***

Ecological Research of The Attention East-Saana Trading Company.

The environment - Henry's crippled past had cultivated in him a deep affection for Saana’s diverse habitats. Between duels, he’d wandered a great deal alone through its untamed regions, his companions nothing but the game’s impossible landscape and the monsters that stalked it.

Even for less sentimental duellists, the environment had to be respected as the stage for the match. In this regard, it could hold a pragmatic significance and presence, one almost equating to a third participant.

In jungle duels, you had to deal with extra verticality, with the threat of nearby predators, with the quick alternation of sensory reliance from sight and sound as the enemy oscillated between the rustling thick of vegetation.

Street duels offered a fun play between the crowded bazaars and the empty alleys, and you and your wrestling foe, smashing through home after home, would improvise the commonplace instruments of daily life into weapons.

Steppe duels, although strategically limited, possessed an enchanting spatial magnitude. The kilometres of flat horizon diminished the duellists, reducing them like two flowers meeting by chance adrift the ocean to touch, one sinking, the other floating on.

Temporally, too, the time you spent with any setting absolutely dwarfed that with the opponent. The duel itself lasted a few minutes, tops, its duration flanked by two heftier expanses of scenic solitude. Before, one might devote hours or days or weeks to scouting, analysing ambush spots, charting points of escape. As for after, when one stood alone, this time, even if not much by the clock, definitely felt longer. The greatest victories hurled one into a stretching, endless vertigo. The sensation might be likened to descending a stairwell and miscounting the final step. For a few beats, the heart of the duellist continued to fall into the missing opponent, continued to grope through the milliseconds for their absent body and touched only the curves of the land and the soft pastel infinities of the sky.

The environment, for some duels, was almost everything.

Such had been Henry's nostalgic take as a duellist, as a PVPer who, ultimately, judged the scenery subordinate to the more thrilling struggle of man against man. For many players, however, lest we forget his oddities, the game's environment ranked its chief attraction.

Saana had a sizeable PVE component, of instance dungeons, of adventure questing, of massive thousand-player open-world raids. Judged by the total surface area of the planet, these activities actually out-scaled his own. His wars'd been confined to a tiny strip of humanity, the population centres being islands separated from each other by the seas and the beast-haunted hinterlands.

Outside of war, dealing with these non-human threats was the world’s main 'military' activity. Borderland territories incurred regular monster invasions, and the transportation routes connecting them to the capitals needed constant reclearing. On the fringes, scouts, like those of The Odayakan Floating Leaves, maintained an eternal vigil. The planet’s rough topography had already been mapped. Nevertheless, the wilds underwent perpetual shifts due to herd migrations, herd mutations, and weather/geological aberrations. In the span of centuries, the inhospitable surroundings, similar to Saana’s other cyclical mechanisms, could be viewed as shrinking and contracting, leaving more or less room for human occupation. The highest level of PVE centred around reclaiming frontier territories lost in this flux and capturing new ones; throughout the world, army-sized raids ground through a labyrinth of progressively harder zones that snaked into the continental interiors.

The above was Saana for a huge portion of the player base. That, today, included much of Henry’s own guild, who'd been redirected to these pursuits after his reformations and whose methods he—who’d never managed this area, it handled by colleagues—would now be studying himself.

While NPC arts existed for this, none neared his PVE division in scope or mastery. His guild’s operations covered a broader territory than any previous game civilisation, controlling frontier raid zones all across the planet. For a sense of scale, an NPC empire like the Old Rangbitans, at the heights of their golden age, sustained enough troops for 3 major frontiers. His guild ran ten times that figure. Their raid teams waged a perpetual, worldwide anti-environment crusade in jungles, deserts, snowscapes. Supporting this was what he'd built, an imperial network of semi-autonomous colonies, with millions of support staff, craftsmen, researchers, farmers, and so on.

