Life moves hither and thither, and strange things can happen without explanation or warning. I knew this well, as one who’d walked countless paths, and weathered myriad storms. My name is Ellis Alexander Holst, formerly Ellis Dorothea, and for the longest time, I’ve been lost.

I mean that in both the literal and figurative sense. My origins begin at a small branch family of a moderately-sized noble clan. My story beyond that...is something I’m not particularly keen on sharing, and even if I were so inclined, I don’t think I have the vocabulary necessary to do the job right.

Suffice it to say, I was the victim of a very cruel prank, one executed by my troublesome siblings. That was followed by what felt like an even crueler prank by the very universe itself. I was sold off and then sliced, diced, and grated into countless tiny, screaming, pieces. My soul, my core essence, was scattered and then reincarnated, into countless lives, in countless worlds.

It took me what can flatly be described as...several eternities…, to pull myself back together again, and even now, I’m still not convinced that I am entirely whole.

Strangely, and perhaps ironically, after eons of scrambling to reconsolidate my soul, I randomly found myself back in time, back in my original body. I think it was a result of synthesizing all the disparate powers that my various selves had accumulated.

I found myself on the stone, on the small isle, where my younger-self and his caretaker, were fated to meet the sea-spirit that would ultimately kill her and sell him...me...off to the shady group of spirits and gods who’d cut me up, and turn my pieces into tools for their own ends.

After realizing what had happened, I quickly recovered. Since my recovery needed high-end, energy-rich materials, I got to get a little payback, since the bodies and spirits of immortal sea-spirits like the one that sold me off, were an ideal resource for my needs. With the sea-spirit slain and my body brought up to snuff from the broken, congenital impairment-riddled mess that it had been before, I and my caretaker left the island.

After that, things happened very quickly, and in very short succession. I left the server...I left behind Velena-Rana-Perfetta, Velena-Rana for short, the world in which I’d been born.

I used my powers, and the enhanced system-access rights that had passed over to me from my myriad iterations, to create a private server, a fortified private universe all my own. Then once I’d finished setting that up, I moved to another server to set up a new life for myself and my caretaker. I’d eventually go back to Velena-Rana, since there was a surprising amount of useful stuff there, but it’d primarily just be for business purposes

For most of my myriad lives, I’d been a destroyer. A conqueror. A corrupter. A ruiner. A villain. Most of my fragments had been made into living-weapons. I can make excuses and try to explain how very little say I had on the matter due to the enhanced neural reprogramming, and coercive magics, that had been used on my fragments. However, in many cases, all I needed was the right push and I’d find myself doing the most horrific things with little to no restraint.

I didn’t want to continue living that way. After being the key villain in countless horrors, ghost stories, and sci-fi thrillers, I wanted to lead a peaceful slice-of-life existence. Thankfully, I’d picked up a number of skills that could be used in such a way. I was good with medicine, alchemy, blacksmithing, and artifact creation and repair. I knew magic. I knew martial arts. I knew cultivation knowledge. I knew dance and the histories of myriad cultures. I knew music, poetry, and most of the visual arts. I knew tons of things, some of which I still dabbled in, most of which had been put in a box in the back of my mind, marked "DO NOT DISTURB!"

I figured I could some of those talents to non-nefarious ends and open a shop. A little curio, convenience store, and diner that would travel with me throughout the myriad servers. Thus I became the shopkeeper, the shop owner, the businessman.

I built a new life for myself idly touring the worlds that made up Horologia, the third of the Division of Cosmic Artifice's digitized multiverses. My transdimensional shop and my status as a Shopkeeper allowed me to peacefully gather rare resources and meddle with the goings-on of the various worlds with relatively few restraints.

Some days I simply took in the sights. Some days I helped customers. Some days I wandered the wild and untamable wilderness, wastelands, and dungeons that existed behind the stabilized spaces of the worlds. It was...it is...it has been a good life thus far.

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

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have caught that each of the servers of Horologia is a world. How big each server was, varied drastically from server to server. The first factor was the size of the original world that each server was based on. Is it based on an entire universe? Is it based on a galaxy? Is it based on a planet, or just a country? That answer depends on how big the crisis got before the worlds was converted and added to Horologia.

The second factor was the population of the server. The unique nature of our partially-digitized reality meant that servers could be freely expanded or shrunk depending on how many souls were present within them.

All these worlds were governed by a thing that was simply known as the system. Some folk called it the great system. This system was known officially as the Horologium-OS and Interface. Everything in this multiverse was plugged into it. It controlled Horologia’s laws of physics, it controlled the myriad Server’s rules for magic, it controlled the movement and designations of souls within Horologia.

The system was quite important on an individual level as well. It kept track of one’s identity, schedule, calendar, and location. It monitored one’s stats. Keeping track of one’s: Strength, Constitution, Agility, Dexterity, Charisma, Intelligence, Will, Perception, and Luck.

It monitored your abilities and simplified the process of using spells, and powers, that one had already memorized and learned. It monitored the progression and behavior of one’s Fantasy Blight. It kept track of one’s social circle serving as a handy communication tool. It kept track of political affiliations, national identity, criminal activity, and one’s total net worth and financial assets. It also granted each user a certain limited amount of subspace storage utility, in the form of an inventory.

