The One Above All excitedly diverted the soul of the person that he’d known would earn this chance for… well… eternity.
The One Above All and foreseen this guy’s life and death and the utterly vast amount of positive Karma that the guy accrued in his life.
The soul was diverted into a holding chamber and The One Above All made sure that he wasn’t looking at the outcomes of the conversation that was about to go down.
Knowing the end results would spoil the whole encounter that he’d waited a literal eternity for.
And oh boy was The One Above All surprised by the entire thing.
It was the best treat he’d ever gotten, and he knew that he’d be waiting a long time for the next one as well.
The soul had taken the offered chance at life with powers and abilities of his own, but with a major twist right at the end.
The soul had basically brainstormed what he wanted with The One Above All until an entire system and power advancement structure was designed that was a thing of beauty and terror.
The One Above All was slightly confused as to why the soul designed all of this in such a way.
But after a good five hundred years of ironing out all the details of how it all worked the soul utterly derailed The One Above All’s thoughts when it made its final request.
“Ok, now that we’ve designed this thing to perfection…” The soul paused as if to create a dramatic effect, “My wish is for you to grab a random soul of someone who would never get this opportunity.
Not an evil soul, but someone more in line with an anti-hero type than pure good and give this entire thing to them.
Also, completely blend up and turn my soul into like a smoothie or something and use it to make that person’s soul a lot stronger than it should be.”
The One Above All had never in his eternal existence been rendered speechless before.
So surprised was The One Above All that his control slipped and he saw the results of an infinity of arguments with the soul, all of which led to the same conclusion.
Dissolution and fulfilment of the soul’s wish.
“There is nothing that I can say or do that would convince you to take another path.” The One Above All stated glumly.
He had not anticipated this at all.
“Nope.
I don’t see a point to continuing my existence at all.
Made up my mind years ago that if an afterlife actually existed, I was going to seek out a way to put a full stop on it.” the soul spoke wryly.
“Would you at least like to observe the individual that I give this to for a while?” The One Above All asked, knowing it was futile.
“Nah, just get it all over with… oh also, before I go, don’t give them the whole speech an all that.
Just pop them into it with no explanation whatsoever.
Let the system we designed do all the explaining.
It’ll be funnier if they don’t know why they got the opportunity.” The soul chuckled.
The One Above All sighed as he flexed his will and made the soul’s wish come true.
∞
He woke up in a daze, laying on his back looking up at a flaming sky wondering how the hell he had gotten to wherever he was at the moment.
The last thing that he remembered he’d been cursing not only his own fate, the vile religion that had caused it, and the fuckers who were killing him, the next moment he woke up here.
Remembering the blade that had been sawing through his neck what felt like moments before.
The fucking men shouting “Allahu Akbar!” as they murdered him for not being a Muslim.
Rage at the helplessness that he felt, bound and gagged before a tripod and camera setup as they read off some dumb manifesto before they proceeded to cut off his head with a kitchen knife.
Rage that the U.S.A hadn’t just glassed the whole region of the world that had caused his death in such a vile fashion.
Honestly, he was spitting mad even as he realized that he wasn’t dead somehow.
It took him a long while to settle down and calm his raging emotions before he finally, and fully, realized that for some reason the sky was actually on fire.
The air was frightfully cold around him despite the flames roiling in the sky.
And despite the cold, and the strange ambiance from the sky burning, he found himself quite comfortable and not the least bit bothered… physically at least.
Mentally was another story as he shot to his feet realizing that he was in some kind of vast courtyard surrounded by a gigantic wall of dark stone that looked to be in disrepair, towards the center of the of enormous courtyard was a massive, menacing, obsidian black, tower of doom that was covered in millions of evil looking sigils and symbols, that glowed a dark red, making the whole tower almost look like it was bleeding.
As he finally got his bearings and managed to take in the fact that he definitely wasn’t in Kansas anymore, he realized that in the back of his mind he was highly… ‘aware’ of the world around him in a way that he couldn’t fully describe.
It was like being Omniscient.
He could tell that he was on a planet.
That said planet was not orbiting anything, there was no moon, the entire sky was on fire, there was no life anywhere on the planet besides himself, and that there were seven distinct continental landmasses, and hundreds of thousands of islands.
And he was fully ‘aware’ of it all.
Down to the smallest grain of sand inside of a sealed cave that had never seen the light of the surface and never would without intervention.
Somehow, he was filtering away all the stimulus of being aware of an entire planet subconsciously and only now that he was actively focusing on it was he consciously aware of everything.
