After the third announcement from the Ether Law, the IGS had a lot to do.
In the precedent era, the government usually had more of an overseer role, but now they had a completely proactive and responsive role with everyone waiting for “official” support.
Making a new announcement for the newly integrated information board dimensional sectors was the first thing everyone thought about when it came to that. And the new picture information form added more, maybe a lot more, work to make the announcement more formal.
The imminent activation of the Ether Law was a half-disaster considering no one knew if it was linked to their dimension reaching tier 1 ether density or not.
Fortunately, in any case, it was only imminent, so the whole IGS just accelerated the smooth evacuation of the young and babies as they didn’t have the capabilities to make an avatar yet.
But with babies came parents, and with parents came close families, and the industrial capacity of the IGS, despite being able to change entire stellar systems in months, was ultimately limited as the law governing their perfected technologies and industry was fluctuating more and more.
To accommodate that fact, the IGS sent orders to hasten the construction of the refuges with a slight change. The parents would have to live in the pure space around them, that was the plan they had to complete before gravity started to kill everything for no logical reason.
There was of course an ambiguity as to whether “Ether Law activation” meant “ether erosion”, but nobody really wanted the young to take a risk regarding that. Surprisingly?
The new rifts leading to the Deep Void Dimension were the least of their problems, same for the rest of the announcement, the forces the IGS built would demand respect even from the Ether Law if it was conscious.
Their whole hierarchy had already been adapted to the new Interdimensional Era, with all government agencies being moved to be out of every planet's evaluated gravitic field.
Patrollers and adventurers alike were responsive and increased the average individual prowess of their civilization at a running speed, geniuses were never lacking in quantities, new professions, new spells, new applications, new technologies…
The private market couldn’t be ignored in all this turmoil, a pioneer, competitive, and not monopolized market was a thriving market, and the economy was adapting, IGS normalized credits had their value fall as time passed, to the profit of ether resources.
The economy department was already thinking of a way to compress ether resources into a coin-like way. In parallel to that, they were prepared to establish an official resource to IGS credit exchange rate after accumulating enough ether resources.
That would serve to stabilize the fluctuating economy.
The Adventurer’s Society was not on its way to becoming a behemoth, it had already become one. Initiatives after initiatives were taken to respond to its now hundreds of trillions of members with tens of trillions being official active members.
In all this, the 3 path organizations remained the ultimate center of individual powers.
The martial supreme dojo was the brightest star, their reinforcement technique forging the path for the birth of true warriors, those only heard in tales and legends, and their close combat and body control fundamentals attracting the interests of lots of people. Too many people.
The new energy institute was the most brilliant repository crafted by hand.
They concentrated so many energy and ether experiments in their database and had an insane rate of researching all the subtleties associated with spells while they never forgot a single anomaly, leading to new innovative spell matrices being archived for further research each day.
The psychic union was ultimately a background actor, a silent force. They didn’t have any offensive knowledge, but while some ignored the physical or energy path in favor of the one they preferred, nobody ever ignored the spiritual path.
They advanced silently with the few leads they had, a boosted momentum technique, a refined awareness, a more advanced perception sphere manipulation… There was no end to their spiritual path.
In the week following the Ether Law's third announcement, the IGS released their own announcement, showcasing their attitude to the entire information board.
[Dear Citizens of the Intergalactic Society,
This is a summarized announcement to express our opinion and stance on the recent events related to the Ether Law. For further details, please look further down.
Given the recent dimensional sector fusion, this announcement is now also destined to any major forces that are possibly open to negotiations as well as less technologically advanced civilizations. The IGS remains open to every and any plea for help, and will answer them to its best ability.
I ask for the cooperation of every inhabited planet under the administrative management of the IGS. Every young citizen without an avatar will be fatally affected by etherized gravity once the possibly linked Ether Law activation starts.
As such, every young citizen must be brought to the nearest evacuation. No family will be authorized to take residency inside the refuges as not enough have been built to accommodate so many. You’ll have to take residence on simple open space platforms if you decide to accompany them.
