I’d made something of a promise to my parents, my father specifically. One could argue the semantics, that I’d merely said I couldhelp them ignite their cores, not that I would. But I wasn’t so petty as that. The real hold up was that I needed to finish constructing my mana crystal before I could do it. The storage crystal had only just barely had the capacity I’d needed, and once I accounted for a significantly lower level of skill from my parents, I expected it would take a...
2023-11-20 12:33:40 +0000 UTC
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It was no surprise to me to see Malra heading our way within twenty minutes of getting back home. Father left for work and Mother started her daily ritual of feeding her mana to the plants in our garden in a doomed attempt to keep them lush and healthy. If the garden had been a third of the size it was, she probably could have managed it, but then it wouldn’t have produced enough food for all of us.
Or maybe it would. Less plants with more mana meant more food per plant, but I didn’...
2023-11-18 12:36:55 +0000 UTC
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The thing about emitters was that they needed to be regularly cleaned out in order to keep them operating at full capacity. A tiny bit of mana crystallized during the emission process, and if no one ever came along and took care of that, it built up until the emitter was useless.
The emitters the Collector had used had not been maintained, probably not ever judging by how much mana was built up inside of them. Since there was already a bunch of mana stuck inside the emitters, it was eas...
2023-11-17 12:25:27 +0000 UTC
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The tension was palpable. My parents had retreated to one side of the hut and were whispering back and forth rapidly while Senica sat at the table and angry-cried. It wasn’t hard to guess what was causing that. Cherok had been himself, but our parents were unintentionally making it worse.
I dragged a chair around the table and sat down next to her. “It’s okay,” I said.
“No it’s not,” Senica told me through sniffles. “We’re going to fail because of me and then bad...
2023-11-16 12:16:03 +0000 UTC
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The next few days of my life was a mixture of awkward tension and peaceful, uninterrupted work. My mana crystal progressed by leaps and bounds, so much so that I had to revise my initial estimates. Mother had been let in on the secret and, while she was initially more wary than Father, she was now allowing me to work without constantly dragging me away. At this rate, I’d finish the mana crystal in well under two weeks.
Part of me wanted to shake my head at how much easier it was to ma...
2023-11-15 12:35:24 +0000 UTC
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“I love you,” I told my father.
He smiled back and said, “I love you too.”
I wondered if he’d still say that ten minutes from now. I hadn’t truly replaced his son, but the difference might be academic to Father. Gravin was practically an infant when I awakened, far too young to have his own thoughts and goals, to be his own person. His love for his family had mixed with me, but that was the only thing he was capable of contributing to our shared existence.
It was...
2023-11-14 12:50:54 +0000 UTC
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Author's Note: This is not a repost of
2023-11-13 15:24:38 +0000 UTC
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Keiran of the Night Vale has staved off death for two thousand years, but even he’s reached his limits. His body is old, worn out, and failing. While the flesh fails, however, his mind and his magic remain as sharp as ever. What he needs is to reincarnate into a fresh, new, young body, and he bends his prodigious talents towards doing exactly that.
He awakens to find that he’s been reborn i...
2023-11-13 12:30:21 +0000 UTC
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Author's Note: I decided to do a double post today rather than break up the last chapter and the epilogue over the weekend. On Monday, I will start posting chapters of my new story to this tier along with a note about future plans.
* * * * *
Luke felt the doorway open from the other side of the world, something that should have been impossible. The regularly scheduled maintenance scan wasn’t going to happen for another twenty years, and other th...
2023-11-11 12:37:58 +0000 UTC
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At first, letting System work through him had been a sight to behold. It was like watching his own hands put together a jigsaw puzzle so fast that they were a blur, but he could somehow not only still follow every move, but process all the information his eyes were giving up about which piece went where.
Then System had really gotten moving, and Luke had quickly lost the ability to keep up. The number of things his brain was keeping track of at System’s command soon grew to be far too...
2023-11-11 12:34:04 +0000 UTC
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There was an easy, obvious solution to the problem. Luke needed what System could do, and System needed what Luke could do. If they combined their abilities, they could reinforce the system with demonic essence and settle the God Machine back down around the trapped god. They’d been trying to find a way to do it temporarily, but it wasn’t working, and they longer the delayed, the more their supply of essence dwindled as Luke applied it in sloppy, inefficient patch jobs.