There were ruins of towns, cities, and random statues, broken roads, shrines, mineshafts, and oh so much to delve into.
But he pulled himself back from the awareness and back to his body as he contemplated what exactly was going on.
“Ok…” he muttered to himself, “So I was murdered by Jihadists.
Wake up as… a ‘god’ of some kind of twisted dead version of a planet that I’ve never seen before.
Although… everything does seem familiar in some way…” his voice a whisper as he tried to rationalize what was happening.
Looking around for a few more seconds nothing really clicked as he contemplated where he could have seen this stuff before.
And that is when his train of thought got derailed.
He remembered his life, but he couldn’t remember his own name, nor the names of his family and close friends.
He knew that he’d known them before.
But now it was like anything relating to him personally was just gone.
He remembered going to school, reading books, playing videogames, anime, science, his former job.
Everything except the things that, now that he was thinking about it, really mattered to a person.
The worst part was that he could only grieve the loss of the memories but not really feel anything about it.
That set him into an almost panic attack state as he scoured his own thoughts.
Looking for any indication of who had really been.
He really couldn’t understand why he remembered everything else, but not his own name or the names of people he had known.
Maybe he was a little too worried about that fact but realizing that you don’t remember your own name is a bit of a mind fuck so excuse him for plopping down on the ground and just staring off into the distance for who knows how long.
As he mentally processed that now all he really remembered were facts.
And facts don’t care about your feelings.
He didn’t know how long he sat there, oscillating between feeling sorry for himself and feeling impotent rage at the Jihadist fucks who’d murdered him and taken his memories of all the things that truly mattered in life.
But it had to have been a good long while before he finally decided that it was time to figure out what the hell was going on.
Standing up again he decided to explore the tower at the center of the courtyard because he couldn’t seem to understand what was going on inside of it, unlike the rest of the world that felt like he had absolute dominion of.
The interior of the tower, or at least a specific spot within the tower, seemed opaque to his senses.
Walking towards the tower he soon found himself before its entrance.
Evil looking iconography and sigils adorning the archway that contained double doors that looked to be made of a solid black metal.
The doorway was so large that he figured a dragon would have no problem entering and leaving the ginormous tower unless the dragon was LOTR sized.
After admiring the admittedly evil-looking architecture for a moment he walked up to the doors and placed his hand on the cold metal, giving it a gentle shove.
It took almost zero effort for the giant doors to swing inward soundlessly.
Revealing a large entryway to what looked like a throne room.
An enormous dark throne set on a dais, and what almost looked like bleachers in a giant circular formation.
At the center of the room, before the giant throne was something that looked like an altar.
Everything here just oozed ‘evil overlord throne room’ energy.
To the point that it was almost comical.
Demonic looking imagery was inlayed in the walls, the floor and even the ceiling.
Sigils that pulsed ominously with dark red lights were engraved absolutely everywhere.
The lighting in the throne room was provided by a huge spiky crystal that floated near the ceiling releasing a bright red glow.
“Whoever designed all of this was really trying to sell being evil.
Like… overcompensating to an extreme degree.” He commented with a chuckle as he started making his way towards the altar at the center of the throne room.
That was the only thing that he felt like he couldn’t fully perceive or control in the entire realm.
Seemed like the place to start looking for answers.
He walked up to the altar, it was a rectangular slab of stone that came up to about his hips, and the entire thing was engraved and inlayed with sigils that glowed a pale green, unlike the overly red glows everywhere else.
He placed his hand upon its surface before immediately jumping back, startled by what was obviously a hologram projection of a giant faceless head that had a huge grin on its nonexistent face.
“Sup!?” the giant faceless head practically shouted, “Wait!
Don’t respond to that, this is an automated message, and it won’t do you any good to ask questions.
So, listen up while I tell you what is happening to a basic degree.”
Aside from getting startled by the sudden emergence of the hologram and wanting to curse the guy out, he decided to really try to commit whatever this message was to memory.
“So… Sorry, not sure where to begin… Ok, that’ll do.” The holographic head nodded to itself, “I was probably the most awesome person to have ever existed.”
He waited for the giant faceless head to continue as it dragged out a really long pause.
“So awesome was the being that is me that when I died at the ripe old age of 92 surrounded by my friends and family, The One Above All.
The God of Gods.
The biggest cheese of them all decided that I would get a wish.
So, we hashed out the details for a while and designed a system based on an old game series I loved.
It’s not one of those all-powerful systems that makes people ridiculously powerful within a few a weeks, cause that sort of thing isn’t actually fun in real life.
Anyway, it’s based off of the realms of Oblivion.
