Before we get started I would like to state that I am FAR from a professional author and this is the second story I have ever written. The first story was thirty chapters so it did not offer me much writing experience.
If you expect the same quality as the translated novels from authors who have years of experience and have written multiple novels with hundreds of chapters then you are setting yourself up for disappointment.
All I can say is I try my best with the what little time I have to write every day. Some people might find my story interesting and others may not.
Please keep this in mind as you read and if you plan to leave a review.
Thanks for taking the time to read this novel and I hope you enjoy it!
(＾‿') 乃
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It was another scorching night in Phoenix, Arizona. Anyone outside or without air conditioning could only hope the approaching storm would help to alleviate the heat.
The monsoon storm was rolling through the valley, delivering a fireworks display with claps of thunder and bolts of lightning that lit up the darkening night skies.
Ben King had just come home late from work to find that the power had been knocked out by the present lightning storm.
For the past three years Ben had been working for his uncle who is a general contractor who owns a successful company building new housing developments here in the valley.
Ben a nineteen-year-old young man had only recently graduated from high school. While he was still in high school, he began working for his uncle's company. Like most teenagers he wanted to have money to spend now that he was older and had more freedom to go out on the weekends with friends.
His main reason for working though was to save up enough to afford his own place when he graduated. Ben had lived with his grandparents while he attended his last two years of high school.
His grandparents both loved and cared for him. It was a great atmosphere to live, but even if they never complained Ben knew that he was a major drain on their limited retirement funds.
He began work at his uncle's construction company as a basic laborer and had worked his way up to becoming a Carpenter Masonry apprentice with his hard work over these past three years.
For a young man like Ben making decent money from working construction and developing a strong physique was enough to make him feel proud of himself and satisfied with his current life.
Before he had graduated from high school, Ben was unsure of what he wanted to do with his life. Unlike most of the students in his high school who had set their goals and knew exactly what career they would pursue, Ben was unsure of what he wanted for his future.
Back when both of his parents had passed away five years ago, he went through a long healing process. There was a time when he was unsure if he even wanted to continue living, let alone deciding on what courses he should be preparing for in college.
Now that he was independently living on his own, it would be almost impossible for him to go to college and support himself so he moved forward with the skills he knew and continued to work for his uncle.
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Locking his apartment door behind him, he reached out and flipped the light switch next to the door. When the kitchen remained dark he tried another switch across the room and had the same results.
"Ah crap, don't tell me the power is out? I have been working outside all day sweating my ass off to finally return home and I can't even turn the air conditioner on?"
*Sighs*
Ben crossed the dark kitchen and opened the storage closet next to the refrigerator to search for the candles he had kept for situations like this. He placed a candle in each room and had just enough light to find his way around without breaking his neck on a piece of furniture.
After dimly illuminating the apartment, he decided to take a long cold shower, put on a pair of loose athletic shorts, a tank top, and a comfortable pair of running shoes. He ate some leftovers from the large diner he had made yesterday and was glad that the fridge was still cold and his food had not gone to waste.
Now that Ben was feeling a little more refreshed, he decided since the power was out which meant no TV, he would head to his bedroom to find his laptop.
Ben had always loved playing PC games. He enjoyed open world RPG games with character development, spells, and skills, but city/castle building strategy games were his favorite. He prefered to play games that had the player gather resources and build impressive cities or castles with defenses and armies.
He grabbed his gaming laptop, one of the few things that he had allowed himself to spend a good amount of money on since he had begun living on his own.
Ben loved this laptop which had enough power to run every current game available that he had installed on it without so much as a tiny stutter in FPS. His laptop had a 2TB hard drive that allowed him to install every new game, song, book, or anything interesting that he came across.
Not only did he like to play games, but he also enjoyed reading. There currently was a huge selection of books he had stored on his laptop.
Ben would often go online and buy the top-selling books that caught his eye. He currently had books on history, encyclopedias, health and fitness, medical, computers, education, engineering, architecture, construction, books on warfare from the medieval era to current times, and even military field manuals that taught soldiers about anything from hand to hand combat to counterinsurgency.
Even with this massive collection of books, Ben still had his favorites folder that contained all of the popular web novels. He always loved to read books on Fantasy, Cultivation, Systems, and RPG Game Elements.
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Feeling his way across the dark bedroom, he found the protective case sitting on his corner desk that held his laptop.
'It's t0o hot in this apartment, I think I'll go out on the balcony. It might be a little cooler with the wind from the storm.' Ben thought as he left the bedroom to walk across his small living room with the laptop in hand.
Ben lived in a multi-story apartment building on the tenth floor so he often had a nice breeze from the unobstructed winds on his partially covered balcony.
The balcony was just big enough to fit a couple chairs and a small table, but it was plenty big enough for a single guy living on his own.
Placing his laptop on the balcony table, he sat down while enjoying the breeze. Ben decided to boot up a popular castle builder game that allowed the player collect wood, stone, and various other resources from around the map to build an impressive castle complete with towers, traps, defenses, troops, and siege equipment.
He had his laborers building walls and fortifications while farmers brought a steady supply of various crops in from the fields and his craftsmen also kept busy by making weapons from the wood and iron to equip his troops.
He soon had an impressive fortress built up and was preparing to send his well equipped troops out to attack the enemy castles in a fight for the crown to rule the land.
Ben was so engrossed in his game he wasn't paying attention to the storm now passing directly overhead.
One other ominous event that he had not noticed was the appearance of a circle with strange letters and symbols dimly pulsing a faint blue light directly under his chair.
The violent night skies were continuously lit up by the descending bolts of lightning which were being thrown down from the heavens all around his apartment building.
Unfortunately for Ben, his gaming crusade was interrupted when a blinding white streak of lightning came down from above at a distant angle passing through his laptop, him and the mysterious glowing circle underneath the chair where he sat.
The effect was instantaneous, there was no pain or wondering if he was going to die. One moment he was playing his game the next a vast blackness as if he had been put to sleep by some high level magic spell.