The Slums of Suchi.

Armed with tools for repair, the slumdwellers and the Villagers were scrambling like worker ants over the corpse of their burnt and broken city.

Far above, an azure harpy was watching the reconstruction effort with a grin ill-suited to the situation.

“Hark! In these dark hours, there are rays of hope! My protégé, have you ever witnessed a more stirring sight?”

The figure the harpy was talking to, dangling in its talons, didn’t respond.

Henry was in his Mental Library researching recent news about his abductor in order to plan an escape route.

At least 2300 years old, Karnon was a ‘Zone Guardian’. These were Tier-11 Gods assigned to each starting zone to prevent them from being conquered and keep them accessible for noobs. Karnon's protectorate was in Eastern Togavi, the region, coincidentally, where the Merchant who’d pestered Henry down by the docks this morning had hailed from. Hence, they both had azure hair and alabaster skin, both being members of the same race.

These Zone Guardians generally remained aloof of human affairs except during dire invasions of their territories. They preferred to invest their years in meditation and training to ascend to the next tier of Godhood. Karnon, though, took a different philosophy, believing that the best meditation was laughter and the best training what he called the ‘joyful expansion of the soul’, i.e. doing whatever made him happy.

Henry despised the God. He was always popping up at random places at random moments to do very random things. Karnon was like one of those annoying kids in 2042 when pretending you had bipolar disorder became the trend.

Karnon...

In the recent news, Henry read that the stupid God had stolen a forest last week from one of his guild's colonies near Aion Laisije. Roots and all, he waltzed in, cast some magic to bring the trees to life, and made them walk away.

Where were they now? No one knew.

Could anyone have stopped him? Nope.

Why? Because the developers had made Zone Guardians monstrously overpowered to keep their territories safe. For perspective, while they were Tier-11, the next strongest in the human NPC faction were one Tier-9, eight Tier-8s, and seventy Tier-7s. As for the player base, no one was higher than Tier-5. When one factored in that strength roughly quadrupled with each tier, Karnon was effectively invincible.

“My protégé,” squawked the God, “before we begin your instruction, your current level must be gauged. Tell me what you spy!”

A vine lowered a pair of binoculars in front Henry’s face, while a second vine peeled open his closed eyelids.

The view was of a group of naked women in a communal bath soaping off the grime of the ruined slums.

He was also a pervert.

Shouldn’t the system be penalising him for exposing a minor to an R18 image?

Henry couldn't handle this right now.

He sighed. “Look, mate, whatever you saw while tailing me was only the tip of today’s irritating iceberg. I’m exhausted. I’m cranky. What I need right now is 80 minutes alone to de-stress. In exchange, we can skip the verbal game of cat and mouse, and, instead, I’ll give you twelve hours afterwards of compliance with whatever immature, reckless nonsense you have planned today under the guise of offering ‘training’."

Karnon raised his azure eyebrows as though he’d watched a child in a suit arguing a court case. Rare was the soul who dared to negotiate with he. “12 hours...hmmm...with my teaching ability, we won’t need half of that to set you on The Path. Besides, it would be irresponsible for a groom to spend so long away during his honeymoon.”

Having thrown that tangent out, the God stared down at Henry, expecting him to ask the obvious question.

“You’re married?” replied Henry flatly. “First I'm hearing about it. Very surprising.”

Karnon wagged a finger condescendingly. “Not yet. But soon, with your help, your dearest mentor, me, will say goodbye to bachelordom.”

Henry wouldn’t subject a single brain cell to the torture of deciphering that sentence.

“80-minute break, yes or no.”

Karnon’s face contorted in rage. “Who are YOU to argue with a GOD!? You should be offering me your firstborn in thanks! Why, just this morning, I threw away fifty-three letters from fans begging for my instruction!”

Henry rolled his eyes. “We both know that’s a lie. Yes or no. The sooner you answer yes, the sooner we can undergo,” he sighed again, “the joyful expansion of our souls.”

That last phrase made Karnon nod happily. “Well, I do have to prepare the teaching materials. You won't try to escape?”

