Chapter 335: What Was I Thinking?
Once Benton happened to consider using karma as a method to determine who deserved to be offered an invitation to the sect, his first action was to buy a Knowledge of Karma technique from the System for four Sect Points.
The information granted was sparser than Benton’s experience with other such techniques led him to expect, but after further inquiries, the System revealed that its information on the subject was limited.
Good to know that even the almighty System had limitations.
The bottom line, to the best of what the technique revealed to him, was that karma increased with positive thoughts, words, and deeds and decreased when those were instead negative.
Another major point was that karma was only gained or lost based on intention. Say a man stepped on an innocent person’s foot. The circumstances behind the move mattered. If the act was an accident, karma remained constant. If intentional, karma decreased.
The exact amount of the decrease wasn’t something that the System could calculate, however, as it varied based on way too many factors. How much harm was done? What was the karma score of the innocent person? How bad was the injury? What were the follow-on effects of the wound?
Those were apparently just some of the variables involved.
The System also revealed that Benton, upon buying an appropriate Concept, could obtain a karma score on a targeted individual. Which was fantastic. Exactly what he wanted.
Only it wasn’t exactly what he wanted.
Benton basically wanted to know if someone was good or bad, a measure of who someone was inside their heart. Karma didn’t measure a person’s innate goodness, only their actions. Circumstances could drive a good person to bad acts. Thus, It was possible for a person Benton would consider to be good to have a negative karma score and vice versa.
That the score was based on intent, however, helped tremendously in making it an indicator of what Benton wanted to measure, especially when taken as an average over the subject’s lifetime. He felt fairly confident in saying that a person with a decently high average score was probably a decent person.
His first test revealed that Gao Zian averaged around a positive fifteen hundred per year. Which seemed solid. But Benton had no idea what the number actually meant.