Divine Remains

Drogo had never expected that the first time he borrowed books from a library would be after transmigrating.

Back on Earth, he had only gone to libraries during those soul-crushing exam weeks. He had never borrowed anything, using them purely as study halls. Aside from occasionally seeing couples at play, they were quite suitable for studying.

The orc Battleaxe pushed a cartload of hefty tomes back to the toy shop and unloaded them all onto the third floor.

Elven Secrets

The Epic of Soma

Song of Feroni

The Exodus of Valen

The Trafalgar Expedition

They were all the most famous epics, legends, myths, and hero biographies of every race.

Drogo spread a huge chart across the floor, divided into columns for name, race, class, additional traits, skills, and cost.

Then he picked up the first book and opened it.

"Sutter Forge, the thirty-sixth leader of the Demon Mountain Clan dwarves, defeated a six-thousand-strong orc warband at Tigerfall Pass with only two thousand troops."

Drogo finished the biography, which was several tens of thousands of words long. Thanks to years of reading web novels, he had become exceptionally skilled at skimming.

He then filled in Sutter Forge, dwarf, warrior, and, after a moment's hesitation, added leader. Cost: 4. As for skills...

After rereading the story, he found that it seemed to contain no record of any famous moves. He could only make something up himself.

Forge, forge...

Got it!

After activating his skill, he would enter forging mode, greatly increasing his resistance while continuously damaging nearby enemies. After three attacks, he would unleash a small-area knock-up.

Role: frontline, sustained crowd control.

He first jotted down some rough skill values. He had stayed up late calculating the standard values and coefficients two days ago, but he still needed to work them out here. He could not just drag formulas over. He missed Excel.

Many people probably imagined that a game designer's primary job was building dream worlds inside a game engine.

It was not. While they did use engines, their main work consisted of writing documents, filling out spreadsheets, devising implementation plans for producers' sudden flashes of inspiration, and passionately arguing with artists and programmers.

Oh, right. On update days, they also had to pull all-nighters while being hounded to death by publishing and QA.

"Who should I choose for the next character?"

"Wow, are you planning to study history? Is the next Magic Shadow going to have a historical theme?" Aisha had come over at some point.

"No, I'm making a new game."

After creating a series of mini-games like Jump Jump, Down One Hundred Floors, Link Link, Snake, and Twin Towers City Blocks, Drogo felt that he had become quite proficient with illusion inscriptions. It was time for a major project.

He had chosen auto chess.

It had some production difficulty, but not much. At the very least, it was easier to make than games with tons of actions and interactions. The hard parts all lay in the design phase, though there were existing templates to draw from.

Then there were the art assets. There were artists, certainly, but few could turn their work into illusions. Sooner or later, he would improve employment prospects for illusionists through the power of one dragon.

Of course, one dragon could not possibly finish the whole job. He planned to make a demo first to test its feasibility, then assemble a development team once the carbon-based server was ready.

"So the game is historical?"

"No, it only borrows elements from historical figures. Besides, none of this even counts as history."

Drogo pointed a claw at Sutter Forge's portrait in the book. "He never defeated that orc warband. I was raiding that orc tribe at the time, and the warband ran off because they were desperate to return and defend it."

"Um, sir, what were you going there for?"

"That tribe's shaman claimed they had received a gift from the gods, a fruit that could prolong one's life. I went to share it."

Aisha could not understand how he had the nerve to use the word "share," but she continued asking, "Do you even need something that prolongs your life?"

"Not really. There were rumors that the fruit was an unprecedented delicacy."

"And what was it actually like?"

"A scam for dragons. It was only a little juicier than a radish." Though hundreds of years had passed, Drogo was still indignant whenever he mentioned it, as though he were the one who had suffered a loss.

From then on, Drogo had kept his distance from all otherworldly foods advertised to the heavens. Without all sorts of cultivation techniques as a foundation, the raw ingredients alone would never pass muster.

Aisha was now certain that Drogo's title, "Calamity of Wuwang," was entirely fitting. For that orc tribe, which had been raided over a fruit only slightly juicier than a radish, it could not have been more undeserved.

"Oh, right. I came to bring you this."

Aisha pulled out a grimy cloth bundle. Because she had been curious about what Drogo was doing, she had nearly forgotten the important matter.

"The treasure hunters just delivered the divine remains."

"Divine remains!" Drogo sprang to his feet. Speak of a server, and a server arrives. "Where is it?"

"It's this." Aisha held out the bundle in her hand.

Drogo stared at the bundle again and again. This was ridiculous. Throw this thing into the Mixed District, and it would be a miracle if anyone bothered to pick it up.

This was like a man hanging himself because he thought he had lived too long—trying to scam a dragon?

With one swipe of his claw, he shredded the cloth bundle. Inside lay a bone around thirty centimeters long. There was nothing special about it at all, except that its surface was as smooth as if a dog had been gnawing on it for eight years.

One look told him it was obviously fake.

Drogo picked it up. It was light as a feather, putting no pressure on his claws at all. Out of habit, he brought it to his nose and sniffed it.

Something was wrong.

Drogo sniffed it more carefully. This bone had no smell at all!

As dragons' keenest sense, their sense of smell was over a hundred times more sensitive than that of canines. It was no exaggeration to say that if dragons were trained as anti-drug dragons, they could sit inside an airport and smell whether someone on a plane preparing to land was smuggling drugs.

Yet this bone eerily had no scent.

Damn, the uncanny valley effect was kicking in.

Drogo told Aisha to hide downstairs first, then tried injecting a trace of magic into the bone.

In an instant, his consciousness was dragged into a void.

A tiny glow floated ahead of him. It might have been the lingering power left behind by the deceased god, pouring a vast amount of knowledge into his mind.

Then his consciousness was pushed back out of the space.

That scared the dragon!

This was why he did not want to deal with gods. Even after dying, they still liked doing mysterious nonsense.

From the information he had just received, he learned that he was now apparently the proxy dragon for this fragment of a god.

If he founded a church, Drogo would start as pope.

However, since the god was dead, it could not provide any divine authority. It only had the function of storing spell models.

That was enough for him.

Drogo had the authority to define the protocol for connecting to the divine remains server. Rituals, prayers, inscriptions—anything would work.

Was this not making things difficult for Drogo, who was terrible at naming things?

How about, "It costs nothing anyway, so believe a little in everything"?

No, he should be more serious. After much thought, Drogo defined a divine inscription that looked exactly like a Red Dragon tile.

And the most outrageous thing about these divine remains was that their capacity theoretically had no upper limit.

The more believers it had, the more it could hold.

As a server, the greater its load, the more users it had. The more users it had, the greater its capacity. The greater its capacity, the lighter its load.

So the greater its load, the lighter its load.

However, its current capacity was extremely limited. After Drogo tried stuffing in the spell models for several mini-games, almost no space remained.

This was urgent. He needed believers.

Drogo shouted, "Aisha, get up here! I've got something amazing to show you!"