The system was a major part of most of the civilizations of Horologia. It was a wonderfully convenient, and surprisingly enough only minorly Orwellian, piece of reality-altering tech that had saved countless lives, while killing a number of industries. Supplanting the use of most computers and forms of communication tech. Rendering most forms of passive financial management obsolete.

Keeping track of most of the history and achievements of all the sapient peoples of all the myriad worlds. The only thing that the system didn’t do, was help you level up. The DCA(Division of Cosmic Artifice) felt that the Fantasy Blight's highly adaptive, mutagenic nature, made that functionality unnecessary, and overly dangerous. The blight was already super unstable, it didn’t need extra help from the accelerated growth that leveling up would bring.

Which was fine I suppose, the fantasy blight was a blessing as much as it was a curse. Sometimes it was harder to stay normal than it was to become something...different. Also, the law of magical osmosis that shifted power from the dead matter to living organisms, was still in effect.

Finally, the presence of myriad cultivation techniques, and ability augmenting spells and technologies, assured that there were plenty of means for gaining strength in this dangerous world of ours. The DCA made sure of that to compensate for the lack of level-ups and classes.

Of course, all this assumed that one was living in an “Awakened Server”, like my homeworld Veleno-Rana-Perfetta.

Things were a bit different in the “Sleeping Servers”, where the system and the majority of Horologia’s other eccentricities were hidden from the populace for various reasons, called Sleeping Worlds. In sleeping worlds, the natives only received a minimal benefit of Horologia’s protective systems. Though to be fair, those worlds also tended to be a lot more stable and “normal” compared to awakened worlds, thanks to the illusion of mundanity.

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

Snow fell in thick white clumps outside the windows of my shop. I sat at the counter with a book in my lap. I wasn’t one of those people who harp on for hours about the aesthetic pleasure of reading from paper and ink. The book I was holding actually wasn’t the book I was reading. I just kept it because people here gave you odd looks if you stared dully into the air. That was one of the things one needed to account for when one was visiting a Sleeping Server like Kalt-Zahn-Brenner. They weren’t technologically advanced yet to have AR/VR that was meant for daily use, so they had no context for what I could be looking at, besides empty space.

“Da-da-da! Here’s lunch, hon,” said a light, cheerful, voice.

A tall, broadly built, blond woman with floppy, fur-covered, ears like a rabbit or bloodhound, came in from one of our shop's expansive backrooms. Likely the kitchen. She dressed comfortably in jeans, a sweater, fuzzy slippers, and an apron. She held a platter filled with a bowl of savory turkey, and red-grass, potato porridge. This woman was Josephine Jocelyn Holst nee Irvine. My wife.

Did I forget to mention her? I suppose I did. Well, I did say a lot happened in short succession. Getting married was part of that. Jo was the caretaker I mentioned before. She was also my maid. She was also the only person who ever cared one whit for my younger-self back when I lived in the cold and hostile Dorothea household. I only realized I’d loved her after she’d died in that first timeline, and I’d missed her terribly as I suffered through all those timelines as a villain in all those other worlds.

When I suddenly found myself back in time, I didn’t immediately propose. I initially tried to fire Josephine, offering her a very generous severance package to the tune of several billion credits. I might be downplaying it a bit, but I’d come through a fair bit of trauma from all those nightmarish other-lives, and I was going through a dark and edgy, “I don’t deserve to be happy/ I shouldn’t be with other people” phase.

Josephine knocked those silly thoughts out of my head, and forcefully declined my dismissal, and well, one thing led to another and I ended up proposing. She said yes, and now here we are. Considering all that she’d done for me, and considering our mutual affection, I’m determined to make her as happy as a person like me could make her. Even if it kills me...Even this whole bloody world has to end...but that’s neither here nor there.

Anywho, Kalt-Zahn-Brennen was a sleeping world, but it was far from mundane, or boring. Like most worlds of Horologia, “Kalt-Zahn”, was a world that had been brought to Horologia to save it from destruction. Kalt-Zahn was a snowy world that had once been suffering from a permanent winter. A slowly, freezing death, born from some eldritch entity or the other infecting the world and slowly causing it to drift away from its sun.

Since a world was only made into a server of Horologia if it was suffering from the kind of calamity that had infected the very essence of what the world was, Kalt-Zahn now, and would always be, a world of snow. The server’s environmental settings were permanently set to have short springs and falls, basically no summer, and lengthy, often distressingly heavy, hard winters. Changing this would essentially require a complete overhaul of the world itself...Which would render its integration into Horologia moot.

I liked coming to this server because I liked the snow. I liked the rain more, but I also loved the snow. Also, after being added to Horologia and having its forever winter ended, had gradually Kalt-Zahn returned to being what it once was. A fairly modern world with a fairly rich culture and decent media. Which was likely part of why its heavens, Kalt-Zahn's administrative spirit, and gods, decided to leave the world sleeping and unaware of its new semi-digitized state.