by John Gold
“But returning to what you found in Project Chrysalis, there’s the world’s beauty, its realism, the laws of physics and magic, its incredible complexity and fascination. Honestly, you don’t know a tenth of it. The locals, as you call them, are an artificial life form. They’re as real as you are. And all of us here in this world obey the general rules. For them, the attribute panel is just as natural as food and water. They aren’t just realistic ArtIns; they are real, living creatures. This isn’t a game. It’s an artificially created world that helps different civilizations make contact and understand each other’s culture and language. Call it a galaxy-wide game played by hundreds or even thousands of civilizations from other planets and worlds.
“Let’s talk about what’s going to happen next in the world of humans and in the Project Chrysalis world. Lunar will still be a closed nation and will continue to do its best to regulate interstate conflict. On the other side of the interworldly portal, you will find the Papilio world, or the butterfly world if you translate it from the Latin. It’s a third-order world, which means you will be starting over with a clean slate. Don’t feel bad; don’t be afraid. You will take one tenth of the attributes you received from achievements here with you, and your future children will receive half of your joint heritage. It will be added to their natural development ceiling. For example, if you added a thousand points in this world, you will keep one hundred. The natural development ceiling in all other worlds is twenty points, so yours will be one hundred and twenty.
“Your skills will be lost completely. Your abilities will be hidden, affecting your physical and mental bodies directly. Call it a predisposition toward whatever that area is. For example, fire mages who selected a body-transformation ability that has something to do with fire have a better chance of discovering an aptitude toward Fire Magic and everything connected to it. The more abilities you have in a certain area, the stronger the legacy effect will be. Some skills have a 100% legacy effect that takes the form of abilities or the density of your magic in the third-order world. One hint I’ll give you is that they aren’t the most popular or well-known skills. Gifts don’t come up as often, always depending on the situation. While abilities and gifts aren’t displayed in your attribute window, experienced mages can recognize or confirm them. There are no classes or professions in Papilio, only you, your skills, and your attributes. The number of skills you can have is unlimited. You can learn and acquire them yourself if you’re smart enough to figure out how. There are, however, five unwritten avenues for development: warriors, mages, craftsmen, managers, and scouts. No avenue contradicts another, so do whatever you want.
“Remember this though: your body in the game can grow old if you use your skills or gifts, or if you do anything else that expends your life strength. For example, necromancers need their victims to give up their soul to create soul stones. The more they suffer, the more of their soul they’ll give up, though the coefficient will never exceed one. Necromancers can sap you of your life strength by damaging your mental body and using it to exert influence on your physical body. There are berserker abilities that boost your strength, though they accelerate the ageing process. Mages can leverage their life strength when they run out of mana. In these cases, you have to go through the rebirth process, stripping you of your levels but bringing your body back into a healthy state.
“You can also get fat if you eat too much. You lose weight when you don’t eat enough. You can find yourself covered in sores if you don’t heal diseases. You’ll smell terrible if you don’t bathe. I’m telling you all this to make sure you understand how harsh the world on that side of the portal is. But you need to understand that there are civilizations in the universe with slavery, caste systems, monarchies, kings, and queens. The Papilio world prepares you for that by demonstrating the difference in culture between humankind and the other worlds.
“The pain threshold in Papilio is pushed to 25%—it’s both cruel and difficult. You might be captured as a slave, sent off to the mines, raped, skinned, or experimented on. If the consequences are serious enough, the only thing that will save you is rerolling. Also, in Papilio, mastery is more highly valued than your level. You can’t level-up your swordplay skill simply by hacking away at a post or waving it around in battle. You’ll be scared, you’ll be hurt, you’ll be fascinated, and you’ll have fun. Papilio is more developed on a fantasy and technological level. Some of the locals there are from this world, having achieved the pinnacle of development in their class abilities. You’ll find cannon, constant battle, and how hard it is to become a mage, a hundred times harder, in fact, and I’m not exaggerating. You can only become a good warrior if you join the army. Being a healer is a way of life, and everyone likes them. You can’t heal serious or critical injuries immediately. Thieves get their hands chopped off and their bodies thrust onto stakes. Anyone suspected of taking bribes is interrogated using magic that can influence your consciousness, and never ask how to get the marauder class. You’ll be killed on the spot just for asking.
Rabbits can ambush you, witches can poison and eat you. The gods there are real, and wiping whole cities off the face of the earth is nothing to them. The wolves hunt in packs; werewolves come out at night to mate. If you die, you lose your money and everything you’re wearing. Everything remains on your dead body. You can only get realistic loot from bodies, so you’ll never pick up a sword, helmet, or potion from a wolf you killed. All you can get are what you’d normally get: meat, the hide, and the tendons. There are deposits of mithril in the most remote mines, though everyone is equal when it comes to collecting it—there aren’t any special skills.