And technically speaking you are now The Father of Coldharbour.
But eventually you will be taking control of all the realms of Oblivion through accomplishing tasks related to the realms and their specific domains.
“You may be wondering to yourself, ‘but I’m not the most awesome person to have ever lived, why am I here instead of you?’ and you would be totally right about not being as awesome as me, seeing as you are now here its guaranteed.
The thing is, my wish was really to cease existing entirely.
But you see, I’m so awesome that I used that wish to not exist to give someone else the chance to possibly measure up me someday.”
I… was kind of upset.
This guy’s voice was irritating, and he seemed pretty stuck up, but he might have a point.
He certainly wouldn’t have used a wish to help out anyone else.
Much less to cease existing entirely.
“Now, I’m just going to give you a basic ass rundown of the system.
You will gain OP points by performing actions that are in line with the Domains of the Realms that you have under your control.
Right now, you are the proud owner of Coldharbour which means that your domains are Domination, Vampirism, Corruption, and Slavery.
Not all that peachy I know, but hey that was Molag’s MO and I’m trying to stay a little true to his spirit at least, though I did alter the way that you can make daughters of Coldharbour.
You can make Sons and Daughters of Coldharbour now by sharing a little bit of your blood with someone and then drinking some of their blood in return.
Much better than Molag’s method.
“Anyway, you can use OP points to purchase any and all knowledge and skills from the Realms of Oblivion and Nirn.
You can also use the points to purchase domain-less realms that can’t be used to get more points but will enhance the stats of your avatars.
Speaking of Stats, there are only three, Body, Mind, and Spirit.
Honestly, don’t know why I even bothered with it though.
They are basically just a counter for how many realms you have and provide a linear boost to the things they effect.
You won’t be having any superhuman avatars for a while unless you end up connected to a world where you can get superpowers or something.
“But never fear, whatever world you do connect to, you will be able to use magicka.
And the most basic of the basics are free.
So even if you are not going to be picking up mountains anytime soon, you’ll still be able to learn magic.” The holographic head paused and started muttering to itself before it continued, “Oh, I almost forgot.
The Mind stat isn’t going to make you smarter.
You can think of it like a hardware upgrade but your actual mind is like the OS, if you don’t push yourself to think in new ways, and actually use the upgraded hardware it’s gonna be like having a supercomputer running on a windows 98 operating system eventually.
Sure, it’ll be fast, but it won’t actually be used correctly or even close to its actual potential.
Don’t worry, it’ll take a while before you really have to worry about that, but it’s something to keep in mind.
Anyway, I hope you have a good life, or lives, I’m out!”
The giant holographic head winked out of existence leaving him standing there looking at the place it disappeared from feeling more confused than he had been initially.
The hologram had raised so many questions in his mind but all of them were for naught.
He shook his head a little disgruntled, “Someone liked The Elder Scrolls series a little too much.”
He had played some of the games and read a lot of the lore.
Which had reminded him a lot of a more gruesome version LOTR lore.
Especially the creation stories and such.
Now he needed to figure out this system thing and hopefully figure out what he was supposed to be doing.
Being on a completely lifeless planet all alone was not something that he wanted to do for too long.
With a thought the menu popped up in a basic holographic display before his eyes.
Race: Oblivion Lord
Named Realm/s: Coldharbour
Unnamed Realm/s: None
Avatar/s: [Coldharbour 1/1(Human/changeable)]
Mind: 1
Body: 1
Spirit: 1
OP: 0
[Shop]
That was the extent of the interface.
The Shop tab opened to let him purchase knowledge and skills and his eyes bugged out a little at the exorbitant cost of what he assumed were books that he would have to read.
Then there were ‘Lexicon’ versions of each of the books that would directly download the information into his brain, but everything was ludicrously expensive.
If it was easy to get points then it wouldn’t be too bad, but the hologram message seemed like it was indicating that points would be hard to come by.
The free stuff was actually just a single Lexicon called ‘The Basics’ to get him started.
He sighed at that and selected it, feeling quite a bit of knowledge suddenly pouring into his mind.
And it kept going and going.
Flooding his mind with a veritable deluge of new information.
“The Basics my ass!” He cursed as he finally managed to compose himself after the flow of information tapered off.
The Basics turned out to be the basics of like, everything.
It was the basics of basically any topic you could think of.
Every skill you could think of, and every profession you could think of, but with a twist of being all knowledge that came from Nirn and the Oblivion planes.
He now knew how to wield every kind of weapon to a basic degree of competency, how to enchant objects with basic enchantments, cast basic spells, and other useful stuff.
