Neophyte World Builder

Chapter 146: Anchor

CROWN

I awoke to a number of increasingly concerning notifications.

With a quiet groan I rolled out of bed, my head throbbing. Despite the lack of a true physical form, I still had a headache. Nothing else hurt despite the indeterminate amount of time I’d spent in bed…

Which made me realize that I definitely hadn’t been in bed when I collapsed.

I pushed open the door from my small bedroom and made my way up to the command room, rubbing my head. It was eerily quiet, even for a place that I was used to being quiet. I’d been working so much on the upcoming invasion that I had never noticed, before.

“Duck? Orpheus?” I called out. I didn’t expect Orpheus to be here, but Duck was omnipresent. And obviously someone had dragged me over to my bed while I was out.

Or… perhaps that had been Orpheus, before she’d been kicked out. Duck was my Terminal, so I wasn’t sure she would continue to exist while I was out. She certainly wasn’t answering.

The command center was still present, but the giant projection of my world was absent. The huge room looked blank and sterile without it, only a raised ring around the middle with occasional recliners or tables breaking the plain white scenery.

How long had I been out?

My head was hurting.

After a few minutes of standing there with my eyes closed, I finally thought to bring up my interface. I really wasn’t operating at my best at the time.

The very basic window that came up was slow to respond, but it had the current time dilation listed as 1:1. However long I’d been out, the world itself must have had the same length pass. Which meant… years, at least. I could clearly remember the reason I went under was lack of energy, so at least enough for a Standard Cycle must have passed. For my world, that happened every 13 years or so… and we hadn’t been close to another Cycle when I went out.

If the debt had been large, it could have been a lot longer.

I shook my head and opened the chat window to try to contact the gods. If the world was running at the same speed as me, I should be able to get ahold of them easily enough.

[CONNECTION ERROR]

[CONNECTING TO WORLD SYSTEM-DERIVATIVE SUBSYSTEM BYPASS]

[CROWN HAS JOINED THE CHAT]

| CROWN: Haven’t even gotten a chance to try this since the big revision.

| AKASHA: Father! You’re awake!

The error messages made me pause, since it sounded like I was using Akasha herself to communicate. It was still a little strange thinking of her as a sort of system… as The System, really. She always seemed so alive and vivacious when speaking, it was hard to reconcile that with the sterile performance of the System.

| CROWN: I am. How long was I out?

| SOLEN: About 1,300 years. Things have changed a lot.

| EYSSA: I’m glad you’re okay.

| KELAS: The number of high-mana areas keeps rising, and the Calen and Sylen are barely holding on.

I frowned, but then realized what was going on.

| CROWN: They probably will vanish, but they’ll come back. It will be okay. This is a natural cycle of the world, but I’m glad I woke up before it peaked.

| CROWN: Have you spoken to Duck? Any of you?

| AKASHA: She isn’t with you? We couldn’t use this chat while you were gone. I had to go to visit the gods personally if I wanted to talk.

| CROWN: I’m not even sure she still exists. I’m sorry.

| AKASHA: She does, I can still feel her. You should be able to as well.

| AKASHA: We’ve been holding things together, but you should check your promotion queue. More gods would really help right now.

Promotion queue?

Sure enough, when I looked for it, I had that exact thing. Akasha had set up a sort of subsystem where the gods – and Akasha herself – could place souls under consideration for elevation to godhood, dungeons, or some other rewards. She’d even tagged each with any comments the others made, or her own recommendations. It was clearly hijacked from the Great Game part of the System, but it was the first time she’d outright added some kind of functionality to herself.

Perhaps Orpheus would have been worried about that, but I only felt proud. She’d been keeping things running and I could see she’d done this specifically for my sake.

I sat down and spent a few hours reviewing and assigning souls, to fill in currently automated systems with the souls of those deemed worthy. It had been 1300 years, but there weren’t that many candidates… they must have been quite selective. I still wanted to review them carefully.

While I went over the selection, I got caught up on current events. Some of the vaskan had finally turned to gods, so they now had options as well. Fisk had gotten carried away and made a huge empire, but it was starting to fall apart of late. Technology had advanced well into forging steel, but I didn’t hear anything that resembled firearms from either side, at least none that didn’t need mana of some kind to function.

The incursions had continued for some time after I had fallen unconscious, but had lessened and retreated within a couple decades, apparently. That was curious, but I wasn’t about to complain.

Still no sign of Duck. While I worked, I kept trying to “feel” her like Akasha said… and eventually I did get a faint sense of her. She still existed, but she wasn’t… “here” in the sense of nearby. Which meant she had to be outside the Sanctuary.

I didn’t even realize she could leave by herself. Maybe my recent Rank had allowed it?

The situation on the world needed some attention, but it wasn’t anything that needed a full review right away. I’d handled the most pressing matters already, and the rest would take a lot more analysis. I was proud of my world, too. They’d slipped and stumbled in my absence… but they had also done some incredible things.

I’d really need to fully look into it later.

My next priority was… Duck.

The door leading out of my Sanctuary was still there, waiting.

Still, I hesitated. I’d never been outside of my own world’s influence without Orpheus there to guide me. I’d never considered myself a coward, but now that I was alone – after so long with Duck’s snarky asides – the silence was oppressive… yet comforting.

I sent another message to Orpheus, but once again only received an error message.

I didn’t have much choice in the matter.

I opened the door and stepped through.

