Ascendance: The Rebirth Of The Unknown Gamer

Two weeks later, Aura was still stumped.

He had already attached Fiona's new prosthetics, and she was nearing a full recovery.

Aura's wing plan didn't seem very feasable now that he had given it a decent amount of thought.

After all, wouldn't the amphibious wings be a major problem? What amphibian has wings?

Is there even an animal that can fly when their wings are wet?

And after numerous searches and studying, Aura came to a conclusion.

There are no creatures in the real world that are capable of flight when their wings are wet.

But for bats and a few other species, it is less a matter of being unable to fly when wet, but that they cannot sustain it due to the increased effort.

However, creatures in the game can cast spells, allowing them to mostly dry off (actually fully drying off is difficult or takes time, and the main problem for flying after getting wet for birds and insects is the way that the water washes away oils or damages the wings), so this problem can be mitigated to a certain extent.

Giant bat wings are the answer!

But bat monsters weren't really a thing due to the fact that they are pretty much sitting ducks for predators.

Fortunately, creating a monster was pretty easy, all Aura needed was a bat, as well as several studies on the structures of bat wings, because they would need serious remodeling before they could be stuck on Fiona.

For now though, Aura and his slave were going to go clear out the undersea grotto of singing stones, and, if they're lucky, some siren scales.

---

No siren scales, but about six tons of singing stones perfect for setting up some communications between bases.

Yes, Aura planned on having more bases.

But first he needed a return point.

Like in old fashioned RPGs, Ascendance had return points, places that players could teleport to to get out of the fields.

Setting one up was a pain though, since it needed tons of resonant samdstone, which was ridiculously difficult to get your hands on, not because it was rare, but because there was a desert on top of it.

The desert was called the Field of Shifting Sands, and was more or less hell.

There were tons of monsters there, and the desert itself teleports around itself, dunes moving like waves, making it stupidly easy to get lost.

More than ninety percent of the idiots who travel into the desert never come back, and those who did were either really lucky or never went more than ten feet into the desert.

Due to the fact that the desert lies on top of a massive layer of resonant sandstone, every country wants to get ahold of it, and it doesn't help that it's exactly in the center of all five countries.

In Aura's past life, a guild decided to claim it, striking a deal with the five countries, offering them ten percent each if they could mine out the sandstone.

The countries were more than happy to accept, thinking they could just copy the guild's methods later and mine the desert into oblivion.

What they didn't expect, is the guild to turn the whole desert into glass using flame magic, to break all the glass, and then walk away with fifty percent of all the resonant sandstone in the first realm.

Aura couldn't emulate such a feat on his own, but once Fiona had some wings, they would be able to find their way out of the desert so long as they didn't go too far in, and even if they lost sight of safety, Aura's item box could keep them alive for a year so long as he prepared properly.

It all came back to the wings.

Aura still hadn't figured out which bat would be best to work with, but he had some money from selling weapons he made from bloody titanite, so he thought he would just put some bat capture requests up at the guild.

Twenty or thirty of each type of bat should be enough for him to experiment with and figure out the best way to modify them.

He realized it now, but wasn't he basically just taking every fantasy story he had ever seen and turning the ideas he'd read into a woman?

Was he okay in the head?

Probably not, but whether he's sane isn't something he needed to worry about.

Insanity is an argument where the one afflicted is the only one uninvolved, after all.