For unknown civilizations, as you’re now under the same information board dimensional sector as us, and time is short, special schematics can be found below this announcement. They’ll allow for the evacuation of every young member of your civilization to outer-space, having their original body in prolonged sleep far from the fatal gravity that is to possibly come.
If your current civilization level is too low, a special IGS support forum will be created to accompany you in elevating your technology level in the fastest way, be it by making a beacon to call for us or for you to build the evacuation cabins.
As ether monsters still cannot enter the universe dimension, no change will be made to the current established order, please continue on increasing the individual power of the IGS and follow your own schedule.
The current education reform will be accelerated and students will be put to safety in special education buildings to become contributing citizens as soon as possible. It is asked of their families to not lose contact in those turbulent times and create special family forums through the Information Board.
Every administrative sector will shortly manage the production of new ether spaceships able to take over intergalactic transportation following approval from the transport department.
To end this announcement, as the new era down on us, as the current leader of the IGS, I am proud to be the one who will help our civilization have a smooth transition to the Interdimensional Era, and hope that your hard work will be rewarded.
Don’t be left behind.
The IGS Leader authorized this announcement.]
The IGS was probably stretched very thin. The dimensional sectors gathering this time seemed to have incorporated what felt like thousands of galaxies.
Sure, compared to the 2 000 billion of galaxies evaluated to exist, it was a petty number, but the IGS had only had a few dozens of galaxies to manage before the Ether Law awoke, so even if they forced themselves, they just couldn’t respond to all the demands for assistance.
As astonishing as it was, still no major civilization like the IGS was found, making the Azorans, the founder species of the IGS, and the historians, really start wondering if something had happened in their early days that had allowed them to develop technologies advanced enough to not be like the Pachins and all the other civilizations they encountered later and remain locked in their home star system.
The only good news in this turn of event was the number of civilizations who were at the technological threshold of interstellar travel being s a lot.
The moment the different physics laws-based schematics sent by the IGS were published, it just became god-sent for them. It had been the case for the first information board sector too, it had also been the case for the first dimensional sector fusion, and now it was also the same for the second fusion.
It also had to be said that while the absence of major powers increased the help demanded by a lot, it also facilitated the future integration of those civilizations into the IGS. A bad for a good?
…
On every planet, the young and babies were starting to be evacuated while private family forums were created.
on X125, Rune’s home planet, the whole family had created a family forum and were using it.
[Mikael: Everyone writes something.]
Mikael was Rune's father's name, he was the silent but responsible dad type.
[Florence: No problem dear.]
[Floria: Doll.]
[Rune: Ok.]
[Miro: Master.]
[Victoria: Bird.]
[Miri: I’m hungry.]
From Rune's perspective, after the announcement of the IGS government, he had really understood the gravity of the situation. (No pun intended)
He wasn’t an administrative employee, so of course, he hadn’t thought much about the situation and what the Ether Law activating would do to babies without avatars.
He just thought that he would requisition an automatic air cycler and then wait for the IGS to complete all the ether space stations.
But now his two little brothers and two little sisters had become the Tudor household’s anchor point. The two parents and the adult big brother would be following them to the special education station and then be assigned a family lodging in outer-space.
Rune of course let his parents manage the situation, he would only follow and not question.
Overall, the Tudor household was pretty relaxed though, imminent for Ether might mean weeks to months, and they were departing today. So what could go wrong?
As a spectator, it looked like war mobilization against an unbeatable enemy, so the situation was thrilling for Rune when he knew that nothing would really happen.
‘Maybe now is the best time to do perception manipulation training…’
Being pragmatic, he already knew that the management of their administrative sector had prepared the evacuation of rural planets first, so he for sure wouldn’t become a rebel and decide to remain home.
He heard from Miro that X125 had patrollers and that they were the community heroes, if he understood it right, then they were as powerful as he was.
‘It’s not a reason to stop training or relax, maybe I should use the big brother authority to motivate them.’
The current situation was anxiogenic, so sparing with his eager little brothers should diffuse a part of it and make it lighter.
“It’s been 3 weeks since we last sparred, want to see the result of your studies little bro?” He asked when they had reached the evacuation site and couldn’t do anything else but wait.
