Jakob H. Greif

Museum Core Chapter 42: Rankup

The deepest part of a being’s magical core was normally meant to be filled with a swirling mess of orbs of power, one for each rank, with the more simple components of one’s power flowing through the space in between.

“Stats” for humans using a System, the various ways to allocate their power displayed as swirls of energy, a cultivator’s sea of energy, a mage’s mana reserves, and the like.

But like Elias had already said, innately supernatural species were more than a ...

Museum Core Chapter 41: Strange Gains

Well, that just happened. But at least he had a new dragon pattern.

Thomas spent a few minutes reinforcing his dungeon just in case there was immediate retaliation, then summoned the creature.

Tried to, at least.

“Where is that damn pattern?” he muttered, barely even aware of the fact that he was broadcasting the thought.

“With the rest?” Elias replied immediately. He was already fluttering towards the roof, whether that was to act as a sentry or just to sun hi...

Museum Core Chapter 40: Draconic Ultimatum

“Either that thing is lying, or … or one of the nastiest beings in existence just returned from the dead,” Elias said slowly. There had been no need for Thomas to relay the dragon’s pronouncement, that was how loud it had been.

“No long time for long explanations, give me something I can use!” Thomas snapped.

The dragon interrupted as Elias was opening his mouth to answer.

“You may take as much time as you need to make your choice, but remember, her imperial ma...

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Museum Core Chapter 39: System Chaos

“Elias, System’s glitched again!” Thomas called out, but by the time the fairy showed up, he was laughing hysterically.

“What’s so funny?” Elias frowned.

“Oh, you wouldn’t understand, it’s … it’s an Earth thing,” Thomas told him.

It was ridiculous, but the current situation reminded him of a memory from his previous life.

Of sitting down at a desk with a computer while a friend fiddled with the router, trying to set up the internet, shouting “...

Museum Core Chapter 38: The Other Zones (Book 2 Start)

Cameron Jones normally wasn’t one for computers. They were fragile, finicky, and you practically needed to be a rocket scientist to use even their simplest functions.

But this “System” malarkey, even if it looked exactly like those computer games his grandchildren kept wanting him to play, that he could get behind.

It did what it was supposed to, it did what it actually said on the tin, no “press Start to shut off” nonsense, you could give it verba...

Museum Core Chapter 37: Epilog

Ewart Jones had been in the service of his country in one way or another since he’d graduated college, though most of that had been spent as a part of MI5.

The world might have changed, his loyalty would not.

And here and now, he had something that would catapult this great nation to reach its old heights once more.

Breaking the sigils sealing the top of the buried ziggurat had been difficult and time-consuming but essentially boiled down to shooting the sigils and dodging...

Museum Core Chapter 36: The Cultivator’s Folly

The human body was weird. In fact, in some respects, it could be downright schizophrenic.

Particularly when it came to taking damage.

Humans had fallen from airplanes and survived, and yet, simply stumbling could lead to someone winding up with an intracranial hemorrhage and that would be that. Dead.

There were people who’d survived being shot in the head and people who’d bled out from a poorly placed bullet to the leg.

Drunk people in particular seemed to have the...

Museum Core Chapter 35: The Village in the Jungle

“Do we look for the village?” Smith asked.

“Absolutely,” Jaclyn said. “We know Fields isn’t there right now, and he might attack us on sight if he sees us snooping around.”

“Let’s go then.”

***

It had been easy to follow Fields’ trail. He hadn’t covered the entirety of his path in foliage, but the place he’d popped up had given them a good starting point, and from there, they’d followed another natural path once the initial area of churned p...

Museum Core Chapter 34: The Cultivator’s Dive

Name: Jaclyn Abrams

Race: Human

Class: Anima Monk

F-Rank, Level 10 -> 16/20

Class Abilities

Spirit Bond: Honey Badger (F-Rank)

Statistics (0 points available)

Body: 40 -> 60

Magic: 0

Mind: 20 -> 40

Spirit: 19 -> 39

Skills

Pugilism 15 -> 18

Bàoquán 17 -> 19

Athletics 16 -> 17

Situational Awareness 19 -> 20

Bullshit Radar 12 -> 13

Martial Arts 18 ->...

Museum Core Chapter 33: Jurassic Flashback

Jaclyn sighed as they began to advance into the corridor. She’d lost her gun, dropped while she’d been flung around like a ragdoll, and they hadn’t found it even after an exhaustive search. Chances were, it had wound up down a grate somewhere, or gone through a window, sadly. Explaining that she’d lost her sidearm would be … fun, but that was a problem for later.