The dwarves have a banking system, there are civilized cities, and you’ll even find teleports and airships. Levitation takes an enormous amount of strength, so there aren’t any flying mages. There are, on the other hand, ancient monsters, abandoned underground cities, and the ruins of ancient civilizations. Actual demons feed on the souls, bodies, and blood of their victims. There aren’t any angels. There are dwarves, elves, orcs, ogres, goblins, and lots of other small peoples.
Third-order worlds only go up to Level 1000, and skills range from 1 to 100. When you create a character, it has to be the same gender as you, though that doesn’t apply to hermaphrodites. You can do unlimited amounts of damage. There’s no resistance scale—it’s different from one situation to another. For example, stone golems are immune to lightning, though you can hit them with stronger bolts and split the rock in keeping with the laws of physics. You can douse them in water and hit them with a modest charge to burn their control loop. And you can tear out their mana storage if you have enough strength. It’s a highly variable world where the end result depends on how you use your skills. That’s why mastery is more important than your level.
Once you get to Level 1000, you can go through the Valley of Wanderers and cross Six Giants Plateau. The local monsters won’t attack you at that point. At the middle of the plateau, there’s another interworldly portal that will take you to the Crossroads of the Worlds, a third-order world where you won’t have to start over. That’s where you’ll meet other civilizations. And that’s when the game will really start! Good luck, dearest humanity. This is the last we’ll be seeing of each other!”
Akashi’s group leaped down from the cube and dove into the portal. The representatives of the other civilizations in the alliance followed suit. The welcoming ceremony was complete.
This was mankind’s greatest moment. They had won access to Talzeur.
∞ ∞ ∞
Figiraldina Elmaro, or Femida as she was known in Project Chrysalis, headed over to Papilio. All her equipment stayed in the interworld along with her old body and the sword Sagie had given her. Fiji knew that would happen, but she still felt defenseless without all the metal. In this world, she played with a short, one-handed sword, also using melee and grappling moves—yet another facet of her well-honed mastery.
The interface pinged to let her know she had a new mes
sage. Could it be Sagie?
Come to Antiquity Café. First sector in the Plezara residential district—table in your name.
The sender didn’t leave their name, and that meant Fiji’s benefactor was up to his old tricks again. She had a feeling she knew what he was going to say.
After logging out of the game, grabbing breakfast, and kissing Roni goodbye, she set out for the spot. She’d never once left her house in all her twenty-three years—she could only live without her med capsule for twelve hours. After that, her brain overloaded, she lost consciousness, and she fell into something like a coma if she wasn’t immersed in the medical solution. However, that ailment disappeared completely when she went from Project Chrysalis to Papilio.
A courteous waiter led her to a private table. Fiji’s favorite food was already there waiting for her—the benefactor definitely knew where her grandfather lived and what he liked. But he wasn’t there yet. There were about forty people in the room, though they all got up and left as soon as she started eating. The only one who remained looked to be less than twenty. He had dark skin and hair, brown eyes, and a strong, confident stride. His body was trim, he was wearing the perfect outfit, and his manners were flawless.
“I apologize for the rigmarole, but there was no other way. You never know where the next hit is going to come from.”
Fiji knew him! At least, nobody knew him, though Fiji had heard about him and his achievements a hundred times over.
“I never would have thought that my grandfather, Miguel Elmaro, would look five years younger than me.”
Miguel smiled as a father might smile at a daughter.
“I’m happy you’re so smart. Of all my ninety-seven descendants, your talent is the most vividly expressed. Or, perhaps better, the will to develop your talent. Your father told me that you declined an offer to work in the strategic planning office, and that you were too busy focusing exclusively on Project Chrysalis and your mastery there to help him with even the simplest of advice. Bravo! You’re the only one in my family who stands a chance of exceed me as a guide.”
Fiji smiled, not sure how to hide her happiness. It was the founder of the Elmaro family, Miguel Elmaro, one of the three representatives of humankind, who was able to reach a second-order world. And he’d just praised her, a nobody in a side branch of the Elmaro clan.
“Fiji, you’ve seen the paths already, right? You’ve seen the future?”
That, in fact, was the goal of her entire life.
“I’m not sure what to call it or how best to describe it. It’s just that I always know where to go in order to find the right way. Sometimes I know that I’m going to be attacked and from where. Every time, it’s harder to explain to Roni how I know all that.”
It was her grandfather, the legendary personality that stood at the very beginning of Armadillo Industries and Lunar, the second human after Akashi. All she wanted was to hear how he saw the world.
“You’re unusual, Fiji. I noticed the first traces of that ability when we got to Level 500, but you recognized them not a week into Papilio. I’m sure you have hundreds of questions, so ask the most important one. This will be your personal test.”
“How?”
