Suchi, Central City, The Chapel of The Sky.

Beneath the Ibanpita's main chapel was a catacomb with hundreds of chambers housing God Statues, through which one could communicate with those deities who'd Ascended to the Cosmos. The Church had other, more public places of worship, the visitors coming here specifically doing so to converse with their deities in private. Through the dimly-lit hallways that connected the chambers, they moved about quietly, their features concealed by the shadows of hoods, their voices altered, their secretive motives as manifold as the Gods.

Amongst this clandestine lot, one visitor exhibited exceptional meticulousness in hiding his identity. He'd wrapped himself from head to toe in brown cloth, hidden his face in a porcelain mask, and even falsified his gait to avoid recognition of his stride.

It'd been a productive afternoon of training for Henry, of laying the breadcrumbs for the miraculous saga of The Cripple's Return. Once more, he'd introduced to Suchi, and the world, the latest 7 tools he'd mastered overnight. He'd given the noobs of the arena sermons on war, grappled them into death, acted out their destruction, snacked upon them with his arrows, hooked them away from victory, speedily wove their demise, and bewitched them into defeat.

Now, he was set to meet his school friends for the evening torture by exposure to plebs. Before that, though, he was making a brief pit stop in these catacombs to lay breadcrumbs for a different side story, that little tale about the downfall of an Empire.

He'd gained admittance to the place as Master Brady, the same Alchemist identity employed back when organising the cure for the vampiric moth curse. Upon close inspection, the measures he'd taken to hide his identity were imperfect. Whenever he lowered his Lightstone Torch to the ground to guide the way, he flashed between his gloves and his shirt sleeve a few centimetres of Brady's black wrist skin. Moreover, meticulousness was itself an identifiable trait. These 'flaws' were intentional; he wanted to be caught.

To provide visitors with extra anonymity, the God Statues had been arranged in groups of 8 and 14 per chamber, and guards at the entrance of each chamber admitted only one visitor at a time. In this way, anyone spying on a person would struggle to pinpoint which God they were contacting. The reason for this precaution was historical; after the Neeshifites purged The All-Mother's dogmatic monotheism from the region, they'd implemented strict measures to ensure polytheistic freedom - a guarantee of anonymous worship was one example.

When Henry approached his target chamber, guards blocking the entrance signalled that it was occupied. Strolling on, he faked visiting a different chamber for six minutes, before looping back.

During the return, he passed the previous occupant. They'd made no effort to cover up their bulbous-eyed, magenta-haired anime avatar. Their chin held high, they waved at him with a friendliness and sociability unbefitting of this secretive location, what one would expect from a happy suburbanite jogging on a sunny afternoon. In short, a filthy casual.

Or a spy disguised as a filthy casual.

Henry, exaggerating the paranoia of his real-life persona, faked a second visit to a wrong chamber.

When he finally entered the correct one, he passed through a 20-centimere-thick wooden door that utilised both magical tech and physical insulation to muffle sound transmission. Pure darkness smothered the interior. Upon insertion of his Lightstone Torch into an aperture, the place lit up, revealing undecorated walls, ceilings, and flooring of a monotonous white stone with no hiding spots for eavesdroppers.

In the chamber's centre, nine statues had been arranged in a ring. Amongst them was one of a man in a woollen suit with feathers tucked behind his protruding ears and a disarming smirk.

Henry used The Ring of a Thousand Souls to swap to his crusadingintheshadows username, i.e. The Tyrant. Approaching the smirking figure, he then touched the rim of an offering cup in its grasp and ejected a tendril of scale-balance-shaped energy from his fingertips.

The statue belonged to Svakaipa The Beloved, a Tier-13 Peopleworker Midgod. His backstory was a mystery to Henry since he'd reigned between Saana II and III. Although one could speak with the Gods directly through these statues, they kept tight-lipped in regards to historical matters. Restraining them were even higher powers, the game developers gating progress.

All Henry knew was that this guy definitely hadn't been a good person.

When the cup had filled to the brim with Peopleworker Energy, the surroundings grew heavy and ominous, as though a second type of gravity, one that could only be sensed by the soul, had been cranked up a thousand-fold.