The small hallway was… unremarkable. Dark, but I had no trouble seeing. A simple wooden door was perhaps ten meters away, the final barrier between myself and somewhere else. A barrier I’d never passed alone, nor asked how to do so. Was there a trick to it? Or did it work by desire?

With the faint tug of Duck’s presence guiding me forward, I crossed the hallway and grasped the doorknob – yes, a simple Earth door, that’s all – to twist and push it open.

“Took you long enough.”

Duck’s mild voice teased me in a familiar manner as I stepped into… white nothingness. It wasn’t even an empty room, it was just… nothing as far as the eye could see. No sign of walls, or ceiling, or even a floor. The only things within sight were the door behind me, three occupants, and a large vault-like door standing free, with nothing behind it.

I was pretty sure that actually opening it would lead somewhere. I’d been around long enough by now to understand this was just a representation of reality.

Next to the vault door stood Duck, who was in turn standing beside the tentacled creature that I’d met briefly so long ago, during the long meeting. Trent, I recalled his name being. Such a deceptively normal-sounding name for a very inhuman creature.

Ember, in that sculpted obsidian body of hers, stood on the other side of the vault door, and gave me a casual wave that looked far less strained than the serious expression on her face.

“Were you all just… waiting for me?” I scratched my head as I walked forward. “Hello, Trent. Ember. Duck. What’s going on?”

“Orpheus has been absent for some time,” Trent answered before the others could. “At least one of us has stood by this gate ever since. None of us can open it.”

Ember gestured to the door. “We’re just hoping Orpheus comes out. This is apparently where they would come from when they needed to talk, but none of our interfaces are working properly now. Trent and the others think Orpheus might be uh… dead or… the equivalent of it. Maybe sleeping like you were.”

Trent’s slimy tentacles lifted, contorting in a gesture of distress.

“Your Terminal’s presence is an… irregularity.” The octopus-thing burbled uncertainly, at least I thought so. “Terminals should not be able to operate remotely during torpor.”

Duck just shrugged. “I’m a weird Terminal. I can do a lot of things I shouldn’t be able to.”

Again, that sensation of familiarity washed over me. The feeling that there was something I’d forgotten… but this time, instead of slipping away, it clicked into place. I opened my mouth to say something about it… but caught Duck’s eyes. Her tail swayed, and her ears were quirked in a manner similar to an elf’s smirk.

It hit me, then, that she had let me remember.

“Yeah,” she said, as if in confession. The slim elf stretched her arms over her head. “Go ahead.”

Ember and Trent looked at her curiously – at least, I assume Trent’s expression was curiosity – as she said that, but I knew what she’d meant.

“Duck can change things without my permission. She can exist without me, I think…” I trailed off and stared at her.

My supposedly-subservient Terminal chuckled. “Not quite. I told the truth most of the time… lying to you was actually really hard, Donut. If you somehow died, I’d go with you… but yeah I have a lot more independence than what Orpheus could detect. Or you. I could even sort of… nudge your thoughts about me a certain way. I kept thinking one day you might figure it out, and I think you came close a few times, but… here we are.”

“Right… you changed the parameters of how the System saw me several times when I was in an Avatar,” I muttered. “And I completely missed that you hadn’t asked permission. You could change things the entire time.”

“Well… no,” Duck admitted, ignoring the stares from the other two Administrators. “Yes, but no. I could change a lot of things without your permission, but only when you weren’t in the Sanctuary. I needed you in an Avatar to make tweaks, and even then I didn’t – sometimes couldn’t – do much. I didn’t want to mess things up, and anything obvious you’d notice immediately anyway. I’m still you, kind of… I’m not some secret villain from behind the scenes or anything like that. I’m just also more than a Terminal.”

Ember leaned forward, while Trent’s tentacles curled.

“What did you do?” I asked, with a sinking feeling.

Duck shrugged. “Not much. I tried to make things… easier. I tried a lot of things. Most didn’t work anyway, but I think when I tried to make the System a little smarter… you know what happened after that. I had no idea it would result in that, but yeah… my fault.”

“But why confess now?” Ember broke into the conversation. “Why here with two more Administrators? What do you want?”

“Not sure yet,” Duck admitted. “As for why now… so you won’t ask too many questions about why I can do this.”

She rapped on the vault door… and with a ponderous motion, it slowly swung open to reveal a black void within. I couldn’t see anything beyond it, but I could feel the weight of it. The depth and importance of whatever liminal space sat beyond that inky curtain.

The other two backed away, but Duck just shrugged. “Neither of you can walk through there. Don’t ask me how I know. I think when Donut here created his System, and then spawned me, it linked me to the interface somehow. That’s why I can do the things I do. But I know that neither of you can enter. Neither can I… I’m more than a Terminal, but not quite a full being yet, either.”

She stepped aside and dipped her tail lower. “I’d been hoping you’d figure it out on your own, and I think you were really close, despite my attempts to fudge your perception. This will have to do. Go on. The incursions haven’t stopped, not for the rest of the cluster. Someone is going to have to go in there.”

I had so many questions. So many things I needed to know. But I was still dizzy with all that I’d just heard.

Orpheus missing.

Duck was something beyond what we’d all assumed.

The attack was still ongoing.

I hesitated for the second time in as many hours, standing in front of a doorway.

Did I trust Duck about this? Would this annihilate me and set her free?

Did I really have a choice not to?

“Wish me luck,” I muttered.

I stepped through the gate.