Like before, the absorption process showed Dan how the shards had reached the shattered space. This time around, they had fallen from the sky, much like the one in the lake. Then, more than likely, by the Chaos Mother’s hand, they had landed near their respective targets. One had fallen near the trolls, one near the ogres, with the last near the giant. However, unlike the frogs, even the youngest ogres or trolls were still able to easily resist the shard. This then became even harder when the D rankers of each species came to possess the shards.

  For the trolls, the shamans were trying to harness the power of the shard. Meanwhile, though the ogres were able to resist complete mind domination, they were still a bunch of dumb brutes. As such, it wasn’t hard for the shard containing Dan’s hunger for domination to push the ogres to conquer the rest of the land. So, the trolls suddenly found themselves in a war against the ogres.

  Once the war started, things quickly escalated, and both sides found themselves rather evenly matched. This was mainly because, eventually, the ogres were consumed by Dan’s influence, and one ended up merging with the shard. This gave the ogres someone who could suddenly use telekinetic and telepathy magic, which evened the field.

  Meanwhile, the giant had stumbled onto its own shard and easily resisted its mental attacks, being at Mid D Rank at that point, and due to its ancestry, it was stronger than most monsters at the same rank. The giant wasn’t very intelligent, but its force of will allowed it to easily resist any mental attacks from the shard. Eventually, though, the shard the giant held began using other tactics to tempt the giant. Offering it power, mates, and all the food it could want. The giant, not being the smartest, didn’t realize it was being manipulated, and it eventually gave in, choosing to partner with the shard.

  That's when things got interesting. Dan, or at least the part inside the giant’s shard, knew the ogres would surrender faster out of the two factions in the hills. The ogres respected or, more likely, they feared strength. So, all it took was for the giant to beat their empowered ogre before they submitted. After the union, the shards continued their conquest and moved to bring the trolls under their control.

  The trolls, finding themselves on the battle's losing side, finally started relying on their shard. This shard also had enough intelligence to help them, and they made pacts of sorts. However, that added to their detriment.

  For one, it showed the giant and its shard that there was another shard in the hills, making them push harder. It also gave the troll’s shard direct access to the troll's souls, eventually leading to the fight between them.

  Two factions arose within the trolls. One wanted to surrender to the giant, while the other, being controlled by the shard, didn’t. The shard had sensed the giants shard and did not wish to join it. Sadly, that infighting brought their defeat. Eventually, the side that wanted to surrender did so, leaving the minority controlled by the shard alone. With its newly gained minions, the giant quickly found the fleeing troll shard and absorbed it.

  By that point in the fighting, many of the giants and ogres had died, explaining their small numbers on the battlefield. Additionally, when the last shard was absorbed, they combined and reached D rank. This then allowed the shards to put up a decent fight against the giant’s mind. Unluckily for them, they found themselves evenly matched. This was what bought Dan time to build up his monsters. The giant had found itself unable to act and wandered around the hills area while in conflict with the shard.

  Then came Dan. Seeing the army of monsters approaching it, the fighting between the giant and the shard stopped. When Dan decimated its army, the two entities finally realized there was a bigger fish, and that was when they finally joined hands in battle. Luckily for Dan, the shard hadn’t been able to absorb mana since it was using its full powers to try to take over the giant.

  Now, Dan wasn’t sure why it hadn’t simply taken over the trolls and ogres to overwhelm the giant, but he wasn’t going to question it. Either way, that story was history, with the rest playing out on the battlefield. With the end of that story came the beginning of a new one as Dan finally got to the memories of his old life.

  Annoyingly, it started with a rush of emotions as a need to dominate minds and worlds hit him like a tsunami. It was as if all of his need to be in control had been put into one shard and then dumped on him, which it likely had been.

  Following the dump of emotions were proper memories. He saw his preparations to leave the rocky planet that he had called home. The preparations were mainly him taking care of more mortal matters. He left behind instructions via his shadow persona that he was going out into space to see if he could find more information about the invasion. Then, he had his personal goods, which included the branch of the guild he oversaw, the research branch he had created, and all the money he had made inherited by the original cultists. Once all of that had been accomplished, Dan left the planet.

  He traveled in the emptiness of space, which was no longer as empty. He now always felt mana around him as he followed the river in one of the two directions. Dan wasn’t sure where each one led, but he randomly chose to follow one.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  At first, traveling through the river was a rather lonely affair. However, eventually, he began running into a few more aberrations and odd elemental-like beings made of nebula and specks of light. The elementals were happy to ignore him and instead delved deeper into the river of mana. He had been tempted to follow them further in but was wary of finding stronger beings deep within. Additionally, the further he got from the planet, the more he ran into aberrations and elemental entities.