“Well done—you think quickly. The race of keepers is the only one we know of from tenth-order worlds. Each of them is something other than a single creature or even a colony; we call them supercreatures whose intellect is at least five orders higher than ours. Just imagine a person whose consciousness is expanded by a factor of ten thousand. Multiply that by the ability to exist in the primordial soup life came from; add a coefficient for growing in experience, intelligence, and intellect over all these years; and you have a keeper. There’s just one in every world, keeping track as the supreme being. We don’t know what their objectives are, though they do everything they can to ensure that the different civilizations in the universe flourish. I’m aware of what happened to Sagie, though the reason for that kind of behavior lies outside our understanding. After dying in the game, keepers lose their character and get sent back to their people’s base world. There’s something to be proud of there. Rumor has it that keepers have only been killed twice in the entire history of Talzeur, and that humans were the ones who killed them on both occasions. Once, it was someone from Earth. Although, I should make a side note here: people are a form of humanoid life that is widespread throughout the universe but humankind is just one sort. To get back to the keepers and what we can do, you’ve probably noticed that everyone in the Elmaro family has red hair, even if there are different shades. We’re almost all involved in planning and coordinating what other people do. Still, you and I are the only ones who received the guide ability.”
“What’s that?”
“We can see the future the keeper has for the game world. In its passive form, it manifests itself as the ability to see all the possible paths through locations, prisons, worlds, and everything else—all paths. But everything rests on the most important factor in human consciousness. And what is that?”
Fiji knew it from the very beginning.
“Mastery! It doesn’t matter what you’re talking about—it’s a universal indicator of how well someone is able to get their consciousness and subconsciousness to work together. The greater your mastery, the farther ahead you can see, and the better your chances of predicting the future. You understand key moments and details better. There aren’t any specifics, visions, or voices in the sky; you just start to understand which actions and details are important. Your consciousness operates using a completely different kind of logic.”
Miguel smiled and narrowed his eyes. The girl’s grandmother had told her that this was the highest form of praise he ever gave anyone—recognition.
“You’re a gifted girl.”
“Oh, grandpa, stop it. We both know there’s no gift or talent. It’s all about hard work and honing your mastery.”
The young man smiled in appreciation of the way Fiji thought.
“And you’re already outdoing me for the stage you’re at. Bravo! Everyone else in the Elmaro family just has an aptitude for data collection and analysis, while you’re going further to see that mastery is the key to everything. Nobody told you anything, nobody hinted at the connection between the consciousness and the subconscious, and you were still able to build a theory and progress it that far. You understand the way and how to make predictions! You’re right that mastery is the key to mastering the guide ability—seeing the way, knowing someone’s future and the trials prepared for them—all of that is part of the stream of consciousness belonging to the keeper that we have access to when we’re lucky. The ability itself occurs in one in a billion. And only half of one percent of those are able to take it from analysis to the ability to be a guide. Only two people in all of humanity have been able to acquire and recognize the ability: you and me. Do you see how important you are for Lunar and all of humanity now? You’re just at the very beginning of your path.”
Fiji had known that from the start.
“No, I’ve never known. I spent my entire childhood in a single room, only once in a while crawling out of my med capsule. Mom and dad logged out of the game to tell me how interesting life was at the Crossroads of the Worlds and how far my brothers had gotten. I listened to fairy tales, read the news, and collected information. Nobody ever taught me anything. I gave myself an education. When I turned twelve and the time came to decide which world I’d start in, I opted to boost my miserable heritage and go with Project Chrysalis. I’ve spent fourteen long years building my strength, getting excited about every achievement and every drop of strength I’ve shed blood for. So many hours of practice, working on battle mastery! But the only thing I regret is that you sent Sagie over to that damned Tanatos alone. I don’t care what humankind wants; I don’t care what Lunar wants. I was working toward a goal: to reach the Crossroads of the Worlds. I wanted to get to the world my parents have told me so much about, the world where the people I care about live. And how
did that turn out? The person who did more for me than my entire family was dropped into the most horrific situation imaginable. Grandpa, what happened to him? Why is there a total isolation shield blocking communication in and out of Earth? Why are Lunar’s security drones scanning the entire atmosphere looking for radio waves or ship communication systems? Why can’t I get in touch with anyone from the Azure August resort? I pulled shots from a satellite, and it looks like part of the resort is demolished, almost like there was an explosion. Did you take Sagie by force? Is he hurt?”
Miguel wiped away his tears. They’d ventured into the topic that hurt the most, and he didn’t know how Fiji would react when she heard everything.
“There’s nobody in the world who wants happiness for Sagie more than Akashi and me. And there’s nobody he hates more than us. But now, he doesn’t hate people; he hates all of humanity. The part of his identity that loved others, forgave them their weakness, and believed in their potential is gone—the good part that wished for peace and harmony.”
“You killed him?! Grandpa!”
“No, he destroyed part of the resort and disappeared, and we detected the first use of psionic ability.”
∞ ∞ ∞
In a first-order world, in an area hidden from wandering eyes, there was a tower made out of indestructible material without doors or windows.
The emergency meeting of the council of keepers had been called because of a death in the race. Thousands of snake-like creatures hovered in the dark, empty space. They were all talking with each other at once.
“Tser’Kareni Papir made a mistake in his estimation of humans.”