“I’m sure you’d find me either way.”

“True! Nothing evades this divine gaze.” A glint surged in Karnon’s eyes when he spotted another sensuous sight below. Nothing! He saw it all! “Where should I deposit you?”

And so Henry had the God take him above Central City. Using an invisibility Spelltome to avoid attention from the city guards, he skydived down to the market district.

There, he did a quick tour of the shops, picking up paper, ink, farming and mining tools, and an assortment of bits and bobs.

With these supplies, he walked to a small manor, snuck into a secret chamber through a bathroom, equipped and activated the shabby ring, hat, necklace, belt, and pants, laid down on a hammock, and drifted off to sleep.

The next moment, he was floating in a swirling multi-coloured space with a smug grin plastered across his face.

While an 80-minute break was pretty good, wasn’t a 232-month break even better?

Welcome to The Overdream. Would the player like to create a new instance?

“Do it! According to the criteria I’ve got in mind!”

Initiating...

....

....

Done!

The multi-coloured space around him shifted into a black, star-studded canvas. Hundreds of thousands of kilometres below floated a planet of blue and green and white, orbited by a solitary crimson moon.

Henry blocked his vision with his fingers so he wouldn’t spoil the world’s layout.

He’d discussed with Hannes, Saana’s lead developer, what would make an ideal base during his stay here. The eventual conclusion was a planetary hybrid of Earth and Saana. It had Saana’s accelerated growth-rates for plants and creatures, but Earth’s 24-hour day, 365 of them per year schedule. Several adaptations had to be made to accomplish this. For example, most high-latitude creatures would migrate or hibernate during winter to avoid starving from their increased metabolism.

Also, all intelligent beings had been omitted, since they would’ve been a nuisance.

“Put me in a random place in my chosen starting zone.”

The next moment, he heard the chirping birds and the trickle of a creek by his feet. Lowering his hands, he took in the sight of a lush-green spring forest.

The chirping was actually coming from winged crabs fluttering around the treetops – this world had undergone its own evolution.

Does the player desire further assistance?

“I’ll ask if I need help.”

On the creek’s opposite bank, a pig with scales had been using its prehensile tongue to collect berries from a bush and store them in a stomach pouch. At the sound of Henry’s voice, it curled into a ball and began to speed towards him.

When he summoned a high-level Spelltome, the ball, sensing his increased strength, veered hard left and rolled off into the forest.

Laughing, Henry waded across the creek to inspect the bush the creature’d been picking at.

It contained pea-sized berries that were the shape of a spinning top, with striations that alternated between lemon yellow and pink. Unable to bite through a berry’s tough outer layer, he used a dagger, exposing an interior that was more seed than meat. The taste had the usual tartness of wild fruits that have not been bred for sweetness.

Congratulations! You have discovered an unidentified species of fruit! Would you like to name it?

This must’ve been what Adam felt like in the Garden of Eden being asked to label the beasts and the fowl.

“Spinning Top Berry. I’ll do the binomial nomenclature later.”

Spinning Top Berry registered.

Uprooting the bush using a Landworker skill, he stored it in his inventory and moved on to begin scouting the area.

While he could teleport his body to give him a bird’s eye view of the land, Hannes had recommended that his home area be a restricted zone where he abstained from all use of The Cap’s editing functions. Manipulating the world willy-nilly put him at risk, after a few millennia, of losing his psychological bearings and becoming a delusional megalomaniac.

Henry wouldn't quibble over such minor restrictions. Plus, he’d found during the battles with The Wolf Empress and The Redeemer that he enjoyed exploration.

For a while, he embraced the relaxed, unbound life of the explorer.

He gradually mapped out the zone, marking the location of any critical resources he discovered.

His inventory swelled with seeds and sample ores and insects and trophies from boss monsters cleared from their dens.

On the second morning, he came across a herd of hybridised horse-elephants, one of which he tamed for a mount, increasing the ground he covered each day.

During the nights, they lay beside a cosy fire, Henry stuffing his belly with wild game and his mind with books and books and books.

