tiny sliver remaining.

In that pit, an insane idea popped into my head.

If I couldn't win by surviving, then I would need to win by dying.

Chapter Begin

I opened my pocket dimension, my commands jittering out like a freezing child's cries. The portal opened, and I summoned a glowing, rainbow liquid. However, it wasn't the blood of the primevals. Harvested from the shining hells of Leviathan-7, the glistening poison promised a complete mental obliteration, and I needed it.

I pulled it to my lips and swallowed several gulps. It coursed through my throat, and needles erupted through my body. They tore into my mind, evaporating all that I was. In a terrifying moment, I disappeared. All was blank. As the virus ate away at my mind, I remained in that liminal space, and I gained a strange awareness while lost there.

In some separate plane beyond our own, I felt one with the universe. I entered some esoteric infinity, though words couldn't describe the sensation. I humbled at the sight like a man gazing at a majestic valley or a high mountain. In many ways, it was like gazing upon concepts one didn't understand but couldn’t deny.

In an instant transition, I opened my eyes. On reflex, I gasped for air, breathing in the dust pluming beneath the wreckage of Emeralga's pillar. I looked around before remembering where and what I was. The psionic virus still raged in my mind, but the poison from L-7 had cleared out a portion of my mental faculties. As I hoped, it killed a part of the entity in my head.

And it would do more. Much more.

Like Shalahora's magic, the psionic poison was a crisp cleanse that left nothing remaining after ingestion. That meant after I perished, it ravaged whatever remained in my head, which was the swarming virus. Abusing that fact, I pulled many times more of the poison out, once more readying myself to gulp it down.

Some of it had spilled beside me after I faded into oblivion. That wasted a limited supply. To keep the poison soaking in after I psionically disintegrated, I saturated my body in a gravity well. The liquid would fall onto me along with the surrounding stone. As I pulled the liquid out, a burst of hesitation filled my head. I shivered for a bit, my body and mind wanting to stay alive.

It was the weakness from the psionic plague, and it wouldn't control me. I silenced my fears, and with trembling hands, I willed the poison out. It splashed over me, and I swallowed as much as I could. It ate away at my mind, but my regeneration hampered its effects. To further the poison's cleanse, I expended as much of my mana as I could, pulling enormous reserves of energy into my runes.

I faded far faster before entering that strange plane from before. In some great beyond, I floated, adrift amongst an endless sea of the void. It was a comfortable kind of afterlife, an experience that mirrored a null and muted journey through eternity. That peace embraced me from all sides. From the nothing all around, ever-changing entities gazed, and a primal fear erupted.

Something intangible passed over me. My terror mounted before my eyes opened. I blinked away tears that streamed down my face. They weren't from a conscious kind of crying. They were a reaction from my body as innate as pain or hunger. I gulped air down in desperation before once again regaining awareness.

At this point, the mental plague had calmed from a raging storm to a withering tempest. I picked up another portion of the psionic poison, raising it to my lips. Before I swallowed, I envisioned the entities. Something about this process left me deeply afraid, though it could've been a natural survival instinct flaring up.

To that end, who wanted to die?

Other thoughts filled my head, and I put the poison down. Despite the danger, the situation held opportunities hidden between the risks. I could learn from this, so I attempted to wrestle the mind virus. Instead of psionically drowning the mental plague, I relied on a tactical application of mind magic.

It was the kind of psionics that took advantage of openings, kept myself guarded, and used good timing. It matched well against the psionic plague, but, like my own mind, this curse kept reconstituting even whenever it whittled away to nothing. Inspecting closer, I found the cause. Nested into my mind from the visions, a portion of my mind had been altered. These weren't tangible aspects but core, fundamental aspects of my personality and being.

The visions from the simulacrums had tampered with my soul.

