World Seed: New Rules

by Justin Miller

  ’I’ll do what I can. Tell me, did you play a new game? It would have been in a shiny silver capsule that just arrived at your house.’ I could at least hold onto the hope that people weren’t randomly being changed into monsters without logging into the game.

  I swore I heard a sniffling sound from the elemental in front of me, who had calmed down enough that she was no longer a tornado. Instead, she was all but invisible unless I used my Aura Sight. ’That… that’s right. Something life… I thought mommy bought it for me…’

  There was another stabbing pain in my heart as I heard about that. Some child randomly got in the game, and thought it would be fun to play as an elemental. How could she have known that she would turn into the creature she chose to play as? Her mother might not have even noticed that she played the game, and thought she went missing. ’I’ll do what I can, I promise. For now, can you show me where you live? I’ll take you back to your mom and explain what’s going on.’

  I could feel a bit of acceptance from Tessa at that, and she slowly glided down the sidewalk, with me following behind. Suddenly, from my wrist I heard Celeste speak up. “What happened? Why wasn’t there a fight? There was supposed to be a fight, right?”

  I shook my head, and couldn’t help but be sad at this situation. “No, just a little girl who was scared.” While we were walking, I started to think of ways that I might be able to help. If I was better with my shapeshifting, I might be able to turn her human again. However, I was a long ways off from even having myself take on a full racial shift, let alone performing it on someone else.

  “Ohh… I’m sorry…” Celeste spoke out sadly from my wrist, and I nodded my head slightly. After we walked for a while, we arrived in front of a small house with blue walls and a dark brown roof, and there were two police cars out in front. Having an idea what they were here for, I walked up to the front door and knocked on it. Thinking about Celeste had given me an idea on how I could at least help them talk to each other.

  A few moments later, a police officer(still human by the looks of him) appeared at the door and looked to me. “Can I help you with something, son?”

  I took a deep breath and nodded. “You’re here about the missing girl, right? Tessa?”

  He blinked at my question, but then appeared to be on guard against me, thinking I might have something to do with the disappearance. “How do you know about that?”

  “I met her a few minutes ago. It’s a bit hard to explain, but she’s here right now.” I sighed slightly. “She got into their Seed, she said.”

  His eyebrows furrowed as he thought about that. “Do you have any way to prove your claim?”

  “I was just called to a scene in front of the city hall. I guess you could say that I’m the local monster hunter now?” I weakly smiled at that, and he nodded as he looked at my wings. Apparently, that bit of information had been spread around. “Living tornado was running amok. When I got there, I was able to speak with it, and it turned out to be Tessa.”

  His face paled slightly as he understood the implications of that. It meant that the little girl was no longer human, by any stretch of the imagination. “I think it’d be best for you to come inside.” He stepped aside, holding the door open.

  Looking over to Tessa, I nodded and sent her another message through the wind. ’It’ll be alright now, we’re going to see your mom. But you’ve got to stay calm for me, okay?’ I felt another weak acceptance, and then walked through the door, my two birds perched on my shoulders as if they had never left.

  I could feel Tessa walk through the door behind me, just before it was closed by the officer. Just before we reached what was likely the living room, he stopped me so that he could go explain to her mother what was going on. After a few minutes, I could hear a loud crying from the room beyond, and a second officer signaled me in.

  Inside the living room, I saw a young woman leaning forward while sitting on the couch, her face in her hands as she sobbed. Her hair was a mess, and she was being comforted by the officer that had gone in ahead of me. After a moment, she looked up at me and spoke, her voice broken by her cries. “Can you… can you really… is she here?” I nodded my head.

  “She can’t understand anyone right now but me, but I think I can make something to let you talk to her, if you want.” After I spoke, I could see a faint light of hope in her eyes, and she nodded her head quickly. “I’ll need an item to work with. She’s a wind elemental right now, and can only speak by using the wind. I can enchant an item to let you take in the wind to understand her, and emit wind mana when you speak so that she can hear you.”

  “Will it… will it let me talk to my baby girl again?”

  “If it works, it will. She said she played NeoLife, so there is still a chance to turn her back to normal, but I’m not sure if it’ll work. When I had just started the game, someone told me that it was possible to pay for a character reset. With what’s happened, I don’t know if it’s still an option, but if it is…”

  She nodded her head quickly again. “I’ll.. I’ll check. If it’ll help her get back to normal... “

  I smiled slightly. “After I train more, I might be able to turn her back myself, but my skills aren’t good enough yet, and I wouldn’t want to risk it on a little girl unless I was absolutely sure. Now, do you have something I can enchant? It’d be best if it wasn’t too valuable, because if the enchantment fails, it might break.”

  She seemed to think about it for a moment, before looking down at her bracelet. It was a simple chain link bracelet, likely a gift she had had for a long time. “Would.. would this work?”

