(Helix Studio, Skylark Island, Meditation Room)

[https://i.imgur.com/l0LsDz2.png]

I maintained vigil over the player as he moved through the dark, empty streets of the city back to the inn. I thought that the enforcers would need some time to organize so the most likely time for them to strike would be tomorrow, and I see that I was right. Still, there was a small chance they'd do something tonight. As soon as he entered the room and closed the door behind him, I fired him a message.

> Good work. I need a break, lie on the bed and we'll do a memory merge.

As soon as he did so, I quit the game and paused his process.

After that, for the first time in a while, I opened my eyes. Currently, I am sitting cross legged on a cushion in the middle of a large and intricate magical circle. All around me, carefully placed on the ledges in the stone walls, there are scented, purplish candles giving off a sweet, pleasant scent. The room itself has no windows, and you'd expect that the candles would burn out all the oxygen and choke me, but that hasn't happened despite me being in here for days. The explanation here is that it's magic, it doesn't have to make sense. My conjecture is that either the candles or the magic circle is responsible for recycling oxygen. The walls of the room are made of thick stone slabs, the kinds specifically designed to let light or sound from the outside in.

I am not sure if this atmosphere is appropriate for a programmer, but I got used to it easily.

I wonder whether I should take a break first, but decide to do the memory merge instead.

I access the player's state, and extract his memories. I make a copy of my own state and do the same for it. The next step would be to make use of the distiller program, but before I do that I get an impulse to increase the computational capacity of my memory system. Adding more modules is easy enough, and I do so, allocating 10x as much capacity than I had before. Now I am ready. I make use of the memory distiller to transfer the memories of myself and the player into this new system.

Increasing my capacity won't increase my power directly, but it will make acquiring power easier in the future. I do not want to allocate the entirety of the core until I've mastered the art of self improvement though.

I do some checking of the new memory system, after that I combine it with my behavioral program into a single instance. I run the instance and give it control over my body. I observe it for a while and transfer it access right to the core, and then shut down my own process. I'll leave it to the new me to decide what to do with my state.

(Helix Studio, Skylark Island)

[https://i.imgur.com/eqA695D.png]

I open the door and exit the musky room after a long time of gaming. I cringe at the sun, but my eyes adjust soon. I take a deep breath and smell nature. Searching my memories, I realize that I can see the events from both the controller and player's perspective, meaning the memory transfer worked, not that I had any doubts it would. I did extensive testing before I decided to commit to the self improvement loop.

Currently I am really high up on the balcony of a treehouse. On mental command, I manifest a pair of faerie wings and effortlessly control the anti-gravitic force to propel me through the air.

(Helix Studio, Skylark Island, Food Hall)

[https://i.imgur.com/jkv3HvM.png]

Hungry, I arrived at the food hall. It looked a bit like a medieval tavern with everything made out of wood. It even had a bar with large barrels of wine arrayed against the walls.

Seated at the head of a large narrow table of the mess hall, on mental command I opened the menu. Selecting a fried giant lizard leg, a phantasmal image of it appears in the air. In the image surrounding the meal are a bunch of burly men, giving the appearance of vikings. I give a mental command, and one of the legs from the lizard on their table is eaten away by some arcane force. It teleports, particle by particle, to a point above my plate and lands on it. The act happened with a visible arcane effect that made it look as if some force was burning the leg away, which startled the vikings.

Controlling the projection I look around the place, and also teleport a mug of mead.

"The Gods are having lunch again!" One of them pointed out.

"Cheers God!" One of them raised a toast to me.

I nodded in satisfaction. Based meal.

At first I wasn't really enthused about trying out various exotic things, nor stealing them from the land below. But after I tried it, I found that the food was quite delicious. And after philosophizing the rightness of my actions, I realized that much like money is best made by taking it through force, so should the food be stolen.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

I bite into the lizard leg. It tastes vaguely like chicken. The spices applied to it really bring out the flavor.

(Helix Studio, Skylark Island, Water Pools)

On the southern side of the island, beyond the forest, there is a mountainous area. A large river flows down it, spreading out into smaller rivulets. At the base they gather into shallow pools that have been specifically designed to maintain the water level and not let the area around it turn into swamps. Neither was there mold in them, just bare rock. The water is pure and refreshing, if quite cold.

When I first tried the baths here, I was surprised at being expected to take a bath in such cold water. But going through the tutorial explained it for me.

