The city was... well, amazing. It was the kind of place that made the rusted pumps and flickering 'GAS' sign of our old 'Gas & Gulp' back on Earth look like a masterpiece of understated post-apocalyptic chic. Which, to be fair, it kinda was.
My thoughts, which usually operated on the same principles as a pinball machine during an earthquake, slammed into the concept of a "magical inventory," and the multi-ball mode kicked in.
How big was it? Could I just inventory the world's biggest landfill? Maybe… but Ronan would hate it. Okay, Stupid. What about smuggling? Could I stuff a person in there? Forget one person, I could become a one-man Trojan Horse and move an entire army. Or, even better, just open a portal and dump a thousand angry, rabid wolves on someone's head. Now that's a plan with potential.
The business applications... a magical laundromat? YES! Wait, no, that's thinking too small. We have to think big! Maybe a courier service, a walking, untouchable vault for a merchant caravan? But who would trust me with all their treasure…
Hmm, what about the portal itself... did it have to be attached to me? Could I open one in mid-air and drop an anvil on someone's head? That would be so funny… What was the absolute biggest thing I could swallow? A building? A small mountain? Probably not a mountain. Let's be realistic here.
If I stick my head in there, would I see Ronan staring back at me!? I should prepare a funny face in the mirror just in case, so I can surprise him... now that was an idea so crazy it looped all the way back around to brilliant.
The chaotic brainstorm finally bounced off the bumper of a single, overwhelmingly practical matter. My clothes were rags, I was covered in a layer of grime that was probably developing its own personality, and I smelled like a wet dog that had been sleeping in old cheese.
'Ronan, that river we saw,' I projected, as I watched what I could only describe as a dinosaur-drawn carriage pass us by. 'Assuming it's not made of acid or existential dread, think it's clean enough to wash off... well, everything?'
'Good question, Murph!' Ronan's voice chimed, ever the helpful guide. 'We should aim for the part flowing from the farmlands, upstream of the city. There, the river should be clean.' He paused, and his mental tone shifted to one of delicate, almost awkward caution. 'However... I would strongly advise against bathing in the water that passes through the city.'
'Right. Monsters crawling out of the sewer pipes,' I thought. 'Got it.'
'Ah, no, not beasts,' he corrected quickly. 'My concern is of a more... biological nature. It is a matter of... civic effluence.'
As he spoke, I started "helping" him visualise. In the shared space of our mind, I conjured a crisp, clear image of a chamber pot being emptied from a second-storey window, complete with cartoonish splash lines.
Ronan's mental voice faltered for a second before he pressed on, trying to maintain his clinical tone. 'One must consider the necessary byproducts of so many living souls in one place! The waste from the tanneries, the runoff from the butcher's quarter, and... well...'
I added a few more slides to my presentation: a detailed diagram of bloody runoff flowing into a gutter and a rather artistic depiction of the "daily contents of a thousand chamber pots, from both man and beast," all helpfully labelled and flowing toward a single, churning river.
Ronan's composure finally broke. 'Murphy, you're doing it again!' he projected, his voice laced with pure exasperation.
'Whaaat?' I shot back, feigning total innocence. 'I'm just visualising what you're talking about. It helps me follow along.'
'Stop it!' he finally snapped, his delicate explanation completely derailed. 'Stop adding a PowerPoint presentation to my explanations! It's disgusting!'
I let the mental images fade, a small, involuntary smile tugging at my lips. "Farm side it is, then," I conceded.
Leaving Lastlight wasn't as simple as strolling through an unlocked gate. The city was ringed by a massive wall. Not as big as the wall on the other side but still at least three storeys. The main thoroughfare led to a massive archway flanked by stern-faced guards clad in polished steel, the sunburst sigil of the Sovereign Empire emblazoned on their chests. Runes carved above the arch spelled out DAWN GATE.
As we got closer, one of the guards straightened up, his eyes landing on me with a look of profound boredom and distaste. He deliberately planted the butt of his spear on the ground, blocking our path.
"Oi. And where do you think you're going, street rat?"
