This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/ralo_ramone on 2026-03-06 22:31:26+00:00.

The morning sun illuminated my office at the city hall.

‘Enchanting is boring,’ I thought, as I engraved the Force rune into the tenth metal disc using exactly seventy points of the disc’s enchantment threshold. 

Ginz and Lyra’s designs had evolved to the point that my involvement with the crafting process was minimal. My only job was to create different types of small mana batteries and reinforce the pieces that were going to endure the power transference. The rest was assembled by their crafting team.

In fact, I didn’t even know what kind of machines each of my enchantments was going to end up in. All I had was a small piece of paper with Ginz’s daily order and a box with carefully labeled parts. Even with Ginz’s mastery and Lyra’s brains, their prototypes broke down more often than not, and this required me to enchant very specific part variations for them.

All things considered, we had reached a fairly high level of standardization, which was excellent news for our plans to shift into a non-System economy.

Boring was good. Boring meant Byrne hadn’t summoned a Corrupted Ancient on top of the elven capital. Boring meant the System hadn’t collapsed yet. Boring meant we had time to figure things out.

“Did you see Ginz’s new seed drill?” I asked. “Everyone wanted to use one. It almost started a riot among the orcs.”

Loki gave me a tired look and rested his tiny mouse head on his tiny mouse hands, sighing softly. Loki spent most of the time with the kids, but they were usually too overwhelming for the Changeling’s sleeping schedule. In those cases, he found peace in my study.

Bored as I was, I closed my eyes and focused on the Changeling.

Loki made little sense both in the physical and magical planes. To the touch, he felt like any other mouse, but in the next moment, he could turn into a dog, a copy of anyone he had interacted with, and even things from people's memories. Whether he was made of real mouse fur, skin, and bones or something entirely different, I couldn’t tell. 

On the magical plane, he looked like mist, a cloud, and a shadow. It was hard to tell where he started and where he ended. I couldn’t tell if his presence was strong or weak. Sometimes, I couldn’t tell if he was there at all. 

Looking at the Changeling in the magical plane made me feel dizzy. 

Reaching him with my authority felt like touching TV static.

Loki was smart enough to understand language. I was sure he could also speak, but he adamantly refused to come up with his own sentences, no matter how much I insisted. It might be an unimportant detail, but I had noticed that Loki showed affinity with sentences that had at least one mild curse.

Lately, Loki had started copying Izabeka’s appearance to scare the kids in the corridors of Whiteleaf Manor. He seemed to do it merely for the pleasure of messing around with others, which led me to believe he had a developing sense of humor. He spent more time with Shu than any other orphan, so it was safe to assume he also liked certain kinds of people over others.

The biggest clue about Loki’s identity came from the Lich. He had called Loki a glitch, which made the Changeling an unintentional consequence of the System’s coding. And a recurring one. Changelings, although uncommon, were well known among the inhabitants of Ebros.

“Do you remember when you were born?” I asked.

“Damn beast,” Loki replied, turning his back to me.

Loki had a favorite sentence. He didn’t use it with Shu and the orphans, though. In fact, his ‘damn beast’ was almost completely reserved for me.

“Can you turn into one of these?” I asked, holding an enchanted piece of metal in my hand.

“Damn beast.”

Loki could turn into inanimate objects and retain his sentience. He could also mimic the effects of enchanted items… when he wanted.

“You could be way more helpful if you wanted, you know.”

For starters, I could’ve learned runeweaving a lot faster if Loki were even slightly more cooperative. I could count on my fingers the times Loki had agreed to conduct experiments for me. He seemed to accept more often when said experiments ended up hurting me, but I did not have enough proof to confirm or refute that hypothesis.

There was no use in trying to convince Loki. When he refused, he wouldn’t budge.

“Are you there?” I asked in no particular direction. “Do you want to talk?”

The System Avatar, as usual, didn’t respond. For the past two years, I’ve been trying to reestablish communications with him. As much as the situation had changed since I reached Farcrest for the first time, the System still had an important place in the world.

“You don’t have time to groom another Runeweaver. You know that, right?”

