System Change

Derek went home in a very good mood after seeing the newborn twins—even if he had been slightly embarrassed by Rayna there at the end. Even though Rayna and Jacks looked great and didn’t seem tired, he and the others knew that they would be after all the stress and planning, so they didn’t want to stay too long. It was the middle of the night, after all.

For the next couple of weeks, Derek continued allowing his Time Prison skill to passively train up while focusing on some of the less useful skills he had—or at least, the less combat-oriented skills like Cleaning, Basic Repair, and even Cure Toxin. During that time, he and the others visited Rayna, Jacks, and the babies almost daily. There was just something about being around them that brought them all joy.

However, with his Time Prison packed full of monsters, it finally hit level 20. He almost scolded himself for not doing the same thing sooner, but in reality, ever since the raid, he’d been using his Void Travel ability so much that it would have been impossible for him to do so. But now that it was level 20, he no longer needed to worry about it and could get back to focusing on other things.

So, he ran one big experiment with his Time Prison and Void Travel. Since all the monsters were locked inside the cells and not just out in the open, he wanted to see how Void Travel would affect them—to see if the cells offered any increased protection. They didn’t.

Derek took a quick trip to a few familiar places—like the area by Savannah with the golem dungeon, and a couple of the less populated areas that he and Alanah had gone to—then came back to his shop. Once inside his ‘travel room’, Derek opened his Time Prison and went in.

Normally, the doors were locked until the sentences were complete, and he only had control of how quickly or slowly the sentences passed. He couldn’t just cancel the sentences and open the cell, he had to wait. But when he stepped into the Time Prison this time, he looked around and saw that all the cells were unlocked. Instantly, he knew what had happened.

Still, he went ahead and opened each cell door and found exactly what he was expecting. Each cell had a corpse—some mutated, some missing parts, but all dead. He gathered all the corpses from the cells and used his Cleaning skill to clean up any messes he found. He clicked his tongue, then left the prison. It all had gone pretty much how he expected it to, but he had a little hope in the back of his mind that the cells could protect since they cut off most all functions, even metabolic functions—unfortunately, that was not the case.

He also didn’t bother dismantling or using any of the corpses in any way. That just seemed… wrong. They were all so mutated that he wouldn’t want to eat any of them, and he wouldn’t trust any of the materials that came from them. So, he had Silvi destroy them completely with her dragon flame, which pained her because it was wasting meat, but she understood.

With everything to do with his Time Prison finished, Derek finally had his complete freedom to use Void Travel back. He was slightly disappointed when the skill hit 20 and he didn’t complete another requirement for advancement, but he was expecting it. But he knew that there was a chance that any type of growth on his part could complete a requirement, so he knew that he would have that hope for anything he did going forward.