I shivered at the prospect. It was one thing to make a person's mind enter a disoriented state. I did that whenever I psionically drowned someone. To keep them effectively unconscious, I needed to plant a puppet consciousness like with the primevals. That left them possessed, but if I took that supplanted consciousness out, they could return.

That brutal process could've damaged them, but they wouldn't be changed. This virus acted on a fundamentally different level. It made recovering versions of the mind alter. In that regard, the psionic plague mimicked the bone runes of Elysium. In their case, they abused how the luck perks revived someone in Schema's system. If I had to guess, Elysium was taking advantage of how Schema's runes augmented someone to change them.

The remnants constructed Schema, after all, so it made sense that their faction could abuse a few of the AI’s loopholes. In my case, this mental virus was more like a weird method to kill someone who could get rid of their entire mind and return. In other words, Firamnia. My hunch was that Emeralga had planned to lure Firamnia here and kill her using these crystals, but he hadn't been able to trick her yet.

After I eliminated the competition, Emeralga turned his attention to me. Knowing I stood in the way of him and the other nuclei, Emeralga attempted to harvest my hoarded supplies. Considering how volatile the virus was, Emeralga wasn't that far off from succeeding. Even as I wrestled against its influence, I couldn't help but marvel at how it operated on strange, esoteric lines of magic.

I mean, it was a law-based, psionic virus that proliferated by damaging someone's psyche...It was a horrifying, insidious concept. I pulled myself upright in the rubble, marveling at the difficulty of creating something so esoteric. It was so beyond anything my current mind magic was capable of. Even Shalahora's absolute mental attacks lacked the sheer malevolence of this creation.

And yet, at the same time, Emeralga died so easily. It left me baffled. If all Emeralga could do was reverse time for a single instance, how in the hell did they envision killing me in combat? I wasn't affected by the temporal field he'd used, and his body was like melted butter compared to mine. His mind magic wasn't even impressive outside of the simulacrums.

Gazing around me, my armor and Event Horizon had already devoured the monster's lingering body. Even after receiving the kill notification from Schema, Emeralga's death felt unreal or intangible. It was a bad joke without a punchline. Despite the nature of his death, I could learn a lot from Emeralga.

For example, I wondered at my own hubris. Chrona and I nearly died from this. Even while in a position of absolute advantage, Emeralga nearly crawled his way into a win. It was my ignorance and arrogance alike that gave him a chance. I shook my head, the virus still raging in my mind. I would need a complete revamp for my training in mind magic.

I found a shortcut to psionic power, and I nearly paid for that with my life. Despite that, I clasped my hand into a fist. I survived, and I would learn from these deaths. Firstly, principle-based psionics were devastating. Even as I thought about all that, the plague still tried to rampage and grow. Instead of eradicating the errant laws and odd mutations in my head, I left them for future study. Of course, I had no intention of keeping them around forever, but even a few weeks could offer some valuable insights.

The same could be said about the fractals. I closed my eyes. Where sight once dominated, fractal lines danced in the gloom. I hadn't forgotten even a little bit about them, and they carried secrets dating back to the pre-Schema era. I let out a sigh before turning back to Rebirth's effective capital. Before anything else, I wanted to inscribe a set of the fractals, contemplate them for a bit, and carve out a reference while they were still fresh in my mind.

Before I did, I took around twenty of my circling minds and had them wrestle the psionic plague. They practiced various kinds of mind magic, and the rest of my psysches devoted themselves to creating glass crystals. Once made, I etched lines into them using heated telekinetic points. After pulling them into my inventory as a reference, I observed my surroundings.

First and foremost, piles of crushed rock and ancient stone piled around me. Alongside the delapidated ruins, Rebirth's faded history peeked out from between torn rubble. Ashen scrolls, rusted over tech, and cultural pieces from Rebirth's old world lined their way across shattered walls and shelves.

Most of it held little use, though shards of a shattered world remained. I found posters covered in slogans. They talked about a desperate need for software engineers and evolutionary biologists. Each advertisement and recruiting poster advertised for off-world universities. I took the references and added them to a growing map of space, hoping to find the planets using Helios's help.

