It turned out my convoluted story wasn’t needed. The EMTs just took us all to the hospital, and that was it. It seemed wild animal attacks were on the rise. Yeah right ‘wild animals’. Those are as likely to be wild animals as me getting a class change to Lord of Cookies and Rainbows. Things were speeding up. On the plus side, I met Kate’s parents. Lovely people. They thanked me for helping drive off the wild dog and for being a friend to Kate since she doesn’t have many. She was nearly incandescent with embarrassment. I told them there was some stuff I wanted to talk to all of them about once Mark woke up, but it could certainly wait till then.

I was patched up pretty easily. After that it was just waiting for Mark. He was going to have at least a few days in the hospital before being home on bedrest. I snagged a few copies of AoA and a RealTek for him online. They should arrive by tomorrow. MythArc ramped up their production a lot faster than I remembered. The first time around you wouldn’t be able to get ahold of both the game and VR unit easily for at least another 3 months. This time it’s even more popular but they are meeting the demand. What random thing did we do that butterflied into this? I’ll probably never know.

Hopefully, the parents would take advantage of the extra copies at some point. Likely after the discussion about world-leakage I was planning once Mark woke up.

With the state of my soul, I would be stuck teaching and learning for a while. Souls can heal from a lot, but the worse the injury, the more time it takes. This applies to weaker souls more than strong ones. With some of my soul carrying over from the future, I couldn’t guess how long I would be out of action for, could be a week of Earth-time, or a month. Of course, there was the matter of whatever I did to my Classes… If things worked like they should have I would have a sealed first class for a few weeks and broken second class that couldn’t advance until it was folded into an evolution.

Since the whole damn series of events was more ‘exception’ than ‘rule’, it could be bad. There is even the possibility I would need to Sunder the classes and start over. I could pick the same classes again, but Sundering imposes a temporary penalty on XP for the class you just removed, it goes away after a while, but the length of time is determined by how far you have grown in the Sundered class. A few weeks isn’t that bad once the Merge happens, but in the prep stage it could be a real setback.

I ended up going back home after a while, at the urging of Kate’s parents. I was cleared to be on bedrest, and they insisted I get it after saving their children. It was strange; I don’t think I ever met parents quite like them before. Then again, I could just be used to a world of danger and monsters where someone with any inconsistencies in their story would be viewed with heavy suspicion. Yeah, that’s probably it.

I wound up chatting with Santa and getting updates. Everyone else had gotten a lot of experience, not nearly the amount I would have gotten due to their lesser participation in the battle, but for them, it was a lot. Furthermore, Santa had to slay a half dozen shadelings in the Death Lounge so that they didn’t ride along on someone else’s log out. Players are immune to damage in the Lounge because of being, well, dead, monsters that don’t belong there in the first place… not so much.

He told me the broad strokes of the battle from his perspective and even sent me the streaming file he had of it. That would be useful after some editing, okay a lot of editing. Some things in that video I wouldn’t want to see the light of day.

Releasing the edited video got me some serious views and subscribers, along with some requests for interviews and comments. I turned those down, giving my injured state as an explanation. I wasn’t going to teach the public about blood rituals and soul magic, even just as an explanation for how I got so powerful. Too much risk of drawing people to the darker magics because it seemed ‘cool’. Regular blood magic would be fine, hell most of the cultist magics weren’t really bad or evil. The odd ones out were dangerous though, dangerous in a way that the other five paths didn’t truly have an analogue for.

Many of the serious problems in Ardos came from misuse of the Cultist Arts, in the future, and in the past. Drawing more attention to some of the most dangerous ones by making them ‘cool’ is something I try to avoid. It didn’t always work in the future, but I’ll be damned if I inspired edgy teenagers to become Souldrinkers or Hemoliches within the first damn year. In the future, I had to put down too many starry-eyed kids that stared into the abyss until they joined it or went mad.

I would much rather they see me throwing rocks and fire and decide to become mages or druids. Those are safer, saner, paths. Of course, classes form based on so many things, and there is no denying that Cultist skills are useful, so many will inevitably delve into darker subjects. I should know, after all, it’s how I got my start on that path.

I realized I had gotten caught in my thoughts again. The damage to my soul made focusing harder and left me even more susceptible to wandering down trails of thought and forgetting the world. Soul damage really was the worst. It wasn’t the most painful or the most debilitating, but it made you less of yourself. Soul damage was also annoyingly potent when combatting monsters in the wild, making it too useful to ignore.

I needed rest. Rest and time to recover. However, there was one last thing to do before I could spend my time on something idle and frivolous. I had to get back to AoA and check my notifications and classes.

A quick dive through the multicolored barrier between Earth and Ardos brought me to the broken battlefield where I had logged out. Let’s see, Unread Notifications, there we are. Wow… that’s a lot of them. Okay switch settings to Compressed, there we go, that’s better.

Okay, lots of things killed and exp gained… and then pretty much all of it lost due to Sacrifice of Veruna. At least I still kept three levels of Blood of the Stone and a single level of Fist of the Primordial.

Soul Stat Unlocked!

Well, that was fairly predictable, it’s hard to do self-surgery on your soul when you can’t touch it. Oh? Level 25 in Blood of the Stone got me a skill.

Under Pressure: Formed in the bowels of the earth you have been hardened, gain Hard Stat and raise it to one quarter of your current Con. Gain Resistance Skills for Pressure and Heat.

