Your first realm should be dedicated to one thing, and one thing only - generating mana. Going into details is beyond the scope of this book. There are plenty of manuals with realm builds from first realm all the way to higher mageknight realms, but I need to stress one thing, the first realm is for mana gathering alone. Anyone who used it for a different purpose regretted it their entire lives.

  — Excerpt from Introduction to Realm Cores

  Day 103, 1:30 AM

  I rubbed my neck again. I found myself in the same forest at the dead of night for the third time, wrapping up with the herbalist class. I finished picking the herbs, since I couldn’t enter the city until sunrise, then waited at the entrance, using the long hours to contemplate the matter regarding Newstar Salamandra. Finally, the guards let me through, and I headed over to the adventurers’ guild to cash in my missions.

  Since I was a paid member, I checked into a private room and followed instructions from several books I had read on realm sculpting and mana gathering. I settled myself on a comfortable bed. For first realm mages, the book suggested finding a comfortable position, but with a body like mine, you could lie on a bed of nails and still be fine.

  Once comfortable, I closed my eyes and focused my mind inward. I didn’t really know what that meant, but I did my best, relaxing and breathing in and out, keeping count until I reached a meditative state. The air suddenly changed, the smell of blood in the air, and I opened my eyes, finding myself in a realm of iron sand, with giant swords and shields poking out of the ground randomly.

  It looked like an aftermath of an apocalyptic battle between giants, eons after their bones had rotted away into iron dust, leaving only their weapons and armor in a barren world of death. I wandered the gray desert when I suddenly heard a thunder of something heavy drawing closer. It sounded like a cavalry charge, heading straight for me.

  I turned around and beheld a fully armored knight riding a horse-sized bipedal dinosaur, aiming a lance at me as he weaved between the shields and swords. The knight was a passable rider, but hadn’t seen real training. I sidestepped his thrust, grabbed the lance, and launched him into the air.

  He slammed against the half-buried shield and slumped to the ground, where I speared him with his own weapon. The massive-jawed dinosaur was turning around to have another go at me, but it crumbled into iron dust along with its rider as soon as I killed the man.

  I wonder whether Dandelion had any other heart demons? And how difficult all this would have been without me being a grandmaster rider and an expert spearman?

  Those questions naturally had no answers, but they gave birth to a terrifying thought. How scary would my real heart demons be? Obsessions and fears made manifest were terrifying for the local children, but I was ancient, even by this world’s standards. I had seen hell, watched my wife die over ten thousand times, went insane multiple times, and communed with outer gods, who sought to devour entire worlds.

  And I had no idea if any of those had left permanent scars on my mind. I was trying to heal, to pick up the pieces, but I knew there was no way I was whole.

  And Dandelion… was mortally afraid of a random dude riding a lizard. Sometimes, you had to envy certain people on how dull they were. I walked around the realm for half an hour, finding nothing but giant swords and shields, until I finally saw a huge something in the distance.

  I walked towards it, and found that it was a gigantic, old-fashioned, hand-cranked water pump. I was certain Dandelion used earth mana, based on what few stories I exchanged with his former cronies, but I guessed he could have been deceiving them? Didn’t explain the iron desert, though.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  I approached, and from up close, the pump was easily a hundred feet tall, and pumping it seemed like the chore of a lifetime, involving running up a hill while holding the massive crank. Still, I had to do it, to see how drawing mana felt. I went behind it, grabbed the rusty lever, and pressed it down. I ran up a hill Dandelion must have made for the sole purpose of working his source of mana, dragging the crank with me all the way up and then down. It took two dashes until a gray mass splashed from the tap.

  I went over to see what it was and found that Dandelion’s mana took the form of the metallic sand and shavings which made up his realm.

  “Moron,” I said aloud. “The man was a moron. He could’ve made a mine, a quarry, stuff normal earth-aligned awakened made as the basis of their realm, and he made a water pump which you work by running up and down a hill.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair, then shook my head. And I had started the Dandelion life thinking I had hit a jackpot. Fortunately, my plan already involved tearing everything down and building up from scratch. But still, a giant water pump, which you had to crank like crazy until it spewed out metal shavings, seemed like the dumbest, most difficult approach to gathering metal energy a human could think of.

  Is there a way to make an automatic pump? Fuel it passively with mana, but how much mana could I waste as fuel? Would it run on my accessible mana or drain a certain percent of mana I am drawing? What happens to it after I use it? Primers on magic mentioned that used mana dissipates and goes back to the world, a perfectly renewable resource. Would that happen with the fuel? Could I draw it back again?

  So many questions, so many ideas, and endless time to test them. But first, an attempt at an automated pump. I didn’t know anything about mechanical engineering or electrical engineering to make an engine-powered technological wonder. But as time passed and the number of experiments grew, I discovered a way to use the falling iron’s weight to reduce the effort of working the pump, but not enough to power it with the weight of what it was drawing.

  I kept at it until I got bored with it two years later. In my spare time, when I felt like I was going crazy, I went to the alchemists’ guild, passing the exam with flying colors, since they always gave me the same one, and with a full membership, I accessed their labs and library.

  It was frustrating when the downtime activity you indulged in to unwind advanced at a noticeably better pace than your main objective. I even went to the artificers’ guild for two months, studying pumps under the guildmaster for exorbitant sums, which I got back after every redo. The last time I hired him, he returned my money and asked me to work for him on pump-related projects.

  So, the pump was a bust. I could improve Dandelion’s insane idea, but I couldn’t perfect it. Not that I had the ability to alter something that’s long since been cemented in the man’s first realm. Temporarily, my first realm as well.

  So, I moved on to other items on my agenda. I tested my strength with the shields and swords, then leveled everything in my third realm, since that was the only one I could change, and found that my strength remained the same, the durability of my skin dropped around five to ten percent, since there was no way to gauge such changes perfectly, but the thing which dropped the most was the damage I dealt with a sword.

  For some reason, having giant swords inside your realm impacted how well the swords you wielded could cut things. Ridiculous, since my proficiency, strength, and agility remained the same, but facts were facts.

  With that bit of knowledge, I tested various shapes, and oddly enough, filling the realm with staff-like figures really impacted how much my staff pulverized the training dummy. The biggest problem I encountered was that I had to sculpt everything by hand. There were no pre-made shapes, no options for them to just appear where you wanted them. No, every last thing had to be done by hand.

  Sometime during my third year, I started enjoying it. It was like playing with sand, only instead of wet sand, the iron stuck together as if magnetized. I stopped making a dashing statue of myself and slapped my forehead.

  “I’m an idiot. I could make a giant magnet to replace the pump.”

  The project fared better, but the magnet was drawing the iron sand as well. But then I had an idea. With my fists, I hammered the surrounding sand into a solid surface, and after a few more modifications, I made a system for drawing mana, which only required me to empty the magnet periodically. I was quite satisfied with my finding, and after another month of tweaking, I had a weird contraption with a powerful magnet drawing a river of metal sand, which would eventually get stuck, and then I had to clean it with a shovel, but I was making progress.

  If only I could figure out how to demagnetize and re-magnetize the magnet, which brought about another question.

  How did I magnetize it in the first place? And why isn’t the metal shovel sticking to the magnet?