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Maybe not used to being called by his big brother, Miro took time to process the request.
‘Maybe it’s family genetics that made overloading our brain easy?’
“Only if I can take you on with Miri…” He shyly answered.
Either he didn’t want to lose too badly or he was too shy… Probably the first.
He convinced Miri to join him in “training” for close combat and body control.
“Come when you want, I trained with monsters all day until yesterday, so I’ll expect you to have at least half of their ability to dish out damages,” Rune provoked the two.
They were currently at the evacuation site, waiting for the transport spaceship to come and embark, so his talking loudly attracted some attention, but he was not shy in this particular case, adrenaline coursing through his veins.
And so Miro and Miri tried to assault him to put him down as he only defended, he even used his 35% efficiency energy compression fundamental with all his 50 energy pool, momentarily stopping his shape mode of reinforcement that he used to replace the revitalization spell.
The energy armor by itself was impressive, covering his whole body in a layer of energy only visible with a perception sphere, but even more impressive was Rune’s use of it.
After hundreds of beatings, he could now not only approximately feel the reduction of his health through his perception, he had also started to form his own fighting style which used blocking and counters at its core.
To block damages under the Ether Law, you had only 2 choices: Exert an equal force, or redirect it. If neither of those actions were undertaken, your health or armor layer would be used to protect you.
And if the damage was too great, you would just lose a limb in exchange for limiting the damage to only the amount of health contained inside this limb.
After having started using an energy armor for a consequent amount of time, Rune had bit by bit discovered some of its properties and learned to incorporate them in his nascent fighting style.
Two of those amazing properties were the omni-repartition of damages and the complete nullification of knockback if he so desired.
The first property was paramount for him as the thing he feared the most in a fight was taking a hit to his head, not only was the minimum consequence of such a hit an unstable and unresponsive body, it could even go as high as paralyzing him biologically.
The second property was not as paramount as the first, but its potential was equally as great. While completely absorbing a hit took more armor in the end than letting the knockback absorb a large part of it, in certain circumstances he was still decrypting…
There was something.
Overall, the potential Rune attributed to the energy armor was one that could eventually help him substitute his health with his energy completely without fail, becoming unstoppable as a result.
For now at least, he had already accomplished a small part of his goal.
As long as his energy armor was on, he could create a margin of error and block any damage without suffering from knockback to reestablish a broken balance at any time. It was for him the true primitive form of an unstoppable juggernaut.
Miro did a low kick targeting his shin, but using counterforce he nullified it. Miri attacked from behind and punched his energy armor, shaving 4 of it or so, Rune just had to observe his armor with his sphere and judge instinctively.
He didn’t react to the attack because Miro was clearly preparing a reinforced punch, the energy vibration was really obvious. Maybe he had judged that his big brother was tough enough to use something like that?
And he was right, when Miro delivered his punch, using purely his stat, Rune grabbed Miro’s wrist and used momentum to create gravity in the punch direction.
Using this gravity he successfully redirected all the punch power and Miro was sent flying with his own strength boosted by Rune.
After this move, Rune stood like nothing happened and waited for his little brothers to come back. They were just training after all.
To taunt them, he even started to make mini firework explosions using surplus energy, he recently found how to do it in an optimized manner that didn’t consume much in the same way that the pulse spell didn’t consume much because it didn’t have offensive value.
The thing about his personal energy training was that he forgot spells, he only did pure energy manipulation, grand or fine it didn’t matter.
What had mattered was that to create explosion visual effects, he had needed to push his different energy fundamentals a lot higher than he had thought at first.
Where he only did it by luck previously, just making spheres crash into each other to make an artificial explosion of colorized energy, this time he only created a single sphere with a high degree of fine manipulation mechanism put into it.
The result was a very impressive but totally inoffensive colorful explosion of 20 centimeters in diameter.
It was only useful for training and entertainment, but now he used it to provoke.
“You can do better than that, use momentum, no. Target my center of mass, this way I’ll be forced to respond more actively and have a chance to create opportunities for you to exploit,” advising them while he was at it, time continued to pass leisurely.
In the end, the 3 spared for 30 minutes.