Much more could be said on the logistics of the machine. But, for duelling, Henry only cared about one of the treasures heaped by his colonial kraken, its vast ecological catalogues. Since their expeditions were recorded and the footage curated, he could access untold hours of the action on any frontier, from any type of landscape, any biome. Warehouses on Chayoka, which he'd browsed regularly and could replicate in the Overdream, stored plethoric samples of soil, herbs, timbers, bones, ores, and furs. His research libraries had bulged with an ever-growing accumulation of manuals on their microscopia and utilisation.

And what did all of that amount to for a duellist? An epic quantity of stage data.

Absorbing this trove, he—whose duelling adventures had already traversed the planet—could extend his roaming further still. Mentally, he could plant his foot on almost any patch of earth and feel unravel the local possibilities of its duels. (And this, as a cyborg, he’d been doing, his sparring matches having been staged around the globe.)

And so he explored. He jammed into his head every square metre of this world’s terrain. Casting his eye across its native undulations, he saw (and practised) the duels of the cliffs, the duels of the coasts, the duels of the lakes, the duels of the chaparrals, the duels of the woodlands, the duels of the steppes, the duels of the volcanoes, the duels of the maelstroms.

From this survey, Henry would finalise the first half of A Thousand Tool’s environmental exploits. This first, a subset of ‘passive’ techniques, applied to maps that couldn't be altered. He covered such things as the selection of map-appropriate tools, the combat implementations of terrain features like pitfalls and obstructions, the identification of regions advantageous to one’s strategising self à la his old ‘Heaven’s Gates’, and quirky locomotive tricks for navigating between points. Whatever the stage, his art provided some avant-garde way of duelling upon it.

And this catalogued world, he would continue to retain going into the next study, for which it’d form the material.

***

The Skeletal-Venous-System Nobility.

After learning to work with nature, the next step, for any daring duellist, was to break it, to harness it, to transform it. In these brief years, Henry would bury his head in the tools of the actual trades, in the Constructionist’s charts, pencils, hammers, and bricks.

The public version of A Thousand Tools utilised for this topic a different style to what he truly researched.

The fake hovered in the title, ‘The Skeletal-Venous-System Nobility’. This one, a sibling to The Left-Hand Nobility, Henry’d familiarised himself with years ago outside of duelling, while designing his empire's infrastructure. Maximising his Fleshbag’s time, he thought this pre-existing knowledge sufficient for A Thousand Tools after supplementation from previous Construction-adjacent styles like Tunnelling Cowmole Claw and Dancing-Stone Architecture.

The second, and real, building art was 'The Contours of The Unrelenting Clay'.

This one—an ancient, tightly-guarded cultural treasure—belonged to none other than the natives of Suchi. It was by The Contours that had been erected and solidified the fortress-complex known as ‘Central City’ standing garishly in The Slum’s destitute heart, Central City whose walls gleamed smooth and unassailable while overlooking the sea of rot.

Despite this being a remote, backwards region in most respects, the fortifications of Suchi and its neighbouring territories were one of its few outstanding assets. The Citydwellers or Clay-people had concealed amongst their red-skinned caste a magic for reinforcing their namesake material to an absurd degree. In their hands, it became as robust as any stone or metal used in the more conventional fortress-craft of other realms. Simultaneously, due to clay’s unique flexibility prior to the application of the curing procedure, they could shape their defences with greater alacrity and intricacy. Together, these qualities made their castles some of the best.

Any visitor to Central City, after passing enough of Nerin’s Trials to gain admittance, would be met by a three-dimensional labyrinth of spatial horror. In the honey-comb-like structure, in its multiplex twists and forks, one envisioned the absolute futility for any would-be invader. Every few metres, one's men would be split again, channelled into dead ends and dead traps. If the one surveying the fortresses happened to be an enemy spy, attempting to document the layout for the impeding army, this effort, too, would be of limited value, for the Clay-people’s expert builders could re-arrange the whole schema in the middle of a battle, sealing old paths and opening new ones.

