Yes, I had a System.
But even with a System, there wasn’t much I could actually do with it at the moment.
Sure, I had the Door Manipulation and Lighting Manipulation skills, which allowed me to control every door and light source within my castle. But neither skill offered any kind of progression.
It wasn’t as though I could earn more Points and upgrade my castle simply by opening and closing doors all day anyway.
The Inventory Skill and Item Sell were useless too since my castle were literally empty.
And so, for the next nine days, absolutely nothing happened.
No visitors. No monsters. No clueless adventurers wandering into my courtyard with swords drawn and dreams of glory in their eyes. Hell, not even a strong enough breeze to rustle the weeds in a dramatic way.
The boredom was so deep and soul-crushing that I genuinely started wondering if it was possible to die a second time from pure existential despair alone.
So, in an effort to keep myself sane, I began inventing increasingly stupid ways to pass the time.
First, I experimented with my windows.
By opening and closing them in rhythm, I discovered I could technically play drums. For a few glorious minutes, I genuinely believed I was producing an absolute masterpiece.
Then I got a little too into it.
One window slammed shut too hard.
CRACK!
The hinge snapped clean off, and the entire pane tumbled dramatically into the weeds below.
Uh oh...
That probably wasn’t supposed to happen!
If I continued with this, I might run out of windows to break eventually.
Thus, I retired from my brief musical career and moved on to playing with the torches instead.
I turned them on.
I turned them off.
One by one. Then in alternating patterns. Then in increasingly complicated sequences that only made sense inside my own head.
Eventually, I gave up on patterns entirely and just flicked them randomly like a bored child playing with a light switch.
Look, I needed something to distract myself, alright? I was slowly losing my goddamn mind trapped inside this silent stone prison.
Eventually, I reached the final stage of desperation.
I started counting the blades of grass in my courtyard.
Six hundred seventy-three thousand, four hundred twenty-eight.
Yes.
I counted every single one.
Fantasy Grass Order: Unlimited Blade of Grass Works!
Somewhere along the way, I even started giving them names for absolutely no reason.
"Sir Lawncelot" quickly became my favorite blade of grass. Then there was "Sigreen", "Cu Chulawn", "Grasstolfo", and even "Lord Nobunagrass"...
....
Still, the endless counting and random torch-flickering helped kill some of the time.
For the rest of those long, dragging hours, I mostly just... slept?
Well, sort of.
I wasn’t entirely sure what "sleep" even meant for a building. I didn’t have eyelids to close or a heartbeat to slow down. But sometimes I would drift into this strange, blank state where my thoughts simply went quiet.
I remained vaguely aware of my surroundings, but without the energy to actually care about any of it.
Honestly, it helped. Otherwise, I probably would’ve spent every waking second thinking about how unbelievably awful my new life was.
Just imagine spending the next thousand years like this.
No people.
No entertainment.
No internet.
Nothing.
Wasn’t that basically a fate worse than death?
The mere thought was enough to make my entire consciousness tremble.
AAAAAHHH! NOT LIKE THIS!
ANGRY CASTLE NOISES
****
But on the tenth day, something finally happened. Something interesting.
Ahaha! Finally!
It rained.
And not just some gentle drizzle or peaceful spring shower, either. This was a full-blown apocalyptic storm.
I had been lying in my usual half-conscious standby state, lazily counting stars one by one, when suddenly—
BAM!
An ocean of black storm clouds rolled in from the west like they had personally declared war on the entire forest.
One moment, the night had been calm and quiet.
The next?
Complete chaos!
The stars vanished behind thick clouds. Thunder rumbled across the distant hills while jagged bolts of lightning tore through the sky. Wind howled through the trees hard enough to bend their branches, and rain hammered against my roof like the gods themselves were stress-testing my structural integrity.
But strangely enough, I wasn’t scared.
I didn’t feel cold, either.
Even if the temperature dropped to negative one hundred degrees, I’d probably still be perfectly fine.
And honestly?
It was kind of exciting.
After nine straight days of oppressive silence, the world around me finally felt alive again.
For once, something was actually happening.
To keep rain from flooding my barren interior, I shut every door and window with a focused thought, then settled in to enjoy the spectacular light show through my external vision.
Then—
BOOM!
Lightning struck!
A direct hit!
A blinding flash exploded across my vision, followed instantly by a deafening crack that shook my entire structure.
Part of my slate roof detonated on impact, along with chunks of stone beneath it. Debris scattered across the courtyard while smoke and steam rose from the scorched impact site.
It hurt like absolute hell.
Which made absolutely no sense.
Because I was a building. I wasn’t supposed to have nerves!
And yet somehow, I still felt the pain in vivid, agonizing detail. Not like a tiny electric shock, either. It felt like Zeus himself had personally grabbed a taser and jammed it into my soul.
Still, at least I learned something important: I was durable. One lightning strike clearly wasn’t enough to destroy me.
Smoke continued to rise from the cracked stone while rain hissed against the still-glowing impact site.
But then, unexpectedly, a cheerful notification appeared in my mind.
[Congratulations on being struck by lightning!]
[Achievement Unlocked: Wrath of the Gods!]
[+20 Points!]