Phoenix gritted his teeth, looked around again, turned sharply, and walked away.

“Let's go!” - He gave the command.

The whole raid followed its leader. Of course, a couple of the players stayed behind to patrol me under the invisibility. If I showed up in the middle of the den, they would immediately start attacking me. But after five minutes they got tired of waiting in the middle of nowhere, so they just left. I too 'jumped' down and carefully made my way out of the boss's lair, heading in the other direction. Unless I had proper spells, I could forget about revenge.

After checking the map and not finding any combinations of energies that suited me, I moved deeper into the caves. With each hundred meters I passed, the strength of the monsters around me increased. If before they were designed for a fight with five or ten players, now there were already 'three-star' opponents around, designed for a raid of 15 players. Here the number of players decreased, because the enemies were too strong, and the battle with them required good equipment.

I cautiously crept forward, using a leap where I couldn't pass. Some monsters reacted to the noise of my footsteps or could even see invisible ones. After walking a little farther than the guides recommended, I set up another terrain scanner. Immediately the entire cave system showed up on my map. This was another 'side effect' of the scanner - I could see all the details of the terrain in the scanned area. Now the two scanners must have covered the whole cave. But I noticed that in the farthest corner of the cave, at the very edge of the scanner range, there were some 'secret passages' that were not marked on the map of the caves in the guides. Looks like I found something again that the writers of these game guides were trying to hide from regular players.

I headed into the deepest part of the caves. There were already only monsters here, requiring a raid of 25 people. If the bosses detected me in one of the lines of the future, they killed me literally with one blow, so I had to be even more careful, and the speed of my movement slowed down even more.

Finally, I got to the 'official' end of the cave and set up another scanner here. Alas, to my disappointment it turned out that the 'secret passages' were only a couple of rooms. Furthermore, it was quite unclear how I could get inside this secret area. I began to walk around the cave, looking around the walls for something I couldn't understand, and I noticed that an energy anomaly was beginning to form not far from me, suitable for charging the Grow a Bush spell. But when I got there, I found that the anomaly was forming right inside the lair of another elite monster.

There was a small 'lake' of crystal-clear water, and a huge snake was curled at the bottom of the lake. As I scanned the future, I made sure that when I tried to get close to this place, the boss would start attacking me, despite the invisibility. The current situation was rather aptly described by the proverb 'So near and yet so far'. I found the anomaly I wanted, but could not use it. Naturally, a desire arose in my soul to somehow 'oneshoot' the boss. However, I didn't have such an opportunity. The aura released by the snake alone would kill me in two seconds.

I looked up at the ceiling of the cave and discovered that a huge stalactite was 'growing' right above the lake. In the real world, I could have tried to drop it on my enemy's head. But here it was a computer game, which meant that there was no such possibility. The caves around me had 'indestructible' walls, and even a hundred players couldn't break a grain of sand off them.

As a habit from past lives, I tried to 'scan' the world around me with psionics, and suddenly... it worked. I literally felt that the cave around me was a kind of digital model, and if I wished, I could rewrite this information and do whatever I wanted with this reality. The sensation was extremely unusual, and more importantly, completely unexpected. I immediately distracted myself from the boss and the charging of the talismans and switched to the awareness of my sensations. I found a secluded spot, sat down on the ground, and concentrated on my psionic abilities.

After an hour, I realized what my sensations meant. When I created my psionic ability, I considered the fact that the laws of the new world might be different from anything I had encountered before. Therefore, I had a built-in scanner in my 'tail' that randomly went through ways of influencing the surrounding reality, analyzing how much those ways could affect something. This process was autonomous and completely random. It was the only way I could guarantee that I was scanning for options that I could never consciously guess at. And now my psionics had somehow managed to catch on to the possibility of influencing the world of the game.

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From the point of view of subjective experience, I was surrounded by a very 'material' world. Yes, I knew that all of this was just computer-generated imagery. But on the other hand, how is it different from the 'real' world? There, too, three-dimensional reality is only a primitive reflection of complex processes occurring in multidimensional space. So, my ability to influence the world of the game was subjectively 'magic'. And in reality, of course, the essence of the influence was in the scanning of memory and processors of computers. Also, if I wanted to, I could 'rewrite' this data, changing the world around me. But I didn't rush into it, and instead began a more detailed study of my ability, taking into account the fact that there was a 'real world'.

Somehow my psionics was able to reach the computers controlling the game. It was a whole network of highly complex computer technology. And when I began to understand the program code, I immediately found out why I had a subconscious 'aversion' to the idea of interfering in the world around me. All information about the world around and events in it was 'signed' with a digital signature. There were several layers of such verification information. Also, there were special computers and programs that constantly analyzed these signatures, and in case of detecting tampering they would raise an alarm and start investigating 'game hacking'.

Of course, I would hardly be found guilty of computer hacking. After all, I could change the contents of the memory directly. But the connection between the changes and my game character could have been found quite easily. So, who knows what decisions the artificial intelligence running the game, or the administrators watching it, could have made? So, I had to find a way to influence the world of the game in a non-detectable way.

I could not directly overwrite the data in the computer memory. But the programs used a 'random number generators' to calculate future events. And these generators were based not on the more familiar to Earth pseudorandom numerical sequence, but on real devices 'extracting' information from quantum noise. Meanwhile quantum fluctuations are Chaos in its pure form. So already after a couple of hours of 'meditation' I had found a way to influence generation of random numbers in the necessary for me generators in strictly defined moments of time. And because these values were 'random', it was impossible in principle to figure out that in fact they were not.

Of course, this kind of influence was rather weak. After all, the game focused primarily on computable, not random, values. If my spear could do 955 damage, even with the best of 'luck' it couldn't do a million damage in one hit. But, it was the random number generator that was used to set changes in the energy of the world around me, which I used to charge my talismans and amulets. I couldn't change the energy right now, but I could adjust whatever values I needed an hour later.

Now my main task was to charge the talismans, so that was exactly the kind of manipulation I was engaged in. Although it would be impossible for an ordinary human consciousness to calculate the necessary impact on reality, with 'foresight of the future' the subconscious mind easily solved these problems. To the people around me such events would look like unbelievable luck, while in fact it was a delicate manipulation of probability lines.

After I made a rough plan of action, I began to wait until the necessary energies reached the appropriate values. Within the next two hours, anomalies would arise in various places in the cave, which would allow me to charge all my remaining talismans and amulets with almost one hundred percent efficiency. All I had to do was make my way through the cave to the right places at the right time, guided by the quite 'legitimate' possibilities given to me by the map and the terrain scanner.

As I wandered around the cave, I mastered another 'cheat' feature given to me by psionics. If I can change the information in the computer, then of course I can read it, too. In fact, I had access to all the information in the game. Just by looking at any monster, I could tell what characteristics and skills it had, and even what would fall out of it if it died. In addition, through information links I could find out which quests required killing this monster, what their reward was, who would grant them, what other quests these NPC guys had, and so on. I couldn't read random information, but with some 'reference point' I could get to any knowledge of the game. So now I no longer needed guides, because I could find out all the information about quests or dungeons directly.