The Citydwellers' castles, along with The Church or Sky-people possessing their own caste secret of rain-summoning, combined for a one-two punch that made this region practically unconquerable. Any force large enough to defeat the city defence could never sustain itself off the local savannah. With no option to siege, you would have to commit to an immediate assault upon landing. And your reward—after suffering tremendous, empire-ruining casualties—would be the logistical headache of feeding millions on grass and a few herds of emaciated hyenas.

As for how clay was hardened, most people in Suchi assumed it was done through blood magic. You see, whispers in the streets murmured, the clay was reinforced using the vast quantities of this liquid collected from the Citydwellers on death – like when Henry’d executed the Senior Director through ritual exsanguination.

To divert a bit further into the lore, this bloodmagic theory was not, to be clear, a conspiracy.

This was the big, open secret of Suchi, deducible within an hour if one spared half a turd to ask the obvious questions about the shithole, ‘Why the hell are these priests collecting all this blood? Where are they taking all that blood? What can you do with so much blood?’

The answer was simple. Blood magic. The blood went into reinforcing the walls around them, slightly redder than the soil. Suchi’s Citydwellers, although richer than the Slumdwellers, were still but rungs in the caste ladder. Their function? A living blood bank. Their numbers were sustained, their bodies pampered and saved from the damage of manual labour performed by the Slumdwellers, for no other reason than to keep the supply in a plentiful, healthy, happy condition.

Ramiro eating kids, the cannibal cult that Henry’d massacred last week, these had merely been the small-scale body snatchers, a low, malformed branch of what was, in fact, the region’s primary modality of governance. Suchi was nothing but a ghoulish mill that liquified humans into strength and rule. Central City, towering over the shacks begging at its feet, had risen red and dripping out of the soil through the siphoning of unholy, absolutely demonic quantities of blood.

Again, if you could find any local willing to discuss this, this was not a conspiracy. Aside from the drunken Villagers and trainees distracted by duelling, everyone you encountered in the area knew the situation. Such affairs were just best not mentioned around untrusted company.

But, actually, this tale of an insidious, barely-covert oppression—although believed by the average inhabitant and any player lore-enthusiasts—WAS a conspiracy, a red herring that simplified and distracted from the truth.

Henry, much better read than most, had long ago dismissed the clay-bloodmagic hypothesis.

Chronology rejected the idea outright. Recalling the region’s millennia-long history, one might vaguely remember the minor but critical detail that the red-skinned ‘Clay-people’ of today were not the same race as the ‘Clay-people’ who’d designed the cities, i.e. the ‘No’Are’, a white-irised folk since genocided. The current-day executions via bloodletting had never been practised by the No’Are, this technique being a later religious syncretisation by their red-skinned successors out of water-preservation rituals from the Slumdweller/Sand-people’s desert nomad ancestors. The OG No’Are, having never collected blood, had shaped their clay cities without it, and, presumably, this was still the practice. (Here, a historical mix-up of evils had occurred due to the No'Are's leader, The Tyrant of Sokgyemant a.k.a. The Deathless One, having conducted forbidden experiments during his quest for immortality. However, blood had never been this fellow’s forte. His speciality had been necromancy and zombies – like those Henry’d levelled up against at the Mammoth Beetle dungeons.)

No, the real clandestine truth behind the Clay-people’s building technique lay in an actual secret of The Deathless One. This guy, hearkening all the way back to Henry's tutorial and the death riddle from The Wolf Empress—"Should struggle lose, The Flame must speak, of entities whom shall He meet, the age-worn masters sought to become: Redeemer, Ten-Hands, Deathless One."—had been a former owner of The Ring of A Thousand Souls. Well, in addition to that, by Henry’s calculation, although never confirmed until hearing that riddle, The Deathless One had also owned the cap in which he now slumbered through the aeons.

