“Oh, you conniving son of a bitch,” Rory said, before frowning.

  Wait, didn’t I just basically call myself a bitch?

  Dismissing his weird relationship with Eon, Rory stared at the notification, taking it in.

  “What is it?” Apostolos asked, staring at him with the regular concern that seemed always to be a second away from his face.

  “I don’t know when you grew up to be such a worrywart,” Rory said with a snort as Apostolos frowned at him, unknowing of Rory’s thoughts. “But that aside, Eon finally dumped something on me that it’s been trying to convince me to take for some time now.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, something called a ‘Sovereign System.’ Last time I had it offered to me, it was trying to thrust me into the position of some vampire lord or whatever.”

  “What’s a vampire?”

  “Blood-sucking human.”

  “Aren’t you basically a vampire then?”

  “No, and I don’t appreciate insinuation,” Rory said with a frown. “No, but digress. It’s nothing you need to worry about.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. I do need to look it over, though, so can you go check in with Irene for me? I tasked her with some simple gem work, and I need to know that she hasn’t accidentally blown her face off.”

  “She’s got the Gem-Crafting Skill?”

  “No, she’s just handling basic stuff in making the base gems. Maybe she will get it one day, but for now, she’s just caring for my busy work.”

  “Well, if you say so,” Apostolos said with a shrug. “If you need anything-”

  “I know how to reach you, yeah, you overgrown worrywart.”

  Apostolos frowned before walking away, content to leave it at this, leaving Rory to take in the notification and the many other connected displays by himself.

  Sovereign System Unlocked

  Access Type: 3rd Grade Stratum Settlement, 10+ settled residents

  I don't know what a 3rd-grade Stratum Settlement is or what a Graded Stratum Settlement is, but the second half is easy to understand.

  Having finally finished constructing each new home for the kids and even one for Eia, though her home was more of a hole in the ground, Eon seemed to have deemed him ready to unlock the Sovereign System.

  That or it had finally gotten tired of his shit and forced it upon him and just made up an excuse.

  Putting aside the notification about unlocking the Sovereign System, Rory switched to examining the system's interface itself.

  Staring at it for several seconds, Rory let out a low whistle.

  That’s a lot to take in.

  First, he now had access to a three-dimensional rendering of their camp, which was reminiscent of the view he would see when allocating ascension energy post-wave. Interestingly, he could zoom out, the rendering showing areas they’d scouted out and explored, even linking with their map of the Maw. Zooming further, things turned blank, far beyond where they’d ever explored. Zooming out all the way, Rory was once more reminded of the size of Aelia -the planet that is- at the very least the size of their old sun, perhaps larger.

  That’s a lot of ground to cover.

  Ignoring the rendered globe, Rory turned to what looked like several rows of information. The first was labeled ‘Municipality Affinity,’ and below it was a glaring None listed. The next column was labeled ‘Legal Charter’ and, much like the first, had a simple None directly beneath it. The third column was the first column to have something other than None listed, the column titled ‘Fabrication Material.’ Beneath it were several listings of, well, materials.

  “Several thousand pounds of Sol’s Glory… a lot of basic stone, some obsidian… and dirt. Lovely.”

  While he didn’t know exactly what fabrication material meant, Rory was at least smart enough to warrant a guess. It was likely material he could build with, material that his settlement had absorbed upon outward expansions. He’d assumed it had vanished into nothingness, but clearly, he’d been wrong.

  Looking past the Fabrication Material, the fourth and fifth columns were where things got… expectedly odd.

  “Authority- 3rd Stratum. Node Level: Eight. Huh?”

  Unlike the earlier listings, he had no idea what either meant, not even an inkling. Therefore, it was incredibly helpful that Eon had, for years now, added small little question mark buttons next to almost everything with even an inkling of uncertainty as to what they were about.

  Alright, that was a lie; it wasn’t Eon that had done that out of the kindness of its-

  Heart? Does Eon have a heart? Wait, probably not; why would it?

  -heart. It had only started adding them when, near the end of a prior year, Rory thought of using a reinterpretation to add them. It was perhaps the most effortless time he’d had convincing Eon while using a reinterpretation, but it was also so brainlessly apparent that he’d been shocked Eon hadn’t done it first.

  Ehh, probably something it didn’t consider necessary. I mean, it took me this long to think of it. What’s the saying, ‘Like Creator like… create-ee?’ No, that’s not it…. Whatever, it's not important.

  Putting aside stray thoughts such as the nature of Earth-born phrases, Rory tapped one of the question marks next to the Authority column.