As dangerous as the Dungeon was, the growth it provided was hard to pass up. She’d just gained another L...

Museum Core Chapter 32: Welcome to the Jungle! (again)

“How do you think they’re doing out there?” Smith asked, once again driving the car.

“Might be going well, might be going horrible,” Jaclyn shrugged.

“The kid seemed pretty confident, and if he’s read Robinson Crusoe, he might even have the right idea,” Smith shrugged.

“Incompetent people always think they’re amazing,” Jaclyn said. “Did you ever hear the story of the guy who thought a forced suicide was the perfect murder?”

“Maybe?”

...

Museum Core Chapter 31: Madness, utter Madness

It was at this point that the Landwyrm finally began to move towards the Dungeon. It was just as big as the first of its kind to enter the Dungeon, but it was completely free of any of the injuries that the first one had suffered at the hands of Thomas’ wyverns.

The final challenge. Everything else had either died in the Dungeon, outside it or retreated when the option presented itself. There was still a wyvern left, sure, but despite its power, it was unable to unleash anything close...

Museum Core Chapter 30: Ancient Power

Dinosaurs had an undeniable coolness factor, they were big and powerful beasts of ancient times that inspired fear and awe millions of years after their deaths.

Even so, they weren’t nearly as dominant as Thomas felt they should have been. The scutellosaurses and the camarasaurus in particular.

They were big, hit hard, and were sufficiently tanky to take a few hits and still remain able to dish out damage.

But their main offensive power stemmed from their tails, which mass...

Museum Core Chapter 29: Horde Mode

Thomas had thought the jungle was insane before, but that had mostly been due to the fact that it had held a lot of big and nasty creatures. Lesser dragons, both in the sky and on the ground, magical rodents with hair that could turn razor sharp and be shot like arrows, lizardpeople, and the countless small but still magical critters he’d had his wyverns haul into the museum over the course of the night.

But something had really set the cat among the pigeons, because the jungle had re...

Museum Core Chapter 28: The Long Road Home

“Do you really think we could have taken out that sabertooth with a rocket launcher?” Jaclyn asked.

“We could have probably killed it, but it’d have been a terrible idea. I mean, we couldn’t have gotten more than what, thirty meters from the tiger when we fired it, and at that point, we’d have been so close to a wall that backblast would have reflected straight into us,” Smith shrugged. “I’d have risked it for something important, like if the Dungeon were holding nucle...

Museum Core Chapter 27: Redecorating

“That cop was a cultivator, wasn’t she?” Thomas finally asked once everyone was out of the Dungeon. “Crazy physical strength, but no obvious magical powers.”

“Cultivators don’t progress that quickly, they need time to pack all the energy they get into their cultivation method. ‘Suddenly get power, flex your hand a few times to get a feel for it’, that’s usually a System. But I got a good scan of her, she’s definitely leveling and her System’s pretty cool too,” ...

Museum Core Chapter 26: First Dive

Their armored personnel carriers spread out before the car in a semi-circle, half the guns aimed out at the jungle, the other half pointing up towards the museum’s roof.

Then, Jaclyn’s borrowed radio crackled to life.

“The orc says that the museum’s a Dungeon, some kind of monster spawner, she says we need to wait until she checks something.”

Ok, referring to their strongest and most important ally as “the orc” was definitely problematic, but not an issue that ...

Museum Core Chapter 25: Expedition

Getting up in the morning was rarely fun.

Getting a six-year-old to get up was a nightmare … under normal circumstances. And the current circumstances were a mess.

… Which was why Jaclyn decided to shelve standard parenting and let Eve have a full English breakfast on a weekday. A few days of less-than-healthy eating was preferable to a mental breakdown.

She also had her daughter get dressed in the spare set of clothing she kept at the precinct. Someone could take the ki...

Museum Core Chapter 24: Incoming

“Morning!” Teddy called out when he caught sight of Elias at the cafe’s entrance. Apparently, he was a bit of a morning person.

And judging by how she was eyeing a nearby coffee cup, seemingly on the verge of chucking it at her “roommate’s” head, Bethany was decidedly not.

“Morning everyone,” Elias responded, gesturing to the cart that was being pushed in by one of the “enforcer” jaguars behind him.