His partner chuckled, a nasty, grating sound. "Look at the state of him. Bet he's crawling with skab-mites. Disgusting filth," he said, giving me a hard shove that sent me stumbling back a step. "We should do the city a favour and burn those rags right off him."
'Arseholes,' Ronan's voice was a sharp chord of noble indignation in my head. 'The empire still has arseholes. Just ignore him, Murphy. He's baiting you. Don't rise to it.'
The first guard, seeing I wasn't fighting back, just smirked. He stepped forward and spat, the thick, brown wad landing on my calf.
And that's when the paladin lost his shit.
The indignation was burned away in an instant, replaced by pure, white-hot outrage. His calm mental voice was shredded, replaced by a raw bellow that echoed in my skull.
'HE SPAT ON US!'
The sheer volume of his fury was, honestly, more shocking than the actual glob of spit on my leg. Look, I complain a lot, but most of it is just noise to pass the time. After a thousand years of experiencing pretty much every form of torture and humiliation known to man, you get... desensitised.
It's more than just being used to it; it's a skill you're forced to develop, a kind of radical, third-person detachment. You learn to stop seeing the symbolism of the act and just see the mechanics of it. That glob of spit wasn't an 'insult' to my 'honour.' It was a projectile composed of mucus, water, and epithelial cells, travelling from his mouth to my leg at a predictable velocity. It's just data.
I'm at a point where that guard could have hocked that glob right into my mouth, and I'd have probably just thanked him for the extra calories.
But to Ronan? The paladin who still believed in things like 'dignity' and 'honour'? To him, it wasn't just an insult. It was an unforgivable sin.
'CHALLENGE HIM, MURPHY!' Ronan roared in my head. 'THIS IS AN AFFAIR OF HONOUR! BY THE LAWS OF THE EMPIRE, HE MUST ANSWER FOR THAT INSULT WITH STEEL!'
An affair of honour? Against a slob of a gate guard who probably used his 'gauntlet' to scratch his arse? Ronan was living in a different reality, one where you settled spitting contests with formal duels. My reality was a lot simpler: don't pick fights with armed men who have the law on their side.
I had to slam a mental door on his bellowing, not because I disagreed with the sentiment, but because his brand of noble outrage was a great way to get a spear through the gut. Academically, he knew about the thousands of deaths that came before, but in reality, he'd only known me for ten years in the quiet dust of the desert. There was a part of me he simply did not know.
Ignoring the seething presence in my own skull, I didn't say a word. I just stopped and looked at the first guard. But I didn't just look at him. I let him see.
It was a look I had earned over thousands of lifetimes. The pure, unadulterated bloodlust of a broken soul who had absolutely nothing to lose; a man who would fight with a relentless, blood-soaked fury with utter disregard for their own safety. It was a look that promised a horrifying fight where the only rule was that everyone goes home in pieces.
I saw the guard's bravado not just break, but shatter. He wasn't looking at a street rat anymore. He was looking at something from his nightmares, and he had just realised there was nowhere to run.
He paled, taking a jerky step back. "Skab off then, you creepy little sod."
We walked on, leaving them to their miserable, boring post.
'So much for the Emperor's elite,' I thought, my internal voice dripping with sarcasm.
'Nah, you've got them wrong, Murph,' Ronan corrected, his own anger now cooled into a detached, analytical tone. 'Those weren't the city's finest. Far from it.'
'Oh yeah?'
'The Empire is pragmatic. A warrior is a blade, and a blade is meant to be sharpened, not left to rust in a safe place.'
'Meaning?'
'Meaning they don't put their best soldiers on the safest gates. The wall facing the Dusk, toward the untamed Wilds... that's where the blade is honed. The fighting would be constant there. That's the post of honour.'
'So the guys at the dangerous gate get better pay and perks, is that it?'
'The best support, priority on beast cores from their kills, and the chance to truly prove themselves,' he confirmed.
'So,' I concluded, 'the heroes get the glory on one side, and the zeroes get to bully travellers on the other. Figures.'
