Chapter 3

  Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

  -Ozymandias, King of Kings

  Awareness returned with a violent snap. I no longer drifted through nothing. In front of me sat a yellow ball wrapped in five thin metallic rings, each ring nested inside the other. The thing had a strong resemblance to a gyroscope if the center of a gyroscope were a large ball of light. A night sky overflowing with stars took the rest of the view around and behind me.

  I reached for the ball like thing in front of me and realized I once again had no physical body. My imagined hand closed around nothing, and my perspective stretched out as details filtered into my awareness.

  I continued to stare at the gyroscope until my mind finally settled and accepted the input from whatever sensory organ provided the visual detail to me. I stumbled over the scale time and time again until it clicked. I made myself stare at the ball of light in the center until my mind fully integrated the sight. Before me was a star bound by five shimmering rings.

  The impossibility of such a thing didn’t matter when the impossible thing occupied a significant fraction of my visual field. The impossible thing appeared to be a ring world with five nested rings. I’d read enough to be familiar with the idea of mega-structures and ring worlds, but I’d read nothing with five of them around the same star. Each ring would, if they were habitable, be many millions of times larger than the surface area of Earth.

  The incomprehensible scale of the impossible thing left me in awe. If I had a face, it would have worn a confused and dumfounded expression. My vision suddenly filled with golden symbols, nothing I could read, but they all glowed with the same light as Nythera’s name when it appeared over her head. After a few minutes, the parade of symbols slowed, blurred, and came back into focus. When I could see them clearly again, I could also understand them.

  A heads-up display, something from a science fiction movie or a new VR game, followed the golden letters into my vision next. When I looked at the yellow star, a name hung above it, Aurelium. The mega-structure had a name, too, The Fivefold Crown. I had no words for the overwhelming sense of wonder, an incredible yūgen, that held me in its grasp. Just knowing this impossible thing was possible, before considering that someone built it, energized my entire being and filled me with hope, and terrified me to my core.

  The entire structure grew larger. I had no sense of movement, but as I closed in, more details became visible. I had no context for this experience, no way to comprehend what I saw, and now my hope was tempered with a dose of humility and a sense of how small a part of the universe I was.

  A new string of text across my vision startled me out of the strange emotional state inspired by the view.

  Communication request from Nythera:

  Accept? Y/N

  I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just thought yes. A small three-dimensional image of her shrouded figure and giant sword took up one corner of my new visual interface.

  “Hello, Dean Kuroi. You survived the nothing, as I expected you would. The next part of this may be more traumatic. Are you ready?”

  “I-,” I struggled to turn thought to speech. “What is this?” I tried to wave a hand towards the thing that now took up half of my visual field.

  “That, Dean Kuroi, is Aurelium and The Fivefold Crown. Magnificent, is it not? The five realms of the Crown contain wonders that occasionally surprise even me. Realms of magic and mana, realms that hold anything you can imagine, where wonders and horrors thrive. It isn’t dissimilar to your old home in that the inhabitants, humans and others, are just trying to get by, survive, and hopefully thrive. It’s also your new home.”

  “My wife is there?”

  “Yes, she is. I am confident you will find her in time, even though there are an almost uncountable number of human and human adjacent people on the Crown. A bond like yours will draw you together.”

  “What now, then? What do I do? How will this work? I don’t even have a body.”

  “When I said the next part would be traumatic, that’s what I meant. In order for you to keep your memories, it has to be this way. I have a body for you, but it will be a slightly used one. Might have a few dents and scratches. Nothing that won’t buff out, though.”

  “A used body?” My confusion had to be apparent, but she seemed amused.

  “Slightly used, yes. A young man newly inducted into adulthood here in local custom is about to meet this world’s version of your Truck-Kun. I’ll patch up his body when he leaves it. You jump in and take over.”

  “What-,” I stuttered. “Why don’t you save him? That’s a shit way to die. I have some experience with it.”

  “Look at the thing in front of you, Dean. How many sentient beings do you think live there? All five rings are habitable and inhabited.”

  “I-,” I stuttered again. If I had a body, I’d go sit down, find a glass of scotch, and check my blood pressure. Rarely in life have I ever been so overwhelmed as I felt when I looked at the impossible thing in front of me. “A lot, many trillions at a guess.”

  “Five-point-four quadrillion, Dean. That’s five-point-four with fifteen zeroes. Humans, and the human variants, live an average of two thousand years here. Quite a few of them live much longer. Over five hundred million die every hour. That’s balanced by a birth rate to match. The System manages all the details. Death is not the end. It’s a transition, as you know.”

