Roughly 4 weeks after everyone’s return and ‘all’ I did was take a few of my skills at level 99 to the edge of their capabilities.

By now they were probably somewhere near level 99,99 and if I chose to use the system resources, it would barely take me an hour to raise them all to 100. Though the real benefits would only kick in at level 101 and that would require a lot longer using the system’s resources, or this back and forth. That step back felt like a crime against my soul and humanity, to make my window into the world blurry and narrower. To allow something to interface between me and reality and not get it to the most perfect state possible.

It felt like a stupid decision, like always wearing gloves while working with small electronics.

However, I keep learning along another avenue. Exploring dozens of other people’s souls for relatively extended periods, I start to get a sense of what the system did. It was still far too distant for me to hope to imitate in any meaningful sense, but as I watch the temporary ghostly and nebulous constructs that Pando had in place, ideas sizzle under the surface of my mind.

Following the system’s blueprint isn’t the only path to power. Hell, across at the very least the millions of inhabited worlds in the universe, I doubt that people would be limited to what we could do on Earth. I already knew of the Titans and though I’m unfamiliar with how to leverage them, I clearly have a humongous soul and potential aplenty.

Most people’s souls weren’t even 100 meters wide, with the strongest ones I brought back from the instance at just over 200. What happened inside and how things were organized inside of a soul also changed wildly.

In my investigations, I all but confirm that the smaller someone’s soul, the larger the Aether constructs which when taken to an extreme such as Aster’s case meant that she couldn’t even absorb the simplest of constructs that someone like me got. Still, even if they are a thousand times larger than Aster’s soul, they still seemed fairly small to me. And that problem just compounds with the construct sizes the system lodged in there. So far, the constructs only took up a fraction of a fraction of our souls, but that would change as we leveled, and I have a feeling that it might be some kind of road block or even a dead end.

I was seeing progress and growing used to the impression that this is a longer term project as I eke out every advantage I could in the short term. So my mind goes back to our most immediate problem: our enemies and more specifically the Elves.

They are a thorn on our side, always ready to surprise us and capitalize on any mistake we make. Though so far we hadn’t seen any reinforcements, I doubt that that would be the state of affairs for long. Soon we would be getting reinforcements of our own, higher level people in both class and skill. All are products of the amazing environment in the instance.

As my mind ruminates the problem, I look out the window to see Paul, the Enchanter that took a leadership role in the inner world. He steps up to my front porch, behind the simple wooden door. Without a word, I open it with a hint of Qi and he just steps inside.

“Nash.”

“What brings you by Paul?”

“Just a few updates and something I want to talk to you about.”

“Anything critical in those updates?”

“Not really.”

“Then save it for later. I think I know what you are coming here for. We have to deal with the Elves. We can’t exactly spend all of our time traveling to the other invasion points, but if we destroy any encampment, it has to be this one..”

“Ohh, bloodthirst tree guardian.” I give him a harsh look and his grim vanishes. “We were trying to decide how to convince you. Hell, half the reason we were worried is that you wouldn’t want to simply massacre them, but if you are open to the possibility...” He says but I can tell he is intrigued.

I exhale knowing that I can’t really make another choice and then I speak:

“Look, I would love to sing to the forest with the elves and in different circumstances, I would definitely not be making the first move. But… you have read my book and know as much as I do about invaders. They aren’t like most of the instance’s inhabitants. So I’m not gonna simply stand in my pedestal ‘clean’ of all the petty concerns of lesser beings and wash my hands of the problem while judging you all. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t looking to other solutions, but meanwhile, wholesale slaughter seems our least bad option.”

His voice grows with weight I had seen few wield and I can tell he understands.

“They volunteer to be here to grab resources for their races. Most of it ends up in the hands of the council, but this isn’t some type of punishment that they are subject to. Even what we got from the months of the very Elves we captured confirms what your book said on the subject. They don’t deny, in fact, they are proud of it, though there seem to be some philosophical underpinnings to it.”

I ignore the tangents I could take the conversion and just keep on the topic for now.

“I agree, and we can’t afford to ignore them forever. Sure, for now, their armies are pitiful outside their defenses. If they didn’t have an Arch Druid, a few seeds and a dozen people could clean them up in a few days on open ground or at the most, one week. Even with him to rally around, they would just last longer, not avoid that fate altogether. But that IS going to change.”

“Well, we haven’t wasted any time. We have round the clock training classes bringing people’s skill levels, battle acumen and formations up to a good level. The real problem is leveling. We don’t have the monster density to allow for effective grinding and even if we only focus on leveling a few elites, it is going to take much, much longer than on the instance. Considering that, the fact that only the most dangerous encounters or actually killing beasts give any Exp and the loss of the bonus of nearly 40 times fold exp means a level that needed 2 or 3 kills now requires a hundred and they aren’t level 1 or 2.”

I nod in thought.

“Yeah, that is the main reason I didn’t push to attack before, but if we can take one day for this before their reinforcements start to pile up, then we start to gain experience. Something essential for our greener troops.”

“We have a solid backbone, but soon we are gonna have to expand by orders of magnitude as more people return. If we let the enemy get even more entrenched, we are going to have a bad time digging them out no matter how many more people we have to do it.”

“Now, what specifically did you have in mind?”

“Well, I was thinking…” I lay out a basic plan for him and after half an hour we settle on the details.

