I yawned as I walked through the streets of the town; it was a warm sunny day and it was making me feel sleepy. Suddenly someone clapped their hand on my shoulder, causing me to jump and whirl round, desperately supressing the urge to throw them.

“Whoa there traveller, it’s just me, Steven,” Steven said. “So how'd ya land hunting go?”

“I got the land I wanted, thank you,” I said, then thought for a second. “I never introduced myself did I? Sorry, that was rather rude of me. My name's Lyte, nice to meet you.” I proffered my hand.

“Ah well, now we know each others names and we can get along proper,” he said, clasping it firmly. “Feel free to ask me anythin'.”

I smiled slightly behind my mask. “I did have one question, is there anywhere or anyone with a large scale map? My own got too badly damaged to use.”

Steven's brow furrowed. “Well, I think Old Man Brown has 'un, but I ain't certain.”

Five minutes later, we were standing inside said Old Man Brown's house, being mildly glared at by the not-actually-very-old Brown. I wasn't offended by the glare; it felt like the kind of glare that only changed for people who earned some very great favour. “Aye, ye can look a’ me map,” he grumbled, his accent an even stronger version of Steven's. He rummaged around in a drawer of an ancient desk that looked significantly older than he did and pulled out a rolled parchment. He dumped it down on the desk, unrolled it, and weighted it down with various ornaments scattered about his desk, including a large golden eye floating in a jar which I was sure had been tracking my progress around the room.

I leaned forward, doing my best to ignore the weights, and studied it, eventually working out the we were in a large low detail patch of trees between several kingdoms that was labelled Beast Woods on the edges, and Beast Forest in the middle. It wasn’t quite labelled ‘here be monsters’ but that was definitely the cartographer’s intention. The map was mostly of one large kingdom, with only small regions of other kingdoms marked over the borders. I quickly copied down a rough copy into a blank book I had pulled out of my world storage.

“Thank you Mr Brown,” I said, and his glare softened by increments scientists would require specialised equipment to measure.

“Goo’ ta kno' someun’ in this here town still ‘as some manners,” he grumbled, “now begone with ye two and quit botherin’ an ol’ body like meself.”

At his prompting, and because I swear I saw that eye in the jar blink, we quickly left.

Once outside, another guard hurried up to Steven and said a few words to him. Steven rapidly excused himself and they both hurried off leaving me to wonder what was so urgent.

Either way, I was left to wander around town by myself. I eventually found what I was looking for: a tailor-cloth merchant, and swapped some woven spider silk from my world storage for nightclothes and a towel. I had previously noticed that all my coins had morphed into this world's currency, but once I mentioned that I had some silk, the merchant was far more interested in that than my coins, so we bartered a deal. I tried to ignore the predatory gleam in his eyes as we did so.

Having achieved my three objectives of claiming my land, getting a basic understanding of my surroundings, and getting my hands on some vital clothing, I decided to head out of town.

As I walked out the gate, I called to the agitated looking guard that ‘if he saw Steven, let him know Lyte is out of town’, then headed off a bit down the road. Once the town was out of sight, I ducked under the trees and continued walking. After a few hundred meters, which, since I started using my speed enhancing boots, took only about two minutes, I dropped my aura control with a sigh of relief. It was difficult for me to keep up for longer than a short period of time, so I really needed to practise it.

Unfolding my wings and leaping into the sky, I turned towards my tower and opened the throttle a little bit, coasting along at a casual fifty meters per second, or about 180 kilometres per hour, so it took around four minutes to reach my tower, rather than the one going out.

I did laps round my tower while considering that. “That's ridiculously fast,” I concluded, and started spiralling back up the tower. I landed with one foot on the ledge at my floor then paused, the other foot hanging in the air, my wings still spread, and looked up.

I did what could only be described as 'a shrug with added wings', thought “Might as well try it,” and carefully stored away my ninja costume, leaving me in my significantly more damage resistant Solar armour, then crouched down on the ledge.

I took off as fast as I could, blasting off from the tower with a flurry of wingbeats, and kept accelerating. I punched through the wispy clouds, leaving trailers of mist in my wake as if grasping for me, but I pushed on. In a watched corner of my mind I kept track of the rapidly increasing height readout. My breath came rapidly and I wasted some by whooping. The sky above me was visibly darker, and I began to see pinpricks of light in it. Then my vision faded to black.