Well, damn… Resistance skills are hard to get. You can get the effects temporarily through a spell, skill, or Body Affinity, but actually getting the skills is tricky. Things like Heat and Cold aren’t that hard to get, but Pressure, that’s useful and rare. To get the damn skills, you need to slowly expose yourself to greater amounts of whatever you are trying to resist, and then you have to adapt to dealing with it at the same time. People often get these skills during a Level Up in an extreme situation. If your body gets tougher while you are being burned alive you might get Fire of Heat Resistance. Of course, the same method doesn’t work for everyone, that’s what makes them so tricky. Someone naturally vulnerable to cold, or just someone that hates it, is going to have a damned hard time getting Cold Resistance outside of a class granted skill. Elemental Monk types like Santa almost always get resistance to their own element, and mages sometimes do. Other than that it’s a Crapshoot.

Once you get the skill you can train it, without the appropriate resistance skill you will just take the same damage from stuff no matter how much you expose yourself to it. Unless you get a body affinity and get a tiny bit of resistance to it that way, but that is minor until you get your Affinity pretty high. If you get a Resistance on top of the Affinity, then you have the seed of something impressive.

Pressure is a nice thing to resist because it lets you explore deep underwater with only a water breathing spell. It also protects you against blast waves, some Air Magic spells, and a host of other annoying shit like getting your head slowly crushed in the claw of a giant crab. Coupled with the new Stat, one I had never heard of, that should make me harder to damage. That was a major boost for a level 25 skill.

I had four bonus points to Will, and two to Con from the fight. Okay that’s unusual but if it was during my Soul Burn it would make sense, normal growth rates get funny when you pull off empowerment techniques.

Of course, the messages from after the blood ritual were strange, to be expected really. When you actually manage to mess with the System, it tends to report errors or just malfunction.

Sacrifice of Veruna Ritual Initiated!

XX#M%** EXP Lost!

Warning! System Integrity Unstable!

Temporal Feedback Detected!!

Time Affinity +5!

P0tent!alll UnLoCkeDDDDD!

Warn---- Class Strain Detedcccctd!!

Level ??? Unchained Shadow King (Legendary Boss) Slain!

+#### EXPPPPP

[[[Quest: Master of the Frozen Shadowood Completed!;;;;;;;

+$$$$

ItEMM RReWaRdd TeMPoraRi!!Y ____hELd

TiTLE GAINED!!!

Gardener Profession Unlocked!

Retro-Edit:::%%>[email protected]^Level 6***//

Blood Ritualist Profession Unlocked!

Retro-Edit::___:::%%>[email protected]^Level 27{[}]

Stonesmith Profession Unlocked!

Retro-Edit:://:::%%>[email protected]=Level 9*???

*^* !!!System Breaker Class Unlocked!!! *^*

[Class2]=Blood_of_the_Stone Broken!

[Class2] Advancement Protocols damaged.

[Class1] Sealed due to Strain!

System Integrity Restored!

Well, that can’t be good… I mean I expected the last bit with Blood of the Stone not being able to advance anymore and Fist of the Primordials sealed temporarily, but how the hell did I break the System enough to get professions unlocked and leveled when they weren’t equipped? Then of course there is the new class, System Breaker. It sounded potentially interesting, except when I tried to bring it up on my class list, I couldn’t find it. Damn errors.

I’ll have to figure out what I want to do with Blood of the Stone sometime soon, but I have time. It wouldn’t be a good idea to level up another class before my soul recovers a bit, anyway. Hopefully, I can merge it into something by evolving it, but that can wait for another day.

The title message sorted itself out quickly. It awarded me the title “Avenger of the Lost”. The rest of the quest reward was still a mess and didn’t appear. It should sort itself out eventually, probably. There was still the matter of that increase to my Time Affinity… but the meaning behind that was still a mystery to me.

I made my way back to Cloudburn and found a pleasant inn between The Preserve and the Mage Guild. This would be my home until I recovered. After that… well, who knows.

I logged out and messaged Santa, letting him know where I would be hanging my hat while I recovered, at least while in-game. Not that I expected to be in-game for a while. I needed rest and sleep. At some point, I would have to talk to Kate’s parents about what attacked their kids. That would be so much fun. I might believe in keeping the truth hidden, but I also believed parents had the right to know how a shadow monster from a video game nearly killed their children. How I was going to handle that conversation… well, I didn’t know that yet. Heh, it’s kind of fucked up that a part of me was hoping Mark would take another couple of days to wake up, just so I could get my shit together.

So much to go over, so much to analyze. I might be ‘resting’ but that didn’t mean I didn’t still have a lot on my plate. One thing about a wounded soul, it made you either very good or very bad at introspection and self-analysis, with the occasional bout of staring at the wall for a few hours in between.

Santa eventually sent me his full analysis of the whole expedition, a true After-Action Report. With the clarity of hindsight, we were both affected by our younger minds that day. We should have found a way to tell the soldiers there was real danger, hell we shouldn’t have taken them with us at all. If the two of us went all out at the start, we could have gotten the King while he was still chained. Ignoring the rest of the shades would have been the right play. A blitz attack and assassination would have done the job with minimal fuss or danger. Ugh, I foresee a lot of meditation in my future. So much goddamn meditation.

This is going to be a long recovery. I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again, “Time Travel Sucks.”