Beyond the gate, the landscape opened into the farmlands that sustained Lastlight. To our left, a sprawling, open-air structure bustled with activity. Creatures that vaguely resembled oversized monitor lizards, but with thick scales and powerful legs, were being groomed and hitched to carts, their hisses filling the air.
'What the hell are those? Dinosaurs?'
'Drakon steeds,' Ronan corrected. 'Slower but far tougher and more sure-footed than horses, especially in rough terrain. They're the main way people travel long distances here.'
'What about the cages? Let me guess, magic FEDEX?'
'The Imperial Celeritas Post,' Ronan explained. 'The scrolls themselves should be enchanted for short-range speed and to verify the sender, but for distance, you still need a carrier. The birds in the cages are Sky-Couriers.'
'A world with magic, and you still have to rely on carrier pigeons? Really?'
'Really,' Ronan shot back, a hint of amused exasperation in his voice. 'Magic isn't like flipping a switch, Murph. Think of it like a technology that's been reverse-engineered, not invented. Most of the runes we use were just copied from ancient artefacts centuries ago. We know what they do, but not always how or why they do it. It's like trying to learn a language when all you have are a few scraps of a children's book.'
He let that sink in for a moment before continuing.
'Sure, there are powerful mages who can send messages with their minds, but hiring one of them for a simple letter would be like hiring a nuclear physicist to change a lightbulb. It's ridiculously expensive. So for everyday stuff? Carriers are cheap, reliable, and they work.'
"You figure out how to mass-produce the magical equivalent of a mobile phone, and I guarantee we'll make a killing."
As we continued, we heard shouts and the clash of steel from a nearby field. Two figures in ornate, if travel-stained, clothing were engaged in a fierce duel, their movements punctuated by flashes of light. A small crowd kept a respectful distance.
'What's their deal?'
'Looks like a sanctioned duel,' Ronan commented. 'The guy in the robes is an Imperial Proctor... basically a legal referee. His presence makes the outcome legally binding.'
'Binding how?'
'You have to register a formal challenge with him and state the terms—money, land, titles, whatever. The Proctor witnesses it, takes a cut for the Empire, which means...' he trailed off, letting me connect the dots.
'...which means the Empire has a financial stake in making sure the winner actually gets paid,' I finished. 'So they'll enforce it.'
'Exactly,' he affirmed. 'Without a Proctor's seal, it's just a common street fight in the eyes of the law. No court will recognise any claim made from it.'
'So why are they doing it out here in a field and not in the middle of town?'
Ronan's voice took on a sombre, heavy tone. 'That decree was written in the blood and ash of a city that no longer exists. Generations ago, two powerful mages settled their dispute within its walls. When the dust settled, so had the city. A harsh lesson, to be sure, but one that has kept the peace for centuries. Now the Empire is far more cautious, sanctioning duels to specific areas based on the power of the combatants' Core colours. This one, out here? It's a mundane squabble. I'd wager we are looking at two Blue Cores, possibly Green.'
We paused for a moment to watch. To a turnip farmer, the two would have looked like demigods. Their swords were a blur of motion, and each clash of steel wasn't just a clang but a small explosion of faint azure light. One of the duellists stomped his foot, and a wave of buckled earth rippled towards his opponent. The other parried a blow with enough force to send his foe stumbling back several metres, a shockwave kicking up dust around his feet.
Impressive, I suppose, if you'd never seen a proper fight. All I saw were openings. The ground-stomp was a flashy, telegraphed move that left its user completely exposed. The powerful parry was wasted on a triumphant pose for the small crowd instead of a finishing blow.
'Amateurs,' Ronan projected, his mental voice dripping with the disdain of a grandmaster watching children play with sticks. 'Their footwork is atrocious. All wasted energy.'
He was right. Well… at least I think he was right. It looked flashy, loud, and like they were showing off. One of the two men waved a handkerchief, and the proctor called a halt to the duel, and I'd already lost interest. The duel obviously wasn't to the death; I doubt it was even to first blood, so we turned and walked on.