I woke up in a shallow crater with the remnants of some kind of monster spread around me. They were charred, and small flames flickered in the remains of the canopy I’d fallen through, so I concluded that my Solar Shield had activated, defending me with a powerful explosion. I couldn't even tell what kind of monster it had been.

“I must have looked quite spectacular,” I mused while standing, cracking my neck, and then stamping out the flames, “a brilliantly flaming orange star falling from the heavens.”

I casually pulled my ninja costume back on since I didn't want to attract any more attention as I returned home.

Talking of which, “Where am I?” I wondered aloud and checked my map. I blinked a few times at it. “Ohkaay, apparently looking down on the world fills in the map. Good to know for later. Now where's my tower?”

After a small amount of searching for it on the map, I eventually found it. I thought about flying back but decided I was too tired, so just pulled out my cell phone and teleported back to my bed. Which turned out, was right where I had been asleep last, ie the crater with charred monster bits.

I sighed, “Flying it is then,” and jumped into the air. I was tired despite, or perhaps because of, my several kilometre vertical forced power-nap, and wanted to get home quickly, so I shot along at close to Mach 1. As I was flying I pulled out my cell phone, having noticed three new notifications from the ‘Bestiary’ app (which I hadn’t even realised existed before), one for the Griffon from yesterday, one letting me know that this world’s rankings had been added to all entries in the Bestiary, and one for the monster that had attacked me while I was unconscious which was apparently some kind of small dinosaur with a dumb expression called a Morosaur.

As I neared the tower, I squinted slightly. It looked like there was a black cloud surrounding it. As I got closer, I became able to see what it was: a massive swarm of bats with wingspans a metre wide was smashing away at the tower.

“I am not in the mood for this!” I shouted, pulling out my dolphin-shaped machine gun and opening fire randomly. The cloud of bats opened to let the projectiles through, unfortunately for them, I used homing bullets. Bats rained out of the sky on all sides of the tower, including directly behind it; one bullet chased a bat twice round the tower before it caught up.

I landed on the ground and sucked all the bat corpses into my inventory. Surprisingly and to my delight it seemed that the bullets were separated from the corpses and were returned to their stack. Some didn't seem to return however, which was a shame. Then I looked at the number of bat corpses in their stack.

“Yesterday a griffin, today over 900 giant bats! No wonder that wolf lady thought I was mad, these things are a pain to deal with.”

I thought for a moment, then dug through my world storage, emerging with the full set of equipment of my summoner character. I then took a potion and activated a special blessing table that would increase my summon ability. Then I brought my Stardust Dragon Staff out of my inventory.

“Arise great dragon, and grant my wish!” I smirked, I had always wanted to say that in context at least once, then activated the summoning staff, funnelling mana from my mana pool into it. The blue bar representing my mana plummeted and when I tried to push extra mana into the summoning I was forced to drink a mana potion to keep up with the demand, managing to almost double the mana before I felt I couldn't add any more, then I released it. With a massive flash of light a massive gold and blue Eastern style dragon appeared in front of me. It did a flew loops and turns, as if enjoying its newly super-sized form, then came back to float in front of me.

“Your job is to guard the tower,” I commanded, and I sensed affirmation before it coiled several times round the tower, somehow twisting its body to leave the ground level door uncovered, and promptly went to sleep.

“Well whatever,” I shrugged, feeling that it needed some time to fully stabilise its existence in the world which would allow me to change back to my usual equipment without it weakening, then flew up to inspect the damage the bats had done. The even-harder-than-yesterday obsidian seemed to have resisted the damage very well, and any cracks that had formed were already closing. I thanked my past self again for choosing to build over a mana spring rather than anywhere else in the forest.

After a quick soak in the mana infused bath (the dirt that I scrubbed off seemed to simply disappear into the water, I assumed the mana was somehow cleansing it), I slipped into my newly bought bed clothes and went to bed. I did have to cut some slits into the top to allow my wings through; I had now grown so accustomed to sleeping with them that I didn't even think to remove them. It was definitely easier to get used to than sleeping with an exoskeleton.