Seventh log, out of too many to count.
They decorated the skies, once upon a time. Great, winged beasts, covered in flame. We don't know much about them anymore - they were one of the first ones to go. Long before we started keeping detailed logs like these, basically, so all we have left are these fragmented, corrupted memories.
We think they were migratory birds that sustained themselves on fire magic. We think that there were seasons where fire magic was more ...
2022-06-08 22:00:03 +0000 UTC
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[An Anchor of Heart and Home] had a cost to it, presumably. The system said it cost ten units of something, but whatever it was, the system hadn't been able to parse it. This was worrying for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that the system was evidently capable of parsing some very esoteric costs — Misa remembered Max's skill costing 'an opportunity', whatever that meant.
Ten units, in this case, was vague and worrying. But not knowing what th...
2022-06-08 16:13:32 +0000 UTC
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For all that she'd been looking forward to this moment — for all that she'd had trouble even sleeping in her anticipation, checking both her system messages and the view outside the window in case she could spot the villagers arriving — Misa found that she was still undeniably nervous.
It hadn't taken her particularly long to find the villagers when she'd woken up. Her inability to sleep had cost her; she'd fallen asleep late in the night, or in the early hours of the morni...
2022-06-06 16:40:56 +0000 UTC
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Here's an extra worldbuilding document that was unlocked astonishingly quickly. If anyone missed it, I mentioned it in the last announcement here - I basically started a small puzzle in the Patreon ad of chapter 49.
A summary of how the puzzle was solved can be found in the author's notes of Chapter 50 on RoyalRoad. Patreon's a good place to track all the logs though!
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Decrypting file [The First Sign]... File decrypted.
---
We had ...
2022-06-03 22:01:01 +0000 UTC
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A dark, glittering fog coalesced in the middle of the clearing.
Derivan heard Vex breathe in, a sharp intake of air — the lizardkin's eyes were wide with wonder, and Derivan couldn't blame him. The fog was a deep, dark shade of blue, verging on being the same shade as the night sky itself; it might very well have been, if not for the fact that it was fog, and so didn't do quite that good a job filtering out all that ambient light.
Perhaps rather conveniently, though, a ...
2022-06-03 14:50:23 +0000 UTC
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I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for your support. It means a lot to have so many people be interested in the world I'm creating and the characters I'm writing. I've updated all the tiers to have extra chapters as thanks - 3 chapters for Gold, 5 for Platinum, 8 for Platinum+.
Authorship is a learning process, I think, and there's still a lot that I want to learn. But I'm glad this isn't a journey I'm making alone.
Patrons, you may find something interesting i...
2022-06-01 22:01:59 +0000 UTC
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Derivan had suggested they go back to the forest to test any new ideas they had about magic, and so they had. They'd informed the Guildmaster beforehand, just in case anything went wrong with the skills they wanted to test and the magic they wanted to cast — she'd assured them she would ensure that there were people that would keep an eye on them while giving them privacy, through an assortment of [Danger Sense]-adjacent skills — so they were free to practice as much as t...
2022-06-01 15:43:15 +0000 UTC
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A lot of things happened all at once.
First was the sudden influx of an absolutely monumental amount of divine mana — the kind that would escape the notice of most people's [Mana Sight], but not the notice of the [Divine Sense] that many clerics had. Several priests over in the nearby temple jerked their heads over, their eyes growing wide; Velykos, in contrast, narrowed his eye-equivalents and stepped back somewhat cautiously. A spell began to form i...
2022-06-01 15:41:47 +0000 UTC
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Velykos was silent for a moment, processing Sev's words. He seemed to use gardening as a distraction as he thought, bending down to pluck weeds from the dirt with a delicate precision that Sev admittedly would not have expected from him. Every weed he plucked disintegrated as he clenched his fists, which...
...admittedly, Sev was a little worried about that part. He was relatively certain Velykos hadn't been disintegrating plants before. A larger part of him, though, was more relieved t...
2022-06-01 15:38:47 +0000 UTC
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Sev found Velykos in the gardens behind the temple again, rather than inside the temple proper. It was quite the sight, really. As old as Velykos was, he was still large, and he towered over the majority of the trees and flowers and herbs that filled the temple garden.
The garden itself was beautiful. Part of it was set out to harvest potion ingredients, that much was clear — there were rows and rows of identical plants, each in various stages of growth and carefully marked a...