Other, far less useful bits nested in the chaos. Glowing disks held captured manas, each one containing an illusion that mirrored a video. Instead of trying to watch them all, I stashed them away while searching for other useful parts. A few held odd markings, though they weren't runic in nature. Instead, they held something akin to a normal language.

Schema didn't translate the text, and I had zero skill in determining any part of its meaning. If we translated it all, we could uncover more about the system in general, outside of images. I regretted not spending more time studying other languages, as they might give me some insight into how these are translated.

Schema automated the rough edges found when speaking to someone in a different language. It gave an easy excuse to neglect any direct research in linguistics or phonetics, yet it held immense utility outside of system-owned space. Even more pressing, by accepting Schema's translations of something as the truth, people ceded enormous amounts of personal agency to the AI.

A chill ran down my spine at the prospect. Without thinking about it, anyone in Schema's system gave him immense power by leaning on that utility. For a moment, I wondered how many times the AI used it against me. I rallied myself to learn more languages to take back some of my own agency.

Centering myself back in the moment, I pocketed everything I could find. Chrona would love to have a lot of this memorabilia, and it may be useful as research material later. Nearer to the bottom of the tower, I ran around harvesting many of the time leylines nearby. I gathered an enormous reserve of them, filling one of the dungeons I carried with me to its brim.

After a satisfied breath, I peered around to double-check if I had forgotten anything. Nothing came to mind, so I bolted back to my base, crossing the temporal territory in record time. At the yet-to-be-named capital, I slowed down and dove through the barrier. I released Chrona in the medbay area, one empty and without healers. It was a safe territory where the eldritch wouldn't attack, at least.

As she flopped out, I grimaced at the wounds. Clean as if sliced by a laser, her arm and wing cuts marked straight lines across her body. They leaked red blood that steamed over a bed of stone and gravity wells. As she let out groans of pain, I enveloped the Rise of Eden over her.

She turned to me as her wounds closed.

"It's a good thing the system allows us to regain our bodies, isn't it?"

I smiled.

"It is."

Chrona opened her dimensional storage as the others raced in. Hod ran over to Chrona, and he wept.

"Hod lose eating buddy."

Chrona scoffed.

"And what makes you believe that?"

Hod pointed at her missing limbs, all six of them.

"Hod see dragon lady turn to whale lady."

Chrona furrowed her brow.

"You're saying I'm like a whale now? Bold of you to mention, I must say."

Hod jumped away.

"Whale lady flop at Hod?"

And so she did. She flopped towards him for a while until I pulled her up in a gravity well. Chrona narrowed her eyes at me.

"It was only a matter of time before I was upon him."

Hod moved his wings in circular patterns.

"Hod fight back whale lady. Hod say back!"

Chrona let out a stifled laugh. The bizarre scene left me baffled, but such was life. Before other shenanigans ensued, Other Hod consumed Hod in a shadow-laden fire. Darkness radiated off of him, and he walked over to Chrona, leaving lingering footprints behind him. They were made of a burning shade.

Other Hod took out and handed her several health potions. In a gentle manner, Other Hod fed Chrona the life-giving liquid, and her healing accelerated. Chrona took a breath.

"It will take several weeks before I am fully healed, but this is far from my end."

I gawked.

"Weeks? What in the world?"

She frowned.

"Limb regrowth is slowed for us gialgathens, so while Schema's system granted us superior healing, it couldn't fix the woes of all wounds."

Other Hod gazed at her, his eyes empty yet piercing.

"What happened to you?"

Chrona laughed.

"We fell into a trap set by the pillar of the planet. It aimed to kill me immediately, but I was able to stop it from disrupting my temporal pacing. However, Emeralga nearly overwhelmed me in the first burst of magic, so I doved downward, hoping Daniel would understand my request. He did."

