Chapter 583: Chapter 583 - System Creation
As days passed, Ironhaven became properly integrated into Lootwell’s growing system.
The North also entered the communication network between the West and Middle Continent.
At first, the exchanges were cautious.
The West Continent people greeted the North with jokes, challenges, warnings about certain facilities, and at least three invitations to group chats that should probably have been supervised by adults.
The Middle Continent people greeted the North with polished introductions, alliance offers, ranking discussions, facility comparisons, and questions about whether Ironhaven’s Echo Crucible records would merge with the existing scoreboards.
The North answered in its own way.
Directly.
[Your jokes are strange.]
[Your introductions are too long.]
[Your records are beatable.]
That last message caused three separate competitive incidents within the hour.
Lucien read the reports and laughed.
...
Little by little, something changed.
People began talking.
Not as factions meeting across negotiation tables.
Just people.
Before the destruction of the intercontinental teleportation arrays, people could travel between continents freely. Yet for many, travel had only deepened rivalry. They saw foreign lands through faction filters, sect pride, trade disputes, inherited grudges, and regional arrogance.
They had been close enough to compete.
Not close enough to understand.
Now, through communication devices, group channels, and shared scoreboards, people were learning each other differently.
As Lucien watched the reports pile up, his satisfaction deepened.
•••
Right now, Lucien was in the main territory.
Specifically, he was in the Origin Core Shrine.
He touched the origin core fragment that has become larger than before.
One hundred and forty-one fragments.
Far more than Lucien had possessed when he first began experimenting with communication authority.
On the stone before him lay several experimental arrays.
He looked at the central design.
Then smiled.
"System Creation."
The words sounded absurd when spoken aloud.
So absurd that Lucien almost laughed.
But the concept had been in his mind for a long time.
The Primordial Slime had granted systems to the Liberators. Those systems had changed their lives including Lucien.
Lucien did not intend to recreate the systems of the true Liberators.
That would be too much. And perhaps too arrogant.
He did not need to give ordinary people world-breaking cheats.
He needed something smaller.
A growth assistant.
Something that could transform life without turning every citizen into a protagonist.
Lucien leaned back and exhaled.
The first phase alone had taken an incredible amount of time.
He had needed to understand what a system actually did.
Structurally.
A system was not merely a game-like panel.
It was an interface between authority and individual experience.
If built poorly, it could become a leash.
If built carelessly, it could become a vulnerability.
If built greedily, it could make people dependent instead of capable.
That was unacceptable.
Lucien wanted the opposite.
He wanted a system that helped people stand better on their own feet.
The first prototype would not grant skills from nothing.
Instead, it would record effort accurately.
Small things.Practical things. Life-changing things.
Lucien tapped the table lightly.
"This will change everything."
He knew it would.
That was why he had not told anyone yet.
The moment he revealed it, the system would stop being merely an experiment. It would become expectation.
Lucien needed to perfect the foundation first.
He needed safety, limits, privacy, and emergency override rules.
It will take time but Lucien was determined to finish it.
•••
The Reincarnation Disc remained sealed inside Lucien’s Divine Energy Core. Lucien could feel it faintly, like a wheel behind a locked door.
He had decided not to open it yet. Not until he truly needed it.
Meanwhile, the former owner of the disc, Deadman, was settling into Grand Confluence well.
His floating small world remained above the branch, wrapped in its protective barrier. Over time, people stopped staring at it with open mouths and began treating it as part of Grand Confluence’s skyline.
Deadman’s people entered rotations gradually.
Some worked in the markets. Some joined record offices. Some entered the academy. Some remained in their small world, preferring familiar fields, familiar houses, and familiar mornings while they slowly adjusted to the absurdity of living above one of the most important branches in the Big World.
Deadman himself moved through Grand Confluence with a quietness that did not quite resemble peace yet.
But it was closer.
Lucien eventually learned why Deadman had chosen to keep his small world traveling instead of settling permanently in one hidden location.
It was because of the lives he had lived.
Deadman had realized something about his strange reincarnations.
They were not from the present.
They were from the past.
Every life he had been thrown into had already happened somewhere in history. A different era. A different place. A different body whose life had once existed and ended.
His cheat had not merely sent him into random lives.
It had made him live records.
Past lives that had belonged to real people.
That made the burden worse in some ways.
Better in others.
Deadman had let his small world drift through the continents because he wanted to see what had become of those places.
Some places were gone.
That hurt him.
Some had changed beyond recognition.
That hurt differently.
Some still existed.
That hurt most of all.
Once, he found descendants of a family he had raised in one of his lives.
They did not know him.
Of course they did not.
Deadman did not introduce himself.
How could he?
What would he say?
Hello, I was your great-grandfather in a life that ended before this body woke again.
So he helped quietly.
No one knew about the Good Samaritan.
Deadman preferred it that way.
But Lucien knew now.
And once he knew, he understood Deadman better.
The man was not only exhausted by loss.
He was surrounded by echoes of lives that continued without him.
Some descendants lived well.
Some struggled.
Some bloodlines vanished.
Some homes became ruins.
Some names survived only as carvings weathered into stone.
Deadman had spent years wandering through the aftermath of his own remembered deaths.
No wonder he was tired.
•••
Lucien sighed when he heard the full story.
Currently, he was watching the man work.
And he was ridiculous.
He truly had not lied when he called himself jack of all trades, master of all.
Lucien saw him repair an advanced formation array while explaining fish stew.
He saw him correct a sword disciple’s footwork using principles from dancing.
He saw him diagnose a rare mana vessel strain by asking about bread.
At one point, a young disciple asked what weapon Deadman specialized in.
Deadman thought for a long time.
Then said, "Regret."
The class went silent.
Then Seran, who was assisting, said, "His second-best weapon is a frying pan."
Deadman nodded.
"More practical than most swords."
The disciples wrote that down.
Lucien, watching from the side, slowly covered his face.
Seran looked very pleased.
Deadman had become a teacher in the Liberator Academy.
Not officially at first.
He simply answered questions.
Then he corrected mistakes.
Then he taught one class.
Then five.
Then an entire schedule formed around him before he realized he had been recruited.
Lucien asked Elias how that happened.
Elias said, "The academy staff voted."
"Was Deadman informed?"
"Afterward."
Lucien nodded.
"That sounds like Seran’s style."
Deadman complained for ten minutes.
Then continued teaching.
His classes became popular quickly with most factions.
Not because he was gentle.
He was not.
He had lived too many lives to have patience for decorative stupidity.
But he was clear.
He could teach a noble disciple and a former street thief in the same room because he had been both, or something close enough that the difference stopped mattering.
He understood fear because he had died afraid.
He understood arrogance because he had died arrogant.
He understood poverty because he had starved.
He understood leadership because people had once followed him into battles he still dreamed about.
He understood grief because grief had followed him home across lives.
That made him a terrifyingly good teacher.
Seran assisted him often.
Or interfered.
The boundary was unclear.
The students loved them.
The academy administrators suffered.
Lucien watched from a balcony one afternoon as Deadman demonstrated three ways to disarm an opponent using a walking stick, a kitchen knife, and a folded towel.
A disciple raised his hand.
"Teacher, which one is best?"
Deadman said, "The one you have when someone tries to kill you."
Seran nodded solemnly.
"Wisdom."
Deadman looked at him.
"You once tried to parry a spear with a chair."
"It worked."
"The chair died."
"It died honorably."
The students laughed.
Lucien leaned against the balcony railing and smiled.
For a moment, everything looked ordinary.
’If only the world could remain like this.’
Lucien’s smile softened.
