World Seed

Author’s Corner: Sorry guys, my internet has been out all day. Finally got the chance to write up the chapter.Looking down at the device, I handed over the five silver coins to the golem shopkeeper to study it. With a shrug, he pressed a button to undo the barrier around it and walked back to the counter. After a moment, Celeste popped up from my bracelet, looking up to me. “Are you sure you want to do this…? I won’t mind if you wait a while longer, you know…”I smiled to her, shaking my head. “It’ll be fine.” Though I said that, I went ahead and sent both of the birds back to the grove, just in case something went wrong. I could either make this work, or save up to get Celeste a robotic body, but personally I preferred this option. After all, a robotic body could still be broken. Maybe after I get some more money, I’ll be able to afford a robot to copy her AI over to, but really this was a priority. And now I was procrastinating again.Taking a deep breath, I used all of my focus to study the aura of this device. There was a handy little display that showed how it attached to the brain to ensure safety, and that helped me in my planning. However, first I needed to completely memorize the aura of this machine. And this was not exactly an easy thing to do. Unlike the scope, this wasn’t considered a ‘simple’ device, even by the game’s standards. Each of the various pieces of the implant were enchanted with different runes, and by some stroke of luck they were all ones I had previously learnt from the enchanter’s terminal.Five minutes, ten minutes, thirty minutes…. two hours later I was still studying that device with all of my attention. I had already used my Record feature to memorize the visual aspect of its aura from every conceivable angle. I even had twisted and rearranged the thin wires to make sure that the aura didn’t show any extra signs of change. In this time, a few different people had come and gone from the store, but I didn’t pay much attention to them.Finally, after three full hours of studying the implant, I felt like I was ready to start. If my memory served me, this was the longest amount of time I had spent studying a single aura since I began this game. As such, I found a nearby chair along the edge of the shop’s wall and sat down. “Okay… here goes nothing. If this fails, seeya in a few hours.”Closing my eyes, I began working, using my Mana Sense to essentially view myself from the outside. I could feel as my mana worked its way into my head, feeling around for the exact place that the device was supposed to be placed. This was the easy part, the hard part was making it. By focusing my mana, I added a bit into my head so that I was not trying to convert any part of my brain.Once I felt I had enough mana to create the basic chip, I got started on changing the aura of the extra mana to match the chip. This part I took extremely slowly, such that by the time I was done, the three hundred mana that I had poured into it had already fully recovered. There was a bit of a nagging pain in my head, but since I hadn’t made any of the connecting wires yet it was just a bit of an annoyance. The next step, I inspected the chip and made sure that I had added each and every little rune into the aura. I wanted to make sure that this was going to be perfect, or else this was going to hurt a lot.For my next trick, I try not to die! In other words, it was time to work on the connection wires. Each one was meant to go towards a different section of my brain, and that meant accuracy was extremely important here. Being off by a millimeter could be the difference between hooking it up to my hearing and hooking her up to my sense of pain.I decided to take it one wire at a time, emulating the connections with my mana down to the smallest detail my puny mind could possibly handle. Each wire took me nearly ten minutes to finish, and after each one there was a growing headache. Smart people take painkillers of some kind before they have other people go poking around in their brain. Other people just do the poking themselves.Six wires in, and it was getting slightly difficult to concentrate. However, I wasn’t even halfway done yet. The one bright side was that the auras for all the different wires were the same, and it was just placing them that I had to worry about. By the tenth wire, I was pretty much fueling myself on willpower while holding my forehead in one hand. I thought I tasted a bit of copper in my mouth, which was likely a bad sign. Somehow, I managed to get through all fifteen wires, before the pain became too much and I fell forward, out of the chair as I lost consciousness.I wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but eventually I woke up… back in the hospital. The familiar metal armband had been reapplied, and was once again measuring my vitals. The same nurse that I had spoken with before noticed I was awake and moved over towards me. “We need to stop meeting like this.”I chuckled a bit at that. “So, what’s the verdict, doc?” I asked, noticing a blue screen in front of my vision.