After a brief explanation and some moderately unkind words from Joe about the wisdom of my deal, we set out for the barrier on the twentieth floor. Lindsey was up and about by then, though still a bit groggy. A great deal more coherent, she had a more positive view of my selling of an avatar, though she was glad that I was taking the risk first rather than her.

We reached the pile of random stuff, totally filling up the stairs leading further down into the dungeon. I summoned the brass lighter that the Painter had given me, and examined it. Unlike the previous key, this one didn’t seem to contain any energy at all. Maybe it provided a different sort of bonus?

After a minute or so of scrutiny, I could somewhat work out what was going on with the enchantment. It was the opposite of the last key. This one would reach out, and if it found what it was looking for (presumably the barrier), it would reach out to all nearby entities that met some difficult to figure out criteria (presumably players) and apply some sort of a change (presumably the mark we need to get past the barrier). That was a lot of guesswork, mostly supported by knowing ahead of time that this was the key I was looking for.

Could I have found this among all the other junk enchantments scattered around the boss floor? Maybe. Probably. Given enough time. But could I do it while The Consumer shouted at me? Would I have needed to negotiate with it to get permission to keep looking? Would it chase me around the floor like one of those unkillable bosses in horror games? I didn’t have a great vantage point to judge the overall difficulty of this second boss room, but I could be reasonably confident that it would take substantially well-developed mystic senses to solve the normal way. That wasn’t something anyone else would have, which should secure our lead. Except… that wasn’t quite correct. We had no idea if the Chinese, or even the Europeans had any mystics. Not to mention any of the new wave of players.

We had no idea how much of a lead we had. The Painter reaching out implied that we were still in the lead, but that wasn’t something we could rely on. We needed to keep pushing, those subscription keys had to show up sooner or later. Probably later.

“Group up, I don’t know how much of a range this thing has.”

Joe and Lindsey stepped close to me, where I stood at the edge of the junk pile. I dropped the key into the pile, and watched as it vanished as soon as it touched the other objects. The magic in it remained in the air, though, and I gasped as it reached out and made contact. It was like stepping outside into the freezing cold, but only for a moment. After that, I felt something resonate with me, like a part of me which had been asleep was being shaken awake.

“Well, that feels creepy,” Joe said, looking at his claws, “Sigil of Excess, and a buff called Essence Hunger, which says it allows me to draw in outside essence to use.”

I opened my mouth to ask if there was a timer on it, and if the previous buff was still there, but I was yanked away before I could. I could feel a tendril of The Abstract Painter looming, absorbing all of my attention. It sat there, hanging in the space between the physical representation of the tower, and wherever its true self lurked, confirming my willingness to give over this body. I silently assented, and instantly sat up in my bed. There was ice water in my veins, as a cool certainty fell over me.

I checked my inventory - everything was in its place. I checked my login timer - the expected three hours and eleven minutes. From these facts, I knew I had not yet ended my time in Dreamshards with this deal. There was something wrong, though. Different. My mind was like crystal. A clarity I had never known was upon me. I sought the source, and found it almost immediately.

Black diamonds of essence had leaked into me from somewhere in my game mechanic area. Tiny inverted stars, dense beyond my reckoning. I traced them to the source and was able to push back the haze that obscured that area for a second time. They seemed to have come from somewhere inside my avatar creation function. The Painter and I had been connected through it, if only for a moment when it took control. In my altered state I could make out a few more of the inputs and outputs of the function, but I could also see with certainty that the majority of this essence machinery was beyond my comprehension. I would need a much more solid foundation to unravel it. But now I knew the way. I would struggle to retrace my steps once the clarity passed, but it had ceased to be an intractable problem.

And the clarity would pass. I could see my solar essence, which had been pushed back from my body and into its containment bubble, slowly fighting off The Painter’s essence. That energy of silent certainty was also being absorbed, in tiny amounts, into my essence. There was some kinship between its essence and mine which allowed that to happen at all, though I could see no influence from it seeping into the fabric of my being. There would be no lingering effects.

I looked around my room, taking in the dark windows and lights from the city skyline, the spare furniture and possessions I kept. Everything suddenly seemed significant. I felt like I could see the web of circumstance all around me. Where everything had come from, the reasons for everyone’s actions, all adding up in an impossibly complex equation which ultimately resulted in the present. I felt like I could trace those same circumstances forward, to their inevitable ends.