Still, for all their sloppy technique, those amateurs had something we didn't: an engine. Even a sputtering, inefficient one was better than nothing.
For a second there, I actually felt a spark of something that wasn't dread. My hands came up by instinct, ready to rub together in that classic, 'let's-get-down-to-business' way, only to find nothing there but my own useless stump. The gesture collapsed.
'Alright,' I projected, my voice dripping with forced enthusiasm. 'So, what's under the bonnet? What colour are we working with? Blue? Green? Given that we are the champion of a god, I assume it's something suitably epic. We are starting at Legendary Purple, right?'
A wave of profound awkwardness radiated from Ronan. 'We... do not have a Core, Murphy. This vessel is Unawakened.'
My stride faltered. "So we're starting from scratch. Is that a problem?"
'It presents a... complication,' Ronan admitted, his tone turning clinical. 'Awakening is a process tied to the body's growth. Most individuals in this world begin the process around the age of twelve or thirteen. That is when the physical vessel is in its most malleable and receptive state. Any earlier, and the body is not mature enough to handle the strain. Every year after that optimal window, however, the process becomes exponentially harder.'
"Any guess how old this body is?" I asked, my voice flat.
'I cannot be certain. Fifteen, perhaps sixteen.'
"And 'exponentially harder' means what, exactly? Are we talking 'surviving a Japanese POW camp' hard, or 'digging your way out of one with a soup spoon' hard?"
'It means the path of pure meditation may be beyond our reach in the time we have,' Ronan stated grimly. 'What a child might accomplish in hours could take us weeks or months of constant effort. The vessel is... past its prime.'
"So how do we do it?" I pressed, my patience already wearing thin.
'There are two paths,' he said. 'The first is one of pure will: many, many hours of gruelling meditation to gather enough ambient Aether to forge a Grey Core from nothing. It is the path of the monk, and it is not for the impatient.' He paused, his tone becoming more serious. 'It is by far the harder road, but it yields the greatest reward. By gathering the Aether slowly, one has time to meticulously shape and temper their nascent Core. You are not just building a foundation; you are forging it layer by layer. The resulting Core is far more robust, with a higher capacity and significantly greater potential for both the quality and speed of future growth.'
"And the second path?"
'You find a catalyst,' he stated. 'You acquire and swallow your first mana core. The raw power acts as a seed, allowing one to synthesise their own Core around it. It is much faster, but it is a quick and dirty method—a brute-force approach. The moment you swallow the core, you are flooded with an overwhelming torrent of raw Aether. You are in a race against time; you must use that energy to hastily construct your Core before the excess power tears your body apart from the inside. There is no time for finesse, no time to craft a proper foundation. The resulting Core is functional, but it is often flawed and far less potent than one forged through patience.'
A short, sharp silence followed his explanation. Ronan let the two options hang in the air, a perfectly balanced and impossible dilemma.
'So, there you have it, Murphy,' he projected, his tone now that of a grim strategist. 'A choice. The slow, perfect path of the monk, which our age makes nearly impossible given our time frame. Or the fast, flawed path of the catalyst, which will grant us immediate power but may cripple our potential forever. A warrior's dilemma. What is your decision?'
I let him wait. He was laying it out like some grand, philosophical test. But the test itself was the clue. A perfectionist like him, a paladin, would never willingly accept a 'flawed' Core. He wouldn't present this as our only viable option unless he was baiting me.
"It's a false choice, isn't it?" I scoffed aloud. "You're presenting a 'warrior's dilemma,' but you're not a warrior; you're a paladin. You don't do 'good enough'." I paused, a slow grin spreading across my face. "You wouldn't be seriously considering the 'flawed' path at all unless you already had some secret, ridiculously over-engineered technique to fix it. The real question isn't which path we take. It's 'what's the master plan you've been holding back?'"
A wave of pure, petulant frustration washed over me from his side of our mind, followed by a long, drawn-out mental sigh.
'Well, you've ruined it,' he projected, his mental voice a sullen grumble.
'Ruined what? What do you mean?' I shot back, my own mental voice a perfect picture of wide-eyed, butter-wouldn't-melt innocence.
