After sorting everything out with the system transfer, I went back to the mortal world, returning to the Sky Citadel where I had left Tsubaki and the others when it was time for the meeting to begin. As soon as I arrived, I saw Tsubaki bowing towards me from across the table, Dana offering a playful smile, and Lifre… pouting?

“Is everything alright, Lifre?” I asked curiously, having expected her to be in a good mood after both the work she had put in and the new system update.

“She was going to ask if she could use some of her points for a marriage system.” Dana said with that same smile, causing Lifre to lower her head slightly.

I simply chuckled when I heard that. “Sorry, that was something Ashley’s been working on for a while. I didn’t even know myself until just now. Why, what sort of things were you wanting to include in a marriage system?”

“I dunno…” Lifre shook her head. “Honestly, I just thought it would be a really nice touch. Maybe an enhancement on parties or something?”

I shook my head, reaching over to pat her head. “Well, you can give it some thought. You really did do a great job at the meeting. All of you. I never really expected to earn a ticket like that.”

Lifre’s eyes squinted as I patted her head, but she quickly nodded. “Alright, I can think of other things! Oh, but first..!” She let her words trail off, turning and leaving the dining room at a full sprint, leaving me quite confused.

“What just happened?” I asked, looking at Tsubaki and Dana.

“She got some inspiration from the game we played, so she said that she wanted to work on turning it into a new training story.” Dana answered, shrugging her shoulders as if it couldn’t be helped.

“Huh. Well, I guess that makes sense.” I said, before looking at Gerard, who was standing in the doorway. “How is the mining operation coming along?”

“Sir.” Gerard nodded, speaking up now that he had been addressed. “The mining for the Blood Heart is going at an exceptional pace, with a large number of Martial Spirits volunteering in the operation. When the crystal is mined, it releases a wisp of ki from any dust that breaks off, which the Martial Spirits are able to absorb without damaging the node itself.”

“At present, we are utilizing the temples of Scarlet and Ryone to refine the crystals into a uniform shape, with the excess material being offered to the two goddesses. Because of this, their tokens have become more prevalent on the market, allowing others to purchase the lower quality of energy crystals that they may need to sustain daily living.”

“It will still take time for the new crystals to enter public circulation, however. Understandably, the greatest demand for them lies with the space fleets exploring uncharted territory. Roughly sixty percent of the harvested crystals are given to them every week.”

I gave a small nod, finding that easy to understand. “I assume that a large portion of what remains goes to government facilities. According to your estimates, how long will it be before we see these crystals in public use?”

Gerard seemed to pause at that, thinking over the question. “At present, the demand is still outweighing the supply. Mage Heart crystals are easier to harvest, as they exist in every floor of Fyor, but Blood Heart can only be exported from Bloodhaven. Granted, Bloodhaven has a sizable territory, allowing for a considerable amount of crystals to be produced, but being their exclusive product means that they are qualified to charge a fee to export it.”

“With Scarlet at the head of the country, I expect that this fee will be reasonable, but not low enough to undermine the value of the lesser gems, or the work her people put in to mine the Blood Heart. If no other source of Blood Heart appears within the world, I estimate it will take fifteen months for the supply to reach a level where it will appear in common circulation. For Mage Heart, my estimate is three months.”

My brows furrowed, but there was no real way to fix that easily. The reason that I put the crystals in Scarlet’s territory in the first place was iconic. She was the Goddess of Ki, her people living spirits based around the energy. The land was so saturated in their power that the rivers and sky had turned blood red. If I spread the Blood Heart out beyond those borders, it would lose that image of being tied to the land of her people.

A thought occurred to me, and I blinked, focusing. Ashley. You migrated the respawn system for the new ores, right?

Of course. The entire system was migrated. The respawn mechanic was… actually quite the challenge, as it was the only instance in our system of an item being generated from nothing. I was tempted to see if that system could be tweaked to apply to a divine item to provide perpetual energy.

I paused at that, before shaking my head. Thoughts for later. Anyways, what would it take to set up new spawn points for the Blood Heart?

Not much. Now that we have the system fully modular, we can input new coordinates for a spawn, and it should crop up in the next weekly cycle. Why, what did you have in mind? Ashley sounded intrigued by my idea, though I was still thinking back to what she had said. And doing my best not to linger on it. Energy that they had to work for was better than free energy that was handed to them for nothing, after all.

I was thinking about setting up a blessing of Scarlet, like the ones you did for Aurivy and Tryval. If someone offers enough faith to Scarlet, she can ‘bless’ a plot of land proportionate to the faith offered, setting it as a new spawn location for Blood Heart. But, I don’t want this to be a permanent thing. The blessing should last one or two months, at most, to make sure that the world doesn’t get absolutely covered with Blood Heart.

There was a pause at that, Ashley likely thinking over the idea. It could work. We should be able to set a timed event to remove the respawn coordinates for these secondary nodes. Do you want to set up something similar with Ryone?

I was going to answer, but then shook my head. Ryone’s the Goddess of Wealth. I’ll let you take it up with her if she thinks it would be a good business strategy. Anyways, back to what you were saying… what all would you be able to set this respawn system to work on? Could we get auto-repairing buildings?