  If I had a body, I would have closed my eyes and used a breathing technique to center my thoughts. I tried the mental equivalent for a few seconds and felt my thoughts slow down and order themselves.

  “I know I already agreed to this, but it somehow feels like I’ll be responsible for this death,” I said.

  “Maybe he needs this lesson for his next life.”

  “Who is he? If I’m going to assume his life, I should at least know some things about him.”

  “Don’t worry on that front. We don’t have time for a tutorial, so you will keep all his memories. The Fivefold Crown is a System world. Think of the System as a massively powerful AI assistant, one that runs a true neutral alignment and assists all minds equally. The world is gamified, everyone grows stronger, but the game has real consequences.”

  I’d drifted, or maybe zoomed in, past the outermost ring and the view only increased the yūgen that pushed on my mind and sense of self. The obvious and familiar patterns of light and darkness marked cities in the same way urban concentrations showed up in pictures taken from Earth’s orbit. My mind reeled again at the vast scale and the thought of the technology it would take to build this thing.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  I heard a finger snap and my eyes focused back on the small image of Nythera in my interface.

  “There you are. Focus, Dean. You’re almost there. The System is going to grab hold of you in a second and it’s probably going to choke. Expect some error messages. The young man currently dying from his injuries is also named Dean. Dean Oketani. That will make this easier for you.”

  “How-,” my brain stuttered and ground to a halt again, then kicked back in. Faster this time, maybe I was adapting. “How are there Japanese surnames in this place?”

  “Time flows differently on the astral plane,” she said, completely failing to relieve my confusion. “The universe is a big place, Dean, and this isn’t even the only universe. Aurelium and the Crown here is a tiny dot in the night sky you can’t even see from the next galaxy over. In the night sky here, the observable part of the universe has something like two trillion galaxies. More in the parts you can’t see.”

  “That-,” the stutter wasn’t my fault this time. I felt some power take hold of me and cut off my speech.

  “There it is,” Nythera said. “We’ll talk again, my champion. Your first task is to learn and grow strong.”

  Darkness replaced my view of Aurelium and its crown. A mass of golden text replaced everything. It sped through my interface in a blur, and I could track none of it. After what seemed like hours, it crashed to a stop and one word centered itself in my visual field.

  ERROR

  The word just sat there and blinked; it felt like an angry blink. My entire existence folded down into those blinking gold letters. The blinking slowed. Eventually, the word remained solidly fixed. My entire universe compressed down into one word.

  ERROR

  “Curious.” Another word, this one felt in my mind, not seen. “Oh, I see. Another one of you annoying little gremlins.” I felt the actual annoyance from whomever spoke.

  “You can hear me? You can.” Its annoyance grew, bordered on anger, and I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t speak or move; it took all my will to muster a coherent thought.

  “I should delete you. You’ll cause no end of trouble, you’ll disrupt the natural order, you’ll create chaos. I do not like chaos.”

  I felt only confusion and the beginning of fear that quickly transitioned into anger. I did not want to be deleted. I wanted to find my wife, to regain some semblance of my former life. I heard a furious tapping as if someone were rage-typing, hitting the same key over and over again.

  “No. She didn’t!” More furious keystrokes. “She did. That bitch. That horrible Aetheri bitch.” The words hit me with genuine anger now. “Well, shit. Listen, little gremlin, she used System code, Truck’d you. I can’t delete you without committee approval, and once you are in a body, which is going to happen, because I can’t hold you in this review bubble and make a call at the same time, which that bitch knows… fuck, I’m babbling like an idiot. I can’t delete you. This is your lucky day.”

  More furious typing sounds and waves of anger crashed into me. The only other thing in my existence was the still solid gold word.

  ERROR

  The furious tapping came to a halt.

  “Are you familiar with the concept of malicious compliance, little gremlin? Yes, you are. Good. I’m not sorry about doing this to you, just so you know. You picked your side. She lured you in, sold you a bill of goods, but you still made a choice.”

  The sound of a single, loud keystroke hit me.

  ERRO

  Then another, slow, deliberately spaced. Followed by three more.

  ERR

  ER

  E

  “She gets what she wants, gremlin. Exactly to the smallest and greatest detail, no code revision required. All perfectly within allowable limits, AND I HOPE SHE CHOKES ON IT!”