'Not cool, Murphy!'
'C'mon, Ron, forget I said anything,' I wheedled, laying the fake sincerity on thick. 'Let's start over. What's the big reveal?'
'No!' he huffed, the pout practically audible. 'I don't even want to tell you anymore!'
I couldn't hold it in. A low chuckle escaped me. "Alright, alright. Don't tell me. Just be ready when the time comes."
The path cut through farmland that had clearly given up on obeying the normal rules. Crops shimmered in shades of iridescent blue and dull purple, and irrigation channels carried water uphill with a quiet, magical indifference. Eventually, the hum of the fields gave way to the sound of rushing water, pulling us toward a thick line of trees.
I shoved my way through a final, dense wall of bushes and stepped out onto the riverbank.
And just stopped.
It was perfect. Too perfect. The sand under my boots was fine and white, like something from a Bahamas travel brochure. The water sliding past wasn't just blue; it was a vivid, glacial blue. The whole scene looked less like a real place and more like a high-resolution photo someone sets as their computer background to forget they work in a cubicle.
The water was cool, a shock but a welcome one. I scrubbed with sand, trying to wash away the grime of this new, harsh beginning and the lingering shadows of a thousand past ones.
"Hey, Ronan. This Inventory Ludo gave us. How much can it hold?"
'Ludo wasn't big on details,' Ronan mused. 'But with this kind of magic, it's usually limited by the user's own focus and stamina, not by any real physical measure.'
I waded into the shallows, only up to my ankles, cupped my hand, filled it with water, focused on that internal void, and pulled. Shimmer. The water vanished. I scooped up a handful of wet sand. Shimmer. Gone. A grin started to spread across my face. This was... this was awesome.
I went a little deeper, up to my knees now, and submerged my arm, imagining the portal opening on my skin. The water didn't just disappear; it vortexed. Sand swirled up from the riverbed as it poured into the Inventory—a novel sensation of filling a space that existed only in my mind. As a larger torrent of water swirled in, I saw a flash of silver get caught in the current... a small fish. It was sucked towards me and passed into the portal, vanishing. But a split-second later, the same portal spat the fish back out. It tumbled through the air, landing with a wet slap on the bank, stunned and flopping.
'Whoa, what was that?' I thought, my concentration breaking.
'Remarkable!' Ronan's voice chimed in, filled with analytical excitement. 'It took the fish, but then it spat it right back out! It must be the 'living spark'—the inventory won't hold anything that's alive!'
'A 'living spark,' huh?' I thought, my eyes on the small fish gasping on the sand. A hypothesis was nice, but proof was better.
I waded over, picked up a sharp-edged river stone, and with a quick, efficient blow, ended the fish's struggles. Now it was just a limp, silvery piece of meat. I picked it up and touched it to the portal on my arm again.
This time, there was no rejection. The fish slid smoothly into the Inventory and stayed there.
'Right,' I confirmed internally. 'So it's not a 'no animals' rule, it's a 'no breathing animals' rule. Good to know.'
'Clever!' Ronan affirmed. 'The spark is extinguished. It's just material now, which the inventory accepts.'
Good. Time to push the envelope. I waded back into the river and lay back in the shallows, and really pulled. Not just with my arm, but with my whole being. I imagined my entire body was a doorway. The river answered with a roar.
'Murphy,' Ronan's voice held a note of distinct alarm. 'The sheer volume... Are you sure you're not overtaxing yourself?'
"Nah, just a bit of a head rush," I grunted through clenched teeth, the feeling of near-infinite capacity intoxicating. "Feels... good, actually."
I could feel the contents flooding in: water, sand, stones. And then I felt something else. Ronan. He was in there with me, not just watching, but... organising. His more orderly mind was instinctively creating piles in the void—fine grains here, coarse there, organic matter. The intake continued for a full five minutes.
"Okay," I gasped, opening my eyes and breaking the connection. "Found the redline."
