There may also be some inaccuracies, since English is not my native language.
Essentially, TBATE is first translated from English into my native language - and in that process, some details are already altered to make it more understandable for us. Now I'm taking that adapted (and somewhat distorted) version, revising it, rewriting it, and then translating it back into English.
I hope you'll point out any mistakes in the text that I might have missed.
× × × × ×
Lucius Zogratis POV
I dealt with the second butterfly just as quickly as I had with the first. After the first use, it became clear that the God Rune of Destruction behaved strangely obediently in my hands-it offered almost no resistance, did not try to slip out of control, and did not weigh on my mind the way it usually did with Arthur or even Regis. Though, if I thought about it, there was nothing particularly surprising about that. My soul had already reached the twelfth rank, and the black-and-white flame burned within me. That alone was, essentially, enough to explain a great deal. With a foundation like that, it would have been stranger if I couldn't subdue a power of that level.
When both blood-red giant butterflies with their bound wings were destroyed, the entire structure of the zone began to collapse. At least, that was the impression I got in the first few seconds. The space around me shuddered, the floor beneath my feet began to split with deeper and deeper cracks, and a low, unpleasant rumble spread through the zone. Instinctively, I lowered my gaze to where the slabs were parting-and beneath them I saw not emptiness, but an entire mass of humanoid figures. There were hundreds of them-no, closer to a thousand. They lay, stood, and shifted below, reminding me of the same creatures that had previously crawled out of the water.
Naturally, I had no intention of lingering around to find out whether they would all start climbing up at once.
Without wasting any time, I quickly tossed the butterfly's corpse, one of the humanoid creatures' corpses, and a portion of that strange aetheric water into my spatial storage. All of it might prove useful later-for analysis, for experiments, or at the very least for understanding what exactly I had found in this zone. After that, I bolted for the exit without the slightest hesitation and, using God Step before everything completely came apart, escaped the zone and returned to the sanctuary.
Fortunately, Arthur and I had discussed in advance what we would do in cases like this. So before entering the zone, I had quietly placed my own portal relic deep in the mountains. That meant that, although I had entered using Arthur's relic, I didn't need to return through it-I could use my own without issue.
After returning, I didn't waste any time and almost immediately headed to class. In the end, I was only five minutes late, which, considering where exactly I had just come from, could practically be considered outstanding punctuality.
And, rather surprisingly, the children greeted me much more warmly this time than they had before.
The reason, however, was fairly obvious. Unlike the cold racist masochist known as Arthur, I was perfectly willing to spare them a few extra minutes of my time. Not out of any special love for it, of course, but more because I had already understood one simple thing: if I gave them a bit of attention right away, they would leave me alone much more quickly afterward and let me get on with my own business. In that sense, a few minutes spent chatting and answering questions was a worthwhile investment.
But there was another reason they were drawn to me so strongly.
They had seen Arthur and me spar.
True, we hadn't used aether at the time, and the conditions had been far from normal-the training device was pressing us down with fivefold gravity-but for Arthur and me, that hardly seemed worth mentioning. Our asuran bodies had long since surpassed what ordinary people considered possible, so that kind of pressure felt more like a minor inconvenience than an actual limitation.
But for these children, it had looked entirely different.
They had never seen a genuinely high-quality spar before. Never seen a fight in which every movement was precise, every attack calculated, and speed, strength, and bodily control pushed almost to the absolute limit. To them, even our restrained training match had looked like something far beyond reason.
Still, all of that was a trifle. While Arthur was clearing the Blood Relic zone and meeting yet another djinn, I had not been idle either… well, to be honest, I had also wasted time on nonsense now and then, but part of that time I truly had spent experimenting with the system, the Blessed Land, and those who inhabited it.
That question had first occurred to me the moment I created life there: could the system be activated on them? As it turned out-no. I tried again and again, testing different variations over and over, but the result remained the same every time. The system simply didn't seem to notice them at all. As though they didn't exist for it in the first place. Perhaps the problem was that they were too weak. Or perhaps their souls were so fundamentally different from ordinary ones that the system simply couldn't recognize them. I didn't yet have an exact answer, but a few guesses were already beginning to take shape.
Along the way, I learned something else interesting. If I gathered a complete set of clothing of the same rank-upper layer, lower layer, everything visible and everything worn underneath, shoes, and if desired even a cloak-the system eventually stopped treating them as separate items. Instead, it merged everything into a single slot, labeling it quite simply: clothing set, rank (). In other words, it became a single item, so I could just issue a mental command and that entire set would instantly appear on me.