  I looked at it and nodded. “I’ll need you to take it off for a minute, but it should work perfectly.” Given how magic circles seemed to prevent the release of magic, I was hopeful that a circular object would be able to hold an enchantment well. She quickly took the bracelet off, and then carefully handed it to me. The ‘spell’ that I was enchanting the bracelet with was one I was only all too familiar with, and would essentially be a cultivation tool for wind mana. As long as she wore it in an environment that had a lot of wind mana(which would always be the case around her daughter), she would naturally take in the mana, releasing some of her own at the same time. That should let her communicate with Tessa the same way I do.

  The tricky part was rigging it to work. Like Jacobs had said, I would need more than just a trigger rune for something like this. I ended up overlapping the auras of the two objects slightly, and connecting them with two ‘passive’ runes. When I was done, I handed it back to her to try out.

  Hesitantly, after putting the bracelet back on, she looked around. “Tessa..?”

  There was a sniffling sound from the air, and the mother immediately looked hopeful. ’I’m here, mommy…’

  Obviously, I was still not completely satisfied. Even though they could speak, a mother that could never hold her daughter was a tragic sight. Who knows how many other little boys or girls climbed into the Seeds without knowing? How many turned into something that their parents could no longer see or touch, or even speak with. I had the feeling I would be needing to get to my full Xeno-Shifter status soon in order to fix things. “I’ll be back when I can help turn her back to normal. I hope you won’t have to wait for me to be able to, though…” I said softly as I turned around to leave, letting the mother speak with her daughter as I showed myself out.

  Chapter 4: The State of Things

  After leaving Tessa’s house, I wandered aimlessly around with the two birds on my shoulder. Given what had just happened, neither I nor Celeste really felt like talking. Even the birds could feel that the atmosphere wasn’t right for their usual antics, and simply obediently sat on my shoulders. I was walking around for nearly an hour before I finally settled on a destination, heading to a simple fast food restaurant to get something to eat. Of course, fast food places always used food synthesizers, so their taste wasn’t that great. However, it also meant that your food was ready as soon as you ordered, and s
ince the register was typically manned by an AI, it was very rarely messed up.

  After sitting down and having a bite to eat, I gradually let my mood improve, though it was still quite a shock to have seen Tessa like that. On a whim, I checked my contacts list, and found that both of my parents were offline now. Did something happen? Normally, they wouldn’t really need a reason to log off, unless they were just spending time together that they couldn’t in the game.

  Once I was done eating, I threw away the trash and started walking back towards my place, while calling them up. “Hey, John. How are things going in the real world?” I could hear my father speaking with a bit of worry, likely remembering that just a couple days before he had told me about the Seeds. At least, a couple days from my perspective, nearly two weeks in the game.

  “Not that good.” I said, trying to hide what I was feeling from my voice. “Mom, I’ve got a question to ask you, is that alright?”

  “Sure, dear. What is it?”

  “Your character is a type of elemental, right? What’s it like to be an elemental, and is there a way to get a physical body?”

  She paused for a moment at the question, and then there was a light gasp from the other end. “Who?”

  Looks like she figured it out. Not like there would be very many reasons I’d ask, given the circumstances. “A six year old girl.”

  “Oh… Oh, I’m sorry. Of course I’ll help, but I don’t know what good it’ll do. The planet I started on was a stray planet without a sun, locked in perpetual night. As a Shade, I couldn’t ‘see’ with my eyes, or ‘hear’ with my ears, or even touch or smell or taste. But I could sense everything under the cover of darkness, like a kind of radar. My race is incapable of making sound without striking something, so my only mode of speech is an ability called Shadow Tongue, which is used to communicate with other dark-attuned races. She should be similar, able to see through a radar anything touched by her element. As for a physical body… after I reached level thirty, I started to be able to condense my body into a solid shape, but it took quite a bit of focus to maintain. According to the elder shades I encountered, a true body isn’t established until level fifty.”

  I nodded my head. There was no way I’d make a little girl fight until she had enough experience to be level fifty. By that time, I’d be more than able to give her a race change, if she didn’t manage to buy one from the game. Speaking of.. “Is there still the option for players to restart their character with a new race?”

  This time, it was my father that answered. “It’s possible. All you have to do is find a shrine of the gods and pray to be reborn. The cost is five hundred dollars, or ten gold coins. Though, I’m a bit worried what will happen when people start using that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  In response to my question, he simply sighed as he spoke. “From the news we’ve heard, the company that developed the game, Manifest Industries, no longer technically exists. At least not in the physical sense. Normally, if you were to reset your character, the money spent would go to the company, who would then spend it on other things to continue circulation. However, if it is just being offered up to the ‘gods’, then something like that won’t happen. It would be the same as burning a pile of money. The same thing would happen with everyone that paid for a Seed as well.”