I also felt a deep uneasiness take hold as those ends unfurled in my mind’s eye. My heartbeat sped up as my breath hitched. The Dreamshards project was doomed. Distant men commanding progress which could never be assured, alien directives which seemed to move against our objectives, moving targets from those in charge when things seemed to be going well. Roberts had been set up to fail. Or he’d foolishly set himself up.

Another, more immediate worry worked its way into the forefront of my mind. I had dismissed it as fantasy when Lindsey reported the use of her power in the real world. But there were other data points. The transfer of power from mere video recording, enough to burn out a display. And that was just what I had seen… whole servers were reportedly destroyed. The NPCs acted like people, no corners cut. Brain injuries seemed to carry over. The Painter knew about Earth. Every game function was internally consistent inside the game’s world. My power’s internal aspects functioned perfectly outside the game since day one, and I would bet that any other mystic would find the same. The painful feedback I had received when I had tried to use my powers in my room stood out as well. If it simply wasn’t possible to do, then there shouldn’t have been any kind of feedback at all. Why had it felt the same as when I tried to do something too big in game? It was too much.

I stood and walked mechanically over to my desk, where the silver pen still sat. Pain lanced through my hips and legs as I moved, but in my current state pain held no sway over me. A dread certainty had gripped my heart. I already knew what I would find, but I had to test it anyway. I held out my hand, and selected a piece of unused paper from my inventory, and called it forth. Easy as breathing, the paper appeared in my hand. A blink of an eye later, and it was gone. Sublimated into nothing. Not even dust remained. If I hadn’t been watching, it would have vanished too quickly for me to notice. I had been watching, though. There was some fundamental difference in the physicality or the permanence of things between the real world and the game, but there was obviously more going on here than a purely virtual world.

I reached out with my hand and my power, and gripped the pen. It felt like walking uphill in a hurricane, but my altered state granted me control in addition to clarity, though both had begun to wane. Once I had a firm grip, I pulled the pen into my inventory.

Pain washed through me as I watched fractures form in the foundation of my essence. I had overdrawn. I had also succeeded. My hand was empty and, looming larger than life, greater and truer and realer than anything it had held before, my inventory contained the silver pen.

I sat down at my desk, my limbs shaking enough that I risked falling if I remained standing. This was the end of the world. The end of any existing established order. Keys were distributed randomly, and someone, somewhere was going to learn that their powers worked in the real world. Or someone would end up with something powerful and purely internal. Control of the key crystals no longer guaranteed control over key distribution, even before someone found more in game. The only thing the people in power would be able to do was try to destroy them.

I could feel the energy from my sun flow into me, soothing my overdrawn essence. The ice flowing through me was thawing, the final motes of The Painter’s essence finally being washed away. I was left with a much more vague sense of unease, a feeling of deep loss. I felt like I had been on the verge of an important realization, but the total shift in my mental state had sheared off that train of thought with extreme prejudice.

What could I do? Roberts seemed to want to make this project work. Maybe I could appeal to him? Maybe we could work together to avoid the worst of the coming… conflict? Apocalypse? I had never lived through a war. The Sino expansion conflict had been a distant thing, not really impacting my life in any obvious way. Maybe this would be no different? But Digital Arts owned the key crystals. The other corporations would surely close ranks, particularly if DA offered to share access. They’d never surrender something so potentially valuable. War was coming here.

And worst of all, war was coming for me, personally. I had realized early on that I might become some sort of strategic resource, just having a key, but this was orders of magnitude worse. Could I work with Roberts to avoid the worst of it? No, what I needed was the ability to protect myself. I could die as many times as I wanted in the game, but out here, I was mortal. I needed to develop my power enough that I could defend myself in the real world.

From the utter exhaustion I felt from taking the pen, I could tell that I was still a long way off. I was also feeling a bit fragile, given the fractures I had caused in the course of my experiment. I didn’t want to harm my power by continuing to practice until the damage was healed, so that route was cut off at the moment.

Could I find some other way to defend myself? Should I get a gun? I wasn’t sure that was within my reach either. I had connections to modding communities, which had existed in a legal grey area since their inception. There was a remote possibility that I could use those legally grey connections to find something darker. Black markets for modded consoles and computers were definitely real, so why not guns?