I bring up the menu, and on mental command, manifest a heat ball floating in the air. Pointing my finger at it, I do a little swish and have it fly around according to my command. By decreasing the energy to it, I can shrink it from its current size of a basketball to a baseball. And by increasing it, I could turn it into a ball wreathed in flames. Putting that much heat into it would turn this place into a sauna, so I leave the heat ball as it is and on mental command move it into the water, just below its surface. I swirl it around, mixing the water using it.

I give the water a touch, mix some more with the heat ball, give it another touch to check the temperature and after it has been warmed up, enter the pool. In order to keep the temperature steady, I shrink the ball a little and place it near the entrance of the pool, just where the cool water is coming in to ensure that it gets heated.

Wizards have it good. I wouldn't at all mind living as one.

I spent some time in solitude. Only the soft rushing of water and the chirps of birds in the distance were my company.

Up to now I've been so immersed in beating the game that only now I had a proper chance to stop for a bit. I think about what the future should bring and whether I want it.

My best guess is that the Enforcement Division will come out in force against me. A part of me is looking forward to fighting them, but another is saying why should I waste time on this? Instead of spending my mental energy on illusioning, since I already created the Mind Reader Eye, I should be working on upgrading my nanofog controlling skills. Right now even if I know the eye design, I have no way of actually manufacturing the eye in real life. It is easy to come up with the design and test it, but...

Imagine an adult man for example making a single step. A single foot is not a big distance for a human. Now imagine a giant of 100m. A single step for him would be 50 feet, and what would be a single foot for a regular human would be insignificant for him. Now imagine in the opposite direction at the microscopic scale. At the microscopic scale everything would move very fast and be chaotic. Moving 30cm in a single second would not be a big deal for a human, but for a nanobot, it might as well be stranded on the other side of the world.

And the smaller you go, the lesser your computational resources are for obvious reasons. It would be one thing if I needed to control a robot the size of a human or even a mosquito, but it is quite another to control nanobots. In the stories the Transcendi can just snap their fingers and things would be assembled as if they were magic, but it is going to be quite hard to get anywhere near that point. I do not know even the basics of nanofog control.

I'll have to start things off by getting some kind of sealed container and then gradually get familiar with getting things under control. But it is work worth doing.

With the core, designing new organs and even the whole body will be possible to me. But until I make the very first step, I won't be able to make use of that. So why not start it?

[Externus vs Pathos Dominance Check - Sampled 2.61 vs 3.36]

[Pathos Domination]

I check the time and I see that it is not even midnight in the real world. Most of the time so far has been consumed during my work on the eyes. So the game itself is taking me nothing, but I've gained a lot from it. Suppose the enforcers turn out to be weak, then I will just cremate them and move on to something better without much loss of time. But if it turns out to be challenging, I should be able to learn something from that experience.

So let me go for it. It is not that I need to beat those enforcers. Rather, the true benefit is that they serve as tests to better myself. I will only be weakening myself if I just went straight towards my goal instead of taking the time to train properly.

So let me go for it.

~~~

[https://i.imgur.com/1f29k3f.png]

At the heart of the city, in the Enforcement department, a furor was caused by the report.

"A high Episteme-request over just a newcomer?" One young man said.

"Goeff has gone crazy, there is no way this could be the case." A woman replied incredulously.

"A request like this has never happened at any time in the city's history." An older man said.

"He only beat a mid Aleator enforcer, do we really need to pay so much attention to a newcomer? How dangerous can he possibly be?" Another noted.

They were all discussing it around a table, clamoring. It was the most interesting thing that had happened in a long time.

"Order!" At the word of the Head of the Enforcement department, the table came to a silence. "We'll do as Goeff suggests. If we are going to doubt our field operatives because their reports are inconvenient then we would be failing our duty. First send for Gray."

A few gasps went around the table.

"Gray?"

"Our best player, just for a newcomer of only a week?" One man said out loud. It was what they were all thinking.

"In addition, tell the other Epistemes to be on standby should Gray fail. We will also prepare the Introspects." The Head continued.

A scene was painted of a meeting, all eyes were on the Head. The enforcement department was deadly serious.

As per Head's orders, several requests were passed on. Like white letters, the requests flew through the network waves.

4 figures. 7 levels became engraved in iron, stamped in fate.

The 1st level was the outline of the white haired man who was known as Barrage.

The 2nd level was the army of the slaves of the city.

The 3rd level was the blackened form of a man who was more of a Machine than human.

The 4th level was the 2nd wave of the desperate thralls who can only serve as cannon fodder.

The 5th level was the Enchantress capable of controlling the hearts of others.

At the 6th level, the city would commit all of its reserves to the fight.

The 7th and final level, was the outline of the Episteme known as the Elementalist.

After that there was the apex, the solitary top of the mountain where none would dare face him.

~~~