"Empty-handed..." In contrast with the Svakaipa's sculpted image, his voice was frail and thin, and the glow of the statue's eyes had a lustreless quality - the God was a millennia or two from his demise. "I suppose you're here for another conversation…"

This wasn't their first encounter.

Henry held out his palms expectantly. "Show me the goods!"

"Again…"

"Dude, I can only select one Legendary Class, and I'm being courted by many desperate dying Gods. Flight, mega-strength, lightning-speed, teleportation, dragon transformations, omniscience - it's hard to pick between superpowers."

"Fine...but, please, in the future..." Svakaipa's voice trailed off in defeat. "Whatever..."

Svakaipa The Beloved (Tier-13) offers to make you his Principal Disciple.

Worker of The Loyal Heart

A unique Peopleworker specialisation capable of boosting follower loyalty and converting foe to friend.

Rank: Legendary

Bonus abilities:

Call to The Faithful. Inflict permanent status to all NPC Subjects within a 150-metre radius. Toggle.

Conversion Therapy. Any negative emotions felt by an NPC towards you are converted to love. Those with sufficiently strong feelings automatically become a Subject. Requires line of sight. 220-metre range. 8-second cast. No cooldown.

Psychic Puppeteering. Mind swap into any Subject. If your original body is destroyed during puppeteering, you will reincarnate from Subject, sacrificing them in your place. 100-metre cast-range. 480-metre leash-range. Instant cast. 3-second cooldown.

God Body. May store God Energy from worshippers to amplify abilities.

Conditions:

Peopleworker who's amassed at least two million concurrent Subjects over the past year.

Collected resources for Svakaipa's Initiation Ritual.

'Subject' was a status assigned to official followers of any Peopleworker. Usually a voluntary position, it allowed the Peopleworker to use special skills on them, like detecting lies. Accepting this status was typically a condition for joining any guild or community.

The Worker of The Loyal Heart's mind-control abilities, in the hands of Henry, who had droves of haters in every kingdom in every continent, would let him enslave the entire planet.

But, as with the Legendary Earthfriend Class offered by that Elf dude earlier, he had zero intention of accepting. This Class was also spoiled by the same honey trap of the 'God Body', which would give him a permanent character death and make him lose his priceless stack of Legendaries.

Instead, the plan was to trick Ramiro—who, like The Tyrant, was a Peopleworker with over two million Subjects—into stealing this Legendary Class for phase 5 of the scheme to save Suchi, Legendary brainwashing bait.

To review, there were six phases: 1) Late Fees, 2) The Decline and Fall of The Slum Empire, 3) Oliver Speared, 4) Corporate restructuring, 5) Legendary brainwashing bait, and 6) Good bloody game. They were currently in phase 2, The Empire bleeding citizens to Henry's West Bank Autonomous Exclave. Oliver Spears was unwittingly working on phase 3, dredging up whatever darkness lurked in Ramiro's sadistic past. After Oliver speared Ramiro's reputation, Phase 4 would begin, The Saviour and his cronies being ousted in disgrace, followed by a period of reform, where the people of The Slums would be deradicalised and re-integrated back into the flourishing global market system.

Phase 4's greatest challenge would be The Empire's die-hard loyalists. Many Slumdwellers, assuming Ramiro's crimes to be false charges drummed up by The Church, would continue to act as dissidents. These rebels would muddy the political transition through terrorist attacks and assassinations. That's where phase 5 came in, the Legendary brainwashing bait. Any lingering notions of The Saviour's innocence would be dispelled by him returning as a mind-enslaving demon. At which point, Henry would kill him for good – both figuratively and literally, Ramiro's Legendary character being permanently deleted.

Of course, this plan relied on the rather huge assumption that Ramiro would willingly trash the last shreds of his public image and engage in a hopeless battle against The Church and The Company. Still, if Henry's read on the guy were correct, there was a 55% chance he'd take the diabolical plunge. Some captains go down with their ships; others insist the ship goes down with them. Ramiro seemed to be the latter type, and a bit more.