After half an hour in which he also updates me on a few other things happening and where I give my input, he walks out leaving me to my thoughts again for the next 9 hours. We settled on leaving at roughly 22 o’clock and having everyone sleep in the inner world prepared for a morning attack.

Our plans play in my mind. Before the system, attacking just before sunrise was the prevalent strategy, supposedly when the watchers were at their minimum alertness levels. Now the equation has drastically changed.

First, the system made most people’s sleep schedules way shorter. With a lot of people already awake, they could easily cycle through plenty of well rested watchers.

Not only that, I had taken periodic glances with the perception field to paint a good picture of their schedule. Most of them would be awake and alert well before sunrise. And that supposed strategy did count in the chance of catching them by surprise. They likely had half a dozen ways to detect us coming, at least a relatively close range, the least of which would be their eyes.

Though we could probably stay hidden against their eyes and with some shenanigans even the life detectors I had deduced they had weaved in their walls and a little island. They had a lot more experience and it would be foolish to assume we could fool veterans with our meager experience, but I still prepared.

Then I pull back my book from the inner world in a pedestal that was transmitting as much information as it could to it.

Intermingled are a few updated notes on magic and whatever we managed to discover about the system, but the vast majority are research papers, manuals, blueprints and the most convoluted math proofs that the human mind could conceive before the system showed up. But as I learned and grew my connection to the Book of knowledge, I start to understand its strengths and its limitations.

The most significant discovery was that any information added to the book could only feed potential pools from that same type and the inverse when you sought to learn something from it.

So as I feed our gigantic digital repository of knowledge to the book at dial up speeds, the returns are limited to scientific insights, but even that is still amazing.

Time and study would solidify and broaden our understanding of physics and all manner of natural phenomena. The only real limitation is the atrociously slow pace data can be sent, which is a limitation of the simple runes that I used and not even tweaking the pedestal and including higher quality materials increased speed to eh levels I wanted. Sure sending a ‘standard’ length novel may take only a few seconds if it was properly compressed. But as soon as we added anything fancy such as images or even text formatting that ballooned really quickly.

In digital terms, the transfer speed sat around 100 kilobits a second, equivalent to an old school internet connection with two phone lines. Transferring anything that wasn’t in proper text was simply a nightmare. Images, graphics, vector diagrams, and complex tridimensional magnetic readings such as the output from particle accelerators took much longer. Sometimes millions of times longer. A single second from the compressed output that the LHC generates would take days to upload.

Still, teams of people curate, reorganize and prioritize the data that is to be sent in as I further delineate my soul and get control of my perception. This sense of connection to my book while Pando was around is new and I start to explore the hidden depths in my book.

I bore my gaze down, connecting with the world, aiming at Pando and my book. It comes, but the impressions are nebulous like I’m manipulating a cloud. Inside my book, in this other realm, there is a sense of selection, of potential unbounded by limitations that the human mind could comprehend. A spectrum ranging through all the colors. But only three have more than a few loose motes and can be utilized.

To my left, a small red egg floats mid air representing ‘direct’ system business which is what I would spend to understand a rune, discover new ones, improve my understanding of magic, classes and its intricacies, and a thousand other things. Then comes the faint green mass that is information tangential to the system, oftentimes relating to the history and people’s impressions of the current state of things.

The largest concentration is a rolling blue mass that almost overwhelms all the other colors. That we have in abundance and it relates to technology and science.

So much unbounded potential ripe for the taking that I almost let myself go, but instead of letting the book peek into my mind randomly as I would in the past, hoping that the system would answer a certain question, I take charge.

Controlling both the flow of power and the question elevates the utility of my book once again. And this time is not a small test, it's for keeps, so I won’t hold back.

I don’t want to empty the pool, but I will draw deeply from it and get my answers. I open the book and seek answers to very select questions that the best physicist, engineers and a hundred other scientists worked on for weeks. Sure I had an idea of what most of it means and could follow along, but the devil is in the details. I doubted that had the insight to generate even two questions this deep even by working exclusively on this for a month.

As I ask the first question, I feel the answer. It is farther than I would have liked and each word costs me but I can afford the price.

I drag word by word into my book. Then a second phrase, a third and so forth until I’m satisfied. I don’t even mind the time it takes me, as even in my ignorance, I’m blown by the answers. The list with a dozen questions consumes almost a third of the blue flame and then I stop.

Putting the book back where it belongs, the pedestal keeps going with its job recharging all the potential I used up. The 4 pages of answers go to the researchers trying to recreate and improve our tech base.

Done with that, the time to get ready for the attack comes. I’m not exactly happy about going on the offensive, but it would have to come eventually. Allowing the enemy to grow while denying our side a learning opportunity is the height of idiocy. This is how things have to be.

With a single look upward, I let go of the book and sink further in Pando’s embrace getting acquainted with the roots making up half their walls around the enemy’s encampment. Soon we would put all our preparations to the test and find out what exactly their defenses are worth as much as the dirt they will eat.

As I look out, however, I somehow know that not all the young people running around to finish their preparations would still be breathing a day from now.

But what was better? A sacrifice of lives today on our side, with a chance to come out stronger or waiting to die, lambs to the slaughter that had never sought to grow, to become stronger. People that avoided reality instead making do no matter the circumstances.

I knew what I would choose every time.

I had already chosen again and again and this time would be no different.

And eventually, I would be alive to change the world into a fairer place.