The Overdream, Riverbank Cabin. A summer night.

Henry admired the interior of his humble cabin. Rays of a crimson moon shining through the window were cast on plain-made wooden shelves that he’d crafted himself - just his own two hands and levitating magical Constructionist hammers.

“Home sweet home!”

Although the nights were for resting, he headed outside. During the interlude, he'd accumulated a heap of excess energy that needed to be burned off.

Him shutting the cabin door awoke a Flying Crab snoozing in the Spinning Top Berry bushes. The critter searched for the source of the noise, recognised Henry, then returned to its slumber.

The farmstead was in the exact state he’d left it.

Rubbing his hands with excitement, he marched over to a shed that served as his Alchemy lab.

Entering, he was struck by an earthy odour from a stack of barrels heaped against an inside wall. These contained test batches of fertiliser that he’d been steadily improving with his expanding understanding of the planet’s unique fauna and flora.

Across a workbench, he unrolled a blank A1 sheet of paper, on which he began to scribble down idea after idea for power limiters.

..................eyepatch...dummy Charges...Charge randomisation......multi-tasking reading...Double Vision Poison...weighted clothing...

Aside from increasing the challenge, he had a secondary and, arguably, more important reason for designing something to mask his strength.

The change had gone over his head because it'd been so gradual from his perspective, but, during his brief stay in Suchi, slumming it amongst the noobs, he’d realised that he'd improved at an alarmingly quick rate. In just one session, he'd become dangerously close to ascending to a literally inhuman level - as in, a keen observer would be able to spot that he’d increased his capabilities through artificial means.

That, in turn, could pose a problem because augmenting one's mind with computing broke several international laws.

Most countries after the A.I. revolution had instituted bans on this practice out of fear that someone or something might attempt to enslave the planet again.

Henry, before signing up for Project Aevitas, had considered whether it might be a smokescreen for a nefarious plot. He'd concluded, however, that this would be a grossly inefficient strategy for world conquest. As should be evident from this life-multiplying dreamscape, the technology in 2050 had surpassed humanity long ago. When you can run a hundred-thousand-speed simulation of a person's mind, there's little value in hijacking bags of flesh.

And if it were a smokescreen for a nefarious plot...woops. Too late now.

The practice being super illegal was actually the reason that The Cap of a Thousand Dreams was included in a set of items with a, superficially, unrelated ability to generate false identities. The possessor was supposed to distribute the bounteous harvest of their expanded existence across multiple personas. Thereby, one would avoid freaking out the world and being bagged by government agents.

Henry'd done exactly that with the 43 novels he'd written in the first session, spreading them across multiple pen names, some NPC, some human.

The supreme martial art, though, he’d been intending to claim for himself. He'd thought he had set up a safe rate of progress by allocating only 2 hours per Overdream-day to combat, the rest going into literature. This meant that in total he would invest into the venture about 200,000 hours, a remarkable amount but not absurdly so given that some veteran players of the game series had clocked in over 70,000 by now. Moreover, he'd split his study across 84 distinctive martial arts, preventing him from mastering any one to an unbelievable degree.

However, in a discussion with Hannes, he'd discovered three critical miscalculations. The quality of practice in The Cap—with infinite adversaries, never pausing, never pulling a punch—was much more effective on a per hour basis. There was a ton of crossover benefits that transferred between martial arts. No one who had played for 70,000 hours was deranged enough to have spent even half that time training.

So he could no longer reveal his true power level.

Conceptually, hiding it wasn't too hard. He could always pretend to be worse. However, having tasted liberty, he viewed such self-restraint with disdain. It would be like having dinner with a historic Mongolian roleplayer who—refusing to acknowledge the fork because their character had never seen one—ate with their bare fingers. In this scenario, acting incompetently would be throwing away his own cutlery and digging wrist-deep into the spaghetti, too. Instead of that debasement, wouldn't the superior choice be to get jacked up on mind-altering drugs that tricked you into thinking you were dining with gentleman company?

Henry's quill came to a sudden stop at the end of the line, 'fight with chopsticks'.

"The rude dinner guest analogy sounded way more sensible when drunk."

In fact, the whole power limiter idea seemed stupidly reckless now that he was sober.

"Oh well."

Having nothing better to do this evening, he continued to brainstorm.

