Chương 511: AF Chapter 510 – The Heart of the System, Part V

High Constitution for the physical demands, high mental Stats to deal with the demands on focus and comprehension, high Levels to cope with the incredible spiritual demands of the profound implications of what we were bringing. It took three hours to slowly scroll over the entire island and memorize all the ley-line taps and their relative strengths, but it gave us the greatest awareness of who was using what on the entire island, outside these monitoring Techies doing their thing.

Nobody called up our unconscious techie-construct guy, no alarms were sounded, nobody noticed anything. This guy's default authority couldn't access internal cameras readily, but that was fine, as he had plenty of other things to work with.

Analyzing the Object on the control console to discern all its functions and basic commands and passwords, jailbreaking the feed, then going into the programming after looking at the coding language helped me understand it at an accelerated rate, the commands arranging themselves into a thought-order.

Then I took over Kris' capillakinesis to drum the Techies fingers against his control board, adding several new screens as the scrying feeds were super ceded, and I began to access things he definitely wasn't supposed to, including some very, very old original coding. Then I moved his hands off the board, pushed him out of the way, and put my fingers on the control board as I fluxed my Aura against it.

There was a flicker from the System, and "New Authority Recognized" flitted across the screen, except it was a couple paragraphs long in their incredibly wordy and precise language. Suddenly my fingerprints and magical Aura were accepted by the System involved here as I added myself to the original coding platform.

"Nois!" Kris grinned, shoving the Techie off to the side to loll there until sunrise, still half a day away. Coding and multiple windows began to pop up as I began to explore the architecture of the magitech system, Zeks' Telekinesis enabling me to vastly accelerate my manipulation of the boards, and Arakne Arms coming out to give my thoughtstreams more limbs to work with for manipulating views and coding across multiple screens.

Datafeeds popped up for them to peruse, which they did intently, feeding everything into a shared Visual File, doing the 'light' stuff while I concentrated on crunchiness.

"You're not going down into the Seal systems at all?" Kris noticed.

"I have a lot of chutzpah infiltrating an Eternal-made magitech System, I don't have the Stupidity Stat to get anywhere close to what they Sealed, inside their System or not." A blur of statistics flashed across the screen.

"Those particular command structures have been accessed ten times in the past forty-two thousand years, if that is correct." Briggs watched one screen as a cleaning bot ambled up to the magibot we'd disassembled and proceeded to sweep it outside the door and over the edge, removing any sign we were here from the internal monitors that nobody was looking at.

"These fellows are incredibly lax on security," he commented cheerfully. A graph of security breaches in the last 42k years flipped up off to the side. Four. The Wards about this place were hella good. Nobody had ever gotten inside. The breaches had actually come from congealed mana leaking out of the Seal, gathering, and proceeding to rampage internally before the security bots brought it down with Pure Light systems that acted really well against the Dark Magic it was composed of.

The specs of the magibots and a lot of the equipment here was also going into our collective Visual File, because why not? Kris was following multiple feeds dealing with the Fall, trying to determine what exactly had happened. That included visual feeds from scrying sensors from all over the island at the time, as well as all the ley line monitors and indicators of aetheric activity in near-portalspace.

Briggs was more concerned with real-time analysis and control functions, especially the respawn functions of the Spawn Points. The main problem was that the System existed here to spend massive amounts of power, it couldn't let it simply build up. Those ungodly number of Spawn Points were there to use up tremendous amounts of energy from below the world.

If I was a gambling person, the reason the Summons actually granted Karma to those who killed them was a conversion function, basically a hugely wasteful process of turning the energies of whatever was trapped below us into useful Karma, Levels, and life energy. At regular intervals that life energy was returned by the permanent slaughter of those living here in one form or another.

High quality life forces were then harvested and infused into the runic structure here, either reinforcing and strengthening the array, or repairing them and allowing the structure to continue existing. Thus the System had been pulling in combatants to live here, inciting conflict among them and with the Summons, basically raising paramounts up as a crop to be harvested.

They used extremely high-level spells to influence minds and events, and were definitely aware of and using the powers of the Mythos Entities who were curious about the place. Even those creatures expended more energy than they sapped from the land of Dereth, forming a net positive to the System as their minions died in battle here and were harvested with all the others. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Mass extinction events like the Fall occurred more frequently from conflicts between forces in the past. It looked like the Empyrean empires that had grown and fallen had been a regular source of fuel and souls for the System here.

The olthoi had brought in new life forces that reproduced rapidly, but the swarm didn't have the appropriate quality level needed, according to the System's measurements, yet they had still managed to wipe out the last Empyrean empire and basically removed the source of paramount-level life energy. That had necessitated the most recent recruitment, bringing in the Isparians to join other servant races or random test races already existing here.

