For the next nine days, absolutely nothing happened.
No visitors. No monsters. No hapless adventurers stumbling blindly into my courtyard with wide-eyed wonder and drawn swords. Not even a single breeze strong enough to rustle the overgrown weeds in any interesting way.
God, the boredom was so profound and soul-crushing that I half-expected to die a second time purely from the sheer weight of existential void pressing down on me. So, to stave off complete madness, I kept myself occupied in increasingly pathetic and ridiculous ways.
First, I experimented with percussion: opening and slamming my windows in rhythmic patterns. For a glorious few minutes, I convinced myself I was dropping a sick beat.
Then I got carried away. One window slammed too hard—crack!—and the hinge sheared clean off. The pane tumbled into the weeds below.
(Uh oh… that doesn't look good.)
I stopped the percussion experiment immediately after that and switched to playing with my torches instead.
I turned them on. I turned them off. One by one, then in complex alternating patterns. Eventually, I gave up on patterns altogether and just flicked them randomly like a bored child with a light switch.
Look, I just needed something to keep myself sane, alright? I was losing my god damn mind inside this silent stone prison!
I even tried to write a novel inside my head, cooking up all sorts of weird plots and S-tier catgirl waifus. (shoutout to my other novel: Catgirls and Dungeons!)
But sadly, there was no one to read that masterpiece, so it was all just pointless brain rot.
Eventually, I resorted to the ultimate desperation move: counting the grass in my overgrown courtyard.
47,428 blades.
Yes. I counted. Every. Single. One.
Fantasy Grass Order: Unlimited Blade of Grass Works!
I even started assigning them names and tiny personalities to make the task feel less insane. "Sir Lawncelot" quickly became my favorite. Next to him were "Sigreen," "Cu Chulawn," and "Grasstolfo."
The vines were hopeless, though. I couldn't count them.
So I changed the game and began counting my bricks, then naming every individual gray stone block that made up my walls, turrets, and floors.
Thus, even the most ridiculous, mind-numbing tasks helped pass the endless hours, and it was during one of these marathon counting sessions that I noticed something genuinely strange about my new environment.
There were no animals here.
Ever since I had arrived in this god-knows-where fantasy world, I hadn't seen a single living creature.
Was it because nothing had ever truly lived here to begin with? Some kind of magical dead zone? Or was the local wildlife actively avoiding me, sensing on some primal level that I wasn't just an ordinary pile of rocks and mortar?
Or maybe… I was cursed? Maybe my very presence repelled life itself?
Honestly, at that point in my slow descent into madness, I would have welcomed even a plague rat.
Still, the endless counting and random torch-flickering helped kill at least some of the time. For the rest of those long, dragging hours, I… slept?
Well, sort of.
I wasn't entirely sure what "sleeping" even meant for a building. I didn't have eyelids to close, no heartbeat to slow down, and no body that grew physically tired. But sometimes I would deliberately slip into this strange, blank, quiet state — a kind of mental standby mode. I remained vaguely aware of everything happening around me through my constant visions, but actively not giving a shit about any of it.
It helped me pass the time without thinking too hard about how much my new life sucked.
Yeah… just imagine spending the next thousand years like this.
No one to talk to. No games to play. Just cold stone, endless silence, and the slow, grinding realization that eternity might be nothing but this quiet, unchanging hell.
Isn't that a fate worse than death?
(Aaaah!)
(NOT LIKE THISSS!!!)
***ANGRY CASTLE NOISES!***
*****
But then, on the tenth day, something finally changed.
Something interesting.
(Ahaha! Finally!)
It rained!
And not just a polite little drizzle or a refreshing spring shower. It was a full-on, apocalyptic-level storm!
I had been lying there in my usual half-aware standby state, idly counting stars one by one, when suddenly — bam! — a massive sea of black, roiling clouds rolled in from the west to crash the party without warning!
It happened incredibly fast.
One moment, the night was calm and breezy, with only the soft rustle of leaves in the distant trees. The next moment, total chaos descended upon the forest.
Thick clouds swallowed the stars. Thunder rumbled across the hills like war drums. Lightning slashed the sky in wild, jagged scars. The wind roared through the trees, and sheets of rain came crashing down on my roof like the gods were stress-testing my structural integrity.
But I didn't feel cold, nor was I scared. Castles don't give a fuck about temperature. Even if the temperature dropped to minus a hundred degrees, I would still be fine.
And honestly? It was… kind of fun!
For once, after nine straight days of static, oppressive silence, the world around me finally felt alive. I was more than ready for a little violence!
To protect my barren interior from flooding, I sealed every single window and door tight with a focused thought, then settled in to watch the spectacular light show unfolding outside through my external vision.
But then—
BOOM!
Lightning struck.
Direct hit!
A blinding flash, followed by a deafening crack that seemed to split the sky itself!
A sizable chunk of my slate roof and underlying stone detonated violently, sending sharp fragments and debris flying across the courtyard in a chaotic spray. The impact site smoked and sizzled as rain hit the superheated stone.
It hurt like fucking hell.
I screamed.
Which made no sense.
Because I was a building. BUILDING! I didn't have nerves!
Yet somehow, I still felt the pain in vivid, agonizing detail. And it wasn't just a little static shock or minor discomfort. It felt like getting personally tased by Zeus himself! My entire stone frame buzzed and shuddered with residual electrical energy that raced along my walls and floors.
Still, I had to look on the bright side: I was clearly built to last. One measly lightning strike wasn't going to condemn me.
Smoke continued to rise from the impact site even as the rain poured down, hissing angrily against the scorched and cracked stone.
And then, unexpectedly, a cheerful notification popped up inside my mind.
[Ding! Achievement Unlocked: Wrath of the Gods!]
[+10 Points!]
(Well, would you look at that? Hell yeah.)
(I finally got something.)