With a violent gasp, Armela lurched into a sitting position—hands flying up to her throat.

  Unfortunately, because of the change, she overshot her strength and speed to where she crushed her neck, managing to 'clothesline' herself hard enough that she was sent cartwheeling backwards through the wall of the tent.

  Two big ruts were left in the dirt floor where her heels had dug in and served as a launching point for her momentum.

  I blinked and then rose to follow her through the hole. Luckily, she hadn't hit one of the support beams or we'd need to clean out a new tent.

  She was sprawled out on the ground roughly ten metres into the darkness. She lay still on the ground, still gasping.

  "Armela! You don't need to breathe! You don't have lungs anymore! Just hold your breath for now!"

  I called out to her as I strode over, trying to prevent her from panicking any more than she currently was.

  She attempted to get an arm under herself, but as soon as she went to push herself up, she was sent flipping into the air.

  I tracked her as she whirled away, 30... 40... 50 metres and climbing.

  Good grief.

  I launched myself up after her. Odds were good she was having trouble adjusting her thoughts and power output to her new 'muscles'. This would require some coaxing.

  I lashed out with a whip and pulled her into my arms.

  Catching her eye, I reassured her.

  "Don't move yet; just focus on holding your breath for now. I'll walk you through this little by little, alright?"

  Her cheeks were comically puffed out with her held breath, but she nodded, the motion violently oscillating her skull back and forth. Her panic lessened, but this would still be a fairly distressing experience.

  "You're going to be just fine; I've got you."

  Her hands dug into my biceps, threatening to separate my arms completely.

  I hardened my skin and halted the crush she was inflicting. We touched down near the cooking fire, and I quickly lit it. Then, I set her down gently on her stump and knelt in front of her.

  Her eyes were darting wildly in all directions; the stimulation of the world was clearly overwhelming her. She was probably stuck in some insane spiral of processing everything all at once.

  "Close your eyes, Armela."

  It took a second for my words to filter through the mess, but she shut them.

  "Good, that's it; alright, I want you to think about not smelling anything. In your mind, just simply think, 'I can't smell,' alright? Your body will handle the rest."

  She nodded, this time smashing her chin into her sternum hard enough to implode a regular person's ribcage.

  "You're doing great. Now, I want you to think that you can't feel anything. Your skin is completely numb."

  The manic, vibrating panic she was experiencing reduced by degrees as each of her senses went offline. Her brain had not been designed or adapted to processing the number of stimuli she was being exposed to. Let alone the speed at which those stimuli were trying to be interpreted by her mind.

  My core was so powerful that sorting, gating, and excluding stimuli was simpler than breathing for me. She had only the brain she'd been born with, even if it had been digitised.

  "You're doing fantastic, Armela. I want you to go through and keep thinking you can't feel things that are coming into your mind, alright? Just keep working through them until all that remains is sound. Can you do that?"

  She shuddered and nodded. Her face was pinched in brutal concentration. It took several minutes, but slowly she relaxed, still holding her breath.

  Eventually she softly nodded her head, showing me she had finally shut down everything she was experiencing. I spoke again.

  "Good, you did so well getting that under control. I'm proud of you. But the work isn't done yet; your mind is racing faster than you ever thought possible. Thoughts whipping through your head like flashes of light flitting across a black void."

  I spoke slowly and calmly, emphasizing a sense of serenity.

  "I want you to focus on those flashes, to think of yourself catching one. Snatching it out of the air like you would a glowing fly. I want you to keep practising that until you feel like they are once again moving at a regular pace, alright? It might take you a bit, but we've got nothing but time here now. Just keep going. I know you can do it."

  She nodded once more and then fell into deep meditative contemplation. There really wasn't any way to tell how long she would be lost in her mind like that. It could take her seconds, could take her weeks.

  I had a loose connection to her mind now that she was operating off of my power, though monitoring her signals and measuring thought patterns couldn't let me read her mind, it did let me know if she was conscious.

  At the moment she was in something more closely related to a fugue state, deeply wrapped up in her own mind. Once she made a breakthrough, I would know and return to her.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  For now, with her occupied, and the next expected caravan a few days away, I hopped into the mine to help speed up the progress significantly. I wanted the iron ore in order to begin production of other Digbots. I also wanted to arrange a basic refinery in order to process the ore automatically.