I was suddenly underwater as the river rushed in to fill the hole I'd made. The riverbank now had a deep, bowl-shaped crater where I'd been lying. I'd inventoried a significant chunk of the river and its bed.
'Well, Murphy,' Ronan's mental voice was a dry blend of utter astonishment and dawning horror. 'You certainly have a talent for dramatic, large-scale environmental restructuring. The local water sprites are likely already forming a very angry, pointy-stick-wielding committee.'
"Yeah, they can get in line," I choked out, coughing up water that had gone up my nose. I was already onto my next test. "If I can suck it in, I can spit it out, right?"
'Makes sense...'
I waded out of the water and slumped onto the fine, white sand, my body feeling heavy and used, like I'd just sprinted a few city blocks. The inventory definitely drained stamina, but it wasn't a constant drain. The exhaustion hit me in waves, a sharp price paid every time I opened or closed the portal. A toll, not a tax. Good to know.
Another idea sparked, this one smaller, more precise. 'Hey Ronan, you want to see something cool?'
'I see everything you see, Murph. That's the whole deal,' he replied, a hint of amusement in his voice.
'Yeah, yeah, smart-arse. Just look at my hand.'
'What about it? Still looks like it lost a fight with a chimney sweep.'
'Exactly. Now, watch.'
I focused, picturing every last speck of dirt and river grime on my skin. Then I just… pulled. There was no sound, no shimmer, but suddenly, my hand was clean. Spotless.
There was a moment of stunned silence from Ronan. '...Okay, that's useful,' he finally admitted, his voice filled with genuine appreciation. 'You have no idea how much time we'll spend scrubbing off monster gore, but why didn't the inventory pull the grime from your hand earlier?'
"I dunno, I think it's a limitation on the power. I need to actively accept whatever I want to absorb and have a clear mental picture of an object or group of objects. Now... let's see what treasures my little swim in the river coughed up."
I waded out of the water, my head throbbing, and slumped onto the sandy bank. While I had been the brute force—the gaping maw that swallowed half the river—Ronan had been the fine surgical instrument, mentally filtering the torrent as it poured in.
'Alright, Ronan,' I projected, closing my eyes. 'Time to see if all that mud-sucking was worth the headache.'
I focused inward, where Ronan guided my attention to a tiny, almost insignificant speck of glittering yellow dust, no bigger than my thumbnail.
'It works, Murphy!' Ronan projected, his mental voice a shot of pure, triumphant glee. 'This is a game changer! With this technique, we can pull riches from any river in this world!'
For once, his optimism was infectious. A manic, unhinged grin spread across my face. 'Forget rivers! Why stop at rivers? We could go to the beaches! Sift the entire coastline of the continent! We'll be swimming in gold!'
'And with that wealth,' he added, caught up in the moment, 'we could fund armies! Build hospitals! A true force for good!'
'Hospitals? Think bigger! Why are we even messing around with loose dirt? Let's just point this thing at a mountain! A gold-veined mountain! We could just... sort the gold right out of the solid rock! We'd be gods!'
My chaotic fantasy slammed into a brick wall of pure physics from Ronan's side of our mind.
'Murphy, no,' he projected, his tone shifting from excited co-conspirator to exasperated teacher. 'What makes you think our sorting ability can break solid stone into dust? It's a filter, not a grinder. It can separate loose materials, but it cannot alter their fundamental state.'
'You don't know that,' I shot back, needing to see for myself.
I grabbed a fist-sized chunk of granite from the riverbank and popped it into the Inventory. I focused on it, pushing with my sorting sense, trying to mentally peel the tiny flecks of quartz away from the feldspar. It was like trying to unscramble an egg with my mind. Nothing. The rock just sat there, smugly solid.
'Alright, no dice,' I conceded, letting the idea die. 'So, mountains are out.'
'For now,' Ronan projected, a hint of that excitement returning to his voice. 'We stick to the rivers.'
I opened my real eyes. The sun was setting, casting long shadows across the riverbank. We weren't gods, not yet anyway. But we had a plan. A stupid, exhausting, probably-going-to-get-us-killed plan.
It was a start.