For the first time in a long while, Jack and I ended up going on a raid. Actually, that’s wrong. We’ve been raiding spheres and shards left and right, all the while. It’s just that for the most part, after a while, between working on my Empty Dream, and hanging out with the Harvesters, we’ve been too busy to really get into the nitty-gritty of raiding.

Thus we’d just plunder the worlds as our true-selves. I’d use my vast nothingness to strip away the sphere, or shard’s, protections, while Jack’s all-consuming darkness swept over the terrain of the sphere, or shard, killing everything before we consumed the little world completely. Or, alternatively, we’d send my constructs, and Jack’s fadelings into the sphere, or shard, to do the deed for us.

This time we were doing it the old way. Sending down our core-bodies, i.e. our anthropomorphized former core-treasures, and then exploring the sphere with them. We had to do so, because the sphere we were raiding was one of the spheres with strong enough internal laws to resist our true-bodies. It was too "consistent" for us to rely on the other means that we had come up with. At least we couldn't do so without simply destroying the sphere and ruining the whole game. The sphere was also large enough that I suspected that this sphere was an entire universe, or a large chunk of one at the very least.

Overall, though, it was a refreshing change of pace. The world was a world of meat. Covered in blood, bone, and pulsating flesh. The flora and fauna apparently had been corroded, corrupted, and changed by some kind of plague. To make matters worse, there were a whole bunch of trogs here too.

Trogs were basically living caricatures of life. Embodying every bad thing one could say about a species or people. Speaking generally, they were almost always, stupid, cowardly, weak, tricksome, hideous, murderous, avaricious, overly numerous, hateful, plainly evil, and rapey. Like certain culturally insensitive depictions of goblins, orcs, and certain ethnic groups of other species.

There were countless variations, and the way that trogification affected the souls of the victims, and could affect the universe at large, if the issue wasn’t dealt with properly, had made it so that the creation of new species of trogs was one of the few acts that would lead to the cosmos itself punishing the perpetrator. Of course, that was assuming the vast majority of dark and bright immortals who universally revealed the act of Trog creation didn’t do so first.

One would think that wandering in a world of nothing but trogs would have ruined the experience but surprisingly it didn’t. The world being occupied with mostly trogs, meant that Jack and I didn’t really need to overthink our subjugation of the sphere. Jack used her shadows to fill the sphere’s underground with a ravenous multi-elemental darkness that hollowed out the world. I called down light from the stars within my true-body and scorched the surface of the sphere. Melting mountains, glassing deserts, and turning all the flesh and bile that was covering everything into ash.

Jack and I walked hand in hand, as we bathed the sphere in darkness and light. We took our time with the raid, eliminating all semblances of life within that sphere. We meandered through this sphere as if we were the only ones that mattered in this world. Egotistically in love, to the exclusion of all else, like a pair of teenagers. There was probably a boss that we were supposed to defeat as well, however, if that was so, that creature was likely consumed, or disintegrated by the light and darkness that now scourged this world.

*************************************************************************************************************

A slender young man with pale skin, delicate almost girlish features, and long silver-hair opened his dark blue eyes and revealed that he was much older than he’d appeared. His eyes glowed with power in the gloom, and were filled with the calm and steadiness of one who’d seen the vicissitudes of life. Yoshino Yuki had already turned 270 a couple of months ago, yet sometimes he still felt like that awkward fresh-faced teenager still trying to find his way at the sect. Maybe that was a side-effect of having not gained a single unwanted pound, or wrinkle in the last 300+ years, but having kind of aged in reverse due to the body cultivation he’d done to make up for some of the weaknesses of his core-treasure.

As Yuki finally emerged from his meditative stupor, he did the little exercise that he and countless others like himself who were unable to believe in things that seemed too good to be true, did. He reached within himself and drew out the little semi-intangible placard that embodied his access-rights for the Empty Network and Empty Dream. A thing that strongly resembles one of the membership cards for the libraries of the mortal world. He pulled the little glowing library card out of his spirit and then inspected it for any sign of ill-intent, or unwanted action. Then only after a few minutes of making sure that the rest of his spirit and soul had been left unaffected, and undepleted by this act, did Yuki reinstall the library card.

“Huh…” mumbled to himself. Unable to ignore the fact that after several centuries even his jaded, cynical, self couldn’t help finding this little ritual a little...unnecessary.

