I gave a small nod as I confirmed that the powers I had wanted to practice had reached their completion. Sitting before me was a mirror, over a hundred beasts visible within roaming in a grassy meadow. Further ahead of me, in an identical meadow, were over a hundred beast corpses, their souls trapped in the mirror I had summoned.

This was the basic trinity that I had created based on a life-saving treasure that Ryone once gave me, extracting the souls of living creatures to store within a mirror, living an illusion of life. However, there were also other abilities that I had created, as well. For instance, the power to summon these trapped beasts to fight alongside me. Or, my personal favorite, turning the souls that I have collected into armaments, their strength directly correlating to what they were like in life.

This was a technique that I derived from Aki Seppo, reimagining it with the Souls domain. So long as I kept these souls trapped within my mirror world, they would be available for me to use in a similar method to how I fought with Leowynn in the past.

In truth, I was somewhat tempted to just run through the monster territory of the Underworld, capturing the greatest souls that I could find. However, I decided against doing such a thing. After my time spent in the Underworld, I became acutely aware that the spirits within the monster territory were too fractured to properly use. Instead, I would need to acquire monsters while they were alive.

Fortunately, I knew just such a monster that would make for an excellent first choice, though doing so would inevitably take away a bit of ‘target practice’ for the people of a certain city. Silver mist surrounded my body, transporting me into the skies above Kal-Thul, a dwarven city hidden within a mountain. I kept the mist around my body, changing its effect from transportation to obfuscation so that those below wouldn’t take notice of my presence.

Looking around, it was clear that the Mountain King was not currently on the offensive, so I flew off into the distance. If it were before, I wouldn’t really know where the Mountain King had been lurking without consulting Aurivy or Accalia. However, I was now able to sense a powerful soul beyond the horizon, one that far outstripped anything nearby in both size and strength.

My body flew at increasing speeds, until I saw a mountainous figure crouched down, slowly digging into the ground with its hands. All around, there were thousands of trenches dug in seemingly similar methods, each going over fifty meters deep. Going by the health bar present over its head, it had likely only been a matter of days since its last attack on the city of Kal-Thul.

With a smile, I used my divinity to trace a circle within the sky, one with a diameter of more than two kilometers. Only in such a way could I create a mirror large enough to capture the image of the Mountain King. Slowly, the mirror took shape, a glass-like surface filling its center while the giant monster looked up.

The Mountain King let out an aggrieved roar towards the mirror suspended high above it, reaching up in an attempt to punch it. Thankfully, I had created it high enough to avoid such a thing from immediately happening. At least for long enough that the mirror was able to complete itself, as the Mountain King was crouching down to jump.

Just as he was starting to launch himself, a cone of silver light shot out of the completed mirror, enveloping the body of the Mountain King. With its body shrouded in the mirror’s light, it became motionless, its health bar vanishing from its head.

I gave a small nod to myself, gesturing for the mirror to approach me as it shrank in size. By the time it reached me, it was small enough to fit in my hand, showing the image of the Mountain King jumping up and swiping at it. Though, now that the mirror had already captured its soul, there was little meaning in its actions. All it took was a thought for me to change the location of the mirror within this little world. Thus, I moved the mirror further away from the Mountain King before bringing my hand to touch the mirror.

King of the Mountains

Vengeful Father

Indomitable Protector

Cowardly Stone

Rock Titan

Mineral Gourmet

Lord of Stubbornness

These were the ‘legends’ contained within the soul of the Mountain King. Each one characterized an aspect of his stories, and could serve as the foundation for an armament. If I wanted to preserve the full potential power of the artifact that I chose, I would only be able to select one of these, as many legends were intertwined.

Normally, if one were to practice Aki Seppo, it would be the primary legend that becomes the foundation of power. Leowynn’s, for example, might be Child of Heaven or Little Star. Either of those could potentially give the power of constellations that she showed with me. Now that I had turned this into a divine ability, I set it so that it was up to me to choose which legend served as the foundation.

Between the seven available options, there were three that I immediately dismissed. These were Vengeful Father, Cowardly Stone, and Mineral Gourmet. Each carried too many negative connotations for me to choose them.

King of the Mountains sounded like something that would give me control over stone. While nice, that wasn’t particularly helpful when I could use a domain to replace that power. Rock Titan would likely give me an armored form similar to the Mountain King… making me just a really large target. That’s another one eliminated.

That left Indomitable Protector and Lord of Stubbornness, both of which had similar meanings, and both of which would be defensive boosts. Stubbornness implied the ability to return after suffering defeat, while Indomitable appeared to mean strength in the face of adversity.