There was also the idea of just running. I could hide out in the wildlands. No one from the corps went there without good reason, as far as I knew. There was that old saying in security circles that “security through obscurity isn’t”, but I wasn’t certain that it applied to a person’s physical security and well-being. Though, how would I eat? Where would I stay? I had played more than my fair share of survival games, but given my recent education in the difference between actual combat and the sorts of combat that went on in games, I was pretty sure my ‘survival’ experience counted for very little.

For the moment, more information might be the thing that I need most. I thought of my butterfly minion, still awaiting a more complete impression to become something. Maybe a lawyer wasn’t what I’d need, if there was no guarantee of law and order in the future anyway. What then, would be more suitable? A survivalist? A doctor? If I could bring my minions out into the world, I could definitely go for a giant butterfly surgeon, to get these damn implants out. The pain was only getting worse. But I just had to hold out until tomorrow, and most of that time would be spent in game anyway, so it would be foolish to pick based purely on how I was feeling at this exact moment.

I guess the question was, do I stay and fight in their war, or do I start planning my exit? It seemed like an easy choice at first. I had no family, and that was largely the fault of the system I lived under. I had very few friends here. Just my old roleplaying group, though we hadn’t played in months and I hardly heard from them anymore. Then there was Joe. Maybe I could convince him to run with me? He had a daughter though. Ugh, what a mess.

Whatever. If I end up staying to fight, I will have all the support of civilization. I’ll only need to rely on myself if I run, and immediate survival is probably the priority. I dressed and made myself a quick dinner, fighting through the increasingly frequent spasms of pain. Once I was ready to go, I grabbed my AR glasses and set off to the office. I wouldn’t be able to submit my reference material request from my home network connection if I was using reasons tied to the game, given the increased level of secrecy.

A long and excruciating walk later, I arrived at the office. To my surprise, there were a decent number of people present, despite the late hour. Mr. Roberts was in John’s office, stomping around and gesturing wildly. His call must not be going well. I sat at a table with a few others, nodded politely to acknowledge them, and got to work on my request.

I requested full access to information related to wilderness survival in all environments, explaining that I intended to imprint this ability onto one of my minions for use within the game. I cited the inverted landmass overhead, and also that the NPC town whose name I had forgotten apparently had access to wilderness areas somehow.

[Finxi]

Right, Finxi had access to some kind of wilderness areas for both meat and soil. I sent off the request, and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Mr. Roberts go still. I looked up and met his eye for a brief moment. He flicked his hand to the side, turned away, and resumed shouting at whoever he was talking to. I checked my messages. Approved.

I checked out the newly unlocked resources, and found there to be an unholy mess of uncategorized data. Everything from building a furnace by hand from clay and smelting iron, up to guides that assumed you had modern tools and showing how to get the most out of them. I whipped up a quick script that took all of the pages and arranged them into a huge linear document, and started glancing at pages. It took only a glance before Nico let me know.

[Next.]

And I moved on to the next page. After the first twenty minutes of boredom, with input from Nico, I wrote another script to scroll at the speed he could reliably read, and just let him work while my mind wandered. Stressed as I was, it mostly wandered in circles, anxiety building all the while. Twice I had to stop and adjust the scrolling script to account for my blinking or glancing away, but once it was done, the process was about as painless as scrolling through more than a thousand pages of text and images could be.

About an hour and a half later once that was done, I set up another script to do the same for all the video content, using a library intended for advertisements to pause the video if I wasn’t actively looking. I was able to set the video playback speed to an absurd multiplier. Apparently, not only was my inventory (and its inhabitants) constantly under the effect of time dilation, but Nico also was quite capable of parsing the video much faster than a human might. Maybe he was delegating to some of the other minions somehow? Something to worry about later, if at all. I sat through the remaining several hours, stewing in anxiety and rising nausea from the rapidly changing images and sound.

By the end, I was feeling quite ill, but Nico assured me that this much information will provide a high quality minion for us. Before I headed home, I ran all the Dreamshards project reports through my document script, feeding them to Nico as well. It couldn’t hurt to have a reference to everything we’d figured out about the game so far in a form I could actually access inside the game.

Heading back to my room, I pondered if calling Dreamshards a game was still appropriate, given what I had learned tonight. Ultimately, I suppose it didn’t matter. I’d keep up the pretext that it was until the higher ups figured it out on their own. I sure as hell wasn’t about to report it.

As I settled back into bed, login timer having already elapsed, I realized that according to my friends list Joe was still logged in. Weird. He should have run out of time like an hour or two ago. Well, might as well meet up with him and hear about what the Painter did with my avatar.