But as for the system itself-
Once I realized the first method wouldn't work, I returned to the old one. I found three bandits-my soul found it easier to carry out what I intended that way-and gave each of them everything necessary for enhancement. As the cherry on top, I also gave each one an Eight-Rank Four-Sided Physique, then forced them to inhabit those bodies.
And it was precisely at that moment - when the synchronization between soul and body was still unstable - that I killed them.
Before that, I sent all of them into the Blessed Land to avoid unnecessary noise and unwanted attention. There, the surges of aether were lost among the ancient energy currents.
Although there were some problems - ones I didn't even know existed until they happened.
For example, when one guy attempted to transition into the 11th rank, his soul simply couldn't withstand it. At first, it granted him an enormous surge of power… and then it completely shattered, and he died even without my intervention.
Well… I'll remember that.
The result:
[Body: Four-Sided Physique (Rank 7), Rank 8]
[Soul: Half-Otherworldly (?), Rank 13]
[Intelligence: Rank 10]
[Energy: Second-Layer Aether Core (Rank 8); Rank 8 Aether Channels]
[Pain Adaptation: Rank 10]
[Equipped God Runes: God Rune of Theft (Rank 11)God Rune of God Step (Rank 11)God Rune of Destruction (Rank 12)God Rune of Aroa's Requiem (Rank 13)]
[Echo:]
[God Rune of Destruction Rank 17 (temporarily sealed due to the weakness of the bearer's body)]
[God Rune of Time Rank 16 (temporarily sealed due to the weakness of the bearer's body)]
[God Rune of Space Rank 16 (temporarily sealed due to the weakness of the bearer's body)]
[God Rune of Theft Rank 14]
[Fighter's Talent Rank 14]
[Keystone Rank 14]
[World Seed Rank 13]
[Tracking Artifact Rank 12]
[Relictombs Transit Artifact Rank 12]
[Aether Crystal Rank 13]
[Aether Fruit Rank 10]
[Weapon Rank 11]
[Djinn Relic Armor Rank 12]
[Clothing Set Rank 8]
[Four-Sided Physique Rank 12]
[Mental Link Rank 10]
[Extradimensional Storage Rune Rank 10]
And another hundred little things of various ranks besides. And, just as I had expected, rank 15 was a new realm altogether-but this time, the system had imposed a lock because my body simply wouldn't withstand the burden of that much power. And, as the names showed, once they passed into rank 14, the primary God Runes changed names and grew immensely in strength. The former God Rune of God Step had become the God Rune of Space, and I could only imagine what I would eventually be able to do with it.
Oh, right-those same men also yielded just under 75,000 soul points, 15,000 intelligence points, and over 200,000 aether points. They helped me enormously. Without hesitating, I began absorbing the soul points in small portions, and in the end, though only by an enormous stretch, I still managed to advance my soul to rank thirteen-though I was left with only 13 soul points afterward.
So, as far as the system was concerned, things were more or less sorted out. All that remained was to keep clearing zones gradually, in hopes of either helping Arthur gain more God Runes or somehow obtaining them myself. And yet what warmed my heart most was the very sight of the God Runes of Time and Space, rank 16.
With them, I felt a little more confident, a little calmer, because they were what gave me hope that one day I would choose the right moment and truly find my world-exactly the way I wanted to see it.
If I intended simply to return, then the God Rune of Space was indispensable. But if I wanted not merely to return, but to find my family and my world still alive, then I needed the God Rune of Time as well. In essence, it was that realization that made me relax for the first time in a very long while. The understanding that I was finally truly close to my goal allowed me, at last, to really look at the world around me.
Not through the lens of speed of growth, necessity, and endless calculation of possibilities.
But simply to look.
To sit in a café, lazily watching birds fight over bread, children at play, the flow of someone else's peaceful life. The feeling of constant urgency and the crushing weight of an unreachable goal gradually faded. And with them, it was as if a heavy invisible burden slipped from my chest. In that moment, I truly opened my eyes and slowly exhaled.
At last, I focused a little more seriously on the Blessed Land and began preparing various biomes, beasts, and phenomena that were meant to appear there in just two days. I had already spent three days waiting for Arthur, so I had more than enough time. After sorting out part of the Blessed Land's capabilities, I changed the flow of time within it: originally, one year inside had equaled one day outside, but now I accelerated it to a ratio of five years inside for one day outside.
