I sat next to Bob for a while, debating what I wanted to do about him. Since the Mecharriage ran on mana, the Ruffalo wasn’t needed to pull anything. Also, he couldn’t move too far away from me without breaking the tether and dying all over again.

In the end, I made the painful decision to let the poor little guy rest in peace. The villagers made a big deal about Bob. I had named him after all. He just had to be important. As we moved on from Melvin Heights, the village elder assured me that Bob would get all ten days of funeral rights.

The trolls from Old Wrotor turned out to be the warriors of the empire. They mostly consisted of the bigger smellier females. When I asked Esha about the smell she laughed. “It’s the rest of you who smell. Trolls smell natural. Many humans mask their natural smells with false odors. It’s a wonder how you tell when your females want to mate.”

“Is that why you always smell?” I asked incredulously. “Because you always want to mate?”

The troll’s face turned pink. “You’ve never smelt me like that. Were you perhaps hoping to?”

Kalli was monitoring me as usual. Melvin, stop egging her on.

Oops, sorry.

I was saved from answering when Esha grew suddenly distant. When she finished whatever she was doing, she looked up and said, “Melvin. Something has come up. Do you mind if we take a detour?”

Esha knew what was at stake with the villages, so I knew she wouldn’t ask me to stop for just anything. I hoped she hadn’t been serious about the whole mating thing. That would have been awkward. She stopped the Mecharriage to explain. “I’ve been in contact with my scouts through group chat. We have made contact with a few of the others who wish to join the empire. However, they cannot enter the dark lands without your help.”

My first thought was that I somehow controlled access to Meltopia but then I remembered the plague. I turned back to her and asked, “How many are we talking about?”

She paused to confirm. “I don’t know exactly. It’s a lot though.”

I sighed, hoping we didn’t lose too many from the next village with the delay. “Okay, let’s do it.”

We traveled fast but it still took over several days to get there. We left our entourage to push the Mecharriage to its maximum speed. The trolls and humans who had been traveling with us on foot headed toward the next village along with Stefanie. I quietly wished to myself that I had another Kalli to send with them for ease of teleportation.

The Mecharriage held a maximum of twelve people, so Esha hand-picked ten of her strongest warriors to accompany us. I had all of them awakened and leveled up that first day.

The second day I spent refining my mana and catching up. I needed to catch up on sleep but it felt like a waste taking a nap if Kalli couldn’t join me, so we coordinated our sleep patterns so we could sleep at the same time.

“I’ve never ditched school in my dreams before,” I commented to Kalli as we ran away from nightmare Tim.

Kalli giggled as she allowed herself to be towed along behind me. “It beats that nightmare you were having back there. Your bully didn’t even pay any attention to me when I gave him a face full of fire.”

I laughed along with her as we ran. It was amazing how I never seemed to run out of breath in my dreams no matter what I was doing. The skill was quite handy for a handful of activities, including running.

Once I was confident that we had escaped, we stopped at a nearby park. Kalli recognized it first. “Hey, Mel. Isn’t this the place where we fought the griffon?”

Fear gripped me as the memory of that day, and Kalli’s wounded body flooded through my thoughts. Noticing my panic, she pulled me into her arms, pressing my head to her chest. “Don’t worry. That isn’t going to happen this time. Besides, this is just a dream, right?”

I wanted to say that nothing could hurt us in our dreams but I was still getting used to navigating them. Pulling away from Kalli, I started toward the exit. “It’s best not to tempt it.”

Kalli didn’t say anything. She just followed me quietly. As we walked, it dawned on me how little I knew about how much we could control our dreams. I squeezed her hand and said, “Hold your breath. I’m going to try to teleport.”

She giggled and said, “I don’t think we need to brea…”

I wrapped mana around the two of us, cutting her off. To my surprise, we arrived at the destination I had pictured in my head. Kalli coughed and spluttered before saying, “I was going to say that we don’t need to breathe, but apparently that doesn’t count for teleportation. Uh, where are we?”

“This is Hawaii,” I announced proudly. “At least this is what I think it looks like. I’ve never actually been here.”

We both looked around at the tropical beach before Kalli looked down and noticed that she was wearing a bikini. She glared at me and said, “Oh come on now. We both know this isn’t my body. I do not look like this.”

I looked her up and down. There was nothing odd about her body. I replied. “That’s how I see you. You’re beautiful.”

The girl’s face matched her hair as she blushed brightly. “I am not. Where did you get this outfit? Did you change it? Wait a second. Can I do that?”

The next thing I knew, Kalli was giggling like mad and I was also wearing a bikini. We spent the next twenty minutes ignoring the Hawaiian beach that I had dreamed up and imagined each other in more and more comical outfits.

When the dream ended, Kalli was dressed as a clown and I had been outfitted in a nun outfit. I wasn’t sure if it was the foul smell or the fact that Esha was shaking me violently that woke me up.

I screamed. “I was having a good dream!”

Esha clamped a hand over my mouth. “Melvin, be silent and look.”

Taking a hint, I peered out the door of the Mecharriage as Kalli checked in on me. What happened, Mel? You woke up.

I replied to my girlfriend while I tried to make heads or tails of what I was looking at.

Esha woke me up. She found an, um, a wall of some sort.

Turning to the troll, I whispered, “What am I looking at?”

She leaned a little too close for comfort and whispered back, “That is the border of the dark lands. Did you know there was a wall? And look closely, it’s guarded.”

Sure enough, there was a gate. There didn’t appear to be any guards on the dark lands side, but there were some turrets higher up that looked like they were put there to deal with anyone who approached.

Esha glanced over at me and asked, “What should we do?”

Walking up to the wall seemed like a bad idea. “Do you think they see us?”