  Pure elements would be easier to feed into the fabrication machines than raw ore. It wasn't impossible to accomplish, but it would be incredibly wasteful to scale the operation.

  One of the basic tenets of the supply chain is a specialised focus at each step of the procedure. Production of goods always seemed to fit nicely with the square-cube law.

  The more you tried to expand the work you wanted to do, the more the volume of work expanded exponentially. Limiting each stage to the specific role it played would eliminate a lot of unnecessary bloat. Miners mined, smelters smelted, and fabricators fabricated. Simple.

  It also meant that there would be fewer opportunities for bottlenecks in the production cycle if any of the machines went down for whatever reason. If the fabricators went down, ore would still be mined and refined; if the miners went down, items would still be fabricated.

  Drones would handle storage and logistics. Sorting, storing, and transporting goods between locations would be handled autonomously through a request/fulfilment system. When a fabricator reached a certain threshold of resource depletion, a request would be sent for more.

  An available drone would accept the request and deliver the requested elements via rift. Somewhere down the line, this would be changed into a direct feed system where a middleman wasn't necessary to ferry items to the fabricator, but for now I'd work with what I had.

  Maintenance of the machines would be handled by me initially. I didn't anticipate frequent breakdowns, but the digbots would likely suffer damage and wear as they chewed up the planet.

  Hopefully, once I'd united the people of this world under the banner of my God, they would be the ones willing to take up the duty of maintaining and replacing the machines. Perhaps even inventing new and more efficient versions...

  Those were a way off yet; for now I just needed to expand. And that started with my fabricator. The blueprint was nearing the final stages of its completion, but there was enough developed for me to get a start on it.

  The basic principle of the machine would be for it to select and then feed raw stock to the printhead in order for it to manipulate the material into whatever needed to be made.

  The fabricator would have the entire database of material makeup—things like chemical compositions, element matrices, and molecular interactions would all be fed into it.

  So when someone was rewarded with an apple, for example, all the required carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, potassium, sodium, phosphorus, etc., were provided to the machine in order for the Printhead to manipulate it.

  The storage tanks would all be isolated and filled via rift as the refinery churned out materials. Anytime a tank was filled, a signal would be produced either to create more storage or halt production if satisfactory amounts of the material were available.

  I wouldn't need an excess of hundreds of billions of tonnes of xenon, for example.

  The tanks themselves would need to be as chemically inert as possible in order to avoid unwanted inclusions forming in the resources. For the time being, a small tank made of stainless steel would serve my purposes for storing the pure iron.

  I would flood the tank with argon to prevent oxidation of the iron, saving myself the added step of removing it later down the production cycle.

  With the blueprint finishing the last of the material calculations, I cleared a short hallway branching off of the main mineshaft. Roughly 2x2x2 metres, it would lead into a room where the mined material would be gathered. I chose a space roughly 20 metres down the shaft and carved away at the wall.

  Because of the volcanic activity, most of the surrounding ground was basaltic stone, which reduced the need for support structures quite a bit.

  I ordered the spider miner to vacate the shaft and head over to a new dig location I'd tagged along the side of the hill. As it trundled out, I finished with the hall and then began on the room itself.

  To fit all my equipment, I would need a space roughly 20x20x15 metres. As I tore away the stone, my spindly whips flung the debris out into the shaft where my drones were carrying it away.

  At the rate I was extracting material, there was no way for the drones to keep up, so I opted to tear open a rift directly over the dump site and simply flung material through it instead. The drones kept clearing the shaft and made headway once I stopped adding to the pile.

  I could have ejected more drones to compensate, but I'd already noticed a 20% decrease in my body mass between the ones I'd already created and my night with Armela. As it was, I already stood 13 centimetres shorter than I had when I arrived here.

  I would need to gather material to restore my body eventually. Losing mass couldn't truly hurt me, but it restricted my capabilities slightly, and that made me uncomfortable.

  The room continued to grow, and after about an hour I had neatly carved out a space for my machines to live and work. First, I would build a hopper, into which the ore would be dumped.

  This hopper would feed into an ore crusher. Directly below the crusher would be a sizing screen to separate pieces too big to move on. The larger pieces would be carried back to the hopper and crushed again.