Since he’d obtained the Earthfriend class, the martial arts he added to his repertoire over the next two decades expanded beyond the basic, physical types.

For the first 2.7 years, to familiarise himself with the class, rather than a specific art, he performed a general survey of 63 Earthfriend styles. It was pointless to dive deep into any single one because their advanced lessons always relied on higher-level abilities. So, he learned a small amount from tree-loving hippies, animal-loving hippies, star-loving hippies, mountain-loving hippies, and generalist hippies who loved a bit of everything.

By the end of that study period, he felt he had a solid grasp of the class’s basics. He'd shaved off 23 milliseconds from the gathering of each Energy charge. With , he could strike a Montane Lightning Antelope zipping down a cliff-face.

Fauna was his weakest domain. The training manuals for it centred around monster forms and combinations different from the three sanctioned in his tournament. Silverback Gorilla featured in only 4 martial arts, Chameleon Monkey in 1, and Savanna Cheetah in 0, manuals for other big cat species having to substitute for the last. One day, Henry would formulate an optimal way to mix the three, after he’d gathered more data on melee combat.

...

The second study period was dedicated to The King’s Harem from Murdnon, Heimland.

At some point in the region's history, a culture of machismo had emerged among the rulers that dictated they dismiss their guard retinue lest they appear effeminate and lose the respect of their subjects. This, ironically, evolved into the harems of the rulers fulfilling guard duty instead.

The style developed by the pretty lasses was a quick, light-armoured polearm form, covering partisans, glaives, poleaxes, halberds, and bill-hooks. For Henry, the polearms, which were heftier than the weapons of his previous styles, shored up a long-standing weakness he’d had against heavily-armoured enemies in the mid-range.

...

Eternal Brother Blade was the third, a martial art employing dual-wielded butterfly swords.

It had no living practitioners, Henry instead having observed an army of zombie ice golems using it when he’d been doing translation work in a zone that his guild had subjugated.

Dual-wielding, without the proper specialisation for it, was more useless in Saana than it is in real life. He chose Eternal Brother Blade precisely for this impracticality. Relentlessly exercising his ambidexterity and parrying, he was awarded a whole extra point in his motor skills Gaming Quotient, raising it to a stunning 127.

...

Four, five, and six were mage-styles, each corresponding to a prominent city in Volefa. Collectively known as The Three Dragons, the styles covered different magical skill-sets, and it was claimed that whoever could tame all three would tame magic itself.

Sea Dragon had originated in Medrisha, a Venice-like city built across several man-made islands and sporting a grand trading fleet. Through naval warfare in which spellcasters acted like cannons firing from boat to boat, Medrisha had perfected static, long-distance spell-usage.

Grass Dragon came from Riga, a city that had to fend off regular incursions from the nomadic tribes to their west. Through their battles on the flat, grassy plains, the Rigans had refined tactics for mobile, mid-range spell-usage.

And Wingless Dragon was from Caineal, which bordered Basindi, the home in Saana of martial arts. Through the intermingling of peoples, they had blended magic and brawn into a close-range, melee-hybrid form.

With Volefa being the game world's preeminent intellectual centre, The Three Dragons were supported by a voluptuous body of research documentation. Henry, alone, could not dream of improving upon the work. At least, not within the next two real-life weeks.

Paradoxically, though, for his 1v1 tournament, mage-builds were one of the biggest growth areas. The small arena size made it too demanding to complete spellcasts in a 1v1-setting without team support. Thus, the 'purer' mage builds like the Grass and Sea Dragons had gone extinct amongst his tournament’s best participants in favour of melee-hybrid styles. With so few playing them, they were underdeveloped.

...

And the last for this session was one from Bes - the region, not its neckbeard Zone Guardian. Bes was under constant attack from its southern neighbour, Nilke, who had almost triple their population and could therefore field a much larger army. To defend against the stronger opponent, Bes resorted to guerrilla tactics, their favourite base of operations being the underground networks dug throughout the Western continent by Tunnelling Cowmoles - the same creatures Henry’d beaten up at Karnon’s behest. The summation of these struggles was Tunnelling Cowmole Claw: techniques for battling in and from the dark.

Henry, practising its blind-fighting drills, died more than he had while learning any other style. The prize for his hardship was a nifty ability to echolocate using tongue clicks. With it, he could jog through a pitch-black forest without bumping into a tree – although the branches still whacked him.