They only stopped when the spaceship arrived and all those present embarked, everyone here was among the first to be evacuated.
20 minutes later they arrived at a very, very peculiar structure, a giant honeycomb-looking cube, with engineering ships busy constructing things all around.
When the ship asked the passengers to acquire a set of air cycler masks while advising that using the revitalization spell would help facilitate future logistics, the door to the airlock opened and people started being ejected into space.
‘A true surrealist scene.’
Who would have thought that citizens would be dropped off into nothing without any equipment and had to use the AI assistant of the zone to know where they had to go?
15 minutes later, the Tudor family arrived at their accommodation, a floating cube attached with metallic threads to a giant pillar that had its foundation in the giant cube.
‘The low-budget of low-budget, not gonna complain as long as I still have air for music to propagate, bone-conducting pods are just too uncomfortable for my taste.’
There was no privilege or treatment of favor. Everyone had a cube corresponding exactly to their family size, theirs had 7 rooms to sleep in and a central living room where it was possible but not advised to eat and drink.
Rune never thought that to enter his home he would have to pass through an airlock, it needed 30 seconds to enter and 30 seconds to get out, a pretty annoying security measure, but the excitement of the ridiculous situation made up for it.
Going to his own future bedroom, he immediately discharged his computer and everything he brought.
5 minutes later, music flowed and his new bedroom already started feeling like home.
[Rune: I’m going back to train in the Deep Void Dimension, I turned on the notification function for this forum so you can call for me if needed.]
[Florence: Later.]
…
‘40% efficiency.’
Rune evaluated his energy armor to now be worth 200 armor health, but considering the fundamental difference between the armor and health, he slowly began to call the armor health simply armor.
Armor didn’t have cohesion in it, but it wasn’t like its resistance was equal to 0 cohesion, it was more like purity did a much worse job at creating defensive value than offensive value. Much much worse.
500 purity maybe equaled 50 cohesion? Something like that? Rune hadn’t succeeded in finding a rigorous study on this subject, so he only had his instinct to use as a reference.
‘Intensive use against monsters makes my efficiency go up a lot faster, exactly like grinding a video game skill.’
The new energy institute used precisely what Rune was experiencing to base their potential on.
The gamers union from the primitive energy manipulation age had developed to give birth to a lot of geniuses and revolutionaries, entertainment was their source of inspiration and drive to progress, and Rune considered himself one of its distant cousins.
There were no levels, no titles, no administrators, no cheaters, only reality and the hard work necessary to progress.
But this progress was as real as reality could be.
Hundreds of trillions of avatars now called themselves adventurers, but the Adventurer’s Society internally classified each avatar in different public and known categories.
The hero adventurers were the front-liners, those who dared or were too lucky.
They were people who dared dream big and dared to follow through with what they thought was the right thing to do.
Only a few millions were classified in this category, but they were active permanently and never stopped training, so the Adventurer’s Society had given them their due respect.
The true adventurers, this category designed those who were not as daring but were as strong as the true heroes.
Their goal was generally more personal and their reasons for seeking power were much more varied. They were the definition of what the Adventurer’s Society was created for, though paradoxically, they weren’t the majority.
The late-comer adventurers, those who recently distinguished themselves,
This classification gathered all the geniuses far from attaining the current peak tier 1 power but were as invested as the previous 2 categories, they’d transit to one of the 2 categories as long as enough time passed. If not, it simply meant their drive had been overestimated.
The common adventurers were the last classification.
They were not that much involved in the increase of the IGS individual power overall but made up 90% of the Adventurer’s Society members, and their number only kept getting higher.
Comparisons made that way were unfair however. With hundreds of trillions of sapient individuals, the drive and dedication shown by some, which made the 3 other categories, would be enough to prove that those belonging to this level were indecisive and lazy if their goal was the same as that of the 3 other categories.
But everyone knew that it just wasn’t true. Those classifications were only rough representations of powers.
As everyone was still tier 1, the Adventurer’s Society had it easy as they just used friends, forum commentaries, age, social activity and background, a large database of the citizens of the IGS to correctly classify a person.
