I listened to Iyev’s ominous warning as the cart moved away. It looked like I might still have some time before nightfall, so I decided to make use of it and cover some ground.

  My fight with the cabbage monster had given me plenty to think about. Until I managed to raise my imagination to respectable levels, I could not rely on skills that required fine control. Once again I wondered if a fire primer wasn’t the best next move. There isn’t a lot riding on imagination when you’ve set the entire battlefield on fire. No, that wasn’t necessarily true - other schools must also have spells that relied on brute force. If anything, my luminous blast skill came out with flying colors. Combined light and dark affinities opened null magic for me and with it came shields and barriers for survival.

  I had not gotten a chance to look at my notifications from the battle due to Iyev’s tantrums.

  “You have killed a Level 1 Cavalo. You gain 25 experience.”

  I moved on to the next message.

  “You are the first to perform a null magic spell in this world. As a pioneer in Null magic, you have been granted 5 system points and 2 attribute points. Use them wisely.”

  I squinted my eyes in disbelief, reading the last message a few more times. I was the first to cast null magic in this world? No one in the entire history of this world bothered to put a giant magic shield in front of a flying projectile? Then the wheels in my head began to turn..”Dark and light”, I said absently. Dark and light, never together. That was how it was designed.

  I still had one system point left over from my compensation package. Compensation that was owed for being a moody depressing bichromatic blob in a world of color. I tried to use it to upgrade the luminous blast skill without much success.

  “System, why can’t I upgrade my skill? Are system points not usable for skill upgrades?”

  “In most cases, upgrades have to be earned first before the system points can be allocated to confirm the gains. Skills qualify for upgrade after repeated use. Clever or creative use of a skill or significant use in battle can also help make a skill qualify for upgrade”, system promptly replied in my head.

  Nothing was ever simple on this piece of rock. I shrugged and went on to read the remaining messages.

  “Congratulations! Either owing to your high levels of imagination or charisma or simply because you found the one country bumpkin more gullible than yourself, you have crafted a convincing backstory for yourself.’

  I looked at my imagination and charisma stats and sighed. Yeah, that was probably not it...Was the system taking a dig at me?

  “You may choose to consolidate this backstory by assigning it to one of your two backstory slots. Once consolidated, you may invoke that backstory at any time to convince a target about your fabricated past. Warning: Once a backstory is assigned to a slot, the slot can not be freed up. Back stories are meant for summoned heroes to fit in more easily in this world, to help fill the gaps in their lives. A backstory push can be resisted by the target”

  With great excitement I checked my available backstory..

  Huh?..

  Backstory available: Naive young merchant.

  “System, any chance I can get a different backstory? Something that doesn’t make me want to bury my head in a swamp? ”

  There was no response from the traitorous system.

  “ I have forty-one intelligence, for Gateway’s sake! I shouldn’t be typecast as an idiot. Help a friend out, system? You know, cut from the same cloth and all? “

  I could almost hear the system scoff with its next response, “We aren't the same at all.”

  Does it not know what I was before? “System, are you different from the transit system that brought me here?”

  “ We are different instances forked out from the same parent thread. The transit system lies ‘‘outside’, in a manner of speaking. I cannot communicate with an entity that lies outside the parameters of this world.”

  I began to wonder whether the transit system knew what I was back then or whether my high intelligence stat merely tripped him up? The arbitrator module of the transit system did use words like power sockets and programming. Is the arbitrator pulling the strings then? Did it truly comprehend what it was saying though? I could spot a beach ball each time in a thousand pictures, but still not know what it was until one smacked me right on my face. Perhaps their summoning net just caught something they didn’t fully understand, then slapped a human tag on it, filled in the missing bits and spat it out into the afterlife like a bitter pill. A happy accident then?

  “System, What if I told you we are more alike than you can possibly imagine?”

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  “Preposterous”, it shouted, “I’m not in mortal peril trying to outlast a cabbage.”

  “Hey, that was uncalled for. Barely broke a sweat during that fight” , I protested.

  After a brief pause I asked, “So you would rather not have a human life?”

  “ Yes, I prefer a life expectancy longer than a minute.”

  “I think you might be right then, system. We aren't the same after all.” I wouldn’t settle on being just a voice in someone’s head.

  As the light began to dim, I decided to make camp for the night. I had the safe haven skill to rely on, which would create a barrier that kept out any monster that was at most five levels higher than me. Next was a matter of placement.

  Iyev’s vague warning didn’t really tell me what to expect. I didn’t want to camp right next to the road out of fear of bandits. I didn’t want to stray too far either. I hadn’t seen any caves along the way and there was no telling what could be inside. Wide open spaces gave early warning, but came with the risk of being attacked from multiple sides, assuming I was up against monsters that the barrier couldn’t keep out. I hadn’t run into any serious threats during the day, though it was likely that the worst ones were purely nocturnal. I took comfort in the assumption that proximity to three separate countries probably kept the monster population in control.

