Hi everyone,
Forgot to mention it with the last chapter, but there will not be a chapter on Monday in observance of Labor Day. If you celebrate this holiday, please have a safe and relaxing long weekend! I'll see everyone on Tuesday.
2023-09-02 14:01:27 +0000 UTC View Post“Well, lad” Cirayus said wistfully, gazing off into the distance to times long past. “I’m sure you can already guess a few things about your father.”
“That he was a combat junkie crazy enough to fight Ash Beasts to train?” Vir asked innocently.
Cirayus chuckled. “Aye, he certainly was. Never met a man who loved the thrill of combat quite as much as your father, especially in the early days. Nor anyone who so craved to better himself, either. And not ju...
2023-08-31 15:42:29 +0000 UTC View PostNOTE: Shoutout for my dear friend J.M. Clarke (author of Mark of the Fool), who recently released an amazing new prog fantasy litrpg on RR. It's top tier quality, so definitely check it out!
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/73095/rune-seeker-a-progression-fantasy-litrpg
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Cirayus could hardly believe Vir’s progress. When the boy dis...
2023-08-30 15:43:55 +0000 UTC View PostCirayus was beginning to think he’d made a huge mistake by restraining the boy.
“The City of the Gods,” he said.
“Yes,” Vir replied, frowning at the ground.
“An Imperium Goddess. The Goddess Ashani,” Cirayus said. “Who can create Ash Gates.”
“Yes,” Vir repeated.
“And you left her behind?” The giant roared.
“You were the one who stopped me from going back!” Vir shouted, driv...
2023-08-29 16:04:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Forgot to upload art of Ashani before. Here you go!
2023-08-28 17:46:43 +0000 UTC View PostVir spent the next days charging Ashani’s other core and meditating. While he wanted to spend every free moment he had in her simulated world, the action drained her energy at an alarming rate.
So instead, Vir contented himself with conversing with the goddess and improving his blood’s prana capacity.
He had mixed feelings about his newfound strength. On the one hand, he was positive his Balar Rank easily exceeded five hundred, given the range of area-damaging abi...
2023-08-28 15:59:25 +0000 UTC View PostVir had dreaded returning to the scene of his battle with the Phantomblade. This time, however, he had some serious support. He had all the remaining ten wolves. And he had Ashani.
He’d underestimated the goddess. Now that she no longer worried about her energy consumption, she unleashed her true power upon their hapless foes. And what a power that was!
A single lightning strike summoned by her rod downed an entire flight of Shrikes—the least of which had to have ...
2023-08-24 15:44:09 +0000 UTC View PostVir took his time, spending the next days alternating between charging the orb and taking breaks to cycle prana, sleep, and eat.
Though charging Ashani’s core took a toll on his mind, it was the prana cycling that left him exhausted. He’d wanted nothing more than to spend every waking hour he had working to revive the goddess, but he knew from experience that his attention would eventually slip. When it did, the orb would crack.
He was down to two cores. He co...
2023-08-23 13:53:55 +0000 UTC View PostVir started slowly, taking great pains to monitor the orb as he worked. There was so much going on, the task was easier said than done. Even finding the crisscrossing inscription ribbons was a chore, though after a full half day of simply staring at it, he’d learned to discern them—at the risk of going cross-eyed.
Seeing nothing obviously amiss, Vir upped the flow, cycling prana in his palm with both his blood and pranites.
Prana flowed into the orb as it should...
2023-08-22 14:18:50 +0000 UTC View PostThere's been a rampant spree of stories being stolen off RoyalRoad, processed by AI, and then uploaded to amazon under a different name. This is EXTREMELY concerning for writers. It's unethical and honestly downright F'd up.
For those of you who read on amazon, I'd truly appreciate it if you could keep your eyes out for stories with similar synopses and ch 1's, and report it to the affected authors ASAP.
... 2023-08-21 14:47:38 +0000 UTC View PostVir learned that a battle between god-entities was neither short nor simple. It was an epic, drawn-out affair.
The battle in the sky had raged for the better part of a day. If there were days in the Mahādi Realm. Which, of course, there weren’t, which only made the time feel longer to Vir.
The time had allowed him a nearly full recovery. The pranites had stitched his arms and legs back together after only a few hours, and after a couple more, he was walking again. Soreness rema...
