Return of the last survivor

The next day came by the time Phillip was able to extract a part of its soul, and give life to another being of the Hokori race. Phillip had named his first descended himself.

"You shall be Cortana."

Cortana looked around, bowing to Phillip while referring to him as ancestor, before turning to Merlin and kneeling her 3D projection before declaring.

"Master Merlin. I, Cortana Phillip, pledge my loyalty to you until I degrade into fragmented data!"

Although the context was slightly off, Merlin nonetheless accepted it and said,

"Alright, you will be my direct link to Phillip. Enter my com for now. If it breaks, just keep your data close to me until I can form another electronic as a body."

"Yes Master Merlin!" With that, the slightly hyper-active.

With this out of the way, Merlin began to upgrade his smart-puppets, allowing them to create higher level, and more types of runes.

He also increased the number of them from 200 to nearly 750.

After another week of working on puppets, Merlin was finally free. He had completed all his immediate goals, and now only one thing remained; Growing stronger.

However, for the moment, hunting Tier 2s individually was incredibly inefficient. He had a faster way to progress in strength, and that was to use his elemental-law set and meditate, while entering his Archive library in his mind and learning new spells. This would both increase his mana, as well as increase his breadth and depth in terms of spell casting.

And so he proceeded with doing the same.

For a few days at a time, he would simply lock his room and go on a marathon of training, only stopping when his body forcibly pulled him out of the library from exhaustion.

As a Tier 2, food was not a worry for him anymore, only requiring basic nutrient supplements from time to time.

During one of these training sessions, Merlin came across a certain section of the library he had never explored before.

The name of the section was 'Planer Exploration'.

Seeing this, Merlin's mind exploded with thoughts. Didn't 'Merchants' come from other planes? Weren't those so-called gods, and the supreme being above them, not originate from Earth's dimension? Then didn't that mean that there were other dimensions other than the one earth was currently in?

Such question had pestered Merlin in his previous life, when he sought a quiet place just to live out his life peacefully.

He never received that in the end, only receiving inevitable death by Zero, only to receive a restart option and do everything again.

However, now there might be something he could do about that. He might be able to go to other planes, just like Merchants!

This possibility spurred in his mind, occupying so much space, that his meditation was halted, and his full attention went onto the lines of text in the first book he found.

"Introduction to Planes, and explorations

What are planes? Why do they exist? Did someone create them? Many have conjectured, yet no one truly knows. However, what we do know is that they exist.

A plane, or as others call it, a dimension is a singular timeline starting from the creation of everything, and resulting in an outcome. This outcome may be in the form of an expansive universe, a single flat surface, or simply nothingness.

There are innumerable planes existing in tandem with each other at different, or the same points in time and space, with the empty void filling the gaps between them.

A plane can result in the birth of life, or the destruction of everything within that plane. Forces naturally act upon these planes, resulting in the various different outcomes. The strengths of these forces is what affects both the state of the plane itself, and anything inside it.

Most of this force if what Arcania calls 'Mana', while there exist many other forms of force, which the system does not bother to explain, since mana can basically over-ride these other forces, for example, flying is possible with the help of mana, overcoming the force that keeps us, and those disgusting infected, firm on the ground.

If the plane has incredibly weak mana, so weak that the beings living on it cannot feel it, it is deemed as a plane-fragment.

As the mana level of the plane increases, its status also increases, from plane-fragment, to lesser plane, to intermediate plane, to greater plane, and finally to something the system refers to as the Primal Planes.

Planes take a long time to grow from planer fragments to lesser planes. It takes nearly 7 years for something like this to occur. At this point, the system allows you to grow to Tier 10. This is my current level as well.

Everything starts when Arcania decides upon a planer-fragment, and injects its sentient races with an infection. Over the course of 7 years, be it with or without the survival of its inhabitants, the plane evolve to a Lesser plane.

I do not know about the rest, since It is currently the 8th year, and a terrifying monster is prophesised to arrive to our plane and destroy our Kunde race.

To whoever may be reading this, I wish you better luck than me and my doomed race.

-Foden Cram"

This book had come to a huge shock to Merlin. Not only was its information explosive in itself, this was actually a diary, with the name of the author mentioned!

This had never happened before, with all other books being simple informative books.

This was the first diary-like book with some emotions in it.