This sun hat, like his ring, was another piece from The Armament of The Syncretist.

Who was The Syncretist? Henry didn't know. However, fine-combing through the historical record would reveal this figure’s shabby items being worn by a host of this world’s powerful elite, good and evil. The number of pieces each possessed differed, but every owner was unified by the rusty ring, which seemed to magically transport from country to country.

As for this straw sun hat, its most notable owner had been Saana’s most celebrated craftsman, Ten-Hands. He'd been notorious for beginning work on any project after a brief nap, regardless of whether the task was painting a still-life or designing the architecture for a metropolis.

This ability had not at first caught Henry’s attention, being fairly unremarkable in the game lore, where demons and continent-destroying spells abounded. However, one day he read a similar anecdote in the memoirs of another owner of the sun hat, a crazy hermit by the name of Tinolk.

The hermit had written that he’d been made a king as a toddler after the passing of his father. Amongst his inheritance, there'd been a chest containing a rusty ring, a straw sun hat, a tattered cloak, and an envelope to be opened only when he came of age.

Young Tinolk, however, couldn't resist his curiosity.

His unconscious body was discovered by his mother, who spent half an hour shaking him before he finally awoke. Opening his eyes, he spoke to her with an articulation well beyond his age about entering a dream that had lasted for seven years.

His mother disposed of the items, believing them cursed. Her mistake would mark the end of their dynasty.

When Henry investigated further, he tracked down half a dozen stories with the same theme.

A pasty hand was waved in front of his face.

“Stop ignoring me!” Hannes said.

Henry, following Tinolk’s instructions, adjusted the hat so that the front part of the rim was level with his hairline. Then, taking a strand of loose straw, he threaded it through a hole to make contact with his scalp.

At the beckoning of The Ring, The Cap of a Thousand Dreams awakens.

The hat shrank to fit his head. The creepy sensation created by The Ring within his brain extended to touch the straw stand. From there, it grew branches connecting with his ears, his eyes, his nose, and his mouth.

“Don’t activate it yet," warned Hannes. "We’ve got to work through the liability briefing!”

“Say it while I’m checking out the goods.”

Henry'd actually heard it all before.

"Fine." Hannes discarded the party popper and adopted the consciously-casual pose of a tech entrepreneur trying to scam investors. “Congratulations, you’ve completed one of Saana’s hidden quests, a trial that has no doubt pushed you to your utmost limits. For your achievement, a great opportunity opens up before you now to benefit yourself AND humanity by participating in the most ambitious, most ground-breaking technoneurological experiment to have ever been conceived: Project Aevitas. What is Project Aevitas, you ask? I often ask myself the same question. When I was a young boy, I, Hannes Heikken, who you may recognise as the genius lead developer of Saanatek, dreamed of...”

To summarise, the project was basically an attempt to make humans immortal by creating digital replicas of their minds. Right now, both of them, in this timeless area, were computer programs. To produce a sense of continuity with their real selves, their brains would be rewired to contain the replica's memories.

Trippy sci-fi stuff, what a wonderful year 2050 was.

While Digital Hannes was selling his idea, Digital Henry smiled at a new option in The Armament’s menu.

Menu for The Armament of The Syncretist

Eligibility Criteria: Scholar with

Equipped pieces (2/13): Ring of a Thousand Souls, Cap of a Thousand Dreams

Options: Soul Transformation, Enter The Overdream

“Enter The Overdream, baby!" Henry shouted, unable to wait any longer. "Do it!”

Before Overdreaming, it is highly recommended that the player complete a tutorial. Would you like to begin?

“Another tutorial? I love it. Do it!”

As he answered, he collapsed to the ground, losing consciousness.

Hannes, mid-speech, paused and approached the teen curled in a ball atop the loot mountain, the teen’s face beaming with the bliss of a very sweet dream.

“Coming, Impy?” asked the developer, addressing the shadow creature.

“Your visions will be mine regardless," replied The Great Black One. "For now, let me enjoy the quiet.”

“Suit yourself.”

Hannes bent down and pressed a finger to the sleeping teen’s forehead, before vanishing.

The Great Black One, alone, continued to admire the frozen butterfly. What fascination it held, only the creature could tell.

