Walker tried talking to the Book of Souls for a time, but aside from the general warmth it exuded whenever he spoke, he never received a real response.

Logically, he knew the memory didn't exist. He had invented a hypothetical situation, and yet, he'd still been pulled into a vision not unlike his recent foray into the memories of Kwaya. The feeling was the same, although everything had held a slight haze to it. It was like looking out at the desert on a hot day and watching the heat rise in a place you'd never truly understand. He attempted to process what the vision might mean on the long road to being Awakened.

Was he a prophet, and was that a potential future? Did his lower-g godhood upgrade?

Walker stepped into the memory cataloging he'd just invented. After scanning around for a time, noticeably dodging any moments with the Slicer, he found that the only time any mention of potential futures occurred was at the very beginning, just before he was pushed into the first battle. He'd been speaking with Virgil about the different ways a Creator can fail the protocol, when they'd been discussing his guide, Mr. Harrison.

"...every guide is taken from an image of the Creator's world in the future. Mr. Harrison, as you jokingly named him after he left, is a future resident of your currently named world, Symphony."

When Walker then asked if he could stop Mr. Harrison from ever being born, Virgil gave a cryptic answer that didn't really say anything: "The complications with future imaging are vast and profound."

It made him wonder if Virgil, no longer bound by whatever geas the Evolver's placed on Assistants, could tell him now. It also made him wonder about something much more serious.

If Walker's Awakened powers were the reason he was able to see a future image, as Virgil called them, then didn't that mean that there was another Awakened within the Evolvers? One who was just as, if not more powerful, than Walker himself, and created all of the future images that identified Creators. And if there was another Awakened, were they then bound by the bastards who run this place, or was there something else going on? He felt like the answer to this question might lead to many more; as if the mysteries of the alpha protocol all stemmed from it.

As he considered the proposition of the Evolvers having their own powerful Awakened, he thought about his place in Symphony on the scales of power. Walker was in the third stage and could easily be called the strongest overall Awakened here. Though Zeus was in the fourth stage, he hadn't shown any levels of strength that could rival him. Of course, he'd just started to get his power back, but the Creator didn't think that would upset their balance greatly.

Athena had asked him to speak with the god of lightning multiple times; he simply hadn't had the chance yet. Who knew what new powers he might obtain at that level? After the last time he zonked out, his pseudo-girlfriend placed the Book of Odin somewhere safe. He'd have to take a gander at what the great god of Norse mythology had to say one of these days.

Either way, idle speculation wasn't going to get anything done. He'd just have to accept that future images based on hypothetical thoughts might crop up more of these. His hope was that not every evolution of skills would develop the way that poor child he'd seen had. This made him reconsider the restrictions involved in how their skills would develop.

Allowing skills to cap at 100 might solve the problem, but it took away the infinite growth plan he'd started long ago. He felt his Icon burn a little at the thought of restricting future Symphonic citizens, a reminder of his oath from long ago. As usual, the burn didn't begin to fade until he decided not to follow through with the cap, removing it entirely from his mind. But, as he forced his thoughts toward a different direction, an idea began to flower.

Who said he had to cap the issue? What about a reset?

That way, as the skill Awakened and became something more powerful with the life strand included, the Sapient could take it in a whole new direction if they wanted to. It allowed for more agency and more power in the long run. Only, how was he going to do it?

Walker sat down after pacing for so long. He tried scanning through his abilities, but nothing popped out at him. Now that he knew how the system worked, he also knew that he could modify his own abilities and potentially even create more. But none of them were close to what he wanted, except for the Domestication ability. He pulled up the ability and looked a little closer after applying a bit of darkness to his eyes.

The Domestication ability:

An ability designed to selectively remove up to one evolution and one modification per chosen entity.

Limit: One evolution per entity may be removed. One modification per entity may also be removed.

Upgradeable.

Note from Administrator Kwaya: This is a weapon for any Awakened who finds themselves lucky enough to be placed within a protocol. Each time you use it, you'll be able to take away more evolutions and modifications as it upgrades. Eventually, you'll be able to remove everything from an Evolver with the click of a button. Sure, they'll likely die in the process, but who gives a shit. Fuck em all.

"Fucking Kwaya," Walker said with a shake of his head. Sure, the Evolvers are some pretty shitty people from what he'd seen thus far, but the entities that were created by them didn't need that stigma placed on them as well. It simply....wasn't a fair way to look at the world.

If the push of a button could instantly remove their abilities, then that meant there had to be something similar in the Primordial energy strand. Every ability he'd seen thus far was tied back to a strand. The obvious came first; the temporal subsystem was tied directly to the Temporal strand. The pocket dimension was attached to both space and dimensional strands, although he still wasn't sure how the actual ability worked. Each ability had a connected strand that empowered it and gave it direction.

With that knowledge in mind, he pulled up his resources and looked at the strands again. One obvious choice jumped out at him....nullification. He only had a few hundred resources for it right now, but that should pick up as they exited the time displacement. Walker stared at it for a time, trying to figure out how this would work.

Skills would gain consciousness strands as they went. The moment they reached one hundred, as the sapients learned new and useful ways of interacting with it, it needed to reset to level one and begin gaining life strands. Would consciousness strands still need to be added? It made him consider the broader implications of what life was. What was it without a mind attached? If he didn't add consciousness strands back into the skills, it would be like trying to talk to a jellyfish back on Earth. Sure, it may hear you, although he questioned whether jellyfish could actually hear, but there were no thoughts there.

That meant that the reset had to be done in totality, and then consciousness and life strands needed to be added step by step as had occurred when first reaching the initial one-hundred plateau.