2022-06-01 15:36:53 +0000 UTC
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The half-orc pulled up the box for [An Anchor of Heart and Home], and exerted an effort of will. The system didn't exactly come with instructions, though it was rather intuitively built and would respond intelligently to most thoughts directed at it. The problem was that one needed to know that a command existed to be able to perform it.
Sure enough, it took only a slight twist of perspective for the skill to suddenly flicker, changing form.
[X-51...
2022-06-01 15:35:36 +0000 UTC
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They stepped through the doorway into the Guild, and the Guildmaster paused as she was speaking; she glanced expectantly to the desk where Max usually sat as the receptionist, and frowned slightly when she saw the desk was still empty. "I hope Max is alright," she muttered.
"Is there any reason she wouldn't be?" Sev asked, a note of worry entering his voice. The Guildmaster shrugged, gesturing into the air as she seemed to check through her messages; seeing nothing, she shook her head a...
2022-06-01 15:34:31 +0000 UTC
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The temple's activity stopped almost immediately the moment Derivan walked in with Kestel in his arms. Many priests had a basic [Triage] skill running at all times, and the fact that Kestel had immediately caught their attention was immediately alarming; Sev winced slightly as he watched a few clerics practically pull the silent scientist out of Derivan's arms, bringing him over to the corner of the temple they usually kept for the sick and infirm.
It was a small corner...
2022-05-30 16:08:20 +0000 UTC
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Misa stared at the wording of the skill, briefly speechless. The others went silent as well. It took a moment for them to process what it all meant — the wording of the skill was vague to begin with, and there were a lot of things it could mean, but the fact that it had merged with an artifact that was responsible for apparently shaping reality?
That was a little outside the scope of what they'd expected.
Misa was the first one to speak.
"Is this the reas...
2022-05-27 17:41:54 +0000 UTC
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The first problem appeared almost immediately — Derivan found that he couldn't move.
He wasn't as worried about it as he thought he should have been, though he stopped mid-walk and that caused his friends to look at him with concern and alarm.
The second problem took a moment to appear, and it was in the spate of notifications that immediately appeared to him.
<ERROR>
Unable to find item <ERROR>.
<ERROR&g...
2022-05-25 17:44:54 +0000 UTC
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"But you wouldn't actually kidnap someone without hearing my explanation first, right?" Vex asked.
"Well, no, of course not," Misa said, looking suspiciously willing to do exactly that. She glanced surreptitiously at Sev and Derivan, then leaned in to Vex, mock-whispering. "I mean, those two won't, but you just tell me who we need to kidnap—"
"Misa," Vex said, laughing as he pushed her away. She grinned at him, sticking her tongue out, and he shook his head wit...
2022-05-23 17:45:26 +0000 UTC
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They were leading the way back towards the Guild. They'd tried to get Kestel to tell them about whatever status effect he had, but the lizardkin seemed incredibly reluctant to talk about it, and Sev didn't push the matter.
The group was much larger than they were used to, though, and Sev couldn't help but keep glancing back, worried that — today of all days — they would be attacked. Monster attacks in the wild weren't necessarily uncommon, but this particular route should h...
2022-05-20 18:02:20 +0000 UTC
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For the umpteenth time, Sev glanced at the notifications hovering at the corner of his eye, even as he stormed closer towards Kestel. The researchers flinched back at his approach, but calmed when they saw his robes and the focus he wore around his neck; he was clearly a cleric.
The notification was distracting and persistent, though. He'd been doing his best to ignore it, with everything else that was going on, but...
<WARNING>
No ######s are ...
2022-05-18 17:24:13 +0000 UTC
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For all that everything seemed to be fine for the time being, there were a lot of things that needed the adventurers' immediate attention.
The first were the system notifications. Several of them were just strings of errors, but a number of them were distinctly ominous.
<ERROR>
[B-63 ####### #####R] integrity has failed. Unable to sustain local dungeon. Examining dungeon contents...
Dungeon contents cannot be era...
2022-05-16 19:32:17 +0000 UTC
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Misa stared at the spark for a moment, nonplussed and unsure what to do. Part of her almost instinctively searched for a system notification to explain what was happening — but there was nothing. Just the gentle pulsing of the spark in her hand. There was no hint from [Guardian's Premonition] here, either; her village felt... safe. At least for the time being.
"Um... Do we know what it's doing?" Vex's tail swished nervously behind him.
"Nope," Misa said. "No not...