But he also knew the basics of digging latrines, aqueduct construction, topography of Nirn and all the planes of Oblivion, every religion ever on Nirn, forging, fishing, animal husbandry, and so so much more.
On top of that, apparently, the prerequisites for a lot of that basic knowledge was every Aidric, Daedric and mortal language of Nirn and realms of Oblivion, both spoken and written forms.
Somehow, after absorbing The Basics, he found himself thinking in Daedric.
It was as if Daedric had replaced his first language as his main language.
The more useful bits of information were how everything really worked with his system.
For instance, Stats were additive to his avatars and were largely percentile based, with Mind being a bit special.
Stats added to the base of his avatars.
And if his avatar underwent a ritual, gained superpowers, or was somehow enhanced, his stats were applied after that and would count for more that way.
He’d also learned how he was supposed to connect to other worlds now, and that even when he did connect to other worlds.
His current Avatar was changeable and malleable.
But once he used his Oblivion Gate to incarnate in another world, the Avatar would be set in its new form.
Eventually his mind would be able to handle living two lives at once and allow him to have multiple avatars running around at the same time, but it wasn’t something that would be starting any time soon.
His mind would need to occupy a single avatar at a time until he reached a certain point in his development as an Oblivion Lord.
Once he went through the incarnation process in a new world, he would be able to freely send items and people to Coldharbor and back to that world at any time, as well as his Avatar.
His Avatar could essentially use Coldharbour as an inventory system, a place to retreat, or a place that he could bring people and animals.
He was going to need to bring things to Coldharbour to start up life in here anyways.
He wasn’t too fond of the environs at the moment.
Then there were the things that he could do as an Oblivion Lord already.
If he brought people into Coldharbour they would be utterly at his mercy.
He could reshape the world with a thought if he wanted to.
Anyone that visited his Realms would be completely under his power unless they had some kind of reality warping power that defied his ability to control everything in his Realms.
Aside from that, when he eventually did bring people to Coldharbour, he had a few options of what he could do with them if he wanted to.
He could turn the souls of his enemies into Soul Shriven or even the various forms of Deadra such as a Dremora, or Atronach.
Influenced by the Realm within which he transforms the soul.
All beings that he converts would become utterly loyal to him which was a grand perk to his mind.
To make the conversion, all he had to do was submerge the soul of his victim into the Waters of Oblivion and initiate the conversion.
If he transformed a person wholesale, their physical body included, they wouldn’t experience any physical changes until their initial body dies.
Once their body dies, they would be reborn again from the Waters of Oblivion with a true Daedra body.
He would get to decide what kind of Daedra they were reborn as.
The advantage of changing someone with their whole body was that they would gain all of the benefits of being a Daedra while retaining anything special about their mortal body.
Perfect for infiltration and creating a spy network.
Also, if the person happened to have superpowers or something, as long as they kept their original body alive, they would benefit from being both a Daedra and a Super.
The advantages of being a Daedra were that the person was genuinely immortal so long as he let them be reborn from the Waters of Oblivion and that they would be able to move themselves back and forth between Coldharbour and whatever other Realms joined Coldharbour in the future.
Meaning that any Daedra that he makes would be able to use Coldharbour as a place to store stuff.
The utility was endless for both himself and whoever he converted.
No matter what world he ended up going to, being able to change people into completely loyal minions to do his bidding was a major benefit.
Even if he didn’t want to transform people into Daedra.
He had another option, as The Father Of Coldharbour.
He could transform people into Vampires.
Vampires who would feel compelled to obey him by the power of their blood.
It wasn’t as solid as transforming them into a Daedra as far as control goes.
But it could easily be used to control people regardless of if he didn’t want to turn them into permanent residents of his Realms.
The Basics had even given him a basic rundown of how to use his own vampiric powers.
Charm, lifeforce draining, Vampire Lord transformation.
He could already do all that and he would be able to teach any vampires he creates how to use their new powers.
Speaking of new powers, the basics of magics were… vast.
He’d gotten the basics of Alteration, Conjuration, Destruction, Illusion, mysticism, Restoration, and Shadow Magics.
Then all of the more specialized schools of magic that were more like a combination of two or more of the other schools of magic.
Then the breakdowns of the individual schools of magic within each school like fire, water, frost, and lightning.
Each school of magic had a breakdown like that, focusing on individual elements of the overarching school.
And He’d just had the basics of all it shoved into his mind.
Along with the most basic of the spell formulas for each of those schools.
He could now cast the spells, Candlelight, Oakflesh, and Waterbreathing from the Alteration school.
