There was a competition to win, but analysing everything was a part of that process. It wasn’t something to put on the back-burner. Absentmindedly, Tom glanced around the well-lit isolation room. The aftereffects of pushing fate too far and upsetting the GODs was very visible. Blood was splattered around the pedestal that contained the ritual status screen, and even more was pooling on the wooden floorboards.

  With a sigh, he grabbed a face cloth and wetted it down as his mind was racing. Then he knelt down with a frown and began the process of sponging the mess up. The familiar actions felt comforting as he tried to understand the implications of the message and the likelihood of deeper clues which had been hidden in the title.

  Logically, the blood removal was probably not required, as powerful cleaning spells would be triggered when he went to leave the room. This was, after all, one of the special isolation rooms, and so everything was stronger here, especially the functions that were there to support anonymity.

  It still wasn’t worth taking a risk, and he figured the more he did manually, the less chance of something going wrong would be. He wasn’t arrogant enough to assume he knew everything that those terribly powerful assassins could do. Magic worked, at least usually, but a bit of manual labour wasn’t going to hurt him either.

  As his hands methodically wiped the floor and then rinsed the red cloth in the sink, he pondered everything he had just read.

  “How screwed are you, Tom?” he asked the empty room. A permanent punishment from the GODs was a problem, and it was going to impact him. The restrictions had teeth, and would hurt. This was not the case of them taking functionality that he didn’t use, nor even of something that was utilised rarely. This was a core piece of his build-kind of stuff. He could recall numerous examples where he had used fate in a manner that was now barred to him.

  Yet, he felt a feeling of Zen.

  He licked his lips and tried to understand why he wasn’t upset, and it was more than just about the ideas the notes attached to the title had provided.

  Any community prayers, given how nebulous they were, would by definition be as good as throwing fate away. He would never have to support that kind of effort again.

  He realised that he was grinning. That, he thought to himself with more than a small amount of glee, was not a bad outcome. While he had always understood the benefit, community prayers and the unspoken obligation to contribute that went with them had always chafed. He was too used to isolation because of those forty years in the tutorial. That meant it was difficult for him to be happy with joint fate creation, especially as he had always known how inefficient the process was. With multiple people focusing on an outcome, even if their overall aims were aligned, there were going to be differences in their images, which would cause a part of the fate to fight against itself. The updated human trait reduced the wastage slightly, but it was still there.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Now, thanks to this title, he could ignore the peer pressure and preserve his fate for more personal endeavours without the guilt associated with being selfish. The simple fact was that the title meant there was no point in him participating in any of those collective efforts, as any fate he invested would be wasted.

  The second significant restriction to his utility was slightly more problematic. After a moment’s thought, he corrected himself. No, that was not accurate. It would handicap him, but not fatally so. His capability to use fate for environmental and trial shaping purposes had been nerfed. While it wasn’t the most important thing he ever did with the resource, it was a function that he had abused extensively in the past. It had allowed him to make risk-free gains in the tutorial by tailoring both lairs and trials into optimal formats for his skillset.

  Then, in Existentia, it had helped him out multiple times. It had almost certainly shifted their starting area into the wasp fields, which, while creating a difficult ordeal, had been better than the alternatives. Without those changes… Tom shuddered when he thought about how many of their eighty lives would have been lost. Instead of less than ten, it could have easily been over half of them - possibly all of them. Then fate had aided them against the dragon, turning what should have been an impossible fight into a win. And then, finally and most pertinently, came the darkhole trial. His investment there had, likewise, turned the impossible task into victory. Under the new restrictions, all of those creative uses of fate would have failed, or, at least, the method he had used would have only wasted his fate.

  Carefully, he considered each situation.

  Were there workarounds?

  After a few moments of thought, he guessed there were, especially in hindsight.

  For the wasps field, what he had done had been a lazy image as he had let fate decide the final imprint, and that had relied significantly on future sight. However, that was not something he had actually needed to do. Instead, he could have achieved a similar outcome by focusing his need on the grass plains to be home to an enemy he could fight immediately. Or, if he was very clever, he could have imagined the wasps they had fought and duplicated that outcome directly. But that path was only available with the benefit of hindsight. He doubted he possessed the imagination to come up with that solution in a vacuum.

  It was the same story with the darkhole trial. If he had used his imagination, he could have shaped the floors to contain creatures with specific weaknesses and strengths. It was only against the dragon that his ability to influence his future battlefield would have failed. That one hadn’t been about changing the environment, but about stacking luck so a series of unlikely events could occur like dominos and create a singular opportunity to defeat the creature.

  Things were far more positive than he had initially thought.

  The two most significant issues, namely community prayers and shaping trials, were not detrimental. The former, he was happy to do away with, and the latter could be almost fully mitigated with preparation, imagination, and clear thinking.

  Absentmindedly, he rinsed the cloth, and the water ran red while he pondered that insight.

  Things were not as troublesome as he first feared.

  “What about building fate for a future perfect cast?” he asked himself quietly. It was an angle he hadn’t considered yet, and the way he had been exploiting fate for the last year was now clearly blocked. However, the wording that DEUS had included in the notes was clearly suggestive and something he could test.