《Sonny Samhain》10: Stress Testing
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I went a little deeper into the Outer-wastes today. Deeper than last time, anyway. I stood in at the base of a canyon staring up a craggy cliff face that looked like some giant had take a city and then stuck it to their wall with glue.
At the canyon’s base there was an immense heap of bodies, trash, charred machinery and vehicles. On the actual cliff was the city, its buildings jutting out, like cabinet shelves in the world’s most desolate office.
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After bracing myself a little I jumped up, the sudden acceleration making me feel just a little light headed. The three hundred foot leap was over in about a second and I found myself hanging from the edge of one of the lowest buildings.
I pulled myself up nearly fell through one of the windows on that side of the building.
“Oops...Careful, Corny.” I said. Warning myself as I walked along the side of the building. Careful of all the holes and broken windows. Sure I was undead but I didn’t want to risk dying again if I could avoid it.
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I’ve come to the conclusion that it's easier to think of the Outer-Wastes and Inner-Territories as two different, mostly separate worlds. One was wild and dangerous and fantastic. The other was ordered, no less dangerous, but mundane.
It was like one of those stories where one could go through a magic portal in between a fantasy land and the real world. And from what I was remembering from Corny’s secondary school history classes, that was pretty much the intent.
The source towers anchored the subspaces and the subspaces overlapped creating what was effectively a miniature parallel dimension. So long as the towers stood, the fantastic and the mundane need not live side by side.
Sure there were a few areas and times where things bled through, but in general the people could enjoy relatively normal lives. Speaking as someone who’d had to live through a world of endless horror and wonder, I both understand and applaud their decision.
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Occasionally wanderlust fine, and a little adventure understandable…if you’re into that sort of thing. But day to day life should stable, safe and sane.
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I explored the sideways city with leaps and bounds. I’d gotten comfortable enough I’d started going inside of the buildings looking for anything of worth.
While the Hunter Office’s would only buy essence stones and materials collected from the bodies of monsters.
Other loot could be sold at numerous salvage establishments and pawnshops throughout the city. And it’d be a shame not to take advantage of the opportunity since I’d bought then fiddled with a storage item, to allow me not worry about how much I was carrying.(More game-like convenience.)
There was shriek that was quickly cut off when I sent a piece of gravel flying in the direction that the sound came from. The little piece of stone whistled through the air, before it hit its target.
A thing that looked like a cross between a haggard old woman and a turkey buzzard, keeled over. The wall behind it was painted in blood and brain matter.
I recognized the creature from a big book of monsters that we’d had in the house for some reason. The beast was a harpy and the city was full of them. This is maybe the fifteenth harpy I’d killed while making my climb.
For a second, I thought the harpy’s body was going to fall through one of the windows. It didn’t, it just felt onto the floor.
Which meant I’d have to harvest it, which was a pain, because aside from the axe I got from my last trip into the wastes, I still needed to buy some decent hunting gear. Collecting beast materials with a kitchen knife was both messier and more difficult than I’d expected.
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After quickly carving the creature apart and cutting my way through its chest, I held the harpy’s essence stone in my hand. Essence stones were heavy things and the harpy’s seemed to either emit or gather air.
A light breeze blew out from my fingers as I held the stone. I stared at it, not knowing what expression to make. Harpies seemed to be some mixture of severed undead and monster. Gaining wings from the magics corruption. So it made sense that their stones were bigger than those of your average severed. (About the size of a golf ball.) More magic meant more essence…
After thinking about the world and its creatures for a bit, I concentrated a little and shifted the flow of my essence, channelling it through the little glowing stone.
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Essence Stone Refinement was a trick of making stationary ‘stored’ essence shift to a semi-active form. It was sort of like using friction and body heat to make drinkable ice water out of a chunk of ice.
In theory anyone could do it, but only innate casters could do so effectively with little ill-effect. I’d picked up the trick when I watched the counter girl...er...Agnes, do it in the hunter offices. I wasn’t that good at it myself, with more than thirty percent of the stone’s stored energies escaping as I refined it.
For bigger, more precious, stones I’d probably go to the Handle offices to have a professional handle it.
I watched the stone grow brighter as its essence was agitated. Then I watched it shrink as the essence flowed out of the stone. Now, if I were one of the Witches in the office I’d be putting the semi-active essence into a jar or vial of enchanted glass.
The customer would take it and then inhale and or drink it in, pulling the semi-active essence into their core. Circulating it through their body so it could join and increase their total amount of personal essence.
‘I’ wasn’t a witch though, I was just doing this for me, so I simply pulled the harpy’s essence inside of me, watching the stone disappear.
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There was a warmth in my chest, after refining more than a dozen harpy stones I could feel my internal essence rising in the same way it rose when I took the essences of that ogre and that Rat King. I’d leveled up again.
Going from level six to level seven. Once again, I was kind of wishing there were some convenient numbers to quantify the changes caused by my increased essence. I mean I could definitely feel myself growing stronger, but how strong was up to debate. Was I many times stronger, or just a fraction stronger.