Henry, while that digital body had passed out, was in another one floating in an endless expanse of shifting colours. The feeling was identical to the full-immersion mode of his Mental Library.

Hannes popped up beside him and, after giving the surroundings a proud inspection, continued with the briefing.

“You might be asking yourself, 'Why me? How did I get selected to participate in this monumental undertaking?' Well, just as there are many ways to crack a nut, so too...”

To summarise again, Saana had certain items, Civilian class skills, and Martial class specialisations that conferred unique powers relating to time manipulation. The attainment of these required the completion of hyper-difficult quests on the scale of this Monster King trial. After completing the quest, this pasty Finnish guy would pop up out of nowhere and hold the reward hostage unless the player agreed to sign up as a guinea pig in his neurology experiments.

With the sheer number of Legendary quests that Henry had solved, he’d encountered multiple of these Project Aevitas triggers.

One example was the Imbahalaala’s click or language. Technically speaking, this worked by generating a mental replica of the listener, having that experience whatever'd led to the speaker to produce the utterance, then fusing this replica’s insights with the listener’s mind. Hence, it's ability to transmit vast quantities of information instantly.

Another trigger had been a random copper coin that gave one a 5-hour ration each day with which they could enter an instance dungeon without time passing in the rest of the game world. This bronze coin was in his inventory now, and it was the reason King Torc’s Prison being a timeless zone had raised his suspicions but not confirmed that this tutorial happened to be one of these special questlines.

But both of these were worthless in comparison to The Cap of a Thousand Dreams, the holy grail of time manipulation tech.

Welcome to The Overdream, a simulation space designed to give the player ample room for polishing their skills. In The Overdream, each minute that passes in Saana’s open world will translate to weeks or months experienced inside.

Once per real-life day, the player may enter for a single, continuous instance lasting up to a maximum duration of one open-world hour. Premature cancellation due to a desire to leave or external character death will consume the entire daily quota.

With two set pieces of The Armament, in a full hour, the player will experience 44 months.

44 months...44 months extra months of life per day.

As Henry read that astounding line, he leaned back and pumped his fist in celebration.

Overcome with joy, he grabbed Hannes by the side of his head and planted a sloppy kiss on each of his pasty Finnish cheeks. “You gorgeous madman!”

Hannes winced, Henry having smeared The Redeemer's blood on him.

To assist with training, landscapes and objects from the outside world may be reproduced. To demonstrate this skill, the player should try imagining a setting. The player may either start from scratch or choose a familiar setting as a foundation.

Henry had just the place. "Take me back to the store!”

For testing the fidelity of the system’s replications, there was no better place than the one he was most familiar with, his little bookshop in Chayoka.

Please specify a date.

“Now!”

For replicated settings, the player must select a point where they were present.

“Last visit!”

In an instant, the wild colours of The Overdream had been replaced by familiar shelves sagging under the weight of dusty books. Beside upholstered armchairs made by small-scale Chayokan craftsmen, coffee tables supported pots of tea that were still warm to the touch. On top of the front desk, a placard read that customers under 12 could take a Tome of Rapid Language Absorption for free.

Henry paced around, even the sound of his footsteps having the same satisfying, resonant clunk of shoe on wood.

From a bookshelf, he pulled an anthology of Japanese poems that he’d never gotten around to reading. Opening it up, he found the pages blank.

Crafted goods can only be replicated if the player has made sensory contact with them in the open world. Creating them will require expending a 10th of their production cost. However, for the duration of the tutorial, replication will be free.

Note: items produced in The Overdream cannot presently be taken back to the open world.

As he ordered the system to generate the book's contents, lines of text raised up from the whiteness of the paper.

There was a poem written in 1180 by a “Yorimasa Minamoto”, who, like The Redeemer of old, committed seppuku after a lost battle.

'Fallen trees, buried in the mud, no longer produce flowers.

So too is the miserable fate of this body.’

“Well, that’s depressing!" He shut the book and reshelved it.

Hannes, who'd never stopped talking, pointed at him dramatically. “As for your personal involvement, we’ve been paying close attention to your actions. We were there when...”

A long while would have to be spent recounting Henry’s convoluted history with the item.