She gestured to the restoring nubs.

"Though I paid a price for my evasion."

Other Hod nodded.

"You understood what risks you took whenever you left, and I won't ask you to live your life whilst restrained by my worry. I would ask that you consider who you'd leave behind should you fall. That is all."

Chrona smiled.

"Of course, little one."

Amara walked up, her eyes once more bloodshot and baggy. Instead of an innate feature, they seemed to be from a lack of sleep. Amara's voice was still even less raspy than the last time I heard her.

"I was working on the runes you requested. I have made progress, but it is not finished. They must be refined. Made better. If they are to be your claws, then they must be sharpened."

A hint of mad scientist leaked into her voice as she spoke. The revitalization after systemization showed itself, and she worked hard. Like her total opposite, Opal hopped into the room. The luminari spread her hands.

"How goes it-"

She screamed before running over.

"My Schema, are you ok?"

Chrona rolled her eyes.

"Have you seen the guildmaster fight? His body is water in a bottle."

Opal turned to me.

"Well then, maybe he should stop being such a bad influence."

I pointed at them.

"Maybe. Time will tell. Either way, I have to head over to my personal chambers and work on some runes."

Opal gestured to Chrona. The luminari leaked disapproval.

"Is it really more important than watching after a guild member?"

I furrowed my brow.

"Of course it is. No one is going to attack her here, and I'll have a guardian golem take care of her. Besides, sitting beside someone's bed and watching them sleep doesn't do anything. It only hampers your own productivity and health."

Opal put her hands on her hips.

"But if they wake up, don't you want to be the first thing they see?"

I pointed at Chrona.

"But she's not even asleep."

Opal's cross narrowed.

"Well, uhm, it's a sweet gesture at least."

I rolled my eyes.

"So is advancing my guild. A rising tide raises all ships."

Chrona nudged Opal.

"Thank you, little one. While I appreciate your sentiment, the guild leader is right. He has information he must digest after this fight, lest he forget. I will be meditating on what I saw as well."

Opal crossed her arms.

"Like anyone's going to forget something whenever everybody has thousands of intelligence lying around...But, yeah, ok, I get your point. But, I think I'll stay by your side anyway. Us girls have to stick together, right?"

Opal's cross smiled. Chrona laughed.

"It is as you say."

I gave them a nod, sending a telepathic request to one of the guardian golems. After that, I turned to the others.

"I might need a while to really dive into what I've been thinking about lately. I'm guessing it will take several months of study. Use my golems as sparring partners in the meantime, and make sure you have one of them near you should you choose to explore. The pillars of this world are extremely dangerous."

I gestured to Chrona. The gialgathen grinned, her teeth sharp as razors.

"I can attest to that, though these injuries are incidental."

I grinned back.

"I'll see you all later then. Good luck, and don't slack off."

I headed out before stockpiling the city with supplies. It wouldn't be long before an exchange center landed here, but bridging that gap in resources was easily done in a few minutes. After handling the supplies, I sent messages to the relevant parties of my guild. So far, Earth hadn't exploded, and I'd take a moment out of every day to assess if it was.

As I sent those messages, my guildmates returned reassurances. The executive golem handled Mt. Verner's expansion, and they had built a canal connecting it to the Great Lakes. Trade and our city's population ballooned from the connection. Beyond my guild's capital, our legion's expansion had already revitalized most of the Eastern and Southeastern US.

Roads reopened. Homes arose from the scorched earth, and security revived from the ashes of a fallen world. The economics of adventurers, merchants, and crafters exploded as peace of mind turned into the expansion of business. The amount of income I earned passively mounted from the venture, though there was still so much to do.

I peered at a set of messages and winced. My guild uncovered over twenty large cities ruled by an avatar of an Old One. It wasn't an insurmountable number, but it still posed a serious question about where to go from here. Obviously, I wanted to finish exploring Rebirth and fully uncovering the secrets of Schema and the remnants.