By this point, either the doomsayers and critics were wrong and their sect’s mysterious Ancestors Calloway “weren’t” plotting to take over the world by getting access to everyone’s spirits. Or the conspiracy theorists were right, but they were far too late, far too weak, and far too few in numbers for anyone to stop whatever was happening. In either case, Yuki was pretty sure this time would be his last time pulling that card out of himself.

First of all, it stung pulling things out of your spirit repeatedly like that. Second, of all, there was no denying that it was only thanks to his access to the Empty Dream that Yuki had been able to reach the Peak-Stage of the Legendary rank as quickly as he had. It was also thanks to that mysterious library that was hidden within the Empty Dreams, and the books, and scrolls, that he was able to so thoroughly master the nuances of his unique core-treasure. Turning the firearm-based body of his Monocle of the Seer into a true instrument of martial wonder.

Yuki wondered if his seniors understood what their Empty Dream had done to the world that they’d left behind. The Shattered World was a whole lot quieter these days. The cultivator world was a whole lot quieter. The existence of a hidden realm where one could go to train, fight, explore, and if necessary die repeatedly in, without suffering heavy losses in the real world was something no cultivator could pass up. The fact that they made the lower levels of membership practically free, meant that even poor Rogue Cultivators were able to take full advantage of the Empty Dreams.

The fact that Empty-Network’s owners seemed to see no difference between man and beast, meant that there hadn’t been a major beast stampede in decades. All the most powerful monsters were busy cultivating in the Empty Dream. Feeding off the spiritual energy released by the dream-beasts, dream-fiends, and various rare loot drops. The beast’s that still needed to eat physical food, either ate a couple of their weaker non-sapient fellows before logging back into the dream, or they fed themselves by using in-game currency to order drone-dropped groceries from the affiliated Empty Market.

The time dilation between dreaming and awake meant those aged monsters who were struggling to attain enlightenment before their lifespans ran out, could struggle a little harder while exploring the ever-expanding confines of the strange and fantastic virtual world. The ability to hasten one’s cultivation by slaying the “dream-beasts” and “dream-fiends” of the Empty Dream meant that younger cultivators could experience multiple times the results of simply meditating.

The court of public opinion was still somewhat unsure as to whether this Empty Dream was truly the Calloways creation, or whether it was simply something they’d found and decided to share for whatever reason. What “was” sure, was that since the virtual realm’s emergence, the cultivation world in the myriad Pearls of the Shatter World had become a lot more placid. The desperate competition for resources became a whole lot less desperate. The need to gamble one’s life to succeed had been greatly reduced. After a few decades of this, with the younger generation quickly catching up to the older generation and the older generation becoming more and more enraptured by the digitized wonders within the Empty Dream. Most people split their lives in half between cultivating inside the Empty Dream and taking things easy in the waking world.

As for the world of mortals, the myriad Pearls of the Shattered World were currently experiencing some of the longest peacetimes in recorded history. This wasn’t to say that war and conflict had disappeared from the Shattered world, it was more than the most problematic and troublesome old monsters who’d normally be stirring the pot were mostly exploring the empty dream. Similarly, mortal rulers were no longer in the mood for hotblooded wars.

In a short handful of centuries, there was no longer an environment for that kind of warfare. Most nations had taken to fighting cold wars in the waking world and having their citizenry and armies wage war in the Empty Dreams PVP areas. Thanks to the cheaper skill books and class books that could be found within the Empty Dream, and were now sold in the waking world at practically bottom-tier prices, the portion of the world that could be called “powerless” had shrunk. Or rather, the standard for being powerless had grown even blurrier than it had been before.

As things stood, the common folk were all suddenly too powerful to be easily oppressed, so heavens only knew what would happen to the nobility and monarchies in the future. Even the poorest nations had terrifying armies of elites, who all but lived in the Empty Dream during peacetimes. Add in the fact, that thanks to the protections set in place for all who were visiting the empty dream, all a nation would hypothetically need to do, to thwart an attempt at invasion is to have most of their citizens logged in when the invading army attempts to attack, and the traditional war was starting to feel a bit impractical.

Yuki’s big question was how much things would change if the whispers he’d heard from the seniors about the Empty-Network and the Empty Dream being able to directly pass in-game items into the physical world, were true. If the line between the real world and the virtual world blurred even more, what would people's lives turn into then? Not for the first time, Yuki was glad he was a cultivator, it meant his lifespan was currently long enough that he’d live to see the weird changes and turns that the world had changed. He was also a little glad the presence of myriad old hands would keep the world from changing into something completely unrecognizable.