Once Tsubaki returned from her visit to the Admin Room, she immediately went to her room. From the look in her eyes, I could tell that she had found plenty of inspiration for her Trial of Shadows. Though I had no idea how long this particular trial would take her, she still left her Servant avatars working within Olympus to maintain it.
Thankfully, she reported to me earlier that not only was Lena considered safe so long as we didn’t mistreat her, but she had even replaced another high-ranking ninja that had previously been sent to eliminate her. With this, I suppose that we had a regular source of information inside the ninjas, at least?
I’d need to ask her later why she kept up that identity, or what she planned to do with it. For now, there was no need to bother her and Lifre in their work. Which left Dana and Gerard. Gerard, ever since I returned from this timeskip, had been working in a research lab on Earth, furthering the world’s understanding of fifth-tier magic. From what I could tell, they had made great strides after studying the information shield that I generated previously.
It was still not at a level where people could casually cast even a basic fifth-tier spell, but that was fine. Fifth-tier spells were not meant to be used like that in the first place. If you want to launch an attack at someone, a third-tier spell will typically suffice. If you want to erase them from existence or create an adaptive shield, you can use a more advanced fourth-tier spell.
When it comes to combat, you only want to use spells of the fifth tier if you want to not only kill the target, but also everyone the target has ever known, and their entire bloodline. By my understanding, a fifth tier spell is meant to be created with some semblance of intelligence to manage its own operations. That’s more than overkill when it comes to single-use combat spells.
Now, Dana… she seemed quite busy with her own thing. I could sense her calling her familiars to her through the World’s Shadow, and then sending them away not long after. A few minutes later, she used the World’s Shadow to disappear as well.
Part of me wanted to ask Chelsea how her experiment had gone, but she warned me not to attempt to contact her from outside the Admin Room, as any such attempt could potentially lead to tainting me with the karma that is being aimed at her. Given the importance of my role, I wasn’t about to push my luck like that because I was bored.
Honestly, there were times that I thought about whether the karma system had become more trouble than it was worth. Unfortunately, it wasn’t so easy to get rid of it at this point, from a larger perspective. Yes, I could have it disabled through the system, but… that would only cause more chaos than it would solve.
The cases in which karma became troublesome were only the most extreme cases, the outliers. The times when there were so many lives hanging in the balance that there was no correct, morally acceptable answer. Let’s take the recent event with the March King. Yes, his actions caused the premature deaths of possibly trillions of living beings. That was an irrefutable fact, and nobody was arguing that. However, he was also saving the lives of those that he could. Whether he chose to commit to the act or to wait for oblivion, there was simply no correct option as far as karma was concerned.
Similarly, in cases like what Chelsea is dealing with now, there are no good options. It is critical that we obtain information about universal creation and destruction, but that information comes at a heavy cost. Theoretically, Chelsea could try to clone lifeless worlds, and use those for her experiments. However, the point of this was to merge two world systems together, which doesn’t work if the only things copied are two dead universes with no additional systems.
It is fringe cases like this that cause the system to appear flawed, but the system is critical in the daily operation of the world. The karma system itself was created to aid Irena in processing the deceased in the Underworld, allowing her more freedom by erasing the need for her to personally judge every soul that crosses over.
Without the karma system in place, the Underworld would be thrown into chaos. And not just that, but it would have severe ramifications on the living world, where karma is often used as a metric to judge a person’s character.
The primary concept behind the karma system was to reward those who helped others, and punish those who hurt others. This was a simple truth. Unfortunately, it was too simple. The system operates only in black and white, with no regards for anything other than the simple numbers.
Rather than removing the system, it would be my ideal to modify it, to change it in a way where it would judge actions more intelligently. If such a thing were easily done, I would have done so long ago, but there was one major problem. The karma system was not a part of the game system.
Ashley had extensive experience modifying the lesser game system that functions on my worlds. I had no doubt that she would be able to create an artificial intelligence through fourth-tier magic or some similar methodology, and attach that to the karma system if it were part of the overall game structure. Unfortunately, because the karma system is outside of the game code, she wouldn’t have had access to it.
This was one reason that led to Digital Conversion becoming so broken, because it was designed to work with the game system. This made its code available to people like Ashley to study and reverse-engineer, making modifications until it became one of the most overpowered assets in our collection.
The same could not be said for karma. In fact, the only way that we could identify the karmic system on that level is to conduct these world creation and destruction tests. From there, maybe we will be able to create an entity that intelligently governs karma, without any personal bias towards one party. Until then, the system would have to remain as it was.