The more I explored, the less certain a prospect that became. While I learned a lot about the developmental cycles of eldritch, I had learned a limited amount from the actual questing. Despite that hiccup, I enjoyed the journey tremendously. Finding new worlds while fighting enormous hordes of enemies left me exhilarated.

However, letting the avatars use people wasn't something I could accept. Despite my misgivings, I received another bit of good news - the guild took control of several cities on its own. While my golems had the firepower to leave a mark on the avatar's forces, the hulking, metal titans lacked the might to overpower their guilds entirely on their own.

My guild coordinated alongside them, offering supportive magic to amplify and disrupt the enemy forces. We lost a few people in the resulting sieges, but they conquered several wards in Tokyo, a few of the larger cities in China, and even began tearing away at parts of India.

A strange sense of pride glowed in my chest from reading the parts alongside a tiny inkling of dread. Without Torix or me, the guild experienced a tremendous power void. That gave way to councils or figures who took charge whenever we left. According to guild reports, they kept their methods tame and guild-approved, and apparently, my golems helped with that.

They were the weapons of my forces. In a normal army, any soldier could aim a gun at anyone for any reason. If they pulled the trigger, then the weapon would activate regardless. On the other hand, my golems contrasted that wartime reality like night and day. They could always say no to a request, and that accountability scrubbed away a lot of would-be atrocities.

It left me lighter knowing my guild expanded and handled infrastructure build-up even without me. I would still need diplomatic relations going forward, though Florence already met with many of the leaders in the meantime. As for the remaining warlords, they ruled like Marcella. Harsh and militant, these ambitious potentates held power in their iron fists.

Despite the imperfect rule, I could handle that as they stabilized the eldritch population and helped handle the ever-growing problem of raw rifts opening across the globe. That's where the other worrying news arrived. The sheer number of spatial ruptures exposed how much of an armageddon this event had become.

My guild reported thousands of them, and these weren't dungeons. They were full-blown openings into other worlds, and after several weeks of being open, they molded into their surroundings. The Earth was becoming a Swiss cheese of planetary portals. It gave us a partial fringe world status as a planet since so much of the integrated space was ruled by the eldritch.

Aside from that, my current philosophy for handling them wasn't going to work. I mean, I could carry quite a few of these spatial rips at this point, but thousands of them? Yeah, no. Instead of trying to keep Earth the same as it had been pre-system, I sent out missives to shift our goals. We couldn't contain this many outbreaks, but we could help local populations and prevent mass extinction events.

These situations gave me plenty of options to spend my time, but they also acted as time-sinks. At best, I could slow down the bleeding, but the reality was that Earth would suffer no matter what path I took. Having other planets, cities, and protected areas was about all I could do, so that's what I decided on.

After sending a few messages to Chrona, Amara, and Hod, I put my fractal project on the back burner for now and spoke with Opal. After a bit of time, she established a portal back to Earth. I'd rather have finished my work on Rebirth, but Earth needed a tune-up before I could devote more time here.

Taking several hours, Opal oozed glowing sweat while giving me a thumbs-up.

"This time, it will definitely work."

I stepped through the veil, and the warp put me about thirty miles below the ground, but hey, considering the circumstances, I couldn't complain. Instead, I raged about how the luminari had disguised an assassination attempt in the form of a goofy Fringe Walker. Either that or they trusted Opal far too much, considering she was a half-baked warp specialist who couldn't do their damn job.

I didn't let her know about my mental curses as I flew out of the ground with a new body. In a rush, I checked on several guildmates and put out a few fires. It was mainly enforcing my guild's presence on a few local factions, but honestly, I didn't care much about the local leaders anymore.

They wanted old-world power, the political kind where the will of the people mattered. I wanted the system's power and approval, so I told people to simply give resources, establish infrastructure, and clear dungeons. That's what actually made my territory expand, and it was by far the most pressing matter.

