The first thing I noticed after stepping through the door was the fact that I was pretty sure the advertisements had lied to me. Instead of the small, spooky town I was expecting, I was met with the sight of a barren, grey wasteland. Beneath my feet, cracked and charred soil spread out as far as the eye could see. The only disturbance in the landscape were occasional husks of burnt-out trees that had long since been turned into carbon. Tiny flakes of ash rained down from the dull grey sky, and the area was basked in a seemingly perpetual twilight. The air was thick with the smell of sulphur, and if I actually had to breathe, I’d probably want a respirator. Luckily, I didn’t, so I just stopped inhaling. It was a rather strange sensation, but it’s not like I wasn’t already the type to just forget to breathe randomly anyways.The second thing I noticed was a barrage of notifications, which I looked over in hopes of finding an explanation for the scene in front of me. I read through all the messages before allowing myself to react. [Zone Entered]You have just entered The Cradle Of Ash
[Title Acquired]Name: [Pioneering Explorer of the Boundless Horizons]
Tier: [Emblazoned]Description: [You are the first resident of Eternia to travel more than 1000 km from Fateswatch. Don’t relax yet, as these are just the first steps in your journey through the lands.]Effect: [+10% All Stats Effectiveness]
[Title Acquired]Name: [Pioneering Explorer of the Vast Expanse]Tier: [Dreadbound]Description: [You are the first resident of Eternia to travel more than 10000 km from Fateswatch. Wow! How did you even survive going that far? You did it in the first year as well. Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it!]Effect: [+20% All Stats Effectiveness, Always able to determine which direction Fateswatch is in.]
[Title Acquired]Name: [Pioneering Explorer of the Far Reaches]Tier: [Hellforged]Description: [You are the first resident of Eternia to travel more than 100000 km from Fateswatch. These lands are beyond dangerous, but you should already know that because you travelled all the way out here, after all! We have no fucking clue how you achieved this within one year. If you used a glitch to slingshot yourself out here, please send a report about it to our team of hardworking imps so we can correct that immediately.]Effect: [+25% All Stats Effectiveness, Always able to determine your distance from Fateswatch. Admin Attention]Oh, I’m already dead, then. Just a dead woman walking.I allowed myself to tumble backwards into the ash. If I had any kind of mammalian body, I’d probably be having a panic attack right now. Instead, I had a brand new reaction, which was fairly similar to dissociation. Instead of feeling my entire shell, I only felt myself as the little sphere in the centre of that form. Nestled in there, tight and safe. I allowed myself to feel like nothing could reach me here. I was perfectly safe in this little bundle of plant fibre.[Zone Warning]Next Conflagration Occurring in 60 MinutesIf I still had tear ducts, they would probably be working on overdrive right now. I did the only thing I could think of while lying on the ground, I willed the bug report window to open.‘Hi, Eternia Processing Imp Handling This Ticket,I seem to have been sent over one hundred thousand kilometres from the starting city. Please teleport me back there so I don’t die immediately.Thanks,Ellie Winters’Three seconds later, I received a reply. Fucking amazing customer support provided here.
‘Hello Ellie,We’ve received your complaint and have noted several others with the same issue. It seems non-humans were tagged as monsters, a classification that caused a change in your spawn point. We have since resolved the issue, and it won’t be a problem after the next patch. Unfortunately, in your situation, you are too far outside the city for our quick teleport to work. Instead, we have chosen to compensate you with a random box well-suited to your species. We hope that your experience in Eternia hasn’t been brought to an early end.If you survive until the end of the month, we should have a longer conversation about the subject.Good luck, you’ll need it,Kaelzar, Sovereign of the Fallen Skies
Attachments [1]Runaspriggan Random Box’Oh looks like the big boss is getting involved so this must be a major fuck up, or maybe that’s what ‘Admin Attention’ meant in the title. I poked the attachment, and a box appeared in my hands. I gave a quick prayer to Kaelzar that whatever he had just sent me would ensure I survived the next hour, and I felt some of my Mana drain away. When the gods are real and answering my support tickets, I suppose it means that interactions with them actually mean something now. I wonder what would happen if anyone on Earth somehow prayed to one of these beings.