This overly-long tutorial trial was not the first encounter. He’d ‘obtained’ The Cap five times previously, only for it to be stripped away at the last moment by random nonsense, like The Cap crumbling into dust with a note inside encouraging him to search elsewhere. After confronting Hannes about this and threatening to tank the game’s economy, he’d been informed that The Cap hadn’t been put in the game yet because the necessary technology was incomplete.

Henry would have appreciated being told that before he wasted 40 billion gold worth of resources chasing it down.

Above one of his bookstore's armchairs, a cup of Iceleaf tea was suspended in the air. When he’d last left this place, the shop had contained a few customers and some of his writing associates, but, presently, although their interactions with the scenery were visible, their bodies were not.

The recreation of Sentient entities requires further Armament pieces.

No Sentient entities - Henry didn’t mind that. For his intended use of this space, people were unnecessary.

It is recommended that the player test the terrain modification abilities.

He knew just where to change.

As he moved to the back of his bookstore, the decor underwent a strange transition into a ritzy, seven-table cafe with an open kitchen and bar. This cafe, in turn, opened upon a botanical-garden-slash-palace-courtyard.

None of this fancy stuff had been his doing. His shop had been constructed in a quiet section of Chayoka’s artist quarters. But, one day, after a long weekend away with his family, he'd logged on and been startled to discover that his guild’s in-game headquarters had been relocated next door – another of Alex's dumb pranks.

Henry, with a thought, banished the unwanted additions, the cafe scenery replaced with a stunning white-sand beach around a turquoise lagoon.

Next, from out the lagoon’s clear surface, a water slide sprouted taller than the Eiffel tower. The structure had been replicated from an actual in-game theme park, height hazards not being a problem in a videogame.

A moment later, dressed in a pair of swimming trunks and squeaky clean, Henry was at the top of the slide and zooming down, his hair flapping in the accelerating breeze.

He gazed out over Chayoka city, this kingdom he'd built in the centre of Saana, and he raised his hands like a conductor and started obliterating it, libraries and hospitals whipped up and shredded by sandstorms, the manufacturing quarter crushed by flaming rocks shot out of volcanoes, the harbour freezing into a glacier. Far on the horizon to the east, although not visible from here, a solar flare rained down from the heavens and annihilated Suchi.

With The Cap of a Thousand Dreams in his hands, Henry would have no limits, no obligations. For 44 months, every single day, he could conjure anything he wanted, could do anything he wished, big or small. Fly through the stars faster than lightspeed - it was now possible. Eat pure carbs without any inflammation - also possible.

Henry, a soda appearing in his fist, took a sip and laughed tyrannically at the sweeter than sweet taste. “HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Hannes, sliding behind him in his own swimming trunks, frowned at his lunacy. “By signing up for the study, you will be joining an extensive group of like-minded folk dedicated to pushing humanity forward. So far, with the help of previous volunteers, we’ve already achieved several important milestones. In ’43, we discovered the breakthrough in neural mapping that led to Saana 3’s wildly popular time-dilation feature. In ‘49, the first digital replica managed to live for five million years without succumbing to existential dread. Presently, an ongoing experiment is focused on fine-tuning the merging of digital replicas with living brains to give a seamless cross-world experience.”

The last experiment was the present one. The replica referenced in ’49 was also Henry's.

‘Extensive group’ was an exaggeration. The project had three participants in total: him, some hippy guy, and Hannes himself. The experiments required huge budgets to conduct, resulting in the quests to access them being made absurdly difficult. Moreover, most who finished the quests and learned about the project refused to participate since it sounded like an evil world takeover plot.

Henry tried spicing up the destruction around him with a demon.

Abyssal Sleeper cannot be summoned. The recreation of Sentient entities requires further Armament pieces.

No demon, then - that was one restriction.

“System," he asked, "are there any extra limitations I should know about?”

Real-life scenery and modern technology cannot be produced.

“Drat, that would have been useful.”

The player may recreate any region witnessed from any of Saana’s installments.

"Really? Nice."

There was one place he would like to visit from the past.

In an instant, the scenery shifted, the air becoming hot and dry and sand dunes sprouting around them. Their new surroundings were devoid of all plants and animals except for a few carcasses baked to husks by the relentless desert sun. To the south, a massive range of snow-crested mountains stretched across the horizon.

This was The Lynak Desert, the location of his old capital in the Saana's previous instalment, the site of another of his many beginnings.