World Keeper

I was… surprised when I learned that Ashley had gone to outsource the story of her games to Galahan, rather than Lifre. From the start, I had simply assumed that it would be Lifre filling the role of a writer for her. It was sort of her thing, after all.

However, when Ashley mentioned the same argument that she had given the halfling, that being Lifre’s total inability to remain still and focus on the task at hand, I suddenly became more understanding. I mean, sure, she has periods when she can focus on her writing. She has actually written quite a lot of books that have grabbed the public interest. But… those periods are few and far between.

Galahan, on the other hand, has few distractions. He was one of the first mortal gods, and has more divine energy than he knows what to do with. Literally, he doesn’t know what to do with his power, which led to him creating testing grounds for various scripts and performances in his own home.

Ultimately, I think that Ashley made the right decision, though we’ll have to see how the cooperation works out. It will be pretty hard to actively work together on a project if I have to fast forward the world for any reason in the future. There could be decades where he was simply unable to receive a response back from them.

I brought this up with Ashley, and she simply shrugged her shoulders, telling me that it was his decision. Granted, I didn’t really intend to fast forward more than I absolutely needed to at this point. There was a good chance that doing so would cause me to suddenly advance in rank at this point.

Speaking of which… that brought me to my current situation, where I was approaching James’s research facility. I had already sent Chelsea a message to let her incarnation know that I was coming, so I was unsurprised to see her waiting outside of the entrance for me. There was an almost anxious look on her face when I approached, and I could guess what was going through her mind.

“Is he here?” I asked with a smile, and she nodded her head.

“Honestly, he never leaves. Makes it really easy to find him. You’re sure that it was the same race, though? It wasn’t just a different race with similar characteristics, and his true race is on another planet in Lifre’s universe somewhere?”

I blinked at her question, before letting out a light chuckle. “Honestly, I had considered the possibility myself. If such had been the case, it was likely that we wouldn’t have been able to do this until I reached at least the sixth rank. Thankfully, I checked before I came. He has all of the usual options when I highlight him now.”

Previously, because James was not considered one of my assets, I was not able to ‘highlight’ him. I couldn’t select him for any commands, or even directly follow his history. It took quite a bit longer to retrace his steps, as I had to follow the history of the world around him. Which meant, if he teleported, I had to manually figure out where he went. Now, however, there were no such restrictions on him within the system.

Chelsea nodded her head, turning and leading me into the elevator. “Section Three, Corridor One.” She called out, and the elevator began to descend, before abruptly moving horizontally.

When the door of the elevator opened again, we exited out into the pristine, white halls of the research group. Not far away, I could see where James had his office set up… mostly because Treisha and Nora were waiting there in front of it. “Was everyone told that I was coming today?” I asked in exasperation.

Chelsea nodded her head. “I mentioned that you wanted to talk to James, and they got concerned. I didn’t tell them what it was about, obviously, but still.”

I gave a small nod, walking towards the office. “None of you need to worry. What I have to talk to him about isn’t something major. It’s just a topic that I felt needed to be discussed face-to-face.”

The other girls seemed to relax slightly at that, Chelsea walking over to usher them away. “Come on, we have the data on the last set of experiments to go over.”

When I entered the office, I found James sitting behind his desk, typing away at his terminal. He didn’t appear to have heard my entrance, too focused on his own work. It wasn’t until I cleared my throat that he looked up at me, smiling. “Ah! You came. Chel told me that I should be expecting you.”

I smiled at that, moving to sit across from him. “Did she tell you what I was here for?”

To that, James simply shook his head. “Afraid not. She just said that you would be stopping by.”

“Well… to start things off, we reached the sixty-fourth floor of Fyor. You have officially been recognized by the world system.” James seemed surprised at that, meaning that that report had not yet reached his office. That or he simply didn’t pay much attention to the news on Fyor.

“Additionally, are you familiar with the system known as the Heavenly Gate?” When I asked that question, James shook his head again. “It’s a system that can only be activated by reaching the fourth rank as a Keeper without resetting any of your worlds. Because of that, not many people really care about the system.”

“Sounds rather extravagant. So, what does it do, let you turn a mortal into a god?” He asked, seeming to guess based on the name.

“Close, but not quite. I can pay ten thousand points to give someone access to the Heavenly Gate. Once they have that access, they can visit the Admin Room whenever they want. The only restriction is that the transfer process takes thirty seconds. So, it’s not like you’ll be doing it in combat or anything like that.”

James blinked, seeming to lean back in his seat and ponder that information. “If you’re telling me this, that must mean that you planned to offer me this position?”