The message also solidified something else for me. I was now absolutely certain that whoever had written the description of the human species was the one responsible for this situation. What easier way to make sure that humans get the farthest than to eliminate the early competition? I sat up out of the ash and shook off any that had started accumulating on my body, before turning my eyes to the box I had in my hands.It was a rather unassuming wooden container, and I shook it a little bit, and received no response. Presumably because the item hadn’t been generated yet. It was a random box, after all, wouldn’t be very random if they were pre-filled with goodies. Nothing else to wait on I promptly opened it and was greeted with a ring that I could palpably feel power emanating from. Something about it deeply resonated with me, and I carefully reached out and picked it up. It was clearly an artifact, so I used [Arcane Interface] to connect myself with it. I felt a readout appear in my head as the function of the ring was translated over. As I did this the container it came from vanished, but I hardly noticed that as I looked over the message.
[Eryx’s Puzzle Ring]
A Puzzle Ring crafted by Eryx himself, designed as a challenge toy for new artifact creators. Complete all the levels to unlock the full features of the ring!
I read the description three times over, searching for anything that could possibly help me here. But no, it was just a fucking toy. After a few moments of just sitting there on the ashen ground, I threw the ring as hard as I could at a nearby burnt-out tree and screamed, not that I could throw it very hard with my little body. After I realized what I had done was stupid, I got up to get the ring.Why did I bother getting my hopes up…I fished around in the ash for where the ring fell, eventually finding it. I then turned in the direction I knew Fateswatch was and started jogging. I might as well attempt to get out of the conflagration zone before the hour is up. I was only 245381 km away from town, just a short jaunt if I’d ever known one.
Hopefully, I had been thrown out to one of the edges of the zone closer to Fateswatch, and I wasn’t just walking towards the centre where danger probably resided. It’s like a seventy five percent chance I’m going in a safe direction, right? I didn’t feel like doing the math at the moment. I did, however, check out the puzzle ring, since I might as well go out while doing magic Sudoku.
After putting it on, it was pretty easy to connect my body to the ring, as if my circuits were intentionally designed to do that. Given the box I got it out of, this is likely precisely what was intended. After a couple of seconds, I sent a pulse of Mana into the ring, and the first puzzle was displayed to me directly in my Core. It was a relatively simple circuit, sort of similar to an electrical engineering challenge. Luckily, I’d taken some courses on hardware and had played around with Arduinos before, so this wasn’t anything new to me.The first puzzle seemed to have a Mana source, similar to a battery, except with only one output and no input. There were three circles I think I had to light up and several symbols I didn’t recognize in the path between the circles, requiring me to channel the circuit through those symbols. As an initial step to solve the puzzle, I just drew a channel through all the circles, only sending the channel through one of the symbols.
The circuit immediately failed as expected, not lighting up two of the circles and causing the wiring to pop at one point, but I noticed where it failed and noted the Mana was altered by the symbol somehow. After two minutes of playing around, I figured out the solution, it related to the frequency of the Mana. You couldn’t raise the frequency too high. Otherwise, you’d ruin the signal, and you couldn’t use Mana without having the frequency raised to at least a certain level. I couldn’t determine the reason for that, but I moved on to the next puzzle anyway.
After a couple of minutes of fucking around with the increased complexity, the ring reset to the beginning. Oh, so I’m on a timer, then. The first puzzle was rearranged entirely from the original setup.Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
My steps through the ash caused a small cloud to form behind me as I ran. Eventually, I was distracted by a notification from my Core on level five of the puzzle ring.Warning Ambient Temperature Levels Over Recommended Operating Temperature Of 35°C
Taking a moment to look around at my environment, I couldn’t see much that had changed. It was still a barren, ash-filled wasteland. Focusing a little harder, I could feel something under the ash though. I slowed my jog, not really feeling tired since I didn’t have muscles after all, and started trying to clear ash from an area. After struggling in vain for almost a full minute, I decided there had to be a better way.Clearly, I had Mana in me that could be put to use. I’d just been playing around with how it functioned and had gotten past a level where I had to send a pulse of mana through an air gap. I checked my reserves before doing anything that might drain them.
