I glanced out of the window: still raining.

Grumbling to myself I unequipped my Terra Boots and ran up and down the tower staircase twice for exercise.

It had been raining continuously for 3 days now and I was going stir-crazy. I don’t remember ever having had much of a problem with remaining inside for long periods of time; had my personality changed since reincarnating? Scratch that, did I have any ability to build an entire tower before? Let alone decorating the rooms or learning to create kitchen utensils from raw materials in under an hour. My previous self would have had no idea where to start, and the knowledge the God of Reincarnation had given me wasn’t even remotely good enough for that kind of learning curve, so what was going on here?

Had I changed to fit the role I’d given Lyte while playing him as a character; that of a creator, a builder, a crafter, on top of being a non-specialist fighter? I looked back at my actions the past 13 days with fresh eyes. Yes, yes I think that was the case. But changing wasn’t a bad thing, especially this change. Maybe the proactive mentality of Lyte was helping me with being thrown into his unknown world. I reckon it would probably do better than the much more closed off mentality I’d had on Earth. My therapist did tell me that opening up to people would help with traumatic events... though by the time she gave me that advice it’d been years since my parents died…

“Um, Lyte? Are you alright?” asked Tear from right next to me, having crossed to my side without me noticing. I turned and gave her a mildly indignant glare.

“Excuse me, can’t you see I’m trying to have a deeply poignant and introspective flashback here?”

“Oh, sorry, um, please continue?” her voice lilted up at the end of the sentence as though it were a question.

I sighed. “No, no. The mood is ruined now. I’ll have to have it another time. What were you asking about?”

“Food.”

I sighed. “Give me a minute and I’ll get something ready. Why don’t you start heading down, I’ll probably get there first anyway.”

“Mrrrm,” she nodded and headed for the stairs.

The morning after returning from the Outpost, a highly animated Tear had woken me up. It seemed that as soon as Tear had touched the tower she’d gained the ‘Resident of the Abyss Tower’ Title. The prerequisites seemed to be to ‘have the Master of the Abyss Tower acknowledge you as a resident’, and then ‘come into contact with the Tower’. We were still in the process of working out what the Master and Resident Titles actually did; the description provided by my Cell Phone notification wasn’t all that clear, and Tear didn’t even have a heads-up display for buffs/debuffs, or even health and mana. I wonder why I did- maybe an effect from a Title? I really need to check through all of them… Anyways, Tear just relied on the somewhat obtuse method of concentrating on the feeling of ‘newness’ you feel when you receive a new Title to gain rough information about what the Title even did.

So far we’d worked out that the Master Title had a whole range of knock-on effects such as the Tower starting to repair damage to clothes and objects, make the beds after they were left vacant, return books to their shelves in the library when no longer wanted, and a whole bunch of other stuff though I was uncertain whether they were directly caused by the Master Title, or from the reflections of my other Titles that had been imprinted onto the Tower. The Master Title also adjusted the light level when I entered a room, opened doors I wanted to go through, and acted almost like an assistant while cooking: adjusting temperatures, moving ingredients to where they were needed, and even sharpening the knives I picked up.

The Resident Title seemed to be a less powerful version of the Master Title. For example, doors wouldn’t open automatically when Tear wanted to go through them, but would when she snapped her fingers at them.

Pondering further tests, I dropped down to the kitchen and then, after sorting some basic breakfast out for Tear and myself, descended another layer to the crafting room, where I’d left the as-yet-unrefined segments of Destroyer scattered across the floor last night. Overnight the Tower had sorted them into a neat stack out of the way against the wall. Each segment provided surprisingly little Hallowed metal. I estimated that the entire Boss would end up around 25 bars, a similar amount to what an Expert-level Destroyer would have dropped in the game.

The essence material the Destroyer had generated could be converted fairly easily into a Mechanical Wagon Piece according to the process in my head, but I was interested in experimenting to see what else I could do with it. I had a few ideas but it was fairly likely that I’d just destroy the material, so I might have to hunt some more Destroyers at some point.

After quickly dumping a bunch of segments into a jury rigged chute over an Adamantite Forge, I hopped back up to the kitchen in order to serve out the omelettes, which were perfectly cooked, the Tower having automatically adjusted the heat down, and take them into the dining room just as Tear entered. A quick breakfast of omelettes and toast later and I was back at the crafting floor to shove more Destroyer segments into the chute, then out the front door, the rain sizzling against my Solar Shield manifested over my head.

I’d noticed when the adventurers were camping around the base of the Tower, but the forest was a bit close; monsters could sneak up and ambush someone even if they were right next to the Tower. Karma was there so they probably wouldn’t be hurt, but still, better to be safe.

Taking my Vortex Hamaxe, a tool with the head of a hammer on one side and the blade of an axe on the other, I cut down the trees in a circle about 20m out from the base of the Tower. Each tree took only a single hit, and I swung low to cut them as close to the ground as I could get.

“Does the hammer part not matter to clichés or something?” I muttered, taking a look back at the field of perfectly cut tree trunks, then at the massive hammerhead.

Collecting the trees, I headed back out of the rain, chucking more pieces of Destroyer into the furnace as I passed.

The list of activities I had left to do was steadily decreasing. I hope the rain stops before I get to the end; getting bored doesn’t sound like it’d mix well with my personality, I might end up inventing a magically catalysed version of the fusion drive or something.