Locating people without the vision of the future was extremely difficult. Shaper had to rely on other, more mundane methods he had set up just in case.
He was glad that one of his alarms pinged Windsor Freeman. After learning through his spies that the ex-president was the reason Keynes Kid had triggered the fourth outbreak prematurely, deviating from the vision, Shaper decided it was time to finally meet him.
Shaper had spent decades evading the other man, knowing that their meeting would have ended in disaster.
It bothers you, Magnalius said.
Yes, Shaper replied, switching to his usual attire—black coat, gloves and elegant suit. It was to project an image of control. Wearing a mismatched rift gear was a sign of weakness in his mind. I don’t understand where I failed to correct the events to align them with the vision.
You have not failed, Magnalius replied, although a tad thoughtfully. It is the Chaos debuff affecting the vision.
I know it is the debuff’s doing but I don’t understand how it happens. The vision is external in relation to Keynes Kid and he has no power to affect the whole timeline. Does he?
No, he does not, Magnalius assured him. However, there is another possibility or… two possibilities. The first one is the Chaos debuff and while I do not know the specifics I would wager that it somehow affected probabilities of the future. Even small events would eventually escalate, creating substantial deviations from the vision. The other option is his Untraceable buff. It is not as potent as the Chaos debuff but there is a chance that it somehow obscured Keynes Kid inside the vision, making it harder to predict his movements.
Shaper disagreed. During the time of the One Empire, his researchers studied buffs and debuffs and they were never deemed more potent than even spells, although they didn’t have access to spells back then and could only compare them through visions. Clearly their methods were crude and based on guessing, but information on buffs and debuffs were available firsthand.
You are missing a crucial point here, Magnalius injected, clearly reading his thoughts. The vision itself could have been imperfect. Especially, given the low grade materials available at the time of creating the items.
The truth slowly dawned on Shaper, his cardinal mistake.
I treated the vision as an absolute forgetting it was just the subject of the System. Shaper’s blind trust became his undoing. For all he knew the vision might have been incorrect from the beginning, feeding him the false narrative.
Magnalius appeared next to him, pushing his power to the limits. He was not yet a physical entity but close.
“It will sound… harsh but your job here is done,” Magnalius said. “Leave Windsor Freeman, Keynes Kid and others be. Whatever the future brings, it is not your job to fix it anymore.”
“Why?” Shaper asked, watching his spiritual companion carefully. They hadn’t always been on the same foot and since the events at the Capital, Shaper felt a creeping disconnection… no, detachment with Magnalius.
“I feel tired.”
Shaper frowned, confused. Spiritual companions weren’t supposed to get tired, bored or anything like that. This shouldn’t be happening. Something was terribly wrong here.
“Magnalius…”
“You must level up, Abraham of Telios. Your current Level cannot protect me any longer.”
What? Shaper didn’t believe his ears. Where did this come from?
“The System’s latest update. It looks like the disconnection from the System comes with more drawbacks than we expected.”
The timing couldn’t be worse. It wasn’t the first time Shaper had doubts about the visions and his mission to save the world, but Magnalius had always been there to support him. Shaper had co-exist so long with Magnalius that a life without him seemed unreal.
He took a few deep breaths of the cold air then said.
“After we finish here, we’ll start looking into breaking the cap and levelling up. How does that sound?”
Magnalius stared at the ocean in the distance, remaining silent for a while. When he spoke his voice didn’t have the usual roughness.
“From what I gleaned from the System after it had been awakened, I am… pessimistic about our chances. Even with the right essence, breaking the cap is hard. With human essence, I do not know if it is possible, Abraham of Telios.”
“I refuse to accept this,” Shaper said with renewed vigour. “We still have the Hive Mind for the emergency.”
Magnalius shook his head and with a heavy sigh said, “That abominable spiritual structure was built with a smaller population and humane essence in mind. It will not work the way you hope, if it works at all. It had been millenia since the last activation.”
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Shaper remembered it. The day that changed the course of history, erasing any knowledge of the One Empire from the face of the world. But back then, the population was several million people, with the majority of them not yet ascenders due to a high death rate. These were simpler times.
With that thought in mind, Shaper reignited his resolve. His mission to save the world was the most important thing. If it cost his or Magnalius’s life, so be it. Even if the vision was flawed, Shaper had seen enough of the future to understand what had to be done.
“Farewell, friend,” Shaper said with a heavy sign.
Magnalius wasn’t yet gone but their bond was growing thin. Shaper didn’t know how much time Magnalius had but judging by the rate of decay of their bond, it was not long.
He followed the stairs leading to a hidden plateau located halfway to the peak of Mount Asylia. There, Shaper was going to meet Windsor Freeman, then sending him—
“Argh!”Shaper’s mind went under assault. Instantly, Shaper tried to push against the attack but couldn’t… Somehow, his spiritual protection wasn’t enough to ward him.
That shouldn’t be possible. He was in the Grand spiritual stage, granting him the ability to directly affect spiritual cores of other living beings, including ascenders. At this stage, the spiritual aura became truly physical.