Walker looked again at the Nullification strand. If he wanted to use it, he had to test it first. There was no point in building a system and then throwing it to the wind in the hopes that things would work.

The Creator stepped into the isolated Item system and produced a bag. He added one hundred consciousness strands to the bag, causing the already brown bag's color to deepen further, then took a good look at it.....but, nothing happened. Of course, consciousness on a standard bag wouldn't do much. In order for this to work, he'd need some kind of visual confirmation that the thing was, in effect, alive. Knowing what that meant and sighing at what it meant he had to do, Walker added ten life strands to the poor, inanimate object.

The bag still didn't move, making Walker realize the problem was the temporal fold he found himself in. He placed it on a table and created a localized temporal bubble, just as he'd done with the Crystal Nomads, then sat down to watch. The bag's green-tinged folds opened and closed, tasting its first moments of life.

"Sorry, Buddy," Walker said with a sigh, then reached into his overlay and grabbed a single resource of the Nullification strand. As he pulled it out with his right hand, he felt his arm lock in place.

"Oh fuck me," He said in realization. If it was nullifying, then by principle, it could cancel out almost anything, including Temporal resources. Walker looked at his hand, frozen in Sonata's standard time, while the rest was still in his accelerated space. On the tips of his fingers and slightly covering his hand, he found small colorless sparks floating around them.

While this was certainly a tricky situation, it also gave him a few ideas. Rarely have the genius minds of Earth achieved exactly what they were aiming to do. Most of the greatest inventions and ideas came about purely by accident or in a random situation—a falling apple, a melted candy bar. Hell, the solution to broken penises was discovered while trying to research how to fix an old man's heart. Instead....they fixed other things.

Of course, Walker wasn't exactly Isaac Newton or Percy Spencer. What he had just discovered, was a way to make it impossible for someone to fight back. All he had to do was make a temporal field that he created and owned, then take away pieces of the zone so they couldn't move. A very useful situation for him. However, that didn't help his current predicament.

Eyeing the bag within the localized distortion, Walker stretched his free hand out and quickly grabbed it. Looking back at his frozen arm, he found more and more of the sparkles were disappearing as he watched, implying there was a time limit to using Nullification strands. As careful as he could be, and with one last sad look at the brown bag filled with a small amount of life in his hand, he lightly tossed it at the sparks floating on his body.

As soon as the bag came into contact with the nullifying sparks, a poof of brown and green aether slipped out, obscuring his vision. A moment later, a regular bag, showed itself to him. Walker grabbed a week's worth of Temporal energy and, after covering his opposing hand in darkness, smothered it in the material, freeing his opposing arm from the time constraints of Sonata.

"Hypothesis proven," He said to himself with a nod. The Nullification strand certainly seemed to get the job done. He eyed his single resource of Entropy but ultimately thought better of it. There had to be a real damn good reason they only gave him one when the Primordial Collider had been running for quite some time. Based on the Evolver system forcing equal deals on agreements made, as Virgil once said, he should be able to get a concession from them. There was no way only one had popped up.

Shaking his head to refocus it on what he needed to do with his limited time, Walker refocused on the idea of Skills and Masteries.

He needed to build everything in an alternate dimension, that much he knew. But, he'd never really messed around with the Dimensional strand. And, if he was being honest with himself, it was because it was one of the few strands that worried him. What if he accidentally sent himself to a different dimension? Would he even know how to get back? What exactly were the dimensions? Where did they come from? He knew that the Evolvers had a way of creating separate universes, so what was the difference between a dimension and a universe? Were they, potentially, one and the same?

That took him down a rabbit hole of thoughts. If dimensions were universes, and vice versa, then that meant that, with enough dimensional strands, he could create and control his own universe. Thus far, Walker had created monsters and men, planets and peculiarities....what if he created his own Universe? One where he could design the universal system from the start.

It was a heady thought that appealed to his god-complex, little g.

It was a thought he would have to put in the couch cushion, as his mother used to say. Something to think about later. While he was considering his options on how to look into dimensionality, he had an idea. He did have something that touched on it, so hopefully, he would find a note from Kwaya contained within.

The Pocket Dimension ability:

Grants the Creator the ability to create pocket dimensions that will hold objects in a time-locked stasis field. May be used on non-organics only. The use of Dimensional and Temporal resources is required for initial creation.

No such luck with the notes. Of course, the words Temporal resources within the description told him why. She hadn't been around yet. But, he had an alternative way of looking at things. The last time he'd deep-dived an ability, it had drained him enough that he had been worried about attacking the Primigenials and Founders on Sonata out of sheer hunger. He had a way to replenish those resources, but the Portal system took time to turn on, which he didn't have. He'd have to step out of his temporal distortion, kill some unsuspecting nomads, then return and cover himself in time resources again.

"What a bother," Walker said, shaking his head. In the long run, it wasn't that much lost time, but it was still a loss in resources.

Walker started to pace around the room. He had considered storing the Skills within Mac, but he didn't think that would work. While Mac could hold living things, a very nice upgrade Walker had recently gained, he was worried about the skills gaining an undue influence from the living planet. No, he needed something that would cleanly hold the material. Something that would understand that they were not a part of a collective whole, but singular and meant to be preserved.

Walker needed to make his own A.I.

Not only that, he needed to make an A.I. that would grow with the skills and catalog them—something beyond the Advanced ones—something that would directly impact his little solar system without the limitations built into them by the system. An A.I. that could connect with the worlds he would build.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Walker needed something new.