Over three days, fifteen years had already passed inside, and, in my opinion, that was more than enough to appear there in person for a while and tell the inhabitants certain things. At the same time, I had finally settled once and for all on the magic system for my world. It would be a mixture of the worlds of TBATE and Frieren. I had explained this before, but it was worth repeating: from birth, the inhabitants of my world would possess mana cores, which, like those of asuras, would gradually purify themselves from the very beginning. Their development would stop at the stage of the white core, because an Eighth-Rank World Seed simply would not allow them to go beyond that limit. Still, that didn't matter much, because even a white core by itself granted more than enough mana, and with a magic system based on knowledge and imagination, the amount of mana within a white core became an enormous advantage.
Moreover, I decided to make the quantity of mana in my world truly absurdly high-especially because it cost me practically nothing. One aether essence equaled one million units of mana. Creating a single pure white mana core cost ten thousand units of mana. In other words, one concentrated aether essence was worth one hundred pristine white mana cores. Realizing that, I also understood that each sky in my world could contain up to one million aether essences in order to function properly. So without hesitation, I filled all four skies to the brim with aether essence. After that, I still had reserves left in the Violet Sky, and I could quite calmly spend one hundred thousand aether essences to infuse the world with magic.
The logic was the same. If one hundred white mana cores cost one aether essence, then by spending one hundred thousand aether essences, I could theoretically create ten million white mana cores. Which meant that I could pour one hundred billion units of mana directly into the world at once.
But that would have been too much.
If I dumped that amount of mana into the world all at once, it would most likely start choking on its own density. The ecosystem, the development of living beings, the very structure of the world-all of it could begin evolving along bizarre paths, even if I continued watching everything through the Voice of the World and the Gray Sky. So I chose not to rush. Instead of flooding the world with mana in one go, I would add it gradually, in waves, over the course of two centuries, watching carefully to see how the world changed and developed under its influence.
One possible solution that could partially ease the burden on the world I had created was dungeons. I could spend mana itself on their formation, thus not only getting rid of excess mana, but also creating a full system that would eventually sustain itself. Such dungeons would feed on mana, using it to strengthen their own structures, restore broken halls, generate new monsters, traps, trials, and, naturally, rewards for those who managed to reach the end.
I left all the details of that system to my ChatGPT-or rather, to the Voice of the World. It accepted my command and almost immediately began generating tens of thousands of dungeon variations. Some were to become simple trials for beginners, others lethal labyrinths that only the strongest would dare enter. Alongside them were generated tens of thousands of possible rewards: items that increased mana reserves, weapons with strange properties, odd artifacts of unknown purpose, rare materials, spells, and even types of magic that did not yet exist in this world.
But the most important thing, in my eyes, was neither weapons nor artifacts, but maps. Sometimes, as a reward for clearing a dungeon, one could obtain a small fragment of a magical map on which certain biomes, hidden regions, or yet-unexplored areas of my enormous world were marked.
Individually, such scraps meant almost nothing, but over time they could come together into something much greater. The reason was that each magical map fragment had a connection to the Voice of the World itself, and through it-to the Gray Sky.
In the future, the Na'vi might well create an entire unified magical cartography system based on them. Perhaps it would take the form of a special artifact capable of accepting and combining the discovered fragments. Or perhaps a spell or magical technique would arise that allowed information from the scraps to be transferred into one great map. Little by little, adding more and more pieces, they would be able to reveal the secrets of this world to all clans.
Such maps would show not only biomes, mountains, rivers, forests, and seas, but could also include the locations of dungeons, the habitats of specific monsters, rare minerals, dangerous territories, ancient ruins, clan homes, cities, settlements, trade routes, and other important places. In the end, from those scattered fragments, a true living map of the world could be born-a magical network of knowledge.
I also began creating various magical phenomena and testing the influence of mana on the minerals, animals, forests, seas, oceans, and other resources I had already created. Through the Gray Sky and the Voice of the World, I separately configured the development of mana cores in all living beings, ensuring that it would proceed properly and without imbalance. Those who, by their nature, could not form mana cores-grass, earth, or trees, for example-would still receive mana, just not in such vast quantities as those with cores. Thanks to that, new magical ores, minerals, and trees with all manner of properties would gradually begin to appear in the world.