Seven days passed without incident, and Chelsea’s team was finally freed from their isolation chamber. Aside from the complaint of not having a great variety of food, nobody seemed particularly bothered by their karmic quarantine. They had busied themselves to decipher what they could from the information sent over.
Of course, because this was Chelsea that we were talking about, she didn’t simply let everyone leave. Rather, she wrote her name on one of the more sensitive pieces of machinery, and then rolled it on a cart out the door leading back to the facility, a rope tied to it. If there was still any karmic backlash waiting for her, she believed that associating this device with her identity would cause it to immediately suffer some form of small malfunction at the very least.
If that was the case, she would have immediately extended the quarantine until such time that there were no longer any signs. Thankfully, the device passed through the isolation barrier and came back without any issues.
Only then did Chelsea allow everyone to leave the quarantine and return to their regular work, with an order to report any suspicious luck that they encountered for the next week. With a sigh, she made her way back to her own lab, wanting to review the data herself. She felt like she was on the verge of an epiphany when the quarantine ended, and so wanted to get back to work right away.
That said, she didn’t forget to submit her own report to the Keeper. Alright! We’re out of quarantine now, and everything seems safe. You still want that update on what happened?
The Keeper had refrained from visiting her to learn about the experiment, even in the Admin Room, much to her surprise. When she had her main body send him a message to ask about it, he had said that he would rather wait until the quarantine was over, just in case she was able to put together any additional information to include.
If you’ve got something to share, I’m all ears.
Chelsea simply chuckled at that. I once saw a race that was all ears. Just a bunch of ears wrapped around a brain, with thin membranes on the ears that they could contract to allow for movement.
I probably didn’t need to know that. So, the report?
With a wry grin, Chelsea nodded her head. As expected, the first test was a failure, for the most part. We did achieve a law fusion, but other basic laws were mutated in the process. For instance, the force of gravity was reduced by roughly ten thousand times. This led to the planets losing their atmosphere, and stars simply exploding with all of their contained energy. Additionally, a detailed analysis of the footage has led us to believe that magic ceased to function as it should, due to recorded wards being disabled.
There was little concrete information we could gain after these two observations, because the lack of any atmosphere first caused the cloned Lorek to be scorched by the ever-present stellar storms. Meanwhile, the cloned Deckan exploded from within due to the difference in world size combined with the energy now emitting from its molten core.
There was a brief moment of pause when she gave this information, before Dale reported back to her. This shouldn’t directly impact your research, but I did receive another piece of information that might interest you.
Oh? What is it? Chelsea was rather curious to know what Dale was talking about, given that she knew he wasn’t involved directly in any high-level research projects. A decent manager he may be, but a cutting-edge scientist he was not.
During your quarantine, I received a report that dimensium signals increased in the original Deckan, around the same time that you destroyed the cloned one.
Chelsea’s eyes briefly widened, realizing that she may have made a grave error in judgment. She had originally cloned Deckan because it was an iconic world, with its card magic giving it additional laws that they would be able to study. However, the core of this was ultimately dimensium. There wasn’t actually a set of laws in Deckan that allowed for card magic, everything was derived from the background energy emitted by this almost omnipresent material.
Have the drop rates of monsters increased again? This was one of the key changes that they had noticed over the years. It wasn’t hard to catch it right away, but over time they had noticed that the drop rates of cards had considerably increased after the destruction of the original Metong universe.
It would appear that way. Additionally, some cards have started to drop from monsters below their tier. No fifth-tier cards, because those have not yet been purchased still, but first-tier monsters will sometimes drop second-tier cards, and so on.
Chelsea nodded her head, somewhat lost in thought. Most likely, the effects weren’t limited to just this, but there hadn’t been enough time to conduct a detailed analysis. She had suspected that dimensium might resonate across the void during the original incident with the Metong homeworld, but had dismissed the theory at the time. This was because, at the time, the Metong homeworld was little more than an attachment to Deckan, without any true void separation.
However, things were different now. The new world that had been destroyed was completely disconnected from Deckan, meaning that there shouldn’t have been any change to one caused by the other’s destruction.
If additional Deckans continued to be created and destroyed, and dimensium continued to be empowered each time, it was entirely likely that the mineral could have a catastrophic event on that universe as a whole. Got it, I’ll stop using Deckan as the subject of my experiments for now.