Isparians, humans, proved to be nearly perfect, with a thirst for power and tolerance for combat that dovetailed with a talent for slaughter that was extremely useful. Once given the power to avoid death, the growth in eligible souls was breathtaking in its speed as so many of us sought out the promised power from endless battle and immortality with great enthusiasm. There remained only to overcome the Deathstones put in place by Asheron to harvest our souls.

"Well, Kris?" I asked her, my expression grim. I was navigating for her with TK, not bothering to read the screens as she just indicated where to go among the links, and I complied automatically with the thoughtstream that was basically handling triple-typing and tricoding at the same time.

"Prince Geraine was the trigger, but also sheer fuck-luck," she explained to us quietly as the screens in front of her changed, bringing up magical records of who and what and where around the time of the Fall and the drastic restructuring of the magical fields.

"The System had its teeth into the Deathstones, and whatever Entity was empowering them. Prince Geraine of the Undead was fucking around with the ley lines planning something truly nasty by the indicators in place, and was caught off-guard by the planar flux from the collapse of the Isparian Portals.

The System was involved in those as well, and it set off a domino-effect of unintended triggers and overloads as the machinations of the Prince fed into the System's harvesting mechanics to overcome the Deathstones, and precipitated an amplification of the planar flux that reverberated across the planet, prompting a reality shift to a new magical paradigm.

"The System works with the Source Code, so it remained stable after the transfer and the operational manafield changed its characteristics around and underneath it. The mana consumption of the existing magical effects increased vastly, so many functions that were no longer required to burn off the excess mana were allowed to slide, particularly the loot drops and materialization of material objects from the slain Summons.

"A lot of the influencing magicks into powerful individuals seem to have lost their targets, and the Techies here have been trying to re-establish them, without much success. Among the undead, for instance, many of those control links were only designed to work on the living, and were set up while they were still alive. They literally can't influence most of them anymore, which is has been causing them some consternation.

The undead are no longer a viable control function if their leaders can no longer be influenced."

"Briggs?" I asked him, continuing to Runecode at dozens of characters per second, writing subroutines and spinning them into larger and larger functions within the seemingly endless Code that already existed here.

"They are curious and worried about your Pyramids," he related patiently, studying his own sets of screens, which weren't moving nearly as fast as those of Kris or I.

"The vivic energy is unknown to them, and they aren't sure if it's a good or bad thing for the System. However, the energy consumption of them is smooth and nearly perfect in conversion to 'normal' energy. Thus, the Pyramids basically obviate the need for almost every other venting mechanic in their area of effect." He smiled hard.

"Found the notes on our little scheme with the pyreal. They considered it clever, but ultimately irrelevant. They have very little knowledge or insight into Matrix Magic, and consider it largely irrelevant against the power of the System."

"They used to drop that much pyreal from Summons every day, if not every hour or something," Kris sniffed, going off on a new search paradigm.

"Exactly, and the forging of new magic was simple to do through NPC's and off-camera, allowing them to influence us in whatever direction they wanted by dangling new treasures, without actually divulging such creative secrets to us. Based on their observations, I'm thinking they can't actually comprehend or use Matrix Magic, as it is part of a whole different System architecture, and they are wedded to this one," Briggs deduced with some satisfaction.

"So, more Pyramids going up everywhere might be a very good thing, as long as they don't touch their Wards here." Which I couldn't disagree with.

"Yes. We're going to impose on you to get on those, after at least one more strike." He pointed at Kris to the side without looking, who was looking at another variant of the same map screen I was. A dot and indicator was present there.

"Geraine…" I murmured. The undead weakling prince turned mighty undead progenitor who had started the entire infestation of the undead here on Auberean. Pointedly, there were almost no indicators of attendants around him. Suitably paranoid, he didn't have anyone around who could betray him.

"I think I located the Portal transport commands we can use for our exit from this place." Kris' eyes were smoldering.

"Good. Any Portal or useful links off the island to shut down?" I inquired, busy on my own stuff.

"None currently active, but several past links. They really did have to use ships to reach here in the past," Briggs reported, then his head whipped around.

"Someone is coming." Flickflicflick. I turned around as Briggs stepped away from the Illusionary Wall. A few seconds later, the door opened with a loud click, and a Techie came in. Like the unconscious slob drooling over against the wall, she was a good seven foot tall, although built very thin, with a higher forehead than human and emphatic cheekbones, only the hint of a bust to indicate a gender that was likely more affected than relevant.

Shimmery white hair fell straight down her back over the clean and simple blue robe she wore as she held up a dataslate expectantly, then paused as she looked around the room. The screens showed a whole bunch of scryviews across Dereth, but the room was otherwise empty. She looked around in some confusion, furrowed her high brow, then shrugged, turned, and exited the room, completely unaware an Ancient had been an arm's-length away from her and ready to grab her in a most unchivalric manner.

"What are you working on?" Kris asked once Briggs indicated the Techie was gone. Obviously we weren't staying too much longer.