In fact, it was the only thing that gave me regional control of an area. I already owned the planet itself, but without cities, the regions were locked to me. If my guild cleared dungeons, I gained that area of the planet under my direct control. Taxing that area was system imposed, and someone couldn't stop it at that point.

Everything else was my own business outside of other system privileges. So, instead of trying to reason with people, it was far more efficient to bypass them altogether and go straight for the source of real power and real help - dungeons. We'd continue our humanitarian efforts, but we wouldn't bother actually managing the ruler's relations.

They'd manage themselves, and knowing all of that made the process far simpler. Having handled the conflicts of interest, I switched gears and built the cities my guild needed to establish. All the while, I had breaks to visit my guildmates, especially Althea. She and I spent wild nights in Paris, Moscow, and Tokyo alike, all their landscapes mere shadows of once majestic cities.

In the howling air that rushed between empty skyscrapers, Althea and I touched upon memories of a different time. We sipped on champagne atop the Eiffel Tower. We snowboarded down Mt. Everest, and we dove to the depths of the Mariana Trench. It was the most fun I'd ever had in my life.

In all that, I found time for a reunion with Joshua. He still received messages from Jasmine, Jamal, and Nissa, all of them having already checked off three of the world's wonders. I squeezed these personal meetings between large chunks of enforcing the guild's infrastructure. I passed through many towns I had never heard of or knew about, and I erected system-verified cities there. I spent several weeks doing so, zooming across our system-owned territory and gaining a beachhead in a few other areas.

I left several coreless golems to keep the cities safe, along with runes on the city pylons to buff the citizens inside their shielding. I could do nothing more. After all, I was so busy all the time, and I wanted to advance in my understanding of the system and universe. By comparison, this was the grunt work I devoted myself to but wasn't exactly passionate about.

Despite the grueling mundanity of it all, I met hundreds of people, and I put them down into my status along with images of their faces. I would do good work on this, and even though it was grueling at times, many parts of the journey interested me. I found thousands of spatial rips, most leading to odd, strange worlds. Taking advantage of the resource, I began a pet project of mine.

Infinity Plaza 2.0.

As I traveled, I took many of the interesting spatial rips and hauled them back to Mt. Verner. It took a while, but I got us several hundred dungeons to harvest from. I established an agreement with a few spatial mages from the albony, and with Plazia and Diesel's help, we created a vault underneath Mt. Verner.

It was a massive undertaking, but magic sped up the pace of construction by leagues and bounds. Having both architect golems help didn't hurt anything either, and we hollowed out an absolutely enormous facility underground. In each room, my dimensional fabric boxed in a space, and I created doorways with gravitational locks.

Behind the doorways, hundreds of active rifts waited for my guild to clear them. Instead of having to travel out into the world, they would find the world under their feet. It was a solid start to our own Infinity Plaza underneath Mt. Verner. In those confines, I even set up specialized dungeons using the leylines I found on Rebirth.

These mana-laden dungeons acted as engineered training grounds for warriors and mages specializing in heat, cold, or time-based magic. The professors at Mt. Verner's University even instituted their use in their curricula. The last operation I helped with was the creation of spirits. Blegara had been a huge success, and the spirits kept the eldritch there on a short leash all the while building up the environments. Even after only a few months, these spirits revitalized an eldritchified landscape. A few of my guildmates sent pictures of enormous coral reefs, life-laden trenches, and paradise islands. The spirits designed those spaces for beauty and purpose.

They were rich in wildlife that left resources like energized shells, alchemical sands, and augmented herbs. I wanted Earth to follow suit, so I organized a group of skeptiles to help me. Having Plazia's help, we created twelve colossal spirits for Earth, each of them imbued with different parts of nature.

Air, water, earth, fire, forests, and cities - we made the colossal phantasms for each environment. Eight of those were dedicated to the air and water alone, since humans tended to forget to clear dungeons resting at the bottom of the seas. This left the ecosystems of Earth turning from eldritch hellholes into ecological havens.