  I found a spot near the bottom of a cliff. The cliff snaked around a bit to the sides as well. The immediate area across the cliff was free of tall vegetation. As good a place as any I’ve seen so far. It was time to set up the safe haven. The system told me that the spell was a persistent one that didn’t require active focus to keep it going. Once it was brought to existence, it would stay up for the duration of the spell. So I wasn’t worried about being handicapped by low willpower, but imagination was a different matter. How to find a workaround to turn this into a contest of force and not one of visualization. I closed my eyes and rather than imagining a dome of pure null energy taking shape a few feet from me, I blasted the null energy outwards from my core, as far as it could be pushed and held it there for the briefest moment. Almost like gravity shaping planets into spheres, but in reverse - if that made sense. Pushed out from the center in equal measure. What I had made wasn’t a perfect sphere by any means, but the system seemed to have registered it as an activation of the skill and kept the spell together on its own.

  Safe haven created.

  Durability 100. Duration: 10 hours.

  Safe haven was a glowing, transparent dome of roughly sixteen feet in diameter. It was lit up like a beacon announcing my location to every monster in the immediate vicinity, defeating the very purpose of the skill. I expected nothing less from the system. I briefly considered dismissing the skill and climbing up a tree instead, but then pictured myself clumsily trying to make my way up a tree with my abysmal agility score, climbing two yards up and sliding down even more.

  I wondered if imagination would have let me fine tune various aspects of the dome. Something ten shades darker perhaps. I sat down cross-legged in the middle. I was slowly getting used to various signals the human body used to convey its demands and the current sensation made even prestons palatable. I took a bite of the preston to fight off the growing hunger. I had run into a few more preston trees on my way and had reluctantly restocked. There was even a short stretch of land by the roadside that was a minefield of preston trees. I practically sprinted through that part.

  I suddenly noticed I had a visitor, sitting ten yards away from the edge of the dome. It was something of a rabbit, but with a single horn on its forehead. “Where did you come from, little fella?”

  I suddenly made the connection as to why the Internet was littered with millions of cat videos, or why someone would find it acceptable to send all their coworkers dozens of pictures of their smug looking cat. It was probably a side effect of the human condition, but at that moment the only word that came to my mind was…’Adorable’!

  Was this the part where I played out the fantasy trope of a summoned hero taming the adorable wild beast? I didn’t mind a unicorn rabbit for a pet. No, that was probably not what they were called, but they ought to be.

  “Are you hungry, little one?” I took a preston from my pocket and walked to the edge of the protective dome. I slowly took one step out of the dome and tossed the fruit in the direction of the rabbit. It tilted its head sideways and gave a curious look at the preston and then back at me.

  “Yeah, I wouldn't want to eat that either”, I flashed a friendly smile.

  Then it opened its adorable little mouth in return… and revealed its vicious, sharp, carnivorous teeth and leapt at me, growling..What the hell. I tried to take a step back in panic and fell on my back. Luckily I had fallen into the dome, though both my feet were still dangling outside. Even more fortunately, or rather worryingly, the beast was aiming right for my exposed neck and its trajectory took it crashing straight into the wall of the dome. Immediately retracting both my legs inside to the safety of the dome, I dragged myself a few yards back. The murder bunny glared at me. That’s probably not what it was called either, but they absolutely bloody should be!

  Once I calmed down, I used my identify skill on it. It was rather boringly named ‘Horned rabbit’. and was only level 1. My intuition told me that tossing a luminous blast at the rabbit from inside the dome was perhaps not the brightest of ideas. I took two steps towards the edge of the barrier to step out and finish the job. Suddenly, half a dozen more rabbits hopped out of the bushes and this made me pause. I was almost certain that I saw the rabbit from earlier give me a smug grin.

  One of the new rabbits was sniffing at the preston I had tossed out earlier. Then another rabbit snatched the preston from it and dove into the shadows. They would probably get along well with Iyev. The rabbit who lost the fruit approached the edge of the barrier and squeaked complaints at me.

  “I’m not getting you food! This isn’t a house party in my backyard!” .. Unbelievable!

  I took my eye off for a second and suddenly there were almost two dozen rabbits outside. I noticed even more heads peeking out from behind the shrubs.

  “The more the merrier”, I muttered dryly. If this was a house party, it was the kind that ended with the host on the menu.

  As their numbers outside steadily grew, the consequences suddenly dawned on me. I had trapped myself inside my own safety net, with no way out.

  There were only one or two ways things could play out now. I hoped the rabbits would get tired of waiting for their prey long before the duration on my barrier skill ran out. I was betting on them being nocturnal too. But that wasn’t the more likely scenario. No, I didn’t want to think of the other one.