The guy’s epithet kind of said it all, 'Deathless'. In the same way Henry, an immortal cyborg, min-maxed everything from duelling to cookies, The Deathless One, ancestor in both tyranny and artificial longevity, had exploited the Overdream for his own purposes. Within the multiplying lifetimes devoted to who knows what, some ration must’ve been spared for the local geography. He would have examined the clay’s most microscopic degrees. He would have pursued down a thousand different pathways its elemental, magical, and material properties. He would have tested his era’s every esoteric Construction tradition. He would have generated at the speed of thought an untold number of fortresses until he’d found one beyond perfection in its sturdiness and shape.

Some portion of that hidden labour, shared with his people and eventually hijacked by their enemies, had become the insurmountability of Suchi’s towering walls.

Incidentally, a suspicion about The Deathless One and The Cap of A Thousand Dreams had been the main reason behind Henry’s past activities in Suchi. Therein had been the motivation for progressing through Nerin’s Trials, for buying the West-Bank Autonomous Exclave, for his abundance of digressive trivia knowledge about the region. During one frustrating leg of the hunt, he’d tried to find this other tyrant’s tomb, hoping to grave-rob it for the artefact or clues to its whereabouts.

And that was, likewise, why Henry wouldn’t reveal his dabbling in The Contours. He'd rather not expose his journey to transform into an immortal cyborg. (Also, these building methods were highly restricted in his present location, and their theft could be construed as a flagrant declaration of war.)

As for the unanswered mystery of the siphoned blood, Henry—fleshbag or cyborg—didn’t know its function.

A certain God who provides clues through pranks, when he’d vaporised The Trading Post and turned all its inhabitants into a grotesque rain of blood, had been making pretty unsubtle allusions to the other prevailing theory in Suchi. The Church, the ‘Sky-people’, used their collections to summon their rainclouds after The Cleansings. That’s where the blood went, up into the sky, then back down into the crops, into the food everyone ate, into the soups they sipped. Last week’s Earthfriend moth invasion had not been Suchi’s first sighting of bloodsuckers. The streets were already run by vampires. Blood, it was blood in everything, blood in the soil, blood in their mouths, blood that quenched this arid region’s endless thirst.

This other open secret, you really couldn’t gossip about, Suchi’s cloudless sky always observant.

Was that the truth? Actually, spoiler alert, no. The chronology didn't align with this theory either, the rain summoning originating with The Deathless One, too. Alas, another red herring, flapping distractingly on deck.

(Note: Henry wasn’t denying the presence of blood magic in general. It was, obviously, blood magic. An ambiguity simply existed due to the many types of blood magic.)

Anyway, the takeaway point from that lore was just that Suchi's cool castles were probably the result of next-level min-max cheating with the Overdream.

So, Henry, donning the cap now, repeated the scam. With The Contours as a starting point, he spammed whatever designs sprang to mind. He tested how high he could go before his towers tipped, how dense he could pack his catacombs before they collapsed. He dug impossibly deep into the red-stained dirt, into a universe of complexity guarded within its stratified layers.

Within a few months, he'd cracked the code. As he’d guessed - not blood magic. The hardening procedures were unlocked by simply testing the local soil to the preposterous depths enabled by the Overdream, by cataloguing thousands of hyper-rare interactions across various mineralogical, elemental, alchemical, planar, and so on dimensions. The Citydwellers had pulled off a bang-up job preventing its leakage.

Having figured out The Contour's general mechanics, he reckoned he could replicate it himself in Suchi or anywhere. Give him a pinch of material and a wink to nap, and he could harden sand, mud, timber, bonedust, or any other fragile substance into a granite-firm wall.

Easy.

After learning this Construction art, going beyond it and the dirt of Suchi, he combined these insights with the previous study, with his guild’s global ecological catalogue.

Building in swamps, building in caves, building in every random place, he formulated the second half of A Thousand Tool’s environmental toolkit, a subset of ‘active’ techniques for altering the map in one’s favour. How to crank out one-man fortifications, how to lay and cover traps, how to funnel herds of monsters at your opponent – he developed these kinds of fun stage modifications, a strategical duellist not merely adjusting to the scenery but making it a tool as well.