“I know those things are supposed&nb...

Museum Core Chapter 23: Cassandra

Kids were living paradoxes. Anytime they wanted you to do something, by the time you got around to doing it, they wanted the exact opposite.

Most recently, that had manifested in Eve literally falling asleep on the way to the hotel and having to be carried the rest of the way, yet exploding with manic energy the moment Jaclyn had put her on the bed.

Leaving a sleeping child in a hotel room was iffy parenting at worst. Doing the same with a fully awake and inexplicably hyperactive ...

Museum Core Chapter 22: Growth

Naturally, the first thing Thomas did was replace most of his defenders, though he didn’t re-summon the insane number of boomslangs all over the place.

And immediately after that, he increased his domain to include the dinosaur section and added a new wall in the corridor between the two entrances to that section.

That way, anyone trying to get to his core would have to walk past the dinosaurs to reach the mammal gallery.

There was one small issue, though. Al...

Museum Core Chapter 21: Wyrm

The first thing to do had been to have all his creatures get into positions that couldn’t be seen from the door to ensure the wyrm couldn’t just snipe everyone without even going inside.

And the second would have been to start swapping out existing creatures, but in the end, he didn’t have the time, as the creature entered and thereby shut down his ability to control his dungeon.

He really needed to grow his domain to the point where he could manipulate it even with...

Museum Core Chapter 20: Loot and Terrible Ideas

As it turned out, making hot coffee was damn hard. So hard, in fact, that Thomas would up setting a jaguar on fire.

The idea had been simple, heat up coffee in an appropriate container, then somehow scoop it out with a cup, and then absorb that cup.

Putting that into practice had been a hell of a lot harder.

The cold coke had been simple, with every component needed already present.

A bucket that had been part of a janitor’s cart, water from a pipe in the wa...

Museum Core Chapter 19: “Triumphant” Return

Leaving the jungle felt almost as surreal as entering it had been as much of the noise normally associated with civilization returned with a vengeance.

Shouting, demands and pleas for help, cursing, general sounds of discontent … on any other day, this would likely have been deemed a riot and responded to with some kind of completely over-the-top overreaction.

But today, that just left two police officers who’d locked themselves inside their cruiser, watching and waiting.

Museum Core Chapter 18: Tales of the Fall

The woman, who’d introduced herself as Bethany Miller, wound up spinning a rather terrifying tale of a cataclysmic disaster.

Thomas hadn’t been awake for any of that, but she and her daughter had lived through it.

A gigantic crack had appeared in the sky and then, a massive jungle had started to grow. Parts had just appeared, others had grown, others still seemed to even have patches of time that flowed at a different rate … she’d seen all sorts of messes from the top floo...

Museum Core Chapter 17: More Visitors

“I need an avatar to talk to people directly, right?” Thomas asked. Having Elias share all his knowledge meant he should have theoretically gotten all the information he possibly could have needed, but in practice, he’d only properly retained a tiny part of the fairy’s teachings. He had vague memories of some more lessons, however not to the point where he could implement them.

But even so, he still had to ask a ton of questions. They might be requesting clarifications rather th...

Museum Core Chapter 16: Apex Predator

Jaclyn was already moving before she’d even noticed the incoming attack, twisting to the side as she brought her gun around to aim at the thing that tried to flay open her back with its claws.

Its skin was mottled various shades of brown and green that seemed to fail as camouflage now that it was right in her face, but would doubtlessly make it nigh-invisible if she hadn’t known where to look.

At the moment, it looked oddly stretched, its feet planted almost five mete...

Musuem Core Chapter 15: Law of the Jungle

London’s city center should have been a ghost town. In many ways, that would have been less terrifying than the reality of the situation.

No one knew how the city had been turned into a jungle, or anything about it, really, save the fact that it had, in fact, happened and that the effect didn’t seem to be spreading further.

People were supposed to be afraid of crap like that, and make the smart decision of running as though all the hounds of hell were chasing them. Of course, ...

Museum Core Chapter 14: Final Questions

“Pick the wall-climbing power,” Elias said immediately. “That increases the number of spots they can attack from and gives them a chance to reach spots they normally wouldn’t be able to. Hidey-holes are too obvious and you can get stealth from proper Dungeon design. Wall climbing, on the other hand, might not even be discovered after the first time they drop down on someone unless they’re spotted on the walls or ceiling.

“And steel teeth and claws aren’t going to make near...