Ashley let out a faint laugh that caught me by surprise. Ah, sorry! No, I had a similar question, actually. But the system is hard-coded to only work on ‘natural products’. Any intervention from a third party, whether a creature, weapon, or the elements themselves, would put the item in an ‘unnatural’ state. Once the timer expires, that item is then returned to its natural state.

In other words, it is not truly creating the minerals, per se. Instead, it is warping the area back to a state in which the items were present. For this blessing, we’d just need to trick the system into thinking that the Blood Heart was already present, but had been mined. This makes it incredibly impractical to use on buildings or other items. For a building, the building would reject any attempts to decorate it, and may even ‘devour’ its occupants if the settings weren’t tuned right

Your Sky Citadel would be even worse, since its location would be anchored to the respawn point. Every week, a new Sky Citadel would appear at those coordinates, possibly with a new version of all of its inhabitants if they were within it at the time of saving. If we want auto-repairing buildings as a system, we’ll need to find entirely different code to do so.

While the explanation made sense, and even worried me at the potential consequences, it did also leave me confused. What about the thing you said about perpetual energy?

Oh, that? I theorized that if I created a divine item to use as a power source, and then designated it as the item to respawn, it would refresh its energy level every week. The mining operations actually do something similar, using the energy of both the Mage Heart and Blood Heart in order to fuel their mining machines and encampments. However, I wouldn’t be able to move or change the item in any way after setting it like that without first removing the respawn mechanic.

That made a bit more sense, causing me to subconsciously nod. Alright, then talk with Scarlet to discuss the price. Since we’ll be using a system adjustment, she won’t really need to spend her divinity for this. Given her character, she’ll probably insist that you get a pretty sizable cut of the faith, if not all of it. How much would a change like that even drain you?

Honestly? Hardly any. That’s one of the benefits of the modular system we set up. We now have easy variables that I can access, and I tied it into our admin accounts. Technically, you could do it, too, if you took the time to learn how to program. Basically, it will take a little divinity to open the account and verify it, and a little more to finalize the change. However, as long as what I’m doing is purely adjusting some variables like that, it won’t cost me much divinity. If it’s anything bigger, like installing new systems, I’ll need to incorporate it into a full patch, which will be like the system reset we just did.

Sounds good. There were a lot of things that were possible if that was the case. Granted, she couldn’t do something like set someone’s health to zero, because the world’s game system did not control health, but only offered a representation for it. At most, she could create an achievement that could be awarded to someone that nerfed their stamina stat by an insane degree. That would be the closest thing I could imagine to abusing the system in order to kill someone, but it would be far easier to just… well, kill them with her own powers.

Looking up, I saw Gerard watching me curiously, realizing he was still waiting for me to speak. “Sorry, I was talking with the others. We’ll have a solution for getting more Blood Heart available soon. The specifics are undecided, but people will be able to beseech Scarlet to bless their land.”

Gerard gave a small nod. “I see. If that power is placed in the hands of others, it would weaken Bloodhaven’s monopoly, and make the resource more freely accessible. I will need to see the exact cost to activate this blessing before I can make an educated guess on when the Blood Hearts will be publicly circulated, though this should certainly speed them up.”

“Hey, boss.” Dana spoke up from across the table, looking at me curiously. “That deal from last time still up? Would it be fine for Tsuba and I to request something with the points we bought, still?”

I looked over at Dana in surprise, but nodded my head. In truth, there wasn’t anything I was currently needing points for, so there was no problem with letting them have this as an allowance. “If there is something that you can think of, I don’t mind.”

Dana gave a wide grin at that. “Then, I’d like to request you to get the final step of Perfection. I heard about it from James a while back. That there were three steps of Perfection, just like there were three steps of Divinity. Obviously, the third step of Perfection isn’t to simply connect your will with the rest of your body like with Divine Will. I can’t even begin to count how many people tried that and were disappointed.”

“...Huh.” I nodded again. It was surprising that Dana asked for that, of all people. It was a request that she herself would not be able to benefit from, given that she skipped that step to obtain a fully finished body of World’s Shadow. “Yeah, I can see if I can get that. Is there anything that you would like, Tsubaki?”

Tsubaki pursed her lips. Perhaps she had not been planning on requesting anything, but now that it was clear that the other two were, and I was asking her directly, she felt the need to ask for something. “May I put my request on hold? I would like to fully explore the details of the new update before determining if there is anything I see that could use improvement.”

“She wants the Maid class.” Dana said with an impish grin, and all nine of Tsubaki’s tails abruptly stood on end, her eyes wide in shock and embarrassment. I couldn’t help myself from peering into her surface thoughts.

Could that be a real class? How would it differ from the Knight class? Can I really ask for that? It would be embarrassing to have a class brought in for something like that, but… the idea did come from Dana, not myself. Maybe it would work

…Yeah, her surface thoughts were every bit as amusing as her expressions. Honestly, though… what would a Maid class offer? I had a feeling that I’d be finding out soon enough.