  My eye twitched slightly as I started to understand why the option to preorder had still been available. “They’re wanting to force us into use coin currency, the same as in the game. Precious metals can easily be mined from other worlds once we explore space. Although new currency can be printed, it would only prolong the inevitable.”

  “Exactly. Like this, everyone will be forced to use the same types of coins as they have in the game. I wouldn’t be surprised if bankers gained an ability that let them convert one type of currency to the other.”

  I nodded my head slightly, changing my direction to begin walking home a bit faster. “Possibly. If I could get into the game, then I might be able to finish developing my class abilities. At least with that, I could help people change their physical race.”

  My father laughed a bit at that. “Good, good. You probably have one of the best classes available for this new world. As for time to train… why not establish an Adventurer’s Guild? By now, people who logged on right away have had nearly two weeks to train. Quite a few should be strong enough to have classes at this point.”

  I thought about his suggestion, and nodded. With a thought, I quickly dispersed some suspicious mana that had been gathering across the street from me. “True, and this way other people could get involved and I wouldn’t have to worry about being everywhere at once.”

  Of course, I had no idea how to establish an Adventurer’s Guild. And by the time I figured it out, someone would have likely beaten me to it. There were a thousand beta testers for NeoLife, and I highly doubted I was the most forward thinking of them. If I was, then this world had bigger things to worry about than a few monster invasions.

  Saying our goodbyes, my mother wished me luck with helping the little girl, and I quickly found my way to my house. Thankfully, it didn’t seem like another monster had attacked yet. Once I got inside, I suppressed the void field while moving up to my computer. Seeing that my mood was no longer as bad, Celeste spoke up while the birds resumed nuzzling my face. “How’d it go? Get any good information?”

  “Yes and no. Some good, some not so much. Trying to find out more now.” Looking over to the spell formation on the wall, I decided to disable it for now. With Plant Manipulation, I ejected the Seed of Void from the wall, and then filled the formation with wind mana. There was an audible whoosh as the air once again returned to the room. Once I picked up the Seed of Void and put it in my inventory, I went back to looking up recent news related to the new changes.

  The first thing I found was that, after the message appeared for everyone, people began getting skill notifications while going through their everyday life. Things like gaining the cooking skill, or a doctor getting a medicine skill. Apparently, politicians even got a leadership skill. Though, I suspected a few probably got some other skills, such as bribing, blackmail, etcetera.

  Along with that, a few people discovered that they could check their status, and even had an inventory. Though, almost nobody started out above level five, so their inventory size was pitifully small. However, this did mean that the friends list worked for everyone as well, almost completely invalidating the need for modern communication devices.

  On the religious front, people had initially proclaimed that this was divine providence, brought forth by their respective gods. However, when it was revealed that the new system had its own gods, the believers did a complete change. Now, they openly persecuted the system, saying that anyone who willingly logged into the game was an agent of a false god or some devil. They called those who had transformed from the game as monsters, leading to quite a number of arrests.

  Next, rumors of potentially powerful monsters appearing. The strongest was one which was reported to affect the oceans itself, as the tide had been fluctuating wildly lately. People believed that there was likely something similar to a kraken or leviathan beneath the waters, and so boat travel had been quickly stopped in order to prevent casualties. Storms had also been raging unpredictably, causing it to snow in the deserts while the arctic experienced a heat wave.

  Thankfully, nothing like a dragon had been reported appearing yet. Aside from the mysterious monster beneath the ocean, the most terrifying thing reported had been minotaurs and elementals. Hearing about the elementals brought back memory of Tessa, and I had to ask myself how many of those were simply people that had lost the ability to communicate.

  Finally, I came across a petition to establish an Adventurer’s Guild. As I had expected, I wasn’t the first to think about it. Though, the changes to the world were barely two days old, so it was still merely a petition. However, it was incredibly popular as it offered a real solution to stop the monsters spawning
over the world.

  Well, not like I was going to be leading the guild anyways, even if I had been the first to suggest it. To my surprise, it looked like everyday life had been largely unobstructed, aside from the need to watch out for monsters which caused a heavier police presence in the city.

  Turning off my computer, I glanced over to the Seed, debating whether or not I should log in to do some quick Technomancy experiments. I still refused to do such in the real world when it could have any significant effect on me, especially after I repeatedly failed to mimic the camera scope of my rifle. Shaking my head, I decided to wait to do that until later. First, I sent Yin and Yang back to my grove, and then reset the void spell formation.

  I needed to cultivate my affinities until they reached 10% before I did anything new. Once I was done with that, I could work on new affinities and new experiments. Though, I did determine that I would study the next slime that I fought. Worst case, they don’t call me to fight one, I understand the basic process to make one myself.

  When I sat down on the floor to begin cultivating, Celeste spoke up again from my wrist. “So many things changing so quickly. It’s a miracle your race can adapt to it all.”