If he didn...
2023-11-10 12:42:49 +0000 UTC
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Zea appeared behind the screen, where Luke was waiting for her with some clothes. She took one look at him, flinched back, and stumbled.
“Easy there,” Luke said. “You’re okay. Everything’s fine now.”
“Okay, why am I naked? What happened to your face? And where the hell are we?” she asked.
“Oh, well, uh… What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Big metal woman about to bash me over the head with a rod.”
“Right. Well, that happened. Kille...
2023-11-09 12:19:34 +0000 UTC
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Luke grimaced internally, but he had too many skills folded into [Omniscience] to give away a facial expression he didn’t want to now. He’d expected this was coming, but hoped he’d get to skip it. Lizzie and Curt could be overbearing at times, especially when they thought he was doing something stupid. He had very rarely appreciated their heavy-handed guidance in the past, and he suspected he wasn’t going to appreciate it today either.
“What’s really going o...
2023-11-08 12:23:55 +0000 UTC
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The man who appeared in front of the Bennet children did not much resemble the father from Luke’s memories. For one thing, he would have been about sixty years old at the time of his death judging by the journals he’d left behind, but Bill Bennet didn’t look to me much over thirty-five. His hair hadn’t grown back in, and what was left was graying around his ears and in his beard, but he was fit and healthy. His beer belly was gone, as was his perpetual slouch. He was alert and attenti...
2023-11-07 12:32:14 +0000 UTC
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Hello Everyone!
New Year, new link!
As always, there is a book wyrm channel in the discord server (https://discord.gg/PGGQyckvdW) that has the link to the folder and gives updates whenever I add new chapters. If you didn't join when you subscribed, shoot me a message and I can manually add the role to your name.
Thank you for your support.
2023-11-06 12:42:46 +0000 UTC
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It took Luke over two weeks of work before he stopped finding new demons to catch and destroy. The first few days were non-stop, just scooping them up and pulping them for demonic essence, but after that, it started getting harder. All of the simple demons that wanted nothing but rampant destruction were easy to find. That accounted for about eighty percent of the total, and that portion of the job was mostly just hard labor.
It was the rest that made things difficult. Those were the de...
2023-11-06 12:36:30 +0000 UTC
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Luke just stared blankly at System. “What does that mean?” he finally asked after the apparition remained silent.
“In the short term, the entity imprisoned in the God Machine will consume all life on Aros in order to regain its lost divinity. After that, it will chase after the fleeing gods, leaving behind a world devoid of humans, animals, or monsters.”
“Oh. So, that’s bad. Why is this happening?”
“It is one part the system itself being overloaded with the e...
2023-11-04 13:03:43 +0000 UTC
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“They tortured us, Aldrick,” Zammin’s shade moaned, referring to Luke by the alias he’d used when he’d met the dwifkin arena fighter. “Came in, killed a hundred people, captured twice as many, and took us to the cells. Your fault. All of us in agony because you came into our lives.”
“Apostates are a cancer that infect the world. They need to be carved out before they spread their rot,” Lath said in reply, though Luke wasn’t sure if the shade was speaking to him or to...
2023-11-03 11:37:57 +0000 UTC
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System hadn’t been lying when he’d told Zixin that there was a possibility that killing Luke Bennet would result in the entire system collapsing. Redundancies had been placed after-the-fact once the Pantheon was not actively trying to contain the prisoner, but those had never been tested. She had not asked what the likelihood of those redundancies failing was, so System hadn’t volunteered that information. In his opinion, there was a one in one-hundred thousand chance that Luke Bennet...
2023-11-02 11:38:46 +0000 UTC
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It took a few seconds for Luke’s brain to unscramble. When it did, he realized he was about half a mile away from the cathedral out in the open plains, balanced on his knees with Zixin’s hand around his throat.
“I would like to take a little time to gloat, but honestly, you’ve got too many tricks. Actually, now that I think about it, System.”
“Do you require assistance?” System asked as he appeared nearby.
“Just a bit of information. Am I correct in assuming ...
2023-11-01 11:19:58 +0000 UTC
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System stood frozen in place next to Luke while his red doppelganger started working. It—he?—ignored Luke. A new system window popped up, this one red to match the doppelganger, and he started working in it.
