I aligned the pieces of the puzzle together. I had seen the first part of the dream after I had fallen into the Well of Resurrection while trying to dispose of the tears of the old dragon in it.

Mimti was the old dragon. He was the father of the first siren. And hence he was the father of all the sirens. Therefore he was dear to the sirens.

The objective was to punish the adulterous men, but eventually the sirens took to ‘punishing’ all men, using a near impossible-to-deflect charm to prey on them.

So many innocent men must have been killed and eaten by the sirens.

And what of Mimti?

He had left to scatter his body parts all over the world. How then he had ended in the desert? Had he forgotten with time that in truth he was formless, and that the dragon body was just a vehicle to transport the parts of his human body? The dragon body, though powerful beyond comparison, was not unaffected by time. Mimti had become a frail old dragon, a prisoner of the desert, until I went and freed him.

But why was I being shown Mimti’s story? That was the one question that remained unanswered.

“Are you okay, my king?” Fono asked me, breaking me out of my thoughts.

I nodded.

“You can call me Vicky,” I said. ‘My King’ sounded too formal and archaic. “Have you remembered who I am?”

“Is Vicky your name or is it a respectable title of some kind?” Fono asked.

Well, that clarified things.

“It’s a name,” I told him. “I think we should get back to the tower building.”

“The tower needs a proper foundation,” Fono said.

“Yes,” I said. “But… but everything in this realm is so easy to disappear. We can spend all the time thinking out all the details of the tower and everything, and the next moment if I just happened to tell myself that none of it is real then it would all be gone. Poof!”

“That is true,” Fono said.

“So unless we figure out a way to make things not-disappear, even if I told myself that they are not real, we would not be able to make a tower that lasts.”

“Wouldn’t that come with its own consequences?” Fono reasoned. “Say, you get hurt, how will you make it unreal?”

“We’ll have to live with that, I guess,” I said, “but for now it’s more important to find a way to make things stay.”

Pook had tipped me at the start that observation was key. What had I failed to observe so far?

“Did Pook never tell you any other details about this mist world?” I asked Fono.

“Who knows what goes in the mind of Pook?” he said, flinging his arms sideways. “You are the first acceptor of a quest set in the mist world. I know that things here are real only as the acceptor thinks them to be real, but that’s about it. Even the elf king or the other acceptors haven’t been in this realm before.”

“Elf king?” I asked, my eyes popping at the mention of my old rival. “The elf king has accepted a quest from Pook?”

“He has,” Fono nodded. “And so have many others. All the quests really are interrelated. But only Pook knows exactly how.”

From Sam I knew that the elf king and the players were participating in a ritual. Was it all part of Pook’s quest?

As I was thinking about the elf king, my mind set off in a different pattern. I had created an entire forest by multiplying a single tree. The tree was a basic unit, easy to design. I made a small leap into the air, as a eureka moment seized me.

“Aha!”

“What is it?” Fono asked me.

“I think I know what can make things last in this realm of the mist. We need something very basic. A very small, simple particle… like an atom. Once I decide that the atom is real, I can just keep on making everything out of it.”

Make complex things out of simple and basic units.

That could be the trick to make things last. That was how the real world worked too.

A notification emerged in my vision, giving me a green signal. I was indeed thinking in the right direction.

You have successfully uncoded a major secret of the mist world. You can now start building whatever you want in the mist world. The mist world is now allowed to merge with the rest of the game world, provided that you allow it, since you are the acceptor of the quest. All you have to do is to think about it!

I let the mist world merge with the rest of the game world, so that now we were back in the forest. The greenery here was not born of my imagination, the variety of plant shapes and sizes making it obvious.

But we needed a flat clearing, and I couldn’t clear the trees of the gameworld as they were unaffected by my thoughts.

I devised a way round the problem.

I unmerged a chunk of the game world and replaced it with the mist.

This would play to our advantage as it allowed me to change the surroundings of the tower at will. I could turn the tower’s neighborhood into a forest or a desert or even a sea at leisure.

Next I produced the ‘atoms’.

My ‘atoms’ didn’t have any solidarity with true atoms. My ‘atoms’ were simply tiny cube shaped crystals. I kept reproducing them in my thoughts, until a stone slab formed.

Next I multiplied the stone slab. It was easy, and in a short period I had made hundreds of them.