Rune had his registration confirmed to the Adventurer’s Society recently and was classified as a true adventurer.
His whole life from the moment the Interdimensional Era started consisted of farming, training, and learning, so he deserved to belong there.
The end of the 15th month was coming, and life for him and his family was stabilizing quickly. Rune, his father, and his mom were content with keeping to their new home. The internet still worked, so they could all drown into the infinite ocean of entertainment available.
And every day, the 4 juniors came back and sometimes, instead of playing in the backyard, they trained in empty space. Or played. It depended on the perspective.
During the last week, Rune had really started pushing his perception sphere manipulation training to become his main activity.
‘Push! Push! Push! Relax…’
As he had to prepare for when his ether soul would awoke its specialty completely, he pushed himself to his limit. In consequence, in only a week, his spiritual exhaustion quickly reached the same as when he had gone through a moderate whole month of training.
His training efficiency inevitably became worse, but he wanted to increase in a short time his perception manipulation capabilities, so there were no other choices.
Ultimately, his exhaustion reached an impossible level and he turned off his music and the accompanying computer before falling into the serene darkness of sleep.
…
The 16th month began with Rune starting to raze the nest he used to train himself with.
His schedule was simple, 1 day of soft but continuous sphere bending, 1 day of dedicatedly killing monsters. There were no worries and no difficulties, only hard work and spiritual sweat.
He had even stopped using galaxy wings and downgraded to leisure wings, a spell matrix he learned after seeing how stupid his choice of only learning galaxy and battle wings was, as they were totally unusable by his original body.
‘Independence…’
Rune was currently razing a nest at the speed of his energy regeneration, but the subject of awakening his soul came back to his mind with this specific word in mind.
He had Utopia tell him a summary of what the latest conspiracies were, and one of them was the independence acquired after awakening one’s soul.
No primary ether sub-dimensions had appeared yet if the one that had caused the Universe Dimension to suddenly gain an additional 30% in its ether density progress bar was excluded.
Evading a murder-munch monster bite, Rune retaliated with a 100 energy reinforced sweep kick, which sent the head monster colliding with one of its approaching friends.
A few tried to slow him down but he erased their nascent intentions by rushing and colliding with them using a 300 energy reinforced impulse with the help of an energy platform, galaxy wings, and everything.
With the second monster being badly damaged by the collision, he started chaining normal punches and kicks, trying to make all of them transmit 100% of his strength.
Finishing off 2 monsters at the same time was not usual, but neither was it exceptional, and compared to the number living in the nest it was simply negligible.
So he continued punching, kicking, evading, blocking, and rampaging with his always increasing close combat capabilities.
The thrill of dominating to this point a fight through proficiency was fascinating, Rune had recently really begun to feel a sense of exhilaration during every battle, as if he had been born for it.
‘Death… Maybe I should train with my original body integrated with my avatar? This way it would become true life and death training? What can possibly be more thrilling than that? Entering a star?’
Insane ideas coming from deep instinctive desires, he put this suicidal idea in a corner of his mind. He at least wanted to try and see what facing death with one's own eyes would result in.
‘Will I cower, will I face it bravely, will I be overtaken by fear? Why am I so philosophical?’
The more he thought about training with his life on the line, the more he wanted to do it.
[Rune: I want to integrate with my original body and train with my life on the line, can someone dissuade me?]
[Utopia: If you really do it, I’ll follow in your steps once you bring data to the table that proves it accelerates the training of your fundamentals.]
[Rune: Stop motivating me.]
[Arik: Only true suicidal warrior would arrive at this conclusion. I don’t think you’re the first who will really dedicate himself to his chosen path to the point of using his own life as a boost to learn more, and neither will you be the last. if you feel ready then do it.]
[Astryde: I don’t feel ready yet, so unless you accelerated your training or you're a hidden genius then you should also not be ready. My voice is the voice of reason by the way.]
[Rune: Okay! I’m gonna do it then! I’ll communicate my progress in real-time once I integrate, you can judge yourself!]
[Gar: Good luck.]
Following this strange exchange of messages, Rune’s original body stood up from his comfy bed.