I gave a small nod of confirmation. “That’s right. I wanted to give you the chance to be able to visit Chelsea in the Admin Room. Additionally, this is a form of life insurance. Should anything happen to you in the mortal world, you will immediately be transferred to the Admin Room as a full companion. Personally, I don’t see any downsides to this, aside from the cost, but I didn’t want to just apply it to you without coming and talking to you about it first.”

“I appreciate that.” James said, still mulling it over. “Like you said, there aren’t particularly any downsides. I assume that those with this gate are able to participate in defensive invasions?”

I gave a nod at that. “As for offensive ones, I don’t know what would happen if I tried to send them. It might invalidate the gate entirely, or only register you as dead when the invasion ended. Either way, I wasn’t planning to send you on any invasions to begin with.”

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“I’d certainly hope not.” James snorted, shaking his head. “I’m all too aware just how high the mortality rate is for an invasion. Besides, there’s too much of a risk that somebody would recognize me, right?”

I fell silent when he brought that up, and he looked at me with a knowing smile. “Even if I accept your invitation, it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to go to the regular meetings. I’m in a rather… unique position, from my understanding, and we can’t afford to let other Keepers catch wind of it.”

“That’s right.” I nodded my agreement. Sure, there may be ways for other Keepers to create a former Keeper as a Companion, but their System Companion would likely be forced to limit what knowledge they kept in the process. For instance, if I created James back when I was only at the second rank, it’s unlikely that he would retain his knowledge from the fourth rank.

By that logic, it was the exposure to James that allowed me to recreate Chelsea in such a complete state. Even if he wasn’t one of my ‘assets’, the system did acknowledge that I interacted with him in some form.

“Personally, it doesn’t matter to me much either way.” James admitted, stretching his arms out above his head. “Whether I have access to the Admin Room or not won’t change anything for me, aside from that life insurance you mentioned. And… let’s be perfectly honest. If anything did happen to me, Chel would travel to the ends of creation to find a way to fix it. We lost each other once, after all.”

I couldn’t help but give another nod, imagining what would happen. A shiver went down my spine, picturing Chelsea just appearing in my office, demanding I make it better. “Right… still, I think that it would be better to do it than not.” I said, planning to apply it the next time I was in the Admin Room. “At the very least, it will be there if we decide that we need it.”

James simply chuckled, not immediately responding. Looking over at his terminal, I couldn’t help but ask. “How is the world creation research coming along?”

When I asked that, James broke out into a genuine grin, seeming pleased to discuss his findings. “It’s going great, actually! Now that we are beyond the level of development that my world was at in terms of energy control, I am learning so many new things. So far, we’ve still only done the first round of world creation experiments, but just that has already given us so much data to review.”

“I’m not sure if you’re aware, but one of the worlds that we created was a potentially viable world. The only problem was that it was created without any form of time acceleration inherent, so there was naught but cosmic dust. Chel believes that if we add in enough of a time factor, that world would have been perfectly livable. Unfortunately, such a time factor would require millions, if not billions of years, so we couldn’t exactly wait.”

“That’s why, for our next batch, we’re planning to include a time scale like that! As you know, time is rather subjective in the void. With the proper tampering, it wouldn’t be difficult for time to be rapidly accelerated for a single world, similar to the Keeper’s controls in the Admin room. If we use that, we could turn a ‘potentially viable’ world into a new frontier.”

After he said that, he let out a long sigh. “Of course, this is still only creating a world with the existing structures. It would be similar to a more advanced version of how Tubrock and Ryone created the universe where the March is, just more independent. If we want to get into the real meat of the research, we’ll need to figure out how to create a world that has its own, custom system.”

I couldn’t stop myself from blinking as he began talking passionately, making sure that I was keeping up with him. “If you can do something like that… doesn’t that mean that it’s possible to rapidly accelerate time in any world?” I asked, hesitantly. That would be an awful form of attack, accelerating a world so much that all life simply dies.

“Personally, I’d be more concerned with the opposite happening.” James pointed out, lifting one hand. “If the time is accelerated inside the world, that means that they literally have all of the time in the world to come up with a solution. They could have Fallen Gods leave the world to fight the enemies.”

“However… if it were the other way around, and they instead froze time inside a world, it would be the enemies that had all the time that they needed to destroy that world. Regardless, I’m not sure how one would achieve such a method of time control in either direction, just yet. On an incomplete world, it is feasible due to the thin barrier surrounding the world. Once that world barrier becomes dense enough, such manipulations are naturally prevented, and the flow of time is stabilized. At that point, it would take a higher order of technology to alter the flow of time, or intervention from the Admin Room.”

I gave a small nod at that, glad that I wouldn’t need to worry about such attacks. At least, not for a while yet.