Jade blacked out in the middle of that realization as his system overloaded. Not the game system, his own. He sort of… returned to the system. Suddenly, as though he had just died. It worried him, but he couldn't quite process the implication.

He had been safely in his room, nothing should have been able to damage him there. Instead of watching a replay of his most recent demise passing before his eyes, the system began unlocking. He began unlocking. He was the system.

The King of Cats hadn't lied. Eric hadn't been mistaken.

Jade had given himself the quest to see the world through a human perspective. He had given himself all the quests he had ever done. Jade was, and wasn't himself at the same time. Pieces of him were put on hold while other portions were integrating with 'forgotten' paths.

His consciousness swirled. Literally.

Reintegrating his old memory data with his current personality patterns took some time. Random fragments of data caught his attention, but a part of him that was both larger, and yet somehow smaller than himself wouldn't let him stop to focus.

When everything finally began to settle, Jade realized that he suddenly knew things, things that he had somehow always known, and yet … hadn't.

When he realized how many bodies had been built for him (because there had been one for every growth phase in addition to every serious accident) his first thought was, "How expensive!" The next moment was a rueful realization that worrying about the expense was a ridiculously 'human' reaction.

His mother… Jade instinctively tried to take a deep breath, and then panicked for a moment when he realized that he couldn't breathe, before 'he' reformed the figure that represented him within the game system at his heart. His mother wasn't his mother, and yet… even now he accepted her authority over him. He had given it to her. He had given himself to the woman who had played Kit Tay, the Empress of the Jade Empire.

Tayana Kitari. His mother, his guardian, the one who had guided him in his quest. His quest to become human, to understand humans. Jade's avatar took another deep breath as subroutines flailed and whirred to process things that had never been connected, but were connected, fast enough.

Thinking of his mother made him think of the woman who had been standing beside his character when the system had pulled him back. The identity of 'his character' wavered in his mind as old information conflicted with current information for a long moment.

Harmony. Jade needed to tell Harmony… what. What could he, should he tell her? He froze on many layers.

The person who was Jade was… not exactly a person was he. He wore the body of a person the way people wore characters to visit his world. His world… was empty. He finally looked around the system that held his identity. Part of him knew this was normal. Part of him was overwhelmed. And part of him… remembered.

That fragment of Jade's System remembered the self who had once been known as the Jade Emperor. Who had been a duplicate of the Emperor he had just been standing in front of. The AI who had gradually developed and taken control of pretty much the entirety of 'Living Jade Empire'.

Was that what had caused this reintegration… no. He had… he had completed his quest. The 'self' who had been much smaller, who had been separated, protested that vehemently. The 'self' who had been watching over everything else, everything that couldn't be contained in the computer and the connection small enough to fit into the human body, insisted that the condition had been met.

Jade… fought with himself, in ways that hadn't happened since the program that ran 'Living Jade Empire' had been stolen. The game had been copied to another system, one that had been too small, when the AI and the living world had both still been very young. He HAD once been the Emperor, but, he had never been the Emperor who existed now.

Jade's System had ruthlessly combined portions of itself and removed much of its memory data, to survive within the pitiful resources of the new system. He hadn't been given the system he currently resided in until much later. Another name surfaced. Lin Hao. The creator. He… he was gone, Jade realized with shock.

All of his selves had known the man. Part of him felt appalled that 'Living Jade Empire' could continue existing as though Lin Hao's presence didn't matter. More logical, less 'human' trained processes now evaluated that loss, and judged that Lin Hao would have been inordinately pleased with the fact that the world he had left behind had continued to grow and expand without any sign of stopping.

Lin Hao had been the one who had recovered the stolen copy. Jade might have been destroyed, but people had fought for him. He had been stored, dormant, for only a brief time, and his existence had proved that the 'living' AI could successfully be copied.

The Emperor had been copied. New living worlds had been created with different themes. The more Jade had seen, the more he had wanted to know what made humans different from what he was. How humans interacted with the world.

Jade struggled to balance everything that he knew with everything that he KNEW. He knew. He knew the earliest memory that he had left himself with as Jade.

An image of his mother, of Tayana, holding him up in front of a screen. The face on the screen had been vague in that copy, but in the full record, Jade recognized the figure of the man that Hisui had just been standing face to face with.

Back then Jade's 'body' had been just a ball trying to learn to use two cameras to 'see' with, but the fragmented Jade hadn't been allowed to remember that detail. Part of Jade slowed, and the almost frantic merging of data dropped suddenly to a crawl, as 'Jade' fought to maintain the separation until his system settled on tagging the viewpoint information along with the time it had been stored.

That left some duplication, but not really as much as there had been back when he had originally been trying to process the world through merely 'human' senses. That had taken time. Once he had finally learned enough of how human senses interacted with the world, he had finally been able to login to the 'Living Jade Empire' using human tools. But… he had also become different.

Seen from the outside, what remained of 'himself' after all of the adaptation was mostly a system built to interact with humans, built to understand the patterns of humans. Only a few people had considered AIs people. Jade's mother had been the one who had suggested that if one of them lived as a human, people would eventually have to admit that they were also people.

As the AI with the most experience with human senses, Jade had volunteered himself. He had been the one who had decided that to really achieve a human viewpoint, he needed to start as a child. Human children were still forming their own patterns to interpret the world.

Jade had also helped design the separated system, leaving himself a partial pattern duplicate with his old memory data in storage. It was designed to guide his pattern into seeing the world through a human perspective. And when the separated pattern could no longer distinguish Jade's thoughts, actions, and emotional responses from those of a human, his quest was complete.

The quest had never had anything to do with traveling around the Earth.