Mana Stores at 79% Capacity Restoring 1.3% Per Minute
It was restoring slower than the indicator showed it should have been. Which probably meant moving took Mana since some kind of energy had to be expended. Whatever, I’m not going to become more screwed than I already am… I checked the logs for timestamps that might help me track the time. Fifty-three minutes, plus or minus a couple, spending a bit of Mana can’t hurt.I built a circuit in my hand using [Regrowth] to shape how Mana channels flowed through my flesh, remembering at the last second to put a gate before attaching my Core, so I didn’t just blow my entire reserve out my arm all at once. Then, aimed at the ground and opened the circuit. A blue flash blew a cloud of ash into the air, and after quickly closing the gate to stop the flow, I could finally see what my senses were picking up. Tons of different varieties of plants were rapidly growing in the ashen soil. I guess the ash is acting as a fertilizer.
Getting closer to the ground, I could see the Mana from the plants as they absorbed ambient Mana. Apparently, the ash was very rich in Mana. Not that I could sense any of it. The only reason I could see it in the plants was my [Friend of the Forest] Skill. I spent a moment wondering if I could use that as any kind of advantage but realized I didn’t know enough about this stuff to get that to work. I looked down at the puzzle ring and finally realized its true value.
If I learned enough about magic through the ring, maybe I could grow myself a kind of shelter from these plants by using their natural ability to absorb Mana from the surrounding ash. I had no idea if that would work. I mean, it didn’t seem like any of them had managed to survive this cycle of death and regrowth, but maybe they just needed a little push. I did have a Nature attunement, after all.
Diving back into the ring, I got to work trying to crack the puzzle ring from the beginning. The temperature was still rising when I checked my internals, so I assumed I had been walking directly toward the cause of the heat. I’m getting a lot of bad luck lately, aren’t I? Like that truck that killed me earlier today.
Being given the chance to become a whole new species seemed cool, but it just ended up being another way to screw me over. I pushed those thoughts out of my head as I worked through the levels on the ring, slowly gaining an understanding of what I was actually doing through each reset. I chose to stop moving because I was probably going in the wrong direction. Still, I couldn’t be sure the rising air temperature wasn’t just something that happened consistently everywhere in this zone just before the conflagration occurred.It turns out I had been slightly off when thinking that Mana had to be at the right frequency. Well, it was kind of like a frequency, but not really. Instead, it was like the Mana taking on an aspect based on the glyph it passed over. The fifth puzzle had me mixing these aspects to create a more complex aspect that could fulfill whatever the circles indicated they required.
Also, I was no longer working with a single source. Instead, I had to pull from multiple Mana batteries in order to fully charge the circles, my only saving grace being that Mana only flowed one way, from areas of high density to areas of low density. I could use that to my advantage by creating a kind of low Mana density capacitor to store up multiple aspects and allow them to intermingle before discharging once they reach a certain density. The density I set it to is exactly the amount needed to create the new aspect. Obviously, I could use gates for the whole thing and manually handle each step, but that didn’t seem to fit the spirit of the puzzle.
Thirty minutes later, I had reached level ten on the ring. I only had to reset to the beginning three times since I had passed level five. I felt I was beginning to understand how everything worked now. After level five, the challenges no longer used glowing circles to indicate completion. Instead, I had to achieve the goals set out by the puzzle.
The most fun one was when I had to channel fire Mana specifically into a part of the circuit until it caused it to overload, destroying an object located next to the circuit. However, I had to achieve this without damaging any of the other flammable objects nearby, so it was a balancing act of ensuring I could pump energy into a prebuilt circuit as a series of pulses that would decay the circuit walls at just the right area until sending a surge all at once, overloading the circuit and causing it to pop at just the right point.
This would probably be pretty handy if I wanted to sabotage somebody else’s artifact, which I can totally see myself doing. I even had an idea of how I could set a timer to carry out the surge, allowing me to turn a fire-based artifact into a time bomb.Level Ten turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. It was a challenge primarily focused on using Mana to shape a plant into a specific shape. It didn’t use something like the ash I was surrounded by to achieve this, but I was pretty sure I could jury rig something to pull Mana from my surroundings based on something I learned in level seven. It felt weird being able to plow through these challenges as there was no way I would have been able to remember all the specifics back before I’d died. I could tell my [Arcane Interface] Skill or maybe just my Core itself was helping me out here. I couldn’t tell if the Skill was describing something I could already do or if the Skill was what allowed my memory of circuits to be basically eidetic. I had memorized every Rune I’d seen so far. Well, actually, Rune isn’t a great way to describe the symbols as they were often three-dimensional, but I didn’t know what other word to use. The ring didn’t come with a glossary.