  After clearing the sizing screen and proceeding on to the next stage, the crushed rocks would then be fed into a milling machine to grind them down into a fine grit. This would then feed into yet another sizing screen to separate out the coarser grit which, like before, would be sent through to be ground again.

  If the material cleared the sizing screen at that point, it would be fed into an array of spiral separators to further concentrate the iron, leaving the lighter material to be flushed back into the process while the iron became trapped.

  As the spirals were filled, a drone would systematically divert the flow of material from them, empty them, and then reinsert the spiral to continue separating iron.

  The material being flushed from the spirals might still have extremely fine ferrous particles in it, so I would have it run under an extremely powerful, rotating electromagnetic drum.

  Each rotation would lift out the material missed by the spirals, and at 270 degrees of rotation, the drum would demagnetize briefly for a small brush to knock the iron dust into the containment hopper with the iron from the spirals.

  These filings would still contain trace amounts of carbon, silicon, manganese and phosphorus, but in small enough quantities that I wasn't terribly concerned about them.

  I could always remove them through the smelting phase if I needed to make steel; otherwise, the printheads of my fabricator would simply rip their atoms from the iron one by one.

  I moved to the material dump site above ground and perched atop the mound. It was time to piece together all the parts needed to make this mini-refinery a reality. I sunk myself into my thoughts and frayed my body into billions upon billions of strands, flicking them at the pile to collect the resources needed.

  Manipulating the elements, I printed part after part after part. My drones carted them away from where I sat as I continued to chew through the small hill of raw stone and ore.

  Hours passed, day broke, and Seta dropped in to express her overwhelming joy of having mastered the English alphabet and how mathematics was slowly becoming one of her favourite things to play with. The numbers seemed to sing to her in all the right ways.

  She'd absolutely crushed addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division and was just getting a start on whole numbers and fractions.

  She asked me when I'd set the completion time for the daily goals, and I realised that I'd just defaulted it to midnight every day.

  "Vita... it's going to be impossible for me to choose a reward if I'm fast asleep! What if I don't choose a reward? Does the choice go away? Will it be selected for me? What if it selects something for me while I'm asleep and I get a sword? Will it just fall onto my head and kill me?"

  If I could get headaches, I was sure I would have had a terminal one.

  "What happens if I don't select a reward? Will they pile up until I can pick hundreds of rewards all at once? Or maybe the longer I leave it, the better the reward gets?"

  So this was what game programmers needed to put up with. Releasing an early beta version of a game to a crowd like Seta must have been hell.

  I silently paid my respects to them as I listened to her feedback.

  I would adjust the reward period to noon everyday instead and, as Seta suggested, make it so that if a reward hadn't been selected that day, the reward pool would be re-shuffled and the higher tiers became slightly more heavily weighted.

  Each day the reward went un-selected, its percentage chance would go up by .01 percent. After 100 days of saving, you would have a 1 percent better chance of getting an epic item, for example.

  I once again pondered what the world would be like if every second person had access to laser rifles and tanks. The odds were low, but if there were several hundred million people on this planet, the statistics would soon ensure at least a few of them had a rocket launcher or something equally devastating.

  I tacked an additional zero onto the chance multiplier for good measure. They would really need to work for that rocket launcher.

  Seta thanked me and then disappeared back into her bubble of study. Apparently, life in the village had been slowly returning to normal, the drones having been locked within the village leader's house for safekeeping until a priest from the church of Rel arrived to cleanse them.

  Word had been sent the same day the drones were discovered, and the messenger had just returned to inform them of the timeline.

  It appeared the priest would arrive either late tomorrow or in the morning of the day after. I would let the church fiddle with my drones and see what they could inflict upon them.

  It would be an excellent opportunity to see how members of the church fought with forces they did not understand, and what kind of power could be brought to bear against them.

  If anything, my little stunt with the drones had actually strengthened the village's worship of Rel. That hadn't been entirely unexpected, but it certainly hadn't pleased me either. I supposed that ultimately some infamy was also useful in spreading the name of my God. Better to have your name whispered than not uttered at all.

  Soon enough even the church would have an account of my activities and, if Rel really existed, I might feel yet another set of eyes on the back of my head. My mind flashed an image of the crystals sitting outside Armela's tent in a small leather satchel.

  They felt... gross... somehow.