  Authority

  The measure of a Settlements’ ability to command decrees upon its citizens and the world itself. Starting from the first and third Stratum, and every three Stratums after, a settlement gains a Decree slow. Stratum may be increased through the completion of Waves, general citizen activity, and mundane expansion.

  Decree

  Settlement localized physical and magical laws of nature. Any entering a settlement of a higher conceptual tier cannot resist Decree effects. Monsters and Persons of tiers higher than that of the settlement may attempt to resist Decree effects.

  “Interesting,” Rory mumbled, considering just what it meant. Shrugging, the best way to find out for sure was to take a first-hand look at what was offered, given they could pick up two Decrees based on what he’d just learned.

  As if prompted by his intent to review his options, a new interface appeared, masking the explanation screen. For a moment, Rory felt his eyes bulge, shocked at the sheer number of items listed.

  Essence Tax. Pneuma Credit. Ascension Tax. Ascension Credit. Blood Sacrifice? That sounds a little sinister. Time Tax. Time Credit. Thought Tax. Thought Credit. Cognitive Tax. Cognitive Acceleration. Public Cephalon. Wait, Fertility Tax and Credit? Holy crap it just doesn’t end.

  As far as he could tell, there was basically a tax and credit version of everything, and some other options listed were neither.

  Anima conversion? Like Apostolos has? And wait, what the hell is a Presence Conversion? Ascension Stake? Soul Stake? Life Stake? Matrix Reality? Gloryland sounds like a bad movie. Plant Boost. Cell Division Credit and Tax—God, above, there really is a tax and credit for everything.

  With hundreds of options, Rory dismissed them, instead shaking his head and looking to see what Settlement Node was about as he attempted to clear his mind.

  Settlement Node

  The magical capacity of a settlement. The Node level is a mixture of settlement Heart level and settlement Blood capacity. Each Node level grants (1x) Perk slot.

  Settlement Heart

  The Core of a settlement can be crafted and improved through varying means—current Heart level: Eight.

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  “Now, if I had to take a guess, why do I feel like that Iasilisk core that stores all the settlement Pneuma is being recognized as the settlement heart?

  It was as good a guess as any, and the fact that the heart was currently level eight, coinciding with the tier-eight core, gave strong evidence to his hypothesis.

  Alright, so what the hell is the blood of a settlement?

  Settlement Blood

  The esoteric value of Heart amplification through available Pneuma quality and Essence abundance. Current amplifier: 1.01x

  “I guess that makes sense… Sort of. Feel like with all our stored Pneuma, we should have a higher amplifier… Scratch that, I just burnt through half of it only a month ago, and most of our Pneuma is barely grade 1.”

  With a somewhat better understanding of what the Node level represented, Rory held his breath as he opened up the available perks, half-expecting another endless screen of options.

  While there were many options, there were far fewer than with the Decrees, only a few dozen. What they lacked in raw numbers, they made up for in the oddity of the naming conventions.

  Blood Swell. Blood Moon. Abundance Dreams. 1st Hell. Elemental Plane. Necrotic Fields. Fertile Skies. Envenomed Fumes. Soma Forge. Pneuma Vortex. Pneuma Efficiency- oh, that seems simple, at least. Stasis Field. Savage Jungle. Vampyric Domain. Aural Node Conversion. Star Land. Divergent Growth. Convergent Growth. Spatial Anchor. Spatial Tear. Crystal Geode. Lightning Plains. Mountain Base. Mountain Vale. Mountain Peak. Bah, my head.

  Some of the listings Rory suspected were holdovers from when Eon had tried to tempt him into taking a blood-themed version of the Sovereign System. Perhaps even downgraded options compared to what he would have been offered with that version, but Rory was happy not to have every option describing blood in some sense, so he was more than okay with what he saw.

  Even if he didn’t understand what most of them did for the time.

  “I’m in for a study sesh, aren’t I?”

  Three days later, Rory sat upon a platform, feet dangling over the side of an endless void. He was, of course, seated on the teleportation platform of the second floor of the Maw.

  Not for any reason, mind you; it was just that now with eight teenagers living within their settlement, peace and quiet were… rare. As Apostolos had grown up, he’d taken many cues from himself, meaning he’d been a fairly quiet teenager during downtime,

  That wasn’t to say they had never had moments of outbursts themselves, but it was entirely different than eight teenagers; even when they were busy with given tasks, they were still finding ways to be loud.

  Sighing, Rory kicked his feet as he leaned back, laying flat on the platform.

  That reminds me that I should probably start working on those Aural Conduits for the Khan of Blue Lightning. It’s been over a year, and even for a tier-six, I assume a year without updates might start to annoy him.