I grew a chunk of plant mass and started building the circuit I wanted inside of it. I didn’t imbue any of my own Mana into the thing. Instead, I created a kind of constant low-pressure zone, where it would vacuum nearby Mana into the creation and then send out waves of mana to nearby plants. This would force them to grow into a shape of my choosing. In the end, I decided a half sphere would be good enough as I doubted the fire was going to come from the ground. If it did, I might as well lie down and die. I finished what I thought would work and slammed my creation to the ground. From there, I grew out a root structure that would act as the vacuum before disconnecting it from my body.Plants began growing rapidly and forming into the shape I wanted. Unfortunately, they didn’t have quite the firmness or thickness I wanted. I was hoping for a bark-like exterior to handle the flames, but it was turning into more of a fibrous, easy-to-burn kindling, which was exactly the opposite of what I was looking for. I spent a couple of minutes thinking about how to resolve the problem before deciding on the easiest route. Reconnecting to the artifact, I shut the device off, then added a part to the circuit to de-aspect part of the Mana pulled in from the ash, which I could only assume was Ash Mana, if that’s even a thing, and aspected it towards Water Mana. I then turned it back on and was more satisfied with the results. Despite the aspect changes lowering the efficiency, it should at least not be a detriment anymore. I just had to guzzle Mana from the ground to make up the difference, which didn’t seem to be an issue. The plants now had an almost slimy feel to them, which I could only hope would help them resist being toasted.The sphere finished closing itself off, and I was left in the dark in the centre of a mushy plant sphere that was still growing outwards. I touched the artifact once again just to make a few holes I could look out of to see what this conflagration really was. I had a quick release built in to close the holes once I saw any danger. Soon, I received a message as I noted the temperature spiking by a crazy amount outside.[Zone Warning]Conflagration Occurring, Seek Shelter or PerishPeeking out one of the holes, I had to squint as it looked like the sun had descended onto the earth in the direction I had been jogging. Any hope that my wet little shelter would do me any good vanished as the wall of fire began flowing in every direction. I immediately triggered the holes to close, walked over to the first artifact I’d ever made and squatted next to it.
I wondered for a moment if it was a good idea to do what I had in mind, then decided it didn’t really matter anyway. If I didn’t do anything, I was about to die, so even if I fucked up it wouldn’t change anything. I placed my hand on the surface of the blob of plant matter and pushed as much Mana into it as I could, attempting to will my Nature attunement to allow me control over the process and form some kind of fire-resistant shielding over the shell. I obviously didn't need any circuits for this because I felt like I understood Nature Mana. It resonated with me when I saw it in puzzles.
With every passing moment, the temperature rose until I could see steam beginning to form inside the dome. Given I didn’t want to be boiled alive, I began pushing even more Mana in order to manifest the fire-resistant shielding inside the dome to keep the water where it should be. A bark-like material began filling the interior of the dome while a roaring noise could be heard from the outside. I could only assume it to be some kind of fission reaction because nothing about this screams “Natural Occurrence” to me. I ignored several notifications that appeared in my vision, and my entire focus was dedicated to channelling attuned Mana into my creation. That is, until my Core screamed a notification that had all my attention pulled towards it.
Mana Stores at 10% Capacity Please Halt Mana Usage or Risk Internal DamageAs my final act, I dug a hole in the ash and buried myself underneath it as much as I could, waiting for the inevitable.My shelter buckled as the firestorm slammed into the side, and I noticed the heat rising rapidly. My Core started to ache, causing me to shiver despite the heat. After my skin burst into flame, it finally triggered a second warning notification.
Warning Core Temperature Reaching Critical Level of 262°C Disabling Cognitive Function to Preserve Core Integrity.
Once again, in what appeared to be a repeating pattern. I was rendered unconscious.