2023-08-18 16:14:23 +0000 UTC View PostThe guardian screeched out a sound halfway between maniacal laughter and a wail.
Vir fell and continued falling, right into his own shadow.
In the Shadow Realm, a dozen questions ran rampant in his mind, augmenting his fear. Why had the Yaksha waited outside? Why hadn’t it ended him the moment it found him? Was it waiting for him to open the container? If so, why?
It was almost as if it’d waited for him to retrieve the Artifact ribbon. Did it want that for some reason? B...
2023-08-17 17:27:58 +0000 UTC View PostThe pained mewling of an injured wolf drifted through the silent, pitch-dark halls.
Vir Blinked directly at it to find a pile of rubble.
Did the wolf get caught in a collapse? Vir dug through the rubble, unsure of how the wolf could have gotten into this predicament. Had a portion of the room caved in? Vir hadn’t heard a thing, though he’d been in the vault. He could very well have missed it.
Its prana signature was hidden by the Imperium metal covering...
2023-08-16 17:18:37 +0000 UTC View PostUseless. It’s all useless.
Vir rummaged through the rubble of the recently collapsed building, hurling aside rusted pieces of metal one after another. It had barely been a week since they collapsed, and yet, they hardly any better than the other rubble Vir had come across.
Had he been wrong about the preservation inscriptions? It was as if the metal aged rapidly once the inscriptions failed. As if the deterioration of all those accumulated years manifested ...
2023-08-15 17:07:42 +0000 UTC View PostWatching from the Shadow Realm, Vir let the wolves make the first move. There were several good reasons for doing so. For one, the wolves had far more experience fighting monsters in this realm. They’d know the Phantomblade’s strengths and weaknesses, and would use optimal strategies to defeat it.
At least, they were likely to be better than anything Vir could come up with blind.
With Vir’s arms and legs extending outside the shadows, time passed at half its nor...
2023-08-14 16:32:17 +0000 UTC View PostVir and his wolf guides Leaped along Mahādi’s empty streets in silence. The oppressive weight of death always hung over the dead city, but now, without Ashani to accompany him, Vir felt it more acutely than ever.
Trying to keep his mind off such dark thoughts, he focused on his power gains instead. It wasn't tough to do, with the world appearing in slow motion when he activated Haste. Previously, it'd sped him up to just over twice his normal speed. Now...
2023-08-11 17:22:39 +0000 UTC View PostDays bled together as Vir meditated, working tirelessly to expand his prana capacity. Through careful study and experimentation, he’d learned that by injecting blood into Parai’s Barrier pattern and by forcing it to deviate slightly, the barrier effect weakened enough to allow prana to enter his body.
Prana Barrier was essentially a better version of Prana Dam—the supersaturated layer Vir kept near his skin—so with this new ability, he didn’t eve...
2023-08-10 17:15:23 +0000 UTC View Post“Incredible!” Ashani said, her eyes twinkling. “To think they thought it auspicious to build their cities under our Vimana! Fate can truly plot a strange course at times.”
“Why? What are the Vimana?” Vir asked.
He sat on a comfortable chair across from Ashani, high on the rooftop of a nearby building—one so tall, it pierced the curtain of clouds that covered Māhadi. Ashani had set up something of a retreat there, with a chair, table, and awning to ...
2023-08-09 17:15:07 +0000 UTC View PostTwo years?
Vir despaired. Even with the time effects of the Mahādi Realm, it was too long to linger; Cirayus would be worried sick. Worse, he might wander away looking for Vir if he took too much time. If that happened, Vir would have no chance of finding the giant. As he'd learned, Ashani's gates could only reliably open at locations she'd created gates before. The placement was otherwise random.
Besides, it's two years only if I charge it every day without sleep.&n...
2023-08-08 17:09:44 +0000 UTC View Post“You’re normally in hibernation,” Vir said, recalling memories he should never have ever had. “Being active… consumes your prana core. You survived this long only by rationing your power. You spend entire decades asleep. Waking only long enough to check on the city before shutting down again.”
How do I know all this?
“Sympathetic Resonance.” Ashani grimaced. “I thought I’d suppressed those thoughts. They must have leaked during the simulat...
