Adamant Blood

Mark settled down into his deep-dive room in the base of the house, while an illusion of himself sat on the couch in the living room upstairs, reading books on magic.

Perhaps it was overkill to keep that sort of misdirection going. Mark hadn’t experienced an assassination attempt since all of those attempts months ago, before he left for Endless Daihoon, but he had talked about it with Addavein once, wondering if he was being paranoid. Addavein had unequivocally told Mark that it was better to be safe than sorry. Even if blowing Mark’s head off these days was both nearly impossible, and it wouldn’t even kill him, getting sloppy with one’s defenses is how they eventually got you. Mark’s current protections might be as simple as choosing to meditate with misdirecting illusions, but in a year, or sooner, someone would catch on to the hows and ways in which Mark dreamwalked and thus they would plan an assassination around his downtime, and he wouldn’t have that misdirection to save him.

And then Addavein had gotten into the weeds about how misdirection wasn’t good enough, and how this or that were important for magical practice once people started to look your way, and Mark could practically feel his eyes glaze over.

People were still after him, but who, exactly, was after him? Empire Okuana, for one. Who knew who else. Did Mark really need any other reasons to practice good magical practice besides having an entire Empire after him to keep up his best practices? Not really. Addavein mostly told Mark to learn how to go in and out fast, in the field, to get done what he needed to do and then come right back out; that was how all the pros did it eventually.

But for now, in a hole in the ground, Mark closed his eyes and purposefully started dreaming.

He opened his mind’s eye to the porch of his house, to the black grasses spread out beyond the main property, to a black sky that still shone with clear sunlight even in the darkness, illuminating everything in the way only dreamed light could.

With a thought, Mark did a circuit of the property. It all seemed normal.

One main room held the bed (for general rest and healthiness), the adamantium ‘bank’ (for putting away his metal when not needed), the kitchen (for food containing and prep), and a bunch of other stuff. Most of his adamantium forms were in the main room, hanging beside one of the walls, so that he could manifest adamantium into specific shapes and needs as quick as a thought, instead of actually having to make those shapes on the fly. A shelf held a few blueprints for Powers that Mark had managed to mangle into existence, somewhat, though all of them were bad and Mark hadn’t gotten to experiment with them nearly enough to make them useful. One bathroom took care of Mark’s cleaning needs and further healing through infinite ‘panacea’ medicine in the cabinets.

Mark didn’t really get physically dirty these days, for dirt kinda sloughed away from both him and his clothes. It had been like that when Mark was using Union every day to keep clean, but now it was automatic. He always felt rested when he was rested. He was always clean unless he was dirty.

It was nice.

Below the main structure of the house was the septic system that offloaded most of Mark’s digestion into the dreamlands, and Mark was very glad for that. He did not miss going to the bathroom at all. In fact, if he were to list and rank the good things about this new body, not having to even care about going to the bathroom was high on the list.

Also high on the list would be the windows on the house, and his weather vane up top, and his stair steps surrounding the porch that surrounded the entire house. A lot of Mark’s Union was tied up in all of that, and also in the septic system, and that allowed Mark to sense the world and heal himself as a matter of normal life. Thanks to the fragment of a divine mirror he had put into all the windows, Mark could even view how powerful other people were at a glance, though all that really allowed for was Power-Level-typing and estimation. It wasn’t a true System scan, or anything nearly as sophisticated as what Eliot could do with a visor.

But a Power Level typing and estimation was often good enough. If he ever ran into a monster (or person) that was high in Body, Kinetic, or Arcane, then Mark could estimate those battles as ‘easy’, in most cases. Even a Mind monster was usually a simple thing for Mark to deal with, though he killed those super fast because not everyone else could deal with those. Natural and Arch monsters were always the real wild cards which meant that if Mark saw those through his dreamsight, then, if he could, he took a bit more time to try and understand them before he went after them.

And that was most of the structure of the place.

It all looked normal. Nothing truly different from the last time Mark went looking.

Mark was changing, though.