With The Saviour slain and The Empire defeated, Henry would then begin phase 6.

"Mass brainwashing, eh," said Henry, "that's not a bad superpower."

"Than—"

"But are there any extra perks you can throw in? Sweeten the deal, Svakaipa."

"Again...I have no surviving worshippers..no God Energy for cross-Plane delivery..."

Gods who Ascended to the Cosmos continued to be reliant on the mortal world. If their worshippers who channelled them God Energy perished, so too did they, the deity weakening and fading into oblivion. It was a two-way relationship, and fate was merciless to those who failed to safeguard their people.

Because of this dynamic, most of the Ascended Gods treated Henry like a king whenever he revealed his Tyrant identity. If he became their Principal Disciple, they stood to gain the millions of Subjects under his guild for new worshippers.

"Oh, is that right?" Henry rubbed his chin in irritatingly innocent ignorance, the action made absurd by the fact of him wearing a mask. "Didn't you gain any followers since we last spoke?"

"We spoke yesterday…"

Within the God's tiredness was an increasingly loud note of exasperation.

Henry smiled.

By acting rudely, he hoped to sow a seed of annoyance that would eventually blossom into a beautiful flower of betrayal. After he'd gathered the initiation ritual's materials, Svakaipa would tell Ramiro—who would discover Henry's fake Legendary brainwashing plan through his flawed disguise—to steal the materials and perform the ritual on himself, thereby sealing his doom.

"A lot can change in a day!" Henry replied. "You know, Tapira of The Deep Frost said she could get me two Legendaries."

The God, unable to match this offer, sighed, the gesture thick with the frustration of millennia of cosmic obscurity.

In Suchi, some days seemed to drag on for months, but not all of them, thankfully.

The rest of the evening passed peacefully. He trained his friends, and the community event afterwards was speed-dating, where the Villagers swept aside the zone's misery for love, clumping together like a mound of hundreds-of-thousands of rats in heat. Henry obviously refused to date anyone moronic enough to roll a character in Suchi. Nevertheless, he participated in order to beta-test the interview procedure for his gold-digger recruitment tournament. Astonishingly, he'd been startled to find in this trash zone the most perfect gem of a woman. However, it turned out to just be Rose experimenting with a stalker-replacement persona he'd helped to formulate - kind of weird. At some point, his friends ditched the speed-dating in solidarity with Handsome Dan, who was ejected for sexual harassment complaints stemming from his obnoxiously handsome, 'fake' avatar. Back at Byzantium, they helped the Village craftsmen in preparing for the next community event. The Empire had scheduled a fun field trip out on Suchi's dehydrated savannah for tomorrow or, in Henry's case, 19 years from now.

The Overdream.

Wankalgalese Shortsword.

The 29th major style he studied was a shortsword art native to the Wankalga region of Basindi. Its practitioners were Cutthroats, Flame-spec Shaman, and other melee classes that required a free hand for spellcasting. Practitioners of this one-handed style were expected to fight with grace and elegance, and one could not be considered a master until they were capable of crossing swords without spilling a cup of the divine tea for which Wankalga was renowned.

Of the one-handed sword styles Henry'd learned so far, Wankalgalese Shortsword ended up his best adapted to the 1v1 tournament. The majority of novices favoured long weapons so, if one could close in against them, the shortsword would win handily. Moreover, as an Earthfriend, surviving the close in was relatively simple due to his Class's Chameleon Monkey stealth and Flora spell-shield. A quirky benefit was using the free-hand to eat the Duelling Bread Loaf while fighting, allowing him to replenish his Stamina on the fly – a brilliant showboating technique.

While studying this martial art, he also completed a Legendary quest to master Wankalga's second most prestigious tea ceremony. The special brew, The Tea of The Stone, dipped the imbiber into a meditative state of unparalleled clarity and focus, in which one would be content to stare through two sunrises and sunsets at raindrops pummelling a pond. At 509,000 gold per cup, the experience was not quite worth the price.

***

With his real and digital life tallied up, he reached his 100th year of existence a month into this fifth session.