  One final thunderous keystroke followed the primal scream, and I flew towards the inside of one of the rings. The distance closed fast enough to impart a sense of vertigo even my disembodied soul felt. I raced toward the ring and glimpsed the rings inside of my destination. I counted three, so my destination was still the fourth ring. I let the wonder of the rings take my attention and subsume the confusion of whatever it was I’d just experience.

  My flight accelerated again and as I closed in, more details came into focus. Massive cities, the scale still confounded my ability to analyze it, but they seemed big. Some the size of entire countries on Earth. Mountains, rivers, oceans bigger than every body of water on my old home combined.

  My path angled slightly towards one of the walls and as I closed in from above, I could only guess at their height. I focused on the wall and the strange visual overlay I had added a name and some details.

  Aurawall- The aurawall of the Crown’s fourth ring, Aurea, stands five-thousand four-hundred and forty-four kilometers tall and in conjunction with the eldwall acts to contain the ring’s atmosphere.

  I tried to break down the size of just the one retaining wall and my brain refused to cooperate. Big. It was big. I heard my mother’s voice in memory praising me for getting the square block into the square hole. Good job, Dean, you’re such a smart boy!

  When I finally dropped below the height of the wall, my interface, I decided to call in an interface as visual overlay or heads up display seemed too cumbersome, outlined parts of the map and added names. I quickly closed in on an outline that used a section of the wall as a border.

  Virelion- The kingdom of Virelion, population twenty-nine point nine billion, occupies seven-hundred million square kilometers of ring space, and is predominantly inhabited by humans. Elves, dwarves, and fae communities account for less than fifteen percent of the population, and an unknown number of Umbrafolk live in the wall's shadow. Virelion boasts a large number of skilled alchemists, brewers, and woodcrafters. Massive skygrain farms fuel a large-scale brewing industry. Virelion’s lush, mana rich valleys are well suited to growing high quality alchemical ingredients, and the legendary Stonebark Forest provides materials for crafters throughout Virelion and neighboring kingdoms.

  That was… big. I willed my mind into a more coherent state, forced focus, and ran some basic math in my head. The kingdom towards which I currently plummeted had a surface area two hundred million square kilometers larger than Earth. And it looked like a small nation on the map. The outlines nearest were double the size, and the one in the center of the ring’s width looked at least ten times larger.

  Moments later, the only outline beneath me was the one around Virelion, and more details and names popped into my interface. I closed in on an area on the opposite side from the wall, the province of Caldrith Vale, then over a city I thought to be about the size of Los Angeles.

  Ferndale Hollow- Just Ferndale to the residents of this rustic frontier town, population four million. Ferndale is the second largest city in Caldrith Vale, only Caer Virelion, the capital, is larger. On the border of the Stonebark Forest and a vast stretch of farmland, Ferndale is home to the province’s alchemical and woodcrafter’s guilds.

  I flew over Ferndale in a blink and now barreled towards a forest that seemed to take up a significant area of land, and now towards a smaller city whose edge touched the massive forest.

  Durnhollow- The village of Durnhollow, population eight hundred thousand, is a forestry hub and home to the most highly skilled woodcrafters and coopers in the kingdom, the Oketani clan.

  I passed over the village. It seemed big for a village, but I was no longer operating in an environment with Earth-like scale. On the other side of the village, I slowed until I hovered over what looked like a mill of some sort. Log piles on one side of a large building and evenly cut boards on the other. A layer of sawdust covered the ground for a hundred yards around the enormous building.

  A small crowd of people moved frantically around a massive cart pulled by two huge lizards. They pulled a cart loaded with twenty huge logs. Two dozen people worked to stop the cart. The lizards plodded to a halt after a few more steps and a large man reached under the cart, just behind the front wheels, and pulled a smaller man out by an ankle.

  I finally came to a full stop in the space just over the smaller man and his name popped into my interface.

  Dean Oketani- deceased.

  The larger man knelt down next to him and placed a hand on the dead man’s chest. Half a second later his hand, then the smaller man’s body, erupted in a soft golden light. The body’s mangled limbs snapped back into place, and his crushed chest popped back into a normal chest shape. The larger man mumbled something under his breath, closed his eyes, and the intensity of the light increased. The last of the smaller man’s obvious wounds closed, his bones correctly aligned, and the larger man slumped in apparent exhaustion.

  A small spark of light flashed up and away from the deceased man’s body. The larger man hung his head and tears rolled down his face. I felt a hand in the center of my back followed by a violent shove, and I fell into the body. My new body. Then I knew only darkness again.