This place was built upon orichalcum, probably just like the divine realms, though the historians were still debating on that one and the gods never told people what they built their realms on, and to even suggest that the realms were a physical place was often considered heresy by some people, and ‘yeah sure I can see that’ by others. Mark wanted no part in those conversations, and so he stayed out of it, but orichalcum was the divine metal, so it made sense to think that this house, built of the same materials, was sort of like a divine realm, but very tiny and personal.

Mark had been digesting a 5 kilo ball of orichalcum every day or two by sticking it into his belly, literally, through his belly button. Surface area didn’t seem to matter for rate of absorption, so while Mark had experimented with orichalcum dust and found the absorption rate to be the same, he had stuck to orbs, and now his System Prime Status was probably up to… 113 Utilized? Whatever that metric meant, Mark did not know it. All he had were numbers, but he didn’t have access to System Prime in the real world.

And so, the first part of the day’s action was getting new numbers.

Mark lifted into the air and landed on the roof. The weather vane in the middle of the roof looked normal; it was a rooster and an arrow. The whole thing listlessly angled to the side, which was normal for right now. Mark wasn’t focusing on anything, and nothing was focused on him, so of course the weather vane was still. If anything focused on him, or if he focused on anything else, then the arrow would rapidly spin toward that thing. Mark hadn’t known that’s how it would work when he made it, but that’s how he had imagined it would work, and eventually, when he was able to figure out how to ‘half-dream’, to enter his house while he was still fully awake, Mark was able to see the vane working exactly as he imagined it would.

The weather vane actually got rather hyperactive once Mark started really concentrating and looking at stuff on a battlefield, and Mark’s senses had felt a lot stronger ever since he made the weather vane, which was the purpose of it all.

Mark walked on, toward the back of the house, where a parabolic dish angled up to the darkness beyond his soulspace. This thing was Mark’s connection to System Prime, to his Status readout… sort of. It didn’t work well. Duct tape and antennas and computer screens were plastered all over the thing, every part of the bad engineering a part of Mark’s attempts to make the connection stronger so he didn’t have to query System Prime so many times in order to get a response. It still barely functioned.

Mark said to himself, and to Quark who had yet to show up in his dream, “Here we go. Turning on the dish. Quark? You there?”

Quark materialized to the side, floating in the air like a silver hologram of Mark himself, but dressed up as a butler and not really looking like Mark at all. He looked like a cousin, too; like Addavein, but different.

He couldn’t act without express permission, not ever since he had been re-infused with a livium core and turned back into a false-AI. Sometimes Mark thought he was just pretending, but… if this is how he wanted to be, Mark still needed an AI, so this was fine.

Quark asked, “Shall I record today’s events as well, sir?”

“Yeah,” Mark said, looking up and out.

Addavein, Walaria, and Elaria Valen got these recordings because Mark trusted them, and he valued their magical expertise. Lola, Eliot, and Tartu got these recordings because he valued their opinions.

Mark continued, “Maybe now that I have a goal for this house —aside from being able to resurrect my friends and family if they should be murdered— then today’s experiments will be particularly of note for all of them.”

“What is happening today, sir?”

“Today, I’m going to throw together some simple spells, like Protect, Vision, Listener, and maybe I’ll even use that malformed Strong Body that I have in storage, and then I’ll go out hunting for some easy monsters.” Mark tapped at the screen for the System Call system on his roof, and the signal did not connect. A red light flickered. Mark tapped the screen again, and again, and eventually the Call came back. As the screen resolved into an actual readout, Mark continued, “I’ll try to switch out some low level Bindings. Take what the monster has, and then give them what I have created.” Mark added, “I fully expect to kill a lotof things before I get this right, so I might as well kill monsters… And I’m pretty sure monsters don’t even have Bindings, so this will be a whole lot of experimentation.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“Forbidden magic, then, sir?”

“Forbidden magic, yup,” Mark said, as he looked at his Status. “Ah. Looks like 114 Utilized. Not my estimated 113.”