To celebrate, he baked a cake entirely using the native ingredients from this Overdream world. Its main flavour was the Spinning Top Berries he'd collected on his first day here. Through his advancements in botany and mineralogy, the fruits had expanded to the size of oranges and speciated into several unique cultivars adapted for various culinary functions and Planar Attributes. The sugar, he refined from another grape-like species, the eggs and butter from his livestock, the wax of his birthday candles from bean oil. This homemade cake was suffused with the taste of his solitary island.

Watching the mass of one hundred candles burn was surreal.

He certainly didn't feel like a centenarian. After disconnecting from humanity to journey into this digital dream, his chronology had diverged far from the standard path. In some respects, his life had been packed well beyond what anyone else this age would have experienced. In others, he was still a disgusting noob.

Hannes had informed that, to a certain degree, he would always be immature because the physical parts of himself remained unchanged. The neural systems for self-inhibition, the hormones and neurotransmitters that stirred passions, the vigour of the heart - all of these contributed to the general picture of one's maturity, and, in this regard, he was frozen at 17-years-old. Physical maturation could be simulated, but that would necessitate a total divorce of his Digital and Fleshbag selves.

To be honest, and it could be his immaturity speaking, Henry didn't care much about ageing. Why would anyone want to be a geriatric? Old people were as pleb as everybody else, perhaps even more so.

***

Medrishan Twin Spear.

This hybrid-Arcanist style centred around mixing defensive spear manoeuvres with spellcasting.

The Volefan region of Medrisha was also home to the long-range Sea Dragon style, to which Twin Spear owed its origins. Sea Dragon practitioners tended to struggle whenever an opponent reached melee range. Theoretically, they could cover this weakness by studying the related Wingless Dragon. In practice, however, Wingless Dragon's dexterous broadsword fencing could not be learned by regular people within a reasonable period. Thus, for a compromise, many Sea Dragon practitioners had resorted to using a spear in close-quarters, this weapon taking far less training than a sword to achieve practical proficiency with.

Due to the studious Volefans documenting everything, Henry had the great pleasure of reading about every step of Twin Spear's evolution. During its development, it split into multiple sub-branches, two of which had survived to the present. The simplistic 'Younger Spear' fulfilled the original purpose of teaching melee self-defence to time-strapped mages. The complex 'Elder Spear' was an independent, fully-fleshed hybrid martial art. Originally, the names had been the other way around, Younger Spear being an older art, but they'd swapped after a conflict between the schools that the now-Elder Spear sect won.

He experimented while studying Twin Spear with hybridising Sea Dragon with the earlier melee styles he'd learned. Of the pairings, Nomad Sabre ended up the most complementary. The style's anti-cavalry sword's length lent itself to defensive manoeuvres, and the rapid stance-switching facilitated alternating between spellcasting, defence, and combination attacks. Twin Nomad Sabre Spear was in turn surpassed by several triple-art hybrids, quadruple, quintuple...

***

After thirteen years of mineralogical investigation, he more than doubled the number of identified elements in this Overdream world, from 613 to 1,296. At last, he pinpointed the exact mineral he'd been lacking for the Nature Energy Grass's growth, the one produced by the three bacteria and fungus that lived in its roots

He called it Indrite after the Vedic god of thunder Indra. The substance was white like the deity's elephant and, when stockpiled in large quantities, it attracted lightning during thunderstorms. This latter fact Henry discovered after the obliteration of his laboratory. Chemically, Indrite was a compound of 16 elements, and its production required a 229-step cross-species metabolic pathway between the three bacteria, fungus, and Nature Energy Grass.

Mixing this Indrite into the soil samples local to his home island, he finally—after decades of painstaking research—managed to sprout his first seed of Nature Energy Grass. The shoot grew to the length of a nose hair before wilting and dying. Henry glowed with joy for weeks.

Next, for optimising fertilisers to address the plant's stunted growth, he would need to collect rare materials from this Overdream world's monsters. To this end, he decided to shuffle around the order of his martial arts, replacing the one initially intended for this session's third with another specialised in solo hunting and butchering exotic big-game.