But who cares about playing with sticks and stones? Let’s sing instead of The Overdream's sweetest fruit, that legendary conquest of literature! Having had a decent warm-up, he began an intensive study of every literary style to have existed. For each, he would celebrate his acquired knowledge by creating a pastiche story imitating the style except set in the modern age with modern characters. These stories would, in turn, form a unified novel sequence that would capture the spirit of his era, much like Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine did for early 19th century France. Naturally, he started with the ancient near east, those poets of the Euphrates, Tigris, and Nile, those first...

Suchi. The attic of a bed and breakfast.

Henry peeled open his eyelids and checked that there were no azure mice by his toes or azure spiders in the cobwebs in the rafters.

Safe, he threw his legs off the bed, sat for a moment on the edge, and stretched out a two-decade kink in his neck.

Congratulations! Your creation of The Song of Skyscrapers qualifies as a miracle. Scholar level has increased by 1. Congratulations! Your creation of Menelaus qualifies as a miracle. Scholar level has increased by 1. Congratulations! Your creation of The Girl from Bhutan qualifies as a miracle. Scholar level has increased by 1.

"Cool."

To avoid creating a scene from his rapid advancement, he’d been advised by Hannes to swap to an NPC identity before returning so that his achievements wouldn’t be announced globally. The developer had been mystified as to why he hadn't used it earlier. The reason: the function was not listed anywhere in the menus for the shabby item set - terrible, negligent game design.

While away, he’d received a message from a bored Abigail inquiring about his plans for the afternoon.

Team Friendship Forever would be scattered before the scheduled evening group training. Cathy was babysitting her siblings, Brian and Anderson were preparing with the Civilian Class Byzantines for tonight’s arts & craft tournament, and Dan was out fighting crime.

As for Henry, today he would begin laying the groundwork for the fiction that would explain the shocking debut of the supreme martial art. The paper on which he penned it would be the massive arena he’d commissioned through the corrupt Senior Director Okai Van.

Initially, he’d had The New Suchi Arena built to hone his skills against Suchi’s best without the nuisance of its worst. Also, the officiators were collecting info on everyone, which he would have secretly used to tailor customised strategies to swindle the opponents he couldn’t match physically.

These purposes, however, had now changed. The New Suchi Arena was to become the final testing grounds where the world’s greatest martial art was completed by none other than The Cripple.

The Invincible Cripple? Do you mean the undisputed GOAT duellist? That once-in-a-generation genius who mysteriously vanished, he's back?

Yes, he's returned, and it's a harrowing tale.

Everyone had thought that the army of anti-fans, who'd created his insulting nickname after he humiliated their heroes with cheats, had gotten to him and forced him into early retirement.

The 'truth', however, was that he'd never given up. All this time, he'd been stubbornly working to prove the haters wrong. Operating in the shadows, he'd researched esoteric martial arts from all corners of the globe, waiting and preparing for his day of revenge.

The Strategy of The Resourceful Komodo was dead. Its corpse had been cannibalised by its own smarter, stronger, sexier son: The Strategy of The Naked Chameleon Komodo Invincible Heaven-Exploding Crippled Fist!

The supreme martial art's title needed improvement.

There were also some flaws in Henry's story, but it didn’t have to be perfect, merely plausible.

His past was littered with false evidence. Searching up the previous whereabouts of his ‘Henry Flower’ character would reveal that it was AWOL for huge stretches. In public, he did nothing but read. Investigating the writing group that operated from his bookstore, one would stumble upon the stories he’d written to show-up Silver Wolf that’d been panned as preposterous fanfic about himself.

Even his guild's inner circle members would probably fall for it. Being single-minded game addicts, their eyes always glazed over when he talked about literature, so he'd given up discussing his new hobby with them ages ago. For all they knew, those times he'd disappeared to read in private could have been spent studying fighting.

'Practising at the big, brand-spanking-new arena,' Henry replied to Abigail's question.

Her response was delayed, as she passed this information to someone else, who then gave her a command.

-Battered Daisy: Can I tag along?

‘Sure. But I’ve got a few minor matters to attend to beforehand.’

There was a power limiter in need of concocting. He’d planned on making it in The Overdream and shipping it out, but the materials he’d taken in had ended up being a tad insufficient for the final formulation.