For the Record

“You will rebuild what you destroyed.”

That is all headmaster Owyn said before he dumped me and my party in the remains of a deserted town on The Husk.

I’d had quite a few months leading up to now – between waking up in some lab, meeting Nyx, learning to Consume humans, finding out a lot of the humans aren’t humans at all, adopting a cat (who still hates me, by the way), accidentally getting married and joining a party, being forced into enrolling at the New Iden Charter Hero Academy, making mistakes and being punished for them, being bound into servitude to the headmaster, awakening as some sort of pseudo-god, and stealing my wife from her own patron god... I've been very, very busy.

I expect I’m going to be even more busy now, assuming I can figure out what I’m even supposed to do here.

(Rebuild it, obviously,) my System Assistant Nyx quips, flicking her silver hair over her shoulder. The former-sidhe-former-indra fixes me with a deadpan stare. I can’t entirely blame her, considering she never chose to be in her place to begin with, immaterial to the outside world, reduced from her famous inventor status to the glorified equivalent of a verbal text prompt.

My long-eared and gray-skinned wife drops the heavy pack she’s been carrying with a huff. “What are we supposed to do now?” she asks, scanning the lifeless town square for movement and unquestionably finding none.

“Izzy, do you think there’s even a chance of running water here?” asks our healer Pearl. She’s slouching so far forward that she’s teetering on the brink of sprawling to the ground much like Izahne’s pack.

“I suppose we should consider establishing a base camp,” the short human offers – an obounis named Abaris who serves as my party’s mage.

Meanwhile Omorth, an intimidatingly-built eldra barbarian, shows no sign at all that the three packs he himself carries weight anything more than a bookbag together. “We have four weeks of trail rations, we should think about how we will feed ourselves after running them out.”

As for me, I’m not nearly as worried about that kind of resource, considering I neither need to eat nor drink. Yes, all of my daily nutritional needs are met by a Skill I’m forced to use to survive, the ever ubiquitous Consume, which allows me to drain mana directly from the soul of a foe.

(You still have an incredibly broken build,) my Assistant sighs.

And she’s not wrong.

Patience has never been my strong suit, so instead of staying put and whining with my party, I move ahead and begin investigating the buildings around us. Most of them are at least two stories tall, some even three, though time has definitely taken its toll, making the integrity of the higher floors questionable at best. A distance away at the top of a hill, I can make out the rooftop of the building to which my master Owyn – demigod of destruction, usurper of the harvest, and apparently adorable al’miraj overlord of rabbits – had summoned me in the past, to inform me of what one of my previous incarnations had done to this place.

The Queen of Hunger, born of the envy of mindless shadows for the living, themselves born of hundreds or thousands of years of negative emotions belonging to the mortals who once walked this plane. A demigod in herself, unmanaged by the Record by which all ascension, apotheosis, and reincarnation are facilitated. All-devourer, subsumer of souls, the first wraith – the most notorious of my past incarnations had many names, but only one purpose: to consume. And so she did, only stopping when she was finally overpowered and forced into servitude by the True Hero Feldspar, master Owyn’s old master.

But not before she subsumed the goddess of the moon, the patron of the Shadowed Plane – now known as The Husk – as well.

It feels like so long ago that my patron goddess Ananke forcibly awakened me to the divine soul still stitched to the tatters of my eternal self, and what exactly that means for who and what I am.

But I digress. It’s not difficult for my mind to wander to such things, considering how uniformly empty this place is. I’ve poked my head into a number of buildings around the abandoned square now, all of them consistent in the heavy layer of dust and scattered belongings, as though the missing occupants of old met their ends suddenly and unexpectedly.

Which is entirely believable. I’m horrendously, System-breakingly powerful, and she was probably at her strongest when all this came to pass.

I continue my search, and finally stop at the one on which I’d once stood.

“This one,” I say to my party as they finally catch up. “It looks the most structurally sound.”

Izahne tilts her head to one side. “Are you sure? It looks about as worn as the others.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” I chuckle. “I’ve literally stood on its roof as my master berated my past self’s actions here.”