With enough preparation, you could, conceivably, hammer out any impossible structural shenanigans. However, in duels, one was beholden to time, and no opponent would enter a fort purpose-sculpted over weeks to counter them. Mid-duel building especially sucked. As with his wood-swarm, Constructionist magic had been hamstrung for game combat balance, structures requiring protracted group preparations to make them permanent, their embryonic manifestations collapsible at a foe’s touch.

These time constraints, Henry’s public release drawing upon The Skeletal-Venous-System Nobility only partially addressed. He provided decent-ish pre-fight earth-based forts that could be summoned in a few minutes and were strong enough to waste a few attacks before they crumbled. For during the fight, he invented nothing beyond the swarm.

As for his cyborg, Contours of The Unrelenting Clay version, it was full-build ahead. For any material he'd dissected, with a single minute prep, he could finish a two-story honeycomb bunker, more than sufficient for most duels. In terms of mid-fight moves, he could cast near-instant pitfalls, ladders, and projectile blocks. Particularly devastating were earthen coffins that completely sealed any combatant below Tier-6. When lined with airholes, these paired excellently with long-cast spells, Henry trapping an adversary before leisurely summoning an inferno to cook them inside. Best of all, the coffins could be spammed on a 1.2-second cooldown.

Between those two, he also created an intermediate, non-cyborg version of The Contours, usable in an emergency or if, for some reason, he stopped caring about the political ramifications of being exposed thieving Central City’s caste secrets. (And, then, naturally, drawing upon the Arcaneworker skills acquired during The Reliquarian's Duty, he forged a Legendary that amplified his clay sculpting's speed, weight, and strength until he could pull off the cyborg tricks as a non-cyborg or, as a cyborg, spam 2.63 coffins per second.)

He could've gone further still. Based on this research and his prior experience duelling Cosmic Gods, it should have been theoretically possible to push these effects into infinity. At higher proficiencies, one might wield the dirt as a proper weapon, both structure and attack. The game’s various spell systems were so interconnected at its core physics that, eventually, despite this being Civilian-class magic, one could summon giant golems and surf tidal waves of earth. With enough knowledge, he might’ve stood before Suchi’s impenetrable walls and, with a single whisper, blown the whole stubborn edifice to dust, millions of tons scattered to the wind.

However, the few years assigned here to The Contours were an infinitesimal fraction of those necessary to break the game to this degree, and Henry had no plans of going that far soon, if ever.

In fact, in the discovery of an enigma shrouded within the enigma, by the end of this period, it’d dawned on him that he hadn’t remotely touched The Deathless One’s hidden mastery of the clay. Fragments of his predecessor's real skill had slipped through in traces of The Contours, neutered as Henry’d neutered the public release of his own art. Apparently, the guy had collected pieces of The Syncretist’s set beyond Henry’s initial estimation, and he'd sunk more labour into the dirt than the entirety of A Thousand of Tool’s development. Multiple millennia, at minimum. This revelation opened up several even bigger mysteries to the nature of the dude, affairs much more monumental than this tiny saga in Suchi, anomalies on the genuinely apocalyptic scale of ‘Great Black Ones’ and ‘Vilified Ones’. But, for now, Henry side-lined this matter. All of this was videogame trivia, to be solved or not solved in the course of his questing once finished with the weekend of duelling.

Lastly, for a small departing gift for the plebs, he blueprinted out of these two studies several duelling-specialised arena maps. These, after refinement by area experts, would be added to his stadiums once Alex gave the format an official league.

Since his Fleshbag self had lacked the time or interest to master architecture (at least before the weird pony world wonder project), he stuck to considerations of function, balance, and complexity. Nevertheless, where possible, Henry'd tried to slip in some nods to his Crippled affection for the game's wild scenery. The kids of 2050, battling upon his maps, would get a small taste of his bygone adventures, from back when the whole world had been his broken arena.