Was this a percentage based thing? Or was I growing in set increments? If I were a normal person perhaps the changes would have been more obvious. Unfortunately I wasn’t, so I just had to guess and be content that the change was at least positive in feeling.
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Destiny stolen at birth, the prince of the once mighty Great Zhou Empire, Zhou Yuan, has been plagued all his life by a fatal poison, forced to suffer powerlessly until one day when fate draws him into a mysterious domain where he meets a beautiful girl in green, a bizarre dog-like creature and an unfathomable old man in black.Join Zhou Yuan as he is thrust into the whirlpool of destiny while he seeks the pinnacle of cultivation.
8 1057The Verant Chronicles - Book One
The once powerful Verant Empire had been brought to its knees after seven years of civil war. The war maybe over, a new emperor maybe at the helm, but the empire remains broken. Deadly plagues, encroaching monsters, divided political loyalties only scratch the surface of the problems the empire now faces. Highwaymen make the roads unsafe, powerful wizards go unchecked and goblin hordes threaten local towns and villages. Elwin doesn’t want to spend his days as a farmer and dreams of adventure. He, his brother Rith, best friend Emerson and adopted cousin Anna, decide to go out into this world as adventurers hoping to seek fame and fortune just like in the books they read. The empire is at a crossroads as Elwin and his friends experience the aftermath of the war, they must come to terms with what it means to live in the Verant Empire as one of it's citizens. It all begins with an intriguing map sewn into cloth, written in a strange language and depicting a place that doesn’t seem to exist. Elwin and his friends decide to go to the capital city to join the adventurer’s guild and find someone who can translate the map and hopeful recognize the locations depicted. Along the way they encounter lizard creatures, goblins, former soldiers, a bard, druid and a powerful wizard who has his own eye on the map. They meet new friends and create deadly enemies. From great plains to a bustling metropolis, to a town devastated by an earthquake, their world of Gaia has a gritty realism to it and the empire is only a small part of a much large realm. It is a Romanesque world teetering on a renaissance in which Gods, gunpowder, armored knights, griffin riders and magic coexist uneasily. Elwin and his companions drink, they swear, they have sexual encounters, they make mistakes and face serious moral dilemmas at every turn. Planned out to be 30+ chapters in total including a prologue and epilogue. Chapters will be released about twice a week when possible.
8 335In This New Life, My Own Fantasy Adventure Begins!
A little shut-in girl that for unknown reasons and means got transported into a fantasy world. Barely surviving her first arrival to this new world, she continued to live her life as she intended, only to experience the hardships and cruelty of the world firsthand. With a little effort and friendship along the way… she found more reasons to do more than just live her life. The more she stayed, the more she learned how problematic the world actually was. And to think that's bad enough, adding to that was the existence of a great evil that threatened the land and all its standing Kingdoms. Given the chance to fix those problems by her own hand, she took it. Her motivations for affirming this heavy task was unclear, even to herself. But one thing's for certain– she's gonna be doing a lot until she gets anywhere… do what she normally doesn't, become somebody she normally couldn't, setting off on an important journey with her newfound self worth. A journey for no absolute constructive reason. She might not be aware of it immediately… but that is her Fantasy. ------------------------- Just a few more things to note before you get started. Extra tag: Anime Yes, this is an anime-styled fiction, and it isn't meant to represent real life scenarios in grave detail. If you're familiar with anime and manga, the following mannerisms and tropes wouldn't feel too foreign. But if you feel that that isn't your cup of tea or you can't appreciate it, you can drop the read anytime you'd like.
8 72Misadventures Of Adventurers
A comedy with parallel universes. yeah that's kind it, I mean there is other stuff but I don't want to write it in the synopsis because it may spoil the story, yeah so I don't know what I should write here, I am just stalling here now. Did I reach 50 characters, no, okay?
8 72Max Level Runemage returns to earth.
Robin expected it to be easy to escape. But after many years in the other world of Nuriran, He no longer had a place to call home. So for the safety of his work, Robin decides to return to the only home he has left. Earth. PS. I'm still working on this one. So expect some very slow uploads.
8 162Twoen
The struggle for an interesting game has been the story of my life for quite some time. Every game I find is either too easy, not interesting or too short. Luckily, my two brothers who match my level of skill, albeit in different areas, tend to spice things up. When I look at my older brother I have no idea how he gets anything done when he's such an idiot. Still it doesn't detract from my respect for him as a gamer, though maybe a little. When I look at my younger brother I marvel at the monster that my older brother and I created. Deadliness, craftiness and quiet, both in what he does and how he is. When it's just us three we tend to destory everything in our path. So normally we tend to compete rather than team. Although that isn't to say we're just good as individuals. When we work together our effectiveness multiplies rather than lowering. Well enough about us dorks. Anyway a new VR game came out, apparently in development for quite some time. Of course my older brother decided to drive out and buy three copies. What would this one be missing? Difficulty? Depth? Length? In any case I plan to reach the top before my brothers do. It was a competition after all. Twoen had all three things I normally yearn for in spades. Something I did not foresee. A keeper
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