Shaper’s aura exploded out of him—or should have. His mind was losing control of his body. Impossible!
As he struggled, he fell to his knees, clutching his head.
“We’re finally meeting,” said a voice.
Shaper tried to look up but he no longer controlled his body.
“At some point, I was beginning to believe that you’re a twisted fabrication of the Old Blood,” the voice continued. “But the spiritual structures convinced me otherwise. I am glad you built them.”
Windsor Freeman? How? Shaper realised with shock at the same time, fighting the mental assault.
Then something clicked around his neck, wrists and ankles. The mental attack receded but the pressure remained lurking uncomfortably at the back of his mind.
Shaper’s eyes snapped open but there was not much else he could do. His body felt weak and he was cut off from his spiritual core and spells. At least, I can move.
He slowly stood up then looked up at his attacker.
“Windsor Freeman.”
“Shaper,”Freeman said coolly. “I was waiting for you.”
“You did not,” Shaper replied, trying to sound as cold as possible. Magnalius, are you there? Only silence replied as Shaper couldn’t even feel their bond.
“You would be surprised but enough of the chit chat. We have a lot of work ahead of us. You are going to tell me everything you know. Then I will decide what to do with you.”
“We have only one task ahead of us,” Shaper said, growing frustrated with his carelessness. He had been the apex predator for so long that he became blind to threats. “We must stop Vivena Sael from killing Keynes Kid.”
***
Windsor watched Shaper with a mix of satisfaction and concern. For decades he considered him his most dangerous adversary and today, that same man was reduced to a crawling worm. This part worried him. Before the outbreaks, Windsor Freeman had only feared one other man - Columbus Curt. He had solved that issue with the ritual of peace and threat of using the superstructure shooting concentrated mana beams.
But things weren’t so simple anymore. Tulli was only Level 5 and she was able to take Shaper out. Granted, her Talent was evaluated as rank 10, which was considered the highest in the government’s system and she was using several rift items that boosted her Talent. Still, the ease with which she had defeated Shaper chilled Windsor. When they had set up the trap, it wasn’t this he’d expected.
“Take him to the cells,” Windsor said to Tulli and she followed his orders without hesitation. It didn’t stop him from having doubts. What if she turned on him? Could he even control her? He didn’t like the answers to these questions.
***
It had been six months since Keynes Kid entered the Inner Sanctuary and there hadn’t been a day without Jedd cursing his boss.
Frankly, it wasn’t because of the department of knowledge, though that thing was a pain in the ass with all the corporate politics getting in the way. Without Keynes Kid to throw his weight around, Jedd was stalled at each step by the higher ups from the other founders.
If that was all, Jedd would be a happy man. No, the thing that made Jedd’s life harder was Rell Raust’s fungus artificial mind.
At first Jedd was hesitant to take action. Having a sapient artificial mind made out of fungus wasn’t Jedd’s area of expertise. Nonetheless, going to Wagner Zimmermann was out of the question. Jedd despised the man and didn’t trust him.
After spending months in the lab with Raust, Jedd started realising the weight of the discovery. Regullus, as they called the artificial mind, was a phenomenon dwarfing anything else Jedd had seen so far.
Like the company’s Golden Horizon AI, Regullus learned at an impossibly fast rate, but this wasn’t what made him different from the standard AIs.
Regullus could absorb skill shards. It didn’t end there, at least in theory, as Raust expected Regullus to begin forming a spiritual core at some point. When Jedd realised the seriousness of Raust’s achievement, he started to fear the consequences. Some people, even within the company, would kill to silence them.
The solution came from Regullus. Somehow, it had learned that Wagner Zimmerman’s secret space department was building a stealth spaceship and offered them help in building their own version with Regullus as the main computer.
And this was another thing Jedd feared - a powerful AI capable of absorbing skill shards and access to its own stealth spaceship. Were they even cognizant of what they were doing? It led to long discussions between Jedd and Raust that would have remained without conclusion if not for another piece of information from Regullus.
There was a secret cell in their company created with one aim - to eliminate Keynes Kid if he became a liability. How Regullus had learned of it, they could only guess but the appearance of the information worried Jedd on several levels. Even if their AI didn’t lie, it still used the information to manipulate them into building the spaceship.
What was worse was Jedd’s inability to contact Keynes Kid as he was at this point inside the Inner Sanctuary. With Keynes Kid unreachable and no one else apart from the founders, who Jedd didn’t trust, the decision fell on him.
Jedd was no fool. He knew that his tie to Keynes Kid meant that in the case of boss’ death, a purge of Keynes Kid’s subordinates would follow. Jedd didn’t plan on dying, neither he was going to blindly listen to a fungus AI. He gathered the most trusted and smartest people he could and put them to work. With Raust’s supervision, they created a failsafe that could turn Regullus off.
Even though Regullus or Golden Horizon appeared to be all over the place, they were every bit physical and vulnerable. A weakness Jedd and Raust relied on.
Regullus agreed with the plan without hesitation, affirming them of his benevolent intentions.
Jedd didn’t trust the fungus AI and often questioned his decision, but he didn’t back out of the insane idea.