Raise Zombie, Conjure Familiar, Bound Dagger, and Bound Sword from the Conjuration school.
Flames, Frostbite, Sparks, and Convection from the Destruction school.
Vision of the Tenth Eye, Clairvoyance, Courage, and Fury from the Illusion School.
Minor Dispel, Minor Life Detection, Soul Trap, and Remote Manipulation from the mysticism school.
Healing, Lesser Ward, Turn Undead, and Sun Fire from the Restoration School.
Then there was the most complicated school of all of them that gave only one spell, Shadow Bolt from the Shadow Magic school.
The Shadow Magic school seemed inordinately more complex and powerful than any of the other schools.
One thing was very obvious to him about the magical schools.
He was definitely not smart enough to experiment with it all and make his own spells in any reasonable timeframe.
The spells that had been forced onto him with ‘The Basics’ he could easily cast and use, even modify to a small extent.
But trying to create his own spells and work out the spell formula to upgrade his spells?
Beyond his capabilities at the moment.
The amount of study and experimentation that it would take for him to actually understand and truly comprehend all the information that had been seared into his mind permanently by the ‘The Basics’ lexicon was staggering.
Sure, he knew the information, but he would need to put in some solid effort to experiment and create his own spells.
He could regurgitate everything for a test, but he couldn’t tell you why everything was the way it was or how to progress further.
In short, he was fairly certain that he was a little too average of mind to truly take advantage of all that he had just learned.
But that was fine.
He would learn eventually.
And he already had magic, which was awesome.
The more physical skills he was easily able to comprehend though.
They just made sense to him.
So at least he would be able to fight and do carpentry, smithing, masonry and the like pretty easily.
Although he would definitely be at a beginners skill level he at least knew all of the information.
After he spent a good while just… assimilating the massive packet of information that had just been shoved into his mind he finally felt like he had a good grasp on what he had just learned.
Obviously, he wanted to go start shooting off spells and stuff, because who wouldn’t want to play with magic?
So, he did just that.
Casting every spell he could.
Feeling the flow magicka and bending it to his will, commanding it to shape reality with his spells.
It was a load of fun to spew fire and frost from his hands.
He may or may not have had a little too much fun casting [Sparks] and yelling “Unlimited Power!!!” at an imaginary Mace Windu…
After horsing around with magical powers for a few hours he decided to head over to the Oblivion Gates.
He needed to activate them and get his Avatar into a new world so that he could start progressing.
Lexicons in the [Shop] were priced at minimum 10k OP for novice level knowledge, and exponentially rose in price after that.
The books were even worse, starting at a minimum of 50k OP, which he felt was because of the potential to spread the knowledge instead of it only being downloaded directly into his mind on purchase.
Getting OP points was high on his order of priorities.
Which meant he needed to get out into new worlds.
His first task that would give him another Realm of Oblivion was kind of annoying, there was no way he would be able to do it quickly because in his new world he would need to grow up the normal way unless he got lucky and someone gave him their body.
And the first task was [Task: Perform a worthy Hunt.
Reward: The Hunting Grounds].
A child wasn’t going to be hunting any worthy prey for a long time.
So, he really needed to hurry up with getting his Avatar into a new world.
Not to mention that he kind of wanted to have a name.
Arriving at the Oblivion Gate which was just outside the walls of the mockery of the Imperial Palace, he placed his hand upon the large circular evil looking stargate thing and felt it doing its job.
Looking through worlds and feeling for the precise spot to insert his Avatar.
He knew how this would go.
And he knew that as soon as the connection was established, he was going to black out, only to wake up when his new avatar was born in whatever world the gate connected to.
He wouldn’t get a chance to practice the skills and magic that he had learned already until he started growing up in whatever world he ended up in.
What the Oblivion Gate was doing was actually pretty simple.
It was interfacing with the dreams of women in the worlds that it was connecting to and requesting that they serve as the incubator for his Avatar.
It would be a dream to them, and they would forget ever having the request, and basically it was making the request exactly the night that conception of their natural offspring happened because the developing body needed to be tied to his soul before the nascent soul of the developing fetus took root.
From ‘The Basics’ He’d learned that the nascent souls of infants really started to take root within only a few hours of conception so the timeframe for making an avatar was quite limited.
Also, the ones receiving the request would feel a natural aversion to it.
So, the Oblivion Gate pretty much just spammed hundreds of requests until someone took it.
The moment that someone took the offer to become the mother of his Avatar in whatever world it was that he was going to his world went completely black.
A deep sleep took hold of him, and he knew no more.