Chương 15: Chapter 14

Nina looked around the plain-looking room, one filled with only the bare essentials needed in order to survive. It's been two months, she thought. Two months stuck in this place.

"Am I ready to go?" she asked the system. A while back, if one went back two months, the system had told her that, due to the error of her not being the same gender as the original target and several problems on their end, she would not have the privilege of receiving a body in the new world she was about to enter, but since she had come in her younger brother's stead, that did not change the fact that she was now responsible for paying back the debt.

The system had then explained that because she would not be receiving a resident's body from that world, she would have to enter in her soul state instead, and because that state was unstable, it could only allow her to experience the outside world for a short period before she would fall into a state of slumber while it molded a suitable body for her, one that would lack a proper background within that world and would require time to stabilize. At the time, Nina had not really understood what any of that meant.

Just as she had been about to answer, however, her soul shifted into that of her younger brother, bringing forth his mannerisms almost instantly, and "Elias" looked at the system with open disdain.

"So it was a problem on your end," he said.

"Why are you trying to gloss over that? And if I'm going into another world without a proper background, wouldn't that mean the chances of me getting killed because people suspect my identity are much higher? Then doesn't that mean we need to renegotiate? Because I'm assuming there were negotiations before this." As Elias took over, Nina herself felt like nothing more than a bystander watching everything unfold from somewhere deep in the back of her own mind. She had very little input.

She had already been preparing to drift back to sleep when she noticed something strange. The system seemed to glitch. From her perspective, it resembled a cosmic creature with no stable form, yet she watched it stutter like an old television screen struggling to maintain a signal, where something was clearly playing beneath the static, but the image itself could never fully come into focus, leaving nothing but shifting lines moving endlessly across the display like some strange fever dream.

That reaction from the being, whom she would later learn was simply called the System, sparked a faint curiosity within her, enough that she decided to remain awake just a little longer to see what had happened. What Nina did not know was that, on the system's end, it had just encountered another major crisis. Simply put, the moment Nina became Elias, it was not merely her soul that had transformed. Even the data had changed. The system had automatically generated an entirely new category titled False Value.

That new category appeared alongside every existing attribute, producing a second value beneath each one. The newly generated values appeared grayed out, each marked with a small lock icon beside the number. The system immediately attempted to remove the newly generated category. Delete False Value. Failed. It tried again. Overwrite False Value. Failed. A third attempt followed. Force Synchronization. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. Failed.

One notification after another filled its vision. Insufficient Permissions. The system does not possess objective evaluations of the designated subject. Modification denied. The system paused. That message made no sense. Every value stored within its interface had always been generated by the system itself. If an anomaly appeared, it could normally overwrite it, delete it, or restore it to a previous state. Yet this one refused every command.

It selected one of the newly generated values and attempted to modify it directly. Nothing happened. It tried another. Again, no response. Every False Value remained grayed out, the small lock icon beside each entry never disappearing, existing entirely outside the normal authority granted to the system itself, as though ownership belonged to someone else. The system searched through its internal records. No authorization conflict. No corruption. No external interference.

Several internal processes came to an abrupt halt as it attempted to reconcile the contradiction. How could a value exist within its own interface while remaining completely beyond its authority? It searched through every available explanation before arriving at a single provisional conclusion. These values had not been generated from the system's own observations. They had been generated from another source.... The current host. More specifically... The current host's own understanding of the subject.

That explained everything. The system could only modify evaluations that it had personally established through direct observation. Although it possessed extensive records regarding the world itself, it had never directly observed the individuals the host had become, meaning it lacked the objective evaluations necessary to alter the information generated from her understanding. The False Values had not been created from the system's observations. They had been created from the current host's understanding.

Or more precisely... From the identity currently occupying her soul. They were real. They were recognized by the interface. But until the system accumulated enough objective observations of those subjects itself, they would remain permanently locked, completely beyond its authority to modify. One category, however, stood out above all the others. Will to Live. The False Value for Will to Live had reached 100. The Current Value remained 0.

The True Value, the unchanged value the system had recorded before any alterations, remained -100. The discrepancy alone was enough to overwhelm several of the system's internal calculations. The same phenomenon extended across the remaining attributes. For example, Self-Worth had a True Value of -98, while its False Value measured 70. With the exception of Will to Live, every major category now possessed only two separate readings. Yet there was one section that refused to stabilize.

The Gender field continuously shifted. Male. Female. Male. Female. Back and forth. Back and forth. It never settled. The same instability affected both Age and Name. Only one entry remained perfectly constant. Last Name: Blackmore. The system felt as though its CPU were about to overflow.... What is this? It became so occupied processing the impossible data that it completely failed to notice Elias attempting to continue the conversation.

Only after a notification appeared stating that Will to Live had increased from 0 to 1 did the system finally snap back to attention. It stared at the notification. Then at the updated value. A second notification appeared almost immediately afterward. Transfer 1 point of Will to Live from Current Value to True Value? The system paused. It still needed to collect the system debt. That objective had not changed. But at this moment, keeping the debtor alive took priority over collecting repayment.

Without hesitation, it declined the transfer request before finally turning its attention back toward "Elias," who had apparently been trying to get its attention for quite some time.