Out of all seven legends, it was Indomitable Protector that I wanted the most, and so I mentally selected that option from the list. As soon as I did so, the body of the Mountain King within the mirror crumbled, rocks crashing down to the ground in a deafening roar that even shook my mirror.

At the very heart of the collapsed rubble was a suit of stone armor, red and green gems adorning its chest. From now on, this would be the form of the Mountain King, or rather… the Armor of the Mountain King.

With a thought, I transported this armor from the mirror into my own soul, allowing me to summon the armor at will. In the past, I would have been able to only contract with one spirit in such a way, but that limit had been removed after obtaining the Souls domain. Now, I could split my soul into different partitions, each entirely separate from one another to prevent the souls from clashing.

All that was left was to find monsters over time that had built up similarly powerful legends. Part of me considered targeting the stone father of the ashen-skinned dwarves whenever they were inevitably settled. However, I quickly dismissed that idea. Even if the stone father weren’t such a pitiful existence, he had been reborn too many times. His current self would not have had the time to build sufficient legends within his own soul.

I’ll just have Accalia keep an eye out for monsters that fit my requirements. I thought to myself, reaching down to tap on my watch and synchronize my memories with my Virtual self. I had already let Tsubaki know that I would be returning to the Admin Room for a while after I had finished training, so we were just wrapping up our last game.

Thankfully, she did not seem upset at me leaving, perhaps because it had not been that long since my last descent into the world. She simply wished me well and offered me a deep bow while the other two grinned and reminded me to pick them up before my wedding.

I ascended with a slight chuckle as I recalled their expressions at the time, prepared to sit with Scarlet and Aurivy and watch the world once again. However, there was someone waiting for me in the Admin Room before I ever got the chance. “Can we talk for a moment?” Ashley asked, her wings tucked in around her shoulders.

“Of course, Ash. What’s up?” I asked, moving to grab a nearby chair. I had ascended into the dining room, and Ashley had suddenly appeared in front of me. Clearly, she was waiting for me to appear.

“I’d like you to buy a new world.” She said simply, causing me to blink.

“Is something wrong with Desbar?” I opened up the map to check Desbar’s situation, but Ashley quickly shook her head.

“No, no, nothing like that. I want a new world to serve as a testing ground for something that I don’t dare to practice with in an occupied world. You don’t need to get a race for it, and I’d honestly rather it be left uninhabited, aside from basic monsters. All I want for it is a basic game system, and for me to have access with my divine avatar. Everything else, I’ll handle myself.”

I gave a small nod, starting to understand what was going on. “This is about that system stone, right?”

When I asked that, Ashley readily admitted it. “I used my divinity to modify the stone just slightly, and it started displaying the core code of the game system for Lorek. I’m still working on analyzing the code, but I want a world where I can test out ideas and practice with new systems. I might ask you to buy a new system for the world every now and then, that way I can get new variables and see how the systems interact and change. For now, I’m going to be trying to isolate the different systems in the existing code, and then port them over to my test environment.”

“...Am I going to need to be prepared to buy additional worlds if your program crashes?” Although I had only touched at programming myself when I created Ana, I knew from talking to Ashley in the past that code rarely worked on the first iteration.

“I… don’t know yet.” She answered, clearly uncertain. “That will depend on whether a problem with the code causes errors in the system, or if it completely destroys the world. That’s one of the reasons that I’m not willing to do anything other than read the code on an inhabited world. I want to properly understand the consequences of tampering with system code.”

“Alright.” I agreed. “But I have a request for you, as well. Once you have increased your understanding of the code, I want you to build a firewall into our system code. Something that can stop items like this from being used against us in the future. I know Oldbeard wouldn’t use it against us, but she might not be the only one that has had an idea like this, and I’d rather not be on the receiving end if we get paired against a hostile game Keeper. Also, if you made these with your divinity, there might be others in our world that could make something similar.”

Ashley gave a firm nod at that. Naturally, anyone with the ability to produce an item like this would have also taken similar measures to ensure their own system was safe, at which point it would come down to a sort of hacking battle. I just wanted to stack the odds as high in my favor as possible. More importantly, not everyone would be as… cautious as Ashley when it came to testing dangerous code. If someone really wanted to, they could create this modified system stone and just start going wild. That was not something that I personally wanted to see.

“Alright, then. What do you want the name of this world to be?” I asked curiously, pulling up the interface. Since she said she only wanted the basic framework of the game system, I didn’t need to spend much for all the extra systems that I had added to the other worlds.

“Something generic works, like Testbed.” When she gave that name, I simply chuckled, typing it into the screen that appeared.

“Alright, done. I also gave you control of that world’s acceleration, in case you decide that you need more time for anything.” I told her, to which she gave a thankful nod.