  When he said more, he meant going from one or two every few months to every few weeks. He knew the time because he had bought the equivalent of a watch for just that purpose.

  As far as combat went, well, most aberrations were D rank, with very few being weaker than that. And all of them became his meals or escaped deeper into the river of mana.

  That became routine for five long years. During this, he slowly advanced in power and became a High-C Rank entity. The power-up brought him some joy, even if he knew it would only get harder from there. Dan felt and knew that every time he increased in power, the lower-ranked crystals would give him less energy. In fact, once he reached High C Rank, Low D Rank aberrations did nothing for him, and he began to let them go.

  It was also when he reached High C Rank that his newfound confidence began pushing him to go deeper into the river of mana. Even so, he held off and was glad he had done so.

  After about another year of travel, Dan encountered the oddest thing. He saw a ship—a full-on sailing ship from Earthen medieval times just traveling through space. The sails were fully blown as if strong winds were pushing it forward. The problem was that there was no wind in space.

  Sadly, the wonder of the moment didn’t last long because the damn thing began shooting blasts of force at him. The blasts were coming from large cannon-like contraptions on the ship's deck.

  Dan would have been worried, but there were two reasons he hadn’t been. One, the ship was still too far away, so the blasts dissipated into puffs that barely scratched at his shield. Two and more importantly, the blasts were at High D Rank at most. Honestly, it made Dan question why a bunch of D rankers were traversing the Astral, but considering they had fired first, he wasn’t going to let things go. It’s not like he was worried about running out of mana.

  That was one of the best things about the river. The thing was exposed to the Astral, letting Dan transmute more than enough Chaos Mana, but as if that wasn’t enough, there was plenty of regular mana all about. The river seemed to be an endless supply of the stuff. So, Dan engaged the ship, fully knowing he would win.

  Of course, it went without saying that Dan quickly broke through the D rank shield protecting the ship. The shield was decent enough but wasn’t very good at deflecting power from strong one-time attacks. So, he made a hole, and before it could regenerate itself, Dan made it inside. As for the ship's defenses, well, even if the ship also had unlimited mana, it didn’t have much projectile speed in its force blasts, and Dan had easily dodged them.

  The ship was full of humans, which surprised Dan since he also expected some other species. Now, they weren’t Earth humans, noticeably because of the odd language they spoke, which Dan could understand thanks to the blessings the World Crystal of Earth had given him.

  The speech power was useful, and using it, he found out that the humans did not plan to give up the fight in the least. Dan, tired of being lonely and wanting to learn what a bunch of humans were doing in space, quickly subjugated their brains. All of them were Low D Rank, with a few at Mid and the Captain at High, making it relatively easy to bring them under control.

  Dan did feel a bit bad at first, making them think he was a friend, but once the information and comradery started flowing, he quickly got over it. It also helped that they attacked him first. Either way, Dan learned a few things. First, they had come from a world that was relatively advanced in magic. The world was called Otel and was rich enough to allow even D rankers to afford simple flying Astral vessels. The problem was that they didn’t know where the world was. The ship had come from deeper in the river of mana which Dan quickly learned was called the Astral River due to the fact it traveled all throughout the Astral, connecting all planets that contained World Crystals.

  That was a vital piece of information.

  More importantly, there was actual stuff inside the river—different dimensions, at least according to the space sailors. These sailors had apparently wanted to loot these dimensions in their overconfidence, so they took a flying ship that, with a few modifications, could also travel in space, and so they had headed into these dimensions. They, of course, had quickly learned how bad an idea that had been and fled out of them towards the outer part of the river. Surprisingly or really unsurprisingly, the space sailors hadn’t bothered to learn how reality worked and were rather surprised when they didn’t find themselves right outside of their planet just now.

  Dan didn’t care about their sob story. What he did care about was visiting the Realms. That's right; apparently, the Astral River held all of the Realms within. However, to Dan’s incredible annoyance, just as the ship and Dan’s new crew headed deeper into the river, things started to go dark, signifying the end of the absorbed memories.

  “This bitch.” Dan muttered as he came out of his memory dosage. He knew the Chaos Mother had control over these memories and was feeding them to him. So, there was no way all of the coincidences were adding up.

  First, a shard with lots of emotions belonging to dominating and conquering, and now this cliffhanger on a clearly amazing adventure.

  She wanted Dan to hurry up with his dungeon building and continue exploring the dungeon she had made for him to conquer. Well, two could play that game, and he was going to take his sweet time building his dungeon—starting now.