Whatever language it was in, Luke didn’t recognize it. The text was also scrolling by so fast that he couldn’t get a good look at it even when it wasn’t obscured by new windows popping up inside the big one. Those appeared and vanished at speeds far beyond Luke’s ability...
2023-10-31 11:31:20 +0000 UTC
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Luke stood in front of the doors leading into the cathedral. Each one was a sheet of what could easily be mistaken for gold, but which he could tell wasn’t. It was impossibly smooth, the entire thing one featureless plane like he’d never seen. Real gold had texture to it at a microscopic level. Everything did, and Luke’s eyes could see it. This door was different. It was more like the ideal personification of gold than actual gold itself.
The only reason Luke was staring at it was...
2023-10-30 11:41:28 +0000 UTC
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Getting through 100 stamina was no joke, even for Luke. Sheer mass also factored into the equation, and despite hammering the dragon with more than a dozen hits infused with [Power Strike], it was still alive. Not only had Animar survived the poison Luke had given it with [Inflict Status], the damn thing actually seemed to be recovering.
Scales littered the ground around Luke’s feet as he struck Animar’s skull over and over again. Just as he charged...
2023-10-27 11:37:34 +0000 UTC
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Luke was expecting to find some sort of scaled foot or claws to be pressing down on him, but when he twisted his head to look, there was nothing there. Whatever was holding him down had his arms pinned to his side and was pressing on his back hard enough to dig his mace into his skin. Luke was struck by the inane thought that he was lucky he wasn’t using a sword, otherwise it might be slicing him in two right now.
He tried to force the weight off of him, but that only caused it to pre...
2023-10-26 11:43:41 +0000 UTC
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Electric blue sparks rained down overhead as imps tore up the enchanted anti-spider mesh. They provided the only light since the imps had blotted out the morning sun, and in those flickering sparks, Luke saw the trainees struggling against a hundred imps. They were arranged in a triangle with the non-combatants in the middle, but only Jalet was successfully fending off the imps. Sando was getting slowly overwhelmed, and the only reason Asher wasn’t in the same boat was that Zea was focusing...
2023-10-06 11:25:24 +0000 UTC
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Luke had an hour left until sunrise, and he still needed 3000 XP. That was pretty much a non-starter by itself, but he also needed to backtrack to the hunting lodge to leave with everyone else, which meant he had about twenty minutes before he was out of time. Unless he got extraordinarily lucky, his push to level up to 46 was a bust.
He’d been trying to find the main nest of the whispersilk crawlers for the last two hours. That was the XP motherlode right there, and he’d targeted t...
2023-10-05 11:28:34 +0000 UTC
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With about ten hours on the clock until they departed, Luke didn’t think he could scrape together the last 11,000 XP he needed to level up one more time, not unless he got lucky with another cluster of high level spiders attacking all at once. He was almost eager for that to happen, just so he could test out his new [Area Denial] skill properly.
“Everyone get some rest,” Hakiro said. “You’ll be traveling all through tomorrow and it’s likely you’ll be fight...
2023-10-04 11:29:42 +0000 UTC
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Hi Everyone,
Book 1 of The God Machine is live on Amazon today in ebook (including KU), audiobook, and paperback varieties. In celebration, I'll be doing a bonus chapter on Patreon. I would greatly appreciate anyone who'd like to leave a rating or review on the book listing.
Also, today is my birthday! So I'm going to do a bonus chapter for that ...
2023-10-03 12:30:09 +0000 UTC
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After the incident with the crystal fang widow makers, Luke started paying a lot more attention to what was going on behind him. He’d been a sloppy idiot for his first week when he thought there were no dangers to someone with his level in the forest. A hundred spiders, or even a thousand, couldn’t actually hurt him, so he hadn’t been too worried about getting surrounded.
Seeing all those widow makers sitting there staring at him had changed his mind. Most spiders were about as du...
2023-10-03 12:23:27 +0000 UTC
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One thing that Luke really, really liked about the spider forest was the trees. More specifically, he liked how much space there was between the trees. It was far more open than the almost jungle-like density he’d pushed through in other forests on the western continent, even if those openings were clogged with thick spider webs. Since killing spiders was what he was here for, Luke just took the webs as a sign he was going in the right direction.
After their first near-disastrous trip...
2023-10-03 12:23:22 +0000 UTC
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