If not for Torix's initial rituals, we'd have been lost. He left the blueprints that we essentially copied on our planet, and his knowledge left its legacy even while he fought through his ascension ritual. As for Blegara and the moon, I took a similar approach. I hadn't created even a tenth of Earth's cities on the paradise planet, yet it retained far greater stability now.

The only problem for Blegara revolved around the Vagni's strange worship of my image. It gave me the heeby jeebies each time I saw a statue of myself, but hey, what can you do? Some people see a Harbinger of Cataclysm, and they just can't help themselves.

Absurdity aside, I was also able to commandeer a few spirits for the moon, though all six of their spirits cost enormous, bankrupting kinds of money. They also all dedicated themselves to the air. After all, a breathable atmosphere was the biggest problem, and getting one would put the planet in a slightly better spot.

Aside from the good works, the time I spent building up my guild alleviated a lot of my innate guilt. It was something I had come to accept about myself. I felt like I abandoned Earth each time I went off-world, but this burst of progress proved that wasn't the case at all. I brought back people, resources, and many specialized skills that helped humanity.

That included a way out of our current mana-soaked predicament through the leylines. In that regard, I also learned something as I traveled - it wasn't my job to be my guild. It was my job to lead it. I offered innovations, military might, and essential infrastructure. I didn't deserve criticism for what I'd done, my own internal jabs and absurd expectations included. In many ways, I pushed Earth into a new golden age by using the magic and the skills I gained from my cosmic journeys.

At this rate, Earth would become a planet rife with opportunities and danger alike. I would accept that and try to make the best of it. Having brought many of those problems back up to speed, I left Earth in a good spot. It took three months of utter grinding, but I left everything in a reasonable state when I left.

I owned most of North America and a few patches of the world all across the globe. I progressed somewhat on the fractals in the meantime, but they required genuine, focused effort to fully comprehend. Aside from that, the project that excited me most involved carrying the dungeons to Mt. Verner.

I mean, come on. Having a bunch of elementally imbued training grounds in my home city? It was too good an offer to pass up. Still, I wanted to finish what I started on Rebirth, and that meant taking the last two nuclei and uncovering the secrets the planet hid. In that regard, it was a lot easier getting to the planet than the first time.

The capital of the world had finally gained a warp station and a currency exchange, letting my guild leave if necessary. I arrived on site, ionized mist pooling out of the warp drive. It was very sci-fi and nature-ey this time, steel panels leading to open, sunbaked walkways. As I paced out into Rebirth's only city, I breathed in the energy-rich atmosphere. Off in the distance, my golems cleared a large portion of the Frostlands and Firelands alike.

The temporal territory remained an eldritch-infested hellhole, but such was life. Before going to my study, I talked to everybody, making sure they were fine. Chrona already healed up nicely, and the others made good progress.

Hod mastered his psionic poisons, even using a bleeding ritual to disperse them alongside a strange, resonant chanting. It crawled into your head like a pained whisper, one that ate away at your spirit. Chrona gained tremendous insights into time magic from the fight against Emeralga alongside our travels through the temporal wasteland. As for Opal, she created a dance that created humming stars in her wake while she battled.

Their powers built into a powerful cascade of radiation, the effect leaving one warm and unable to heal. As for Amara, she finished working on many of the more complex cipheric rune augments for quite a few purposes. It turned out that whenever she tackled a solvable problem, she could get a lot done.

By the time I got back to Rebirth, it felt like I had spent a lifetime gaining new experiences. I went back to my room at the center of Rebirth's capital. Before I learned more about the fractals, I blinked a few times. This burgeoning city still lacked a name, and it was about time to give this planet's capital something to remember it by.

A few ideas popped into my head before I opened my system menu.

New Capital Name Accepted!

Renewal - the City of New Beginnings