2022-05-13 18:38:35 +0000 UTC
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I realized somewhat belatedly that Patreon does a thing where you only see the latest posts on your feed, and when old posts are updated to be released to other tiers, they're not the 'latest' posts anymore. If you rely on that feed (like I do) it can sometimes look like a creator has stopped uploading stuff.
So this post is just a heads up! The $5 tier now has two chapters, the $7 tier has three, and the $10 tier has... also three. I'm still working on expanding and I'll update a...
2022-05-11 17:12:50 +0000 UTC
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There were a number of things they had to do, of course, before they could stroll into what was hypothetically the prison of yet another god.
For one thing, they had to make sure the bonus room was relatively stable. The dissolution didn't seem to be progressing, and no one was receiving any new boxes; the injuries of all the various villagers were healed, and now they were all trying to recover.
That was the good part. The bad part was that it was somewhat difficult to explain to...
2022-05-11 16:45:14 +0000 UTC
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Dirt and rubble exploded into the air as the Serpent struck the ground, the snake-like head snapping at them the same way a snake would. Misa hadn't blocked it, this time — the villagers, while not completely clear, were far enough away that they wouldn't have been hit by the direct strike. The Serpent itself seemed smaller, too; not so small that it could be dodged easily, but enough so that the impact smashed apart a few homes, and not the entire village.
The force of that impact wa...
2022-05-09 17:49:59 +0000 UTC
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If there was one thing Misa had never really understood despite trying to, it was how [To Fall Yet Hold the Line] worked.
It was, by all accounts, an absurd skill — there was no reason it should be possible to block every attack. More to the point, she'd seen the results of an impossible application of it not too long ago. When she blocked an unblockable attack, rather than one skill trumping the other, all of reality had sheared in half, and then chose the '...
2022-05-09 17:32:40 +0000 UTC
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The screen hovered in front of Misa, and she glared at it like she could make it go away through sheer spite.
Congratulations! You have completed the bonus room <The Village's Last Defense>. The following rewards will be granted when you leave the bonus room.
Bonus Room Rewards:
[Unique Quality Gear: The Blade Arcane]
[Unique Skill: Heart and Home]
Bonus room dissolution commencing....
2022-05-06 19:11:52 +0000 UTC
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Misa had thought the space with the horde was a void. It had been an inky, dark space, lit only by the light of the portals on either side. Seemed pretty void-like to her.
She had never been wherever here was.
The space on the other side of the gate was somehow darker than even that, to the point where Misa thought that it was perhaps only this place that could truly be called a void. Looking out into the distance left her feeling cold, almost, like the sight was...
2022-05-04 15:50:09 +0000 UTC
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Vex was realizing that getting to that dark, oozing gate on the other side of the core-space was easier said than done.
That was what he'd decided to call it for now, since he had no other words for it, and there was no literature to explain what it was. Core-space — an intermediary space between the world and whatever it was that created monsters during a dungeon break.
Not that he'd had all that much time to figure out the name.
"Watch out!" Sev shouted. Light blue flare...
2022-05-02 17:09:21 +0000 UTC
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Misa stood with her companions in the makeshift tent Orkas had constructed for himself, where plans and maps were laid out on the table and weapons were scattered to the side; this was his 'command center', for all that they'd really just lugged a table out of the village and draped a cloth over the whole thing.
Orkas had, rather predictably, exploded when told of the plan.
"You can't go into the rift alone!" he thundered. Misa glanced at Sev and the others, standing just nearby a...
2022-05-01 16:08:40 +0000 UTC
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A/N: I made a small change to the end of the last chapter, sorry! Miscounted the number of delvers (and this time it was unintentional). Only one skeleton that's having trouble coping with his new body, not two.
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Misa watched as light cracked open the sky.
Something was wrong, she knew. It was too early. The first time this had happened, it had been in the middle of the night; it was part of the reason it had taken so long for their village to respond. It wouldn't have b...
2022-05-01 16:06:49 +0000 UTC
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"Whatever's allowing that arcane and necrotic energy to stay apart is only barely stable. I don't know exactly what it is, but I'm guessing that any amount of physical disruption will destabilize it," Vex explained. "That's why you can't damage it."
I'm not sure I follow, Kestel sent over the link. He sounded... slightly calmer, but also strangely out of breath, for someone on a telepathic link. How does that link to it being invulnerable
2022-04-26 12:53:03 +0000 UTC
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