For example, the Gray Sky already held a prototype of iron trees, which grew dozens of meters upward in sharp spikes, their wood comparable in strength to real metal. There were trees with immense conductivity for a specific element. There were also fire trees, so saturated with fire mana that they burned constantly and yet never turned to ash. And so it was with every element: earth, water, wind, and fire, as well as their deviant forms.
To fill the world with a truly diverse magical foundation, I went through more than ten thousand works-manga, manhwa, novels, light novels, and anime-pulling ideas from them for all sorts of magical properties, creatures, plants, ores, and natural anomalies.
In some places, grass began growing that could heal wounds and restore vitality. Other varieties enhanced affinity for specific elements. In certain locations, springs appeared whose waters flowed mixed with water-element mana.
And that was only the beginning.
I also had to seriously rework the zones and biomes themselves, because mana had to gradually change them from within. The seas would, over time, accumulate enormous quantities of water mana. Around volcanoes, fire mana would naturally grow dense. Meadows and high mountains held more wind and earth mana. Naturally, mana of all elements would be present everywhere to some degree, but in certain places one particular element would inevitably begin to dominate the others.
On top of that, I created more than ten thousand different mana beasts, distributing them by element, properties, and habitats. Then I forced the Voice of the World to function almost like an AI, tasking it with generating even more mana beasts based on existing templates: the beasts of my world, mana beasts I had read about in the library, heavily altered Earth animals, and creatures from all kinds of novels and other stories.
So in the near future, my world might very well produce, for instance, a bioluminescent manta ray that used wind mana for flight. It would be around forty meters long and even wider, not counting its tail. With its tail, its total length could easily exceed ninety meters.
Or strange foxes the size of polar bears, whose fur burned faintly, and whose bodies looked more like mist than true flesh.
Or colossal monsters like titanic turtles, more like floating islands than actual living creatures.
I also created a handful of especially dangerous beasts for every environment-water, land, air, and so on. I'll say only one word about the water-dwellers…
Leviathan.
Heavily altered by me as the creator of this world, and by the mana saturating their bodies.
So I began reworking the zones in advance and slowly changing them to suit the future magical environment. There were still too few Na'vi for any of them to notice. They had not yet explored even two percent of the central continent, nor one percent of the eastern islands of the Eastern Sea, so there was more than enough time before the changes would truly become obvious to anyone.
I almost forgot… I also designed an entire network of teleportation portals, distributing them across the world in advance and literally stitching them into the fabric of the surrounding landscape. In mountainous regions, they were embedded directly into cliffs and stone masses; in forests, into the trunks of giant ancient trees; and in marine and coastal biomes, I wove them into coral formations, so that from the outside they looked almost natural, as though such gates had always been part of the world.
At their core, however, all the portals remained the same. Each one looked like an enormous white ceremonial arch, covered in softly glowing violet runes. Their size matched their grandeur-roughly ten meters in height and nearly twenty meters in width.
But I'll talk about all those changes later, when I begin visiting my world in person more often.
For the moment, I simply sat in my room and waited for Arthur to appear, because only an hour ago a notification had surfaced before my eyes:
[Bound Arthur Leywin has obtained Djinn Relic Armor, Rank 8. Receive x10 or upgrade to Rank 9?]
Realizing he would soon be here, I managed, in the span of about five minutes, to do to the three bandits exactly what I had described earlier, and as a result, I was able to upgrade the relic armor to Rank 12.
Third-Person POV
The sun had already disappeared beyond the horizon, and the world sank into darkness-though not entirely. Bioluminescence shimmered everywhere, filling even the darkest corners with soft light and making the night feel strangely alive. Several ikran circled lazily overhead, then a moment later glided down onto a specially prepared platform built into a massive, inhabited tree.
Inside the tree, the walls were covered in dozens of drawings, and hundreds of flowers swayed gently all around, producing strange, soothing sounds that made one's eyelids grow heavy on their own. The entire atmosphere seemed to lull the senses, wrapping the space in warmth, peace, and safety.
Hundreds of Na'vi were already asleep, free of all worry. The carcasses of the hunted animals had long since been eaten together with vegetables, greens, fruit, and berries. The world was generous with resources, so every Na'vi could easily live on fresh food alone. And living upon sacred clan lands, their children grew in peace and safety, knowing neither hunger nor fear.
A hundred and forty years had now passed since the creation of this world.
Because of the abundance of resources, the clans had grown quickly in number, and in that time the original ten thousand Na'vi had become eight hundred and thirty-eight thousand. And they understood perfectly well thanks to whom they were able to live so well.
