Finding the right spot for the shrine turned out to be surprisingly simple. Luna and I wandered around the area for a bit, discussing what we both were looking for and contrasting it with what we knew about the two deities the shrine was supposed to serve. During that time, we decided that the shrine should be outside the previous town limits, the change demanded a new start of some sort, a move away from the ruins of civilisation and its decay. Otherwise, the blessing might become corrupted, the energies of decay still filling the town as it fell into ruin seeping into the newly created structure—a stillborn shrine, so to speak, a place not suitable for a new beginning.

No, until the town had completely fallen to ruin, it would not do to start something here. Well, unless someone was powerful enough to completely overpower the decaying energy of the entire town, neutralising it and turning it into something new. Or tore it all down, but it would be problematic as long as the process was ongoing and the energy lingered. One day, it could be reclaimed but that day was in the far future. Years, maybe decades, and that was without taking the hordes of Undead and Shattered into account.

No, the shrine needed to be outside of town and once that decision was made, a quick look at the map made me facepalm at the obvious choice of location. Before the change, there had been an interstate exchange nearby, two massive bands of asphalt, concrete and steel stretching through the land for endless miles. Just a few hundred metres from town, barely far enough to prevent noise pollution, the two massive roads had crossed paths, a large bridge and a complex system of ramps allowing cars to change their path. Now, that bridge and the ramps had largely collapsed, forming a mountain of concrete, earth and rubble. In a way, it was a monument, a gravestone to our old civilisation, a memorial of days gone by.

And what better way to step away from the past than by taking these ruins and making something new with them? They were small enough that I could completely convert them, overwhelming the lingering energy unleashed by their destruction. What remained were resources, an artificial mountain in which I could carve my shrine.

It took effort. A lot of effort, the material was designed to last decades without issues and centuries with regular maintenance, so the few months since the change would normally have done nothing to it but the influx of Astral Power and the resulting changes reduced the durability to the point that things simply broke.

Even cleaning up the broken pillars that used to hold up the bridge, to say nothing of the bridge itself, was a herculean task, requiring me to constantly use Earth Magic to move the rubble or to break up pieces that were too big for me to move. Nights were spent simply shifting tons of stone a few metres, giving me access to the wall I had assigned as the facade of the temple. A slanted grey, slightly mossy, wall, previously hidden under the bridge, it was far from the splendour the shrines and churches of old displayed but maybe that was for the best. I had no interest in wasting time to make things grand, even if a small part of me wondered just how much I could do.

Remembering the temple I had created in my capsule made me want to repeat that feat, only now in reality. Take over some rocky monolith and set up a lair on top, a place only I could reach. It was possible, I’d only need quite a bit of magic to make sure nobody else could fly up there. I was fairly certain that Wind Magic, or Wind Rune Mastery, had the tools for it, maybe by combining it with Earth Magic or its Runic Mastery. It would take a ton of effort but it was most certainly a ‘someday’ project.

For now, I had to be content with the artificial mountain and the cave I was carving into it. That part of my work was somewhat similar to moving the rubble, only that I now needed to make sure I didn’t take away too much or the wrong parts. With the alterations from the change, I couldn’t assume that things would remain stable from the old engineering, I needed to constantly assess the load of the artificial mountain above and feel the stability of the stone around me.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

At first, that was simplicity and I could work with little concern. If the worst happened, I could simply move backwards and watch as things crumbled before me, but soon, I wasn’t simply carving away the surface layer, I was moving into the tunnel I was digging. Distance made it harder to control my magic, to say nothing assessing the stone and earth in the surrounding area. No, for that I needed to be within the tunnels I was digging and that meant if something collapsed, I’d be in serious trouble. I might be able to shadow step away and escape but I had no idea how that would work out. So far, my shadow stepping had focused on moving across open space, not through solid material and I was a little leery of trying to do so. It might work, or I might get my body torn apart by some interaction I didn’t know about. I’d be a lot more confident if I had some simple way to test that part, but I hadn’t figured out a good way for that. Maybe I would at some point, but for now, that remained as an emergency measure. For serious, do-or-die-emergencies, not something I hoped to experience any time soon.

It was quite amusing where my mind drifted as I methodically carved away concrete and steel, sometimes transmuting parts of the rock above into sturdier stuff. Crystal and Earth Magic were quite good at that part but regardless of the suitability, it was a massive effort, one that wasn’t helped by my lacking affinity. And just how lacking my affinity was, was driven home by the lack of skill points gained. In over a week of near-constant use of Earth Magic, with quite a few instances of Crystal Magic interspersed in the work, I only gained three points in Earth Magic and Earth Rune Mastery, bringing the skills to twenty-four and eighteen each. Crystal Magic was even worse off, gaining only a single point and reaching level sixteen, but I had a feeling it would go further as my tunnels went deeper. At that point, I couldn’t just put in some small reinforcements of hardened stone, I’d have to alter the Earth wholesale, turning it into stone and crystal. Not a simple task and not one I was looking forward to, it would take a massive effort, one that made what I had accomplished thus far seem trivial.

Luckily, the work was mostly monotonous enough that I could let my mind focus on something else, letting a secondary part of my mind run it in something akin to auto-pilot. The only really important parts were the safety checks and those were only every few minutes or whenever I altered a stressed part of the wall. On those, I was incredibly cautious, checking every bit of information I could get my mind on, cautiously tugging and prodding everything to make sure I wasn’t digging my own grave, literally.

Otherwise, I let my mind drift, theorising magical effects or even pulling and prodding at my own traits, trying to sense where they influenced my body and what might be possible to be done about them. Not that I was about to push anything along those lines, while I’d love to somehow get rid of my negative social traits, or even the Curse of the Sun, I didn’t think it would be this easy. Especially the Curse, while it was the easiest to analyse as Curses were nominally under the auspices of Darkness Magic, I wasn’t about to challenge the working of a deity, especially not if it was something applied by, through or with the system.

I had a feeling that the Gods could influence the system but were ultimately bound by it, just like regular people. Only their restrictions were likely quite different, to say nothing of their ample experience of working with it. Or around it, I doubted that anyone who had the ability to become a God was inexperienced in using systems to their advantage, be it a social system, a magical one or the actual System that seemed to govern our new reality.

Or maybe not govern but certainly record, analyse and assess. It was yet another thing I wanted to look into, as I was fairly confident that the System wasn’t natural, not organically grown, which suggested intelligent design. And that required a designer, which opened up a whole host of questions and related headaches.

Luckily, those were not something I had to deal with now, I could simply focus on carving out the next few cubic metres of earth and concrete. There were more than enough of those.