The troll sighed, a bit of slobber coming out of her mouth as she did so. “We aren’t small. Or quiet. I do not doubt that we’ve been seen. However, I stopped short, so barring them entering the dark lands, there is little they can do about us.”

I nodded and replied. “Are your scouts over there?”

She shook her head, pointing to some mountains to the east. “They traveled underground and should be somewhere over there.”

“What are we waiting for then?” I asked, nudging Esha toward the driver’s seat.

She picked her bulky form up and headed back to the front of the Mecharriage while calling over her shoulder. “I thought you should see this. They say there are guard posts like this along the entire border of the dark lands. Armed guards walk along the walls too, keeping people from getting in.”

“And out too,” I added, presuming the worst.

The guards weighed on my mind as we puttered along toward the mountains. When we arrived at the foot of the mountain, Esha sniffed the air, looking closely at the brush in the distance. “It’s over there somewhere. We will have to walk from here.”

We all disembarked from the Mecharriage, the trolls forming a defensive perimeter around me. I materialized my greatsword and asked the nearest troll. “Do I look like I need protecting?”

She gave me a toothy grin and replied, “Are you not the emperor? We are honor-bound to protect you.”

I heaved a sigh and trudged along in silence. Esha walked alongside me within the wall of trolls. “Do not worry. We are headed to meet allies. Not foes. There is nothing to worry about.”

The cave we found made me worry plenty. It was so small that the trolls had to get down on their bellies and slither in. The passage was a little easier for me to manage since I was much smaller but clods of dirt kept falling in my face as I crawled forward into the darkness.

It got a little better the deeper we went. We were able to walk but had to hunch over as the ceiling wasn’t very high. The tall pudgy trolls had it worse than I did but they seemed accustomed to squeezing through the tight spaces.

After walking through the darkness for ten minutes, I asked, “Why are they so deep? I do trust you, Esha, but this seems a little odd.”

She brushed some dirt off of her nose and said, “They cannot come any closer. They begin to feel sick the moment they cross the threshold into the dark lands.

That was a problem. If the plague was an aura surrounding the dark lands as I had suspected, then I could be stuck editing the newcomers for ages depending on how many of them there were.

I was not expecting what I discovered half an hour later. We emerged into a large cavern that was flooded with anxious-looking people.

Esha half dragged me over to the strangest group that I had ever seen. She took charge of the conversation by introducing them to me. “Everybody, I would like to introduce you to the Emperor of the dark lands which he is calling Meltopia. His name is Melvin. Melvin, these are the people that answered our call. They wish to join the empire. First here is Filbe, the gnome. Next is Nolgrit, the dwarf. Then we have Gorlag the orc. Over there is Veug who is an ogre. Then there’s Roundrump. He or she is a goblin. I can never remember if it’s male or female. Last is the human representative, Celestina. These are the races that responded to our offer.”

Looking around the cavern, there must have been over a thousand people of the various races crammed in. I turned to the troll. “What exactly did we offer again?”

She laughed nervously as she replied. “To awaken them, of course. They want a better life like you offered me. Together we can make your empire mighty.”

I gasped, taking in the sheer size of the project Esha had suddenly laid out for me. Since the arrival of the vast group of trolls, I hadn’t been able to keep up with awakening them all. With suddenly thousands more to do, I was worried I might never catch up.

Sensing my frustration, Esha quickly amended, “They know you might not be able to help them all right away. They wish to join and offer their service anyhow, right?”

She looked nervously at the group around us. They all nodded, with the goblin saying, “Roundrump offers her services. Will make you prime boom booms. Just give the word.”

I nodded my appreciation and said, “Rather than making you all immune right away, do you guys mind if I make you a city right here, outside of the influence of the dark lands?”

“You can do this?” Filbe the gnome asked.

I nodded and opened the World Editor to demonstrate.

ENTERING WORLD EDITOR MODE

YOUR GUILD HAS DISCOVERED A NEW VILLAGE [UNNAMED]

DO YOU WISH TO ADD IT TO THE EMPIRE? Y/N

I clicked YES.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO NAME THE VILLAGE? Y/N

YES again. After thinking about it for a few minutes, I decided to honor the empress with a village named after her; [Eshalopolis]. A golden tether tied the new village to my empire and the surge of mana floored me for a moment. Fortunately, Kalli was out of range so she didn’t get drained.

Then I got to the business of creating a rudimentary town under the mountain. I deleted large chunks of rock to make more room for the large number of occupants in the chamber. I then made layers that mimicked different floors to triple the amount of workable space. From there the task was to add buildings of all shapes and sizes for the citizens of the new town to use and live in.

When I came down from World Editor mode, the Dwarf Nolgrit had a few suggestions. “You will want to add some defenses for us just in case we are located down here, my lord. Not all of us are fighters.”

The different races had wildly different ways of defending a settlement. I settled on large crossbows, extra-thick gates, and some cleverly triggered pitfall traps. We unanimously voted no when the goblin Roundrump suggested explosive traps. Nobody wanted to be buried alive after all.

VILLAGE SIZE EXCEEDS 100. UPGRADED TO TOWN

TOWN SIZE EXCEEDS 250. UPGRADED TO CITY

WOULD YOU LIKE TO NAME YOUR CITY? Y/N

I groaned. Naming things was becoming tiresome. Getting lazy and remembering a name I read in a book one time, I called it [City Under the Mountain].

I exited the World Editor to thunderous applause that seemed to come from everywhere.

Pointing at the gnome, I said, “Get together a group of people who want to go into the dark lands to start a supply chain. I will awaken twenty of you and give you immunities. I would do more but there are people with the plague that need saving.”

An hour later, along with Esha and the trolls, I teleported to Eshalopolis.