  He had ideas for how to proceed. The improvements that the Stellar Forge had undergone made the creation of higher-quality Stellar Mass far more feasible. Rather than a one percent concentration, he could get all the way up to two percent.

  As for the changes the forge had undergone, they had been surprisingly curious. The orbital rings and struts surrounding the Forge Heart had condensed into orbiting… orbs, almost like planets orbiting a sun. The entire thing looked far less like a sci-fi fusion reactor or machine and more like a scaled-down solar system model. Even the Inscriptions he’d initially scripted into the orbital rings he could sense were still inside the vaguely planet-looking orbs, the strength of their inscriptions magnified.

  It was all quite curious and interesting and something Rory was sure he’d spent a lot of time studying in the future, but with only a month since the changes and many more pressing matters, it had been a little more than a nice little benefit.

  That, and the entire thing looked far less out of place now.

  That wasn’t what he’d run away- secluded- himself to the Maw to think about.

  No, he was instead pondering everything about the Sovereign System. What had initially appeared as nothing more than some interesting, albeit complex, bonuses quickly became something demanding far more serious consideration.

  It wasn’t called the Sovereign System for shits and giggles. With the hundreds of options and combinations, it was clear that the way you ordered your choices would change the literal world around you, a system to rule over both people and nature itself.

  How should I do this?

  Looking between his options, only a few that he’d decided for sure were solid picks. At least one, maybe two, of his node perks would go toward Pneuma Efficiency. It was a perk that stated it would ‘Reduce overall Pneuma consumption of all Pneuma-related activities and at higher perk ranks, increase Pneuma potency by a variable amount.’

  It wasn’t flashy, but he couldn’t see any downsides.

  The following two picks were less direct improvements, but he couldn’t deny the synergy and potential.

  First, the authority Decree ‘Blood Sacrifice’ stated that blood could be sacrificed, willingly or not, to add vital energy, essence, and small amounts of soul sparks -whatever that was- to their settlement. It was basically a combination of the Soul Sacrifice, Essence Tax, and Recovery Tax decrees. It was less efficient than any of the three individual decrees, but being able to do all three simultaneously, in a slightly different fashion, the advantage couldn’t be ignored.

  His next pick was another perk, Blood Swell. It simply stated that all blood-related effects were boosted, as well as inflicting a polycythemia effect on all those who lived within the settlement.

  In layman terms, they’d produce more blood.

  The reason Rory had chosen the blood-related decree and perk, even when for many years he’d made it clear he wasn’t going to become a dark lord, was solely due to his personal ability to take advantage.

  Blood was odd in that it existed as both a sort of essence and affinity. In many ways, Essence was almost like a magical fingerprint, a sort of marker of a person or creature. Your essence could be fire-themed, but that didn’t mean it was the same as someone else with a fire-themed essence. Furthermore, while your blood could carry your essence, it wasn’t directly the same as your essence.

  Except for Rory, whose affinity was blood itself. His blood didn’t just carry his essence; it was his essence.

  It was all rather complicated theory and understanding, things Rory had thought he’d figured out over the years that he’d been forced to revise at some point or another. Even now, he was reasonably confident that at some point everything he thought he knew about aura, essence, Pneuma, affinity, Ascension energy, and every other form of esoteric quasi-magical force would be upended by some revelation or another.

  For the time being, what mattered was that if Rory was the one making use of Blood Sacrifice, he was confident it would be extra effective compared to the others, blood being an affinity that he felt would likely end up being relatively rare.

  By combining it with Blood Swell, he could maximize not just his ability but anyone’s ability to utilize Blood Sacrifice for the benefit of the settlement.

  This brought him back to his main issue. He knew that Pneuma Efficiency, Blood Swell, and Blood Sacrifice would provide a significant degree of min-maxed benefit, but he still had to decide how he wanted to guide their settlement. The gathered essence and vital energy from Blood Sacrifice could fuel the Plant Boost decree, Life Span Credit, or even something like Recovery Credit, which enhanced the healing and recovery rate of those who called the settlement home. Looking at perks, something like Blood Moon would enhance beast types and blood users so that both he and Eia would see a great boon, but the others would see nothing. Aural Node Conversion would allow their settlement to adopt a Municipality Affinity more easily. Divergent growth could boost the success rate of experimenting with divergent evolutions, such as when he attempted to create the bloodwood trees many years ago.

  Choices. So many choices and options. Rory could even see ways certain perks or decrees could blend. Did he want his settlement to focus on dulling certain emotions and boosting others? Or maybe he could opt for Anima Conversion so that over time, everyone within the settlement could gain access to a Spiritual Body.