Thanks to their god, who had created all of this abundance. Thanks to their god, who had made the sacred places where they and their children could sleep in peace, without fear. And thanks to their god, who had given them knowledge of the world from birth and allowed them to speak with relatives who had already passed beyond life.
Yet even with all of that, what still amazed them most was what happened at the moment of death.
If the body of a dead one was brought to the Sacred Land, it would begin to slowly dissolve into countless white lights, as though the body itself were returning to the world as soft radiance. And in that brief moment, the relatives could see the soul of the deceased in the physical world one final time-and later, meet it again in the world of souls.
That was why their faith was not blind.
They did not merely believe in their god-they lived in a world where every day they saw traces of his will. At times, they even thought they could feel his gaze upon them, as though their god truly watched over and protected them. Through kuru, they could always faintly sense their god's attention. This entire world was the consequence of his will, and nowhere was that felt more clearly than in the spirit world.
But the clearest proof of all was their children. Up until the age of fifteen, not a single child had been eaten by a monster, drowned, fallen from a height, or died from illness. It was as though the world itself protected them.
Ka'olan, leader of one of the most populous clans, slept peacefully in his hammock. He was already the third leader of his clan in his line-after his grandfather and father. Through the Spirit World, or more precisely through the Green Sky, his grandfather had once taught his father. Later, his father had, from Ka'olan's earliest childhood, taught him in turn, preparing him to one day become a worthy leader of the clan.
And he truly had become one.
Now, as he slept peacefully with his wife in his arms, he had a strange dream.
"Ka'olan…"
His body floated somewhere in an unfamiliar, bizarre space. His head felt as though it might split open from what he was seeing: around him stars and planets turned in some incomprehensible, mesmerizing order.
"Ka'ol…"
Snapping his head toward the sound, he saw only more stars. Everything around him resembled an endless night sky full of celestial lights and distant worlds. There were even waterfalls here, but instead of water, soft white light poured from them, streaming downward in living currents of radiance.
"Ka'olan."
A calm, unearthly voice tore him from his thoughts. His body jerked sharply and froze before a strange figure.
"Great All-Father?.." he exhaled at once, his eyes wide, and immediately dropped to his knees in reverence.
He could not tear his gaze away from the strange white figure seated upon white waves that had taken the shape of a throne-or perhaps a great chair. The All-Father's colors changed constantly: at one moment his silhouette resembled a star-filled night sky, then it became completely white, then shifted once more into some other state-and all of this within mere seconds.
The All-Father smiled faintly and gently extended a hand, resting it upon Ka'olan's head. Ka'olan would have sworn that this was the best moment of his entire life.
Then the All-Father drifted back slightly, and his voice no longer seemed to come from one place alone, but from the whole space at once.
"Ka'olan, today you are here to carry my words to all. Soon the world will enter the era of the Second Song, and the world will sound entirely differently. You and several other clan leaders will tell the others of my will."
"The era of the Second Song?" Ka'olan thought belatedly, still too shaken and awed by what he was seeing to properly grasp what he had heard.
Reading his thoughts, the All-Father merely waved his hand.
The space around them warped and flared with strange colors so intense that Ka'olan had to shut his eyes. When he finally opened them again, he froze, staring into a bottomless void and the figure at its center.
The All-Father's figure raised a hand.
And in that instant, earth surged out of the emptiness. In moments, mountains rose, and immediately afterward the world filled with water. Then the All-Father's figure vanished, but in the next breath, the deep seas lit up with coral, trees, and seaweed. Raising his gaze, Ka'olan saw an enormous disk blocking the left side of the world. The instant he understood what he was looking at, everything turned over once more.
He found himself again in the now-familiar space.
His god smiled faintly and continued:
"The First Song was the song of the world's birth and of all living things. The Second Song will tell how this world is arranged. And the Third Song will sound after several generations-and overturn the world."
The All-Father's voice grew quieter, yet lost none of its force.
"I have little time, because your soul will not endure a longer conversation. So simply listen."
Ka'olan nodded reverently, nearly forgetting how to speak at all.
The All-Father waved his hand again, and the space around them distorted-no, not the space. An immense flood of information poured directly into his mind: about oaths, their nature, and how exactly they could be used.
He barely had time to comprehend any of it before the All-Father's figure began to blur before his eyes and the voice itself began to grow distant. Yet he still heard the final words clearly before he woke with a start:
"I am counting on you, Ka'olan. Carry this knowledge to every clan you can reach."