Silence.

I enchanted another piece of metal and threw it in the pile.

“If you don’t say anything, I’m going to create a pirate Access Rune and edit the source code to my heart’s content, damned be the consequences,” I continued. “Your real self might have created safeguards against Runeweavers, but I bet he knew very little about authority users.”

The only problem was actually finding the System’s source code. It had to be somewhere in or near Ebros, but so far, even the nodes remained hidden from me. 

Loki looked over his shoulder, but seeing that I wasn’t talking to him, he returned to his slumber.

“You’d do well accepting that the System, by design, isn’t made to be eternal. Your real self didn’t know about the Corruption Cycle, and even without it, your hardware isn’t going to last forever,” I said, reclining in my chair and tapping the varnished wooden table. “It is not a bad way of living your life, you know? Learning, discovering, and passing it to the next generation.”

Nothing.

“Even now, I think we can reach an agreement. Our goals aren’t mutually exclusive, but I will have to downsize you as much as I can. The people of the present deserve a chance as much as those in the future.”

I waited for a whole minute before realizing the Avatar wasn’t going to answer. 

“I’m being serious! I will use a pirate Access Rune! I’m going to scrap you and use every useful bit to help these people!”

Knowing that I wasn’t going to get an answer, I packed my things and put Loki in my chest pocket. The main problem I had with the System—other than the System Avatar lying and manipulating me to create a scenario where my loved ones and most of the people on Ebros were going to die—was that the System wasn’t compatible with natural magic.

The natives of this world didn’t have the same ‘closeness’ to magic as people from Earth. The Fountain didn’t find them ‘interesting’ enough to pay them any attention, according to the Avatar. I still had no idea what made us so interesting. I wasn’t going to pretend I could understand an ancient non-human intelligence. And it was not like I could just ask the Fountain for answers. I had tried.

I sighed. As troubling as the impending death of a colossal magical superpower was, right now securing food for the winter was more important. Whitelead continued to grow, and we had thousands of mouths to feed.

In the anteroom, Milly and Isolde were drinking from steaming cups. The room smelled like coffee. Gnomes were addicted to Red Moss infusion.

“I’m going to deliver these parts to Ginz’s workshop.”

“You could have a purple git delivering those for you, Boss,” Milly said.

Isolde elbowed her, almost making her spill her tea. “The Boss wants an excuse to go see the missus. Don’t give silly ideas if no one asked you,” she said between her teeth.

Milly bowed profusely as she apologized.

Even after years of dealing with gnomes on a daily basis, their social dynamics never failed to surprise me. Saving face and maintaining appearances to avoid conflict seemed to be more important than I initially thought. I wondered how many situations like this I had overlooked over the years.

“Don’t listen to her, Milly. You can give me all the silly ideas you want,” I said, crossing the room without stopping.

“Y-yes, Boss,” she said.

Isolde rolled her eyes as I closed the door behind me. I feared the day I wouldn’t be able to make small talk with people around Whiteleaf. Before leaving, I opened the door once more.

“If you receive news about Chieftain Alton, give me a call to the manor.”

“You got it, Boss.”

Aurelion and Rhysse were still wandering around the city, although they didn’t engage in any suspicious behavior. They hadn’t even come near the manor or the city hall.

I covered myself in a layer of [Mirage] and left the city hall unbothered. I took Bucko from the stables. The horse seemed glad to leave. Not twenty minutes later, I was climbing the high road.

Golden crops of wheat and barley covered the valley. Even without superfertilizers and machinery, mid-level Farmers could turn a handful of seeds of dubious quality into a plentiful harvest. Farming was an underappreciated job that was going to get exponentially harder once the System started to fail. 

I glanced into the Farlands, hoping for the System Avatar to contact me.

Cadria had taught me that the first ones to lose their Classes were going to be low-level people, and Farmers rarely surpassed Lv.25. If I could strike a deal with the System Avatar to give priority to certain Classes instead of certain levels in case of a partial shutdown, I’d be a lot more at ease.

The moment that Farmers, Alch...

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