2023-08-07 17:23:51 +0000 UTC View PostA young Ashani threw off a boulder-sized piece of road that had crushed her, emerging from beneath the rubble to a destroyed, blackened world. The Mahādi of the present day, with its lightning storms and ashen rain.
The sight came with a profound revelation. One that threatened to overload Vir’s mind.
The Ashen Realm hasn’t always existed… Vir thought, struggling to comprehend the implications.
Logically, it made some sense, of course. The Ash ha...
2023-08-04 16:37:46 +0000 UTC View PostAshani approached the door to a house—the one Vir had woken up in. Janak's home. Instead of the black, cold home from before, the abode was a brilliant white, decorated in gold.
The door dematerialized for her, and inside, Vir found a beautifully decorated home. Where Sawai aristocrats adorned their walls with paintings and lavish colors, the Imperium preferred prana as their paint instead.
Despite knowing it was the same place, Vir still struggled to accept the facts. The house...
2023-08-03 17:50:38 +0000 UTC View PostVir thought he’d prepared himself for what was to come, but he hadn’t. How could he?
Ashani pressed her fingers against the sides of Vir’s head, and like a drop falling on a still mirror pond, the world rippled outward. Where the ripple touched, Ash ceased to exist, restored to its former glory. The placement of the buildings and the streets remained the same, but everything else changed.
Gone were the dark storms and the ever-falling ash. Sinist...
2023-08-02 17:49:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Images of the Ashen Realm, Mahadi, and the Mahakurma. The Mahakurma is bigger than pictured, but I had a hard time getting MJ to give me anything better!
2023-08-01 18:02:33 +0000 UTC View PostSilence pressed on the room with the weight of ages past.
Ashani’s brilliant smile shone like the sun, clearing it.
She’s so… perfect, Vir thought, unable to wrest his gaze from Ashani’s azure eyes. They shone with a depth so deep, he could’ve believed they contained an entire realm within them.
“In simpler terms, Ashani is a construct of the Prime Imperium.”
Vir found his thoughts drifting until he caught them. This was the...
2023-08-01 17:55:30 +0000 UTC View PostVir did not slip into the blissful land of the unconscious, where the peace of dreams awaited. Blaring pain from his broken leg barred those gates.
Pain made worse by an Ash Wolf—the one who’d handed him the black orb earlier. Now it stood with a paw on his leg, howling in desperation.
It’s scared, Vir thought. For… its master?
Vir reached for the orb but found his body sluggish and unresponsive, as if wading through thick syrup. The experience was ...
2023-07-31 18:47:24 +0000 UTC View PostThe $3 Tier is now 10 chapters ahead of RR, and the $5 tier is 20 chapters ahead. As such, these tiers will be shifting to 4x a week as of today(technically yesterday).
The $10 tier is currently 36 chapters, and will stay at 5x a week until it hits 40 chapters ahead of RR.
2023-07-28 18:58:20 +0000 UTC View PostVir had shuddered in fear against a single Ash Wolf. The beast he confronted had killed a half dozen. To fight it was to ask for an early death. And yet…
His eyes flickered to the mortally wounded woman who lay on the ground, bleeding. She still hadn’t noticed him—her eyes were locked on the enemy.
Sorry, lady. I can’t help you, Vir thought, slowly backing away.
Right into the Ash Wolf who’d brought him here, which shoved him forward.
...
2023-07-28 18:52:53 +0000 UTC View PostShe regarded the abomination knowing her end neared. Were it only a few centuries ago, such an Ash Beast would have posed her little threat. But now? When the energy it would cost her burned away the little time she had left? Months, not years.
Where was the fabled encounter it had promised? Where was the one who she was told to trust with her life? Who would lead her to a new future, so bright and dazzling?
Where was her release from this prison of ...
2023-07-27 18:57:30 +0000 UTC View PostMaiya stole through Sonam’s cool stone alleys alone. The nighttime breeze might’ve felt refreshing if she wasn’t so crippled with anxiety.
Months of preparation had culminated in this very moment. Maiya’s heart pounded and a thin sheen of sweat glistened on her forehead. She’d read through every tome, interviewed all her contacts, rehearsed her cover story. Sleepless nights became the norm as she scoured over her research, checking and rechecking her plans.
...
2023-07-26 18:12:27 +0000 UTC View Post