My party members offer each other a questioning glance before accepting my suggestion and moving inside the relatively small building. The walls are ancient brickwork, cracked in places but miraculously still holding. Against the far wall is a small fireplace with an oven and stovetop. Rusted cookware hangs from wooden pegs, and a table large enough for four occupies one side of the room opposite two rocking chairs facing a window missing its glass. Assuming it ever had glass, anyway.

Two doors lead to a washroom and bedroom, respectively. The bedroom’s furnishings are long since decayed to the point of being unusable, so I suppose we will have to replace them. Then comes the issue of five people and one bedroom. The washroom, on the other hand, is surprisingly intact, much like most of the building. A wooden slab with a hole sits above an open pit, while to its side stands a wash basin and a bucket for water. I suppose Pearl is going to be disappointed; whether we have running water here isn’t even in question.

Well, I should probably get to work. I use Consume on the remains of the bedroom’s furniture, reducing it to dust and drawing it into myself - being a monster literally made of ash certainly has its conveniences. Then I take Izahne’s and my bed from my dimensional storage and place it in the corner of the room so as not to occupy the entire space.

“We only have one room, so we can share it for now,” I say. “We should consider either finding additional housing nearby, expanding this space, or maybe figuring out some kind of space saving bedding? I don’t need to sleep anyway, so you could always just figure something out.”

My death knight grabs my hand and pulls me to face her a little more forcefully than I’d have expected. “No. I want you to stay with me at night.”

“Alright, but when is night here? It's been fully dark every time I’ve been here so far. I assume most of you can see in low light or no light?” I ask.

Everyone but Pearl nods, but she just waves one hand in the air while pointing to a bangle around her wrist with the other. “Magic item.”

Good.

I feel a vague sense of concern at how my Will Detection Skill continues to turn up nothing living around us, but I suppose that was to be expected. Who I once was already drained this plane so heavily of mana that it’s no longer even capable of regenerating mana to begin with. That is going to have to be something I prioritize, especially if I’m supposed to restore this place. Nothing is going to grow without mana to feed from.

(Planes to idiot,) Nyx derides, (you’re a fucking god? Why don’t you try out your oh-so-shiny Spellspeech that you’ve never used?)

Ah, that’s right. I keep forgetting I have that... not a difficult thing to do, considering it isn’t even part of my System and so doesn’t show in my Status.

But, how? How would I even do something like that?

(Just like speaking,) she snaps. (Gods have words of creation, and supposedly the gods of creation made the runic languages and their equivalents to empower mortal ascendants to use a small piece of their own mana to shape the world, or parts of it at least.)

So I just... Hmmm.

I take a few moments to think about it while the others continue their current tasks – at the moment being taking out their bedrolls or unpacking in other ways.

Alright. I think I have something that should work.

I take a deep breath. “Everyone, stay calm and leave the room for a moment. I’m going to try something I haven’t done before and don’t know if there will be complications.”

My party looks among each other for a moment before grabbing the armful of things they’ve already taken out and hightailing it into the common room.

That will do nicely. I throw the remaining few things into my dimensional storage – it'd be unfortunate to hear Izahne whine if our bedding was damaged.

I focus my mind and my will, and begin speaking the words as I feel them, in the innate language I don’t even truly understand, and yet I somehow do. “{expand foundation hallway four rooms doors roof nondestructive}.”

The building rumbles, dust falling from the ceiling, and I’m shocked to see the walls in front of me distend and stretch, planks of wood and supports seemingly sprouting from nowhere to transform the space I’m standing in into a hallway with four doors.

(Did... did that actually work?)

I think so?

Leaning my head back into the common room, I call to the others who are just now settling in again. “It’s done. You can come claim your rooms.”

“Uh, what?” Pearl blurts.

“Yes, what she said,” Izahne asks much more composedly.

“Well,” I begin, “I did god things, and made the house change. So now there’s four rooms. Go pick one.”

They look at each other, and then head past me to examine my renovations. I, meanwhile, head into the common room and plop down on one of the rocking chairs, which creaks concerningly but doesn’t give. Not even a moment later, my party returns.

“Uh, Nemesis?” Abaris says. “It’s incredible, what you’ve done. But you see, there’s just one small problem.”

I sigh and turn my eyes toward him. “What is it?”

Pearl continues for him. “Ha, so. The rooms? They’re all the size of closets.”

Oh.