The area’s rough layout was an Iceland-sized island with the standard features of a Tier-0 starting zone with the necessary resources for developing a self-sufficient city. This island was situated a kilometre offshore from a continent that housed higher zones. He'd set these parameters in advance when creating the planet to make his stay comfortable. For sensory novelty, the island had a climate like that of the American Midwest or Northern Japan, with a high contrast between the four seasons: green springs, hot summers, dry autumns, and snowy winters.

After he’d mapped the bulk of the island, he settled on the banks of a river, an hour’s ride upstream of where it flowed into the ocean. Based on the convenient proximity to critical strategic resources, this seemed to be where a starting city would’ve been founded.

He gave his home a simple name, Riverbank Cabin.

Over the following days, he put those Civilian Classes he’d learned to give him flexibility during missions to their intended use.

He levelled a patch of forest using Landworking.

With Construction, he shaped and dried lumber, then built a humble log cabin for a dwelling, barns for storage, fences for fields, pens for livestock, and a palisade for protection.

Those monsters that ambushed him during his labours had their bones, fat, flesh, muscles, and organs rendered into crafting materials through Carcassworking.

He decorated his new buildings with Woodworked furniture.

He decorated his body with Textileworked clothes.

With Alchemy, he formulated fertilisers.

And with Farming, he tilled the soil and sowed the first seeds.

Later.

Outside a ‘chicken’ coup, skeletons with buckets were throwing feed to a brood of flightless birds with four eyes, a pair on the front and back of their heads.

Farmer Henry was strolling down a long row of Spinning Top Berry bushes sampling their fruit. The berries had grown from the size of peas to the size of coins, and they were now in bunches of five, a trait he’d developed through crossbreeding with a different species.

His hopes rose when he noticed the flesh of the berry he’d picked had softened to the extent that he could pierce it with an bite. However, the inner juices that squirted into his mouth made his face twist in pain.

“Sour!”

Before he could mark the bush a dud, a notification popped up.

Scheduled Reminder: Rested enough yet?

He supposed he had.

Giving his farmstead a quick once over, he closed his eyes and entered his Mental Library.

He preferred to read and write in the open, but he’d yet to build a paper mill. The materials he’d brought from outside couldn't be squandered on story drafts, since only they could be taken out of The Overdream.

Around his motionless body, the plants and animals grew noticeably by the hour.

At one point, he took a few steps backwards when an Arcane Sprinkler started watering the Spinning Top Berries.

Aside from that, though, it wasn’t until nightfall that he moved again.

Yawning away the satisfying tiredness of a good day’s work, he stretched his muscles, then went to the Four-Eyed Fowl pen. Collecting a bird, he brought it to an outdoor kitchen area and slaughtered it. After defeathering and butchering it, he stir-fried the meat with sea salt, native herbs, and lard from a monster he’d called an Obese Demongoat.

While preparing and later eating the meal, he continued watching a projection of a movie purchased from the in-game store, the 2042 romantotragicomedy classic, Spacelovers.

Presently, the astronaut protagonist was weighing his love for an alien hive-mother and his loyalty to his home planet that her swarm was invading. His final decision was to go with his heart, embracing his feelings for the hive-mother. During an awkward lovemaking scene that followed his choice, it was revealed that his saliva was toxic to her species. Inadvertently, he became his planet’s saviour.

After many laughs, Henry patted his full stomach with satisfaction and tore open a rift that swallowed him.

In an instant, he was transferred to an empty stadium. The ground level was divided 3x3 into nine partitions of varied design, one containing a replica skeleton of a dragon, another an ancient catacomb.

Few teens in the year 2050 would fail to recognise this arena layout. It was from Saana League, a semi-official e-sport tournament in which international teams competed each week for the viewing pleasure of tens of millions. For boring reasons, the layout was also used for Henry’s recruitment tournament.

This would be the staging grounds for his martial arts training.

It was unfortunate that he hadn’t unlocked the Earthfriend skills, but he could use the time this freed up to build an even stronger foundation.