Next morning Jason wakes up and shakes his head. ‘I should look into the sleep option. The time ratio between NeoRealm and irl is nice, but doubling it would be better. Though I do wonder how it works. In fact, why haven’t I questioned it before?’
Then he stands up and ignores the question.
Out in the den, a decent breakfast of fried noodles and vegetables is being served up. Jason joins them, but the meal is silent. A comfortable silence as everyone has something to do this day and they are ready to head out. Well, Jason is heading back to his room, but everyone else did leave the house.
Back in his room Jason refocuses on where he left off the day before. After following a thread back down into his core, he lets himself drift in the Energy that flows past in an unending stream. Thoughts of roots, thread, and rivers larger than oceans dance in his head. Time passes as glimpses of truths and revelations of fundamental law that have gone into NeoRealm, the world not the game, slowly accumulates for him. Just the edges of leftover crumbs, but more than most people would touch on before the seventh or eighth bottleneck.
Like a clarion call, one fact rings out in his mind. The System is using Energy for the lines. While he had guessed at this, Jason had not been sure before this. Now from his drifting it has become clear that there is a smaller, denser flow next to and yet not fully connected to his own.
From it, in ways he can not fully see, the System is pulling on the unending source of Energy. A flow that Jason has started to connect to the planet itself. Beyond that, he can also tell that the lines are not how it is meant to be used. Rather, they are simply the way that the System forces it to form.
While not entirely wrong, Jason can feel that there is a better way. A way that would sidestep the difficulty of forcing the Energy into thread in the first place. His deepest of revelations, the strangest eonic truth. The living Energy, blood flow of the planet and guide to life does not turn into Mana and Qi.
Mana and Qi are byproducts of Energy escaping back into the primal flow Jason has now immersed himself in. Strange powers that do not change Energy but rather are part of what keeps the flow of Energy so close to the surface of the planet instead of dormant down in the core, waiting for something truly beyond Jason’s comprehension.
Still, despite knowing this Jason also knows he could never use either of them. This one fact everyone knows about, only being able to use one of the three prime powers is not a System restriction. Rather just a truth of how the world works.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
However, it does open up the path for creating his own lines, to return to the natural order. The System, despite appearing to be omniscient, is very much not all seeing. All players and the important natives will have System formed lines. This does not mean that there are living beings without the lines. Rather, that which is not deemed important enough will still have its original, most primal, lines.
Close to Jason he can already feel an example of this. Not his own plants. By planting them and his continued care for them, they have been imparted importance by the System. No, a simple green little plant on a shelf off to the side. A bit of decoration to add a more vibrant feel to the room, has the key.
The plant is barely within his ability to sense it from the Energy flow, but there it is. On the edge of his range a small pull on the flow. Until now Jason had assumed that because he couldn’t detect anything from plants or animals, they didn’t have any lines. That is not true. Rather, he just was not able to sense the natural lines.
The System lines are so obvious because of how artificial and foreign they are. Like someone spray painted bright orange lines on a tree, they stand out. Following the almost unnoticeable draw that the plant has, Jason reverses out of the flow. Not into his own body, but into the decorative plant.
And if not for this act, even knowing it had to exist, Jason would have never found the natural lines. They didn’t just blend in. The natural lines existed as one with the plant, and only from the inside was he able to notice them.
From this the natural form of the threads is revealed to him. Though he doesn’t get long to memorize it. His attention alone is enough for the System to take notice of the plant. Starting at the flow, things begin to crystalize. First it is the opening, a natural looking mostly circle. Within moments the edges of the opening start to straighten until all that is left is a perfect hexagon.
And from this newly reformed hexagon a surge of interference creeps along the natural lines. As it passes through the looser and more flowing lines, the interference fritzes them out and once passed like some kind of industrial spinning machine, those threads are spun tight. At every junction that looks more like a root ball, the lines fly apart, re-twist, and then spin together to form the crystalline nodes Jason is more familiar with.
Maybe if it had been a more powerful being, this process would have taken longer, but that’s the point of what the System is doing. The moment anything becomes “interesting” it is assimilated into the System’s Energy cycle and control.
What Jason had managed to see wasn’t much, but he now had a way to find out more. While he didn’t doubt that, the System would catch on quickly if he tried to examine each stalk of grass one by one. He could instead wander around to find examples of plants and animals not under the Systems thumb. Because what he had seen was enough to know that there was a better way. Not because the Systems method was wrong, but because it would only work for a god-like being. Which honestly made Jason wonder if the gods and goddess had their own sub-system for their followers. Thought the question there is if anyone true believer would really let Jason examine them closely enough to find out.