While all this was happening, and the video was gathering hundreds of thousands of views for its uncanny realism, Albert was spending his time completing the quest the system had given him, the patience one. And what a quest it was.
The system first demanded that he stared at a wall for hours on end, and then it began throwing idiotic tasks at him one after the other, like hour-long sessions of mediation, practices with questionable people who looked like the caricature version of Indian spiritual masters, and solving puzzles and mazes in bullet time.
It felt stupid, and a waste of time. At the beginning.
He went in hoping to be done as soon as possible, the worst mindset one could ever have when the task is literally about patience. And the impatience was quickly washed away, at first by a deep sense of resignation and defeat, but then as time passed and the hours ticked away – a hundred hours and more spent without sleeping and without the need to sleep thanks to some magic by the system – things began to change. A new idea began to sprout in Albert’s mind.
What if there was no need to do everything always all the time?
What if he could choose what he wanted to do, and he could accept the idea of sacrificing other things no matter how interesting they looked? There were only so many hours in a day, and the rewind and the bullet time were no solutions to this problem. What they were was the opposite, because they gave him the illusion of being able to control time when in fact he did not have any more power over it than he did before. All he had was the illusion of control.
Why not learn to accept the finitude of one’s ability to do things, and begin to focus on what truly matters? There is no need to do the daily quest every single day if there are other things to do. Especially because the daily will be there the next day, without disappearing.
Suddenly so many of Albert’s worries revealed themselves for what they were: problems he was creating himself. And they could vanish just as quickly as they came, in theory. True, in practice it was not going to be so easy, but perhaps a little change in mindset every day could go a long way.
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In the end, although he would never do something like it ever again if he could avoid it, Albert had to admit that the patience training was quite useful.
Then he was back in the real world, surrounded by three health potions, three mana potions, some money and a madly ringing phone that immediately put to the test his newly acquired mindset.
Marc was spamming him with messages. What the hell was going on?
***
There was a small café in downtown Temalas city. One of the few places still run like the old days, before late-stage capitalism infected everything with the urgency to do more and to do it quicker. It was one of those places where you could still go and have a little chat with friends, or perhaps you could study or relax while watching the cars come and go on the busy road that was clearly visible through the wide window.
Not today, however. And not because the window was covered by a thin layer of opaque frost either. Quietly, without too much fanfare, the shop had been closed and taped off with red and white plastic tape. The door was closed shut. The owners nowhere to be found, gone to places their neighbors and family would never find them.
Samantha arrived on location shortly after she was done with the owners, confirming what her underlings had told her: they didn’t know anything. But she had seen the video many times, analyzed it over and over again and she was sure. The video was authentic, shot on location and what little tampering had been done to it did not involve the part that interested her the most. It was still up online of course, it would be too suspicious to bring it offline.
But with the excuse of road work, the whole place had been sealed off and she could be free to operate.
“Nothing’s amiss, ma’am.” Said one of the grunts. Man, she missed the two other underlings of her. They were dangerous and deranged, but they were not this dumb.
“I can literally smell the time magic. Can’t you detect it?”
The man huffed, annoyed, moving with slow movements towards the detector that was dangling limply from his toolbelt. Still, he reluctantly punched the numbers and focused the detector on tachyonic energy. Then his face went from bored to surprised, to straight out disbelief.
“It’s… so high. It’s off the charts! The detector must be malfunctioning!”
Samantha shook her head. “It’s not. That’s why I can almost taste the magic myself. It’s thick enough that even a normal can feel it. We have a time mage on the loose, a very powerful one. And something tells me it’s connected to what PsyOps did at the Fence. Get me a helicopter, it’s time to take a trip to the CARF.”