I look at the two screens in front of me as I do my best to nurse the nicks and injuries that litter my soulform all caused by the brutal battle against the dragon's soul, the main cause of such a result being that it was fighting in its home turf, this gaining a huge advantage.

  Still, the pain caused by the wounds barely registers in comparison with the despair caused by something else

  'It didn't do the trick...'

  That's right, even such a majestic beast... despite its soul being extremely tough to rip apart and how the fight caused even my maxed-out soul to be riddled with injuries, once I possessed its body, it barely lasted a few hours, not even enough for me to get used to it and move around properly.

  At this point, a plethora of nasty thoughts were plaguing my mind.

  'Will I really be stuck as I am forever?'

  'I'm going to spend the rest of eternity alone.'

  'Is there some way to end myself?

  And the few hopeful thoughts...

  'I just have to... wait a couple decades for someone to get strong enough...right?'

  'No... my sanity... it won't last that long.'

  ...were crushed by cruel reality.

  Believe me, I would have loved nothing else than to be able to gloat about how I triumphed over myself and overcame death in this strange new world.

  It would be incredible, in all honesty, to be able to say that I somehow overcame this, that I dug myself out of my pit of despair and reached the light beyond...

  But I couldn't do that.

  I just wasn't strong enough.

  The despair was too deep, the helplessness too strong for me to handle.

  I tried, I really did. I thought of distributing my Stat Points, but they would only raise my magic. It would do nothing for my situation. I tried to interact with humans by all means, I even killed a fire dragon after searching for weeks.

  But nothing worked.

  And so I... I fell asleep.

  More accurately, I started acting as if in a dream.

  Without purpose or destination, I wandered around, in a perpetual daze. Sometimes [Inspect]ing people or monsters, out of instinct, other times solving injustices I happened to come across, such as murders or kidnappings. I don't know why or how I did that, but it was most likely what remained of my sense of justice instinctually taking over.

  To be honest, I was barely lucid throughout those times. Once, I almost woke up when I felt a kind of... familiar feeling, after solving a bandit kidnapping incident, but it didn't prove quite enough. A long time passed afterwards where I simply fell deeper and deeper, my actions getting simpler and simpler, although that was based on my own speculation.

  After all, if my memories of the time I was half-asleep were muddled and blurry, the memories of the ensuing time were simply missing. There were some tidbits of memory from those times in my mind, but they were only of mayor events or of specially shocking sights.

  And so a year passed.

  ...And another.

  Soon, a decade had flown by.

  And then it turned into two.

  And three.

  ...I can barely remember how the shapes of human settlements I sometimes went through started changing.

  From tent encampments, to wooden huts, to villages with wooden walls and dirt roads.

  After some time, bigger stone structures came, and towns surrounded by proper defenders and with gravel paths were erected.

  As the bigger towns slowly morphed into cities, rudimentary castles also appeared, eventually being built to sizes that could never have been achieved without the support of magic.

  Floating kingdoms travelled the skies and underwater bubbles housed human settlements below oceans.

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  Some other intelligent races that had appeared with The System also developed their own cultures, mostly deep inside forests or below the ground. Others were natives to shallow seas, and a minority fought with the many human kingdoms over dominion of the plains.

  Of course, they were always defeated.

  I believe several dragons perished by my hands. Each time I saw one, it reminded me to my darkest moment, and as unthinkingly as everything else, I slew them.

  Sometimes blue messages appeared, but I ignored them, and they eventually all faded. I did not want to touch a single blue screen ever again.

  But one day, something shook me out of my stupor. It was hard to describe. It was as if something was dragging me into it... no, it was more of a gentle tug, but somehow it compelled me to go towards it. As I slowly came to, I drifted closer and closer until it was within my awareness range, which was actually just a field made of my own mana.

  The thing itself was some sort of amber-colored sphere smaller than a human head, and it somehow felt like a container. It was surrounded by thousands of interlocking metal parts that I was not lucid enough to figure out the use of, and it was connected to them by thin, sturdy cables that seemed to be made of similar stuff to the amber sphere, but covered in something tougher.

  I could've tried to resist the pull, but I instead let myself get pulled, eventually getting absorbed into the core.

  'If it's a trap... I'll gladly embrace my death.'

  Fortunately -or unfortunately-, it was no death trap. At first I thought it was nothing, but when I tried to drift away I realised... I was stuck inside the sphere.

  I then tried to extend my vision to the outside by expelling some mana, but I couldn't. The mana simply refused to go outside, as if there was an unbreakable wall surrounding the sphere. After panicking for some time, I eventually found some little holes in the wall where my mana could go through, but they didn't lead to the outside world. They were more like tunnels; long, tortuous tunnels with branching paths high were seemingly endless.

  It was impossible for my soul to go through them, but at least my mana allowed me to feel their surroundings; Endless layers of complicated metal parts and what seemed like enchantments. They seemed to be activated with my mana, but I didn't dare do that. I soon realised I didn't have nearly enough control to properly navigate these tunnels.

  Begrudgingly, I did something I hadn't done in centuries. 'Status'

  "..."

  I was left speechless, but I was also immediately jolted awake. 'I travelled over 1.000.000 miles?... Over 1000 years have passed!? I... I need to check it, it must be some misunderstanding...'

  'Status'

  '...wow.'