  Even splitting his mental threads, Rory found himself facing an impossibly complex problem with an infinite number of answers.

  He could also double down on taking ‘neutral’ perks and decrees. Effects like Pneuma Efficiency wouldn’t color the direction of the settlement much in any real way. Still, Rory instinctively knew that the sooner he began forging a path for the settlement, the greater the result would be.

  Part of Rory wanted to jump down to the third floor of the Maw, throw himself into battle against the monsters of the third floor, and allow himself to do something other than think. It was only squashed by the fact that he hadn’t brought his armor with him and that the Architect’s Bane was holed up somewhere down there.

  At his current rate it would still be a few years before he’d have to face the Architect’s Bane again, he had only just recently crossed the halfway point of tier-six, and so he didn’t expect the Bane to hunt him down until he was at least seventy or eighty percent to tier-seven, but that didn’t mean he wanted to gamble a chance encounter by aimlessly wandering the third floor.

  “God damn it,” Rory grunted, pounding a fist against the platform. “I don’t always want to be the one thinking and planning. Hell, I don’t even want to be in charge. But no, I have to be a responsible adult for a bunch of teenagers and a sort-of-adult-sort-of-teenager.”

  The idea of just… pissing off to who the hell knew where and doing his own thing for several years was dangerously tantalizing after the last few years of constant effort for the behalf of the settlement. Still, he couldn’t do that yet; he wasn’t confident that the settlement would be fine on its own, even with Apostolos and Eia at the helm.

  Hmm… Maybe tier seven, tier eight. Yeah… Yeah, that sounds nice.

  With the promise that one day he would get his vacation away from being a responsible adult -he’d only been in his mid-twenties when he’d first appeared on Aelia after all- Rory threw himself back into the struggle of charting the course forward, retreating into his Mind Palace where the flow of time was faster than the outside world.

  Spending what felt like days within his inner world, though it couldn’t have been more than a day or two outside, Rory finally began to paint a vision of the future.

  As much as he had railed for years against going overboard with blood stuff, it wasn’t a bad base from which to build. Sure, blood, and specifically blood essence, were inherently corruptive, but that didn’t necessarily mean evil. How could something not be corruptive when it carried the force of another being's essence?

  Using that, he laid the groundwork—two ‘points’ into Pneuma Efficiency, one point into Blood Swell, a point into Savage Jungle, a perk that combined floral aspects with blood themes, and another point into Abundance Dreams, which promoted plant growth to synergize with Savage Jungle. With three perk points left, Rory had considered balancing the influence of all the blood themes. Typically, one would assume holy or ‘good’ things would balance blood, but blood wasn’t evil, just corruptive. With that in mind, Rory decided upon Star Land. It was a perk that empowered and radiated twin celestial aspects, Solar and Stellar, two aspects he was pretty familiar with. Between the ‘bloody jungle’ theme he had going, Rory could imagine the growth going out of control, an almost cancerous reaction.

  His view of Star Land provided the answer: the harsh sunlight that shone upon their world would burn the overly voracious growth of their land, whereas the nurturing starlight would promote healthy growth in the coolness of the night.

  Finally, to top it all off, the last two perks he chose were Pneuma Vortex and Aural Node Conversion. Pneuma Vortex would drag in more Pneuma from a larger area. Aural Node Conversion meant they wouldn’t have to wait nearly as long for the Municipal Affinity to adopt the affinities between Star Land and Savage Jungle. If both he and Apostolos utilized the benefits of the Blood Sacrifice decree, they could speed it up even more, given they had affinities matching the respective perks.

  Perhaps he was being overly imaginative, but Rory could see a world where one day there would be a city seated within a voraciously prolific jungle, kept in check by the light of the suns and stars overhead. The city would constantly regenerate and renew itself as the people within sharpened themselves against both the challenges and opportunities of such a home.

  It was… pleasing to Rory. He didn’t want an overly cushy life; boredom would only breed malcontent. Challenges wouldn’t be born of malice; they would be the way of the jungle, made manifest. Yet, that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be comforts and community; it was first and foremost meant to be a city, not a meat grinder.

  One day.

  Finally satisfied with his answer, Rory left the confines of his Mental Palace, noting a single message from Apostolos that he chose to ignore for the moment. Pulling up the sovereignty interface, Rory soon locked in both the Decrees and the Perks, leaving one last thing untouched.

  A name.

  In all this time, they’d never named their home.

  It was something that had taken some thought, but Rory felt comfortable that for once, he genuinely had a clever name.

  Mentally keying it in, Rory teleported to the surface, intending to return home to their blooming city.

  To Ehkorrus.