“About time you came by.” The human woman said, standing across from me with a small grin. She held her hands on her waist, watching me while Aurivy stood off to the side. “I almost thought that you had forgotten about our little deal.”

I shook my head with a light chuckle. “Not at all, I was just busy. A bunch of my champions have reached the point of ascension, so I had to monitor how things were going there.”

The woman standing across from me was none other than Sarah, the leader of my guild. In exchange for the eight thousand points she had lent me previously to purchase Vision Expanse, she asked me to give her a hard copy of the newest game I had released on my end. Naturally, since it wouldn’t cost me any points to do so, I had no reason to refuse.

“Did you bring it?” Sarah asked with wide, hopeful eyes, and I glanced towards Aurivy.

“‘Course I brought it!” She said proudly, holding her hand up. Within her hand was an information sphere, no doubt containing all of the core details of Natural Seed. This game actually had a greater value than Vision Expanse, but that wasn’t really important here. After all, we lost nothing by giving this to her.

The information couldn’t even really be used against us. After all, Aurivy created the system within this game entirely independently, so a lot of the ‘common sense’ logic of my world did not apply to it anymore.

Sarah saw the orb, her eyes practically sparkling as she skipped over towards Aurivy. “You’re the one that made this game, then?”

“Yup!” Aurivy admitted without a care, beaming a bright smile towards the other Keeper.

“Nice! I’ve been seeing a lot of reviews from people over your Element Seed system.” Sarah said as she lifted the orb from Aurivy’s hand. “It’s fairly well thought out. Easier to pick up than most magic systems, but also more difficult to master.”

“Eheheh.” Aurivy giggled happily. “That’s kinda what I wanted. Do you have any advice on how to improve it? I wanna make this game as fun as I can!”

“Hmm…” Sarah slightly dropped her happy, playful demeanor to give some serious consideration to Aurivy’s request. “I’d like to say that the entry requirements for magic might be somewhat stricter than need be.”

“From the reviews I read, even common seeds are rare enough to only enable ten percent of the population of a world to activate the magic system. This problem is alleviated slightly when the secret to artificially producing seeds is explored, but even then less than half the population will be capable of finding a seed.”

“And this is before you take into account one person acquiring multiple seeds in order to either replace their former one or merge them, or seeds not being harvested regularly. Theoretically, you could support a tenth of the population naturally. Practically, on the other hand, you would be closer to one in a hundred.”

“Eh?” Aurivy’s eyes went wide in surprise when she heard that, clearly having not noticed such problems in the system. “But, well… I mean… I guess that could be a thing… we don’t have that high of a player base yet, and they are spread out through multiple planets.”

Sarah regained her smile, nodding her head. “Resource problems like that are easier to overlook in a true game, because there could be admin commands to manually respawn seeds. I was just giving my opinion for improving the system overall. If it were any cheaper, I think that it might qualify as a new basic magic type.”

“Oh, yeah! I was wondering about that!” Aurivy spoke up, seeming to latch onto something that Sarah said. “There are Keepers out there with game worlds that actually merge with their real worlds, right?”

Sarah blinked in confusion, before nodding her head. “That’s right. I have a couple of those games myself. They’re only really popular among the higher class, though.”

“Right.” Aurivy nodded, not caring about that. “Anyways… if an admin command is used to spawn something in a game like that, can’t it be taken out? If that’s the case, you’d be able to cheat and just mass produce powerful items or unlimited resources, right?”

Sarah and I both seemed to understand where Aurivy was going with her question. To be honest, now that she said it, I was also quite curious. I had confirmed that I possessed the unique ability to travel into game worlds that we had purchased thanks to my Planar Shift power. Logically, I should be able to bring items out of the game, then. However, I had never bothered with that for the simple reason that the two worlds weren’t merged, so anything that I brought out would be useless.

“You’re pretty smart, huh?” Sarah asked with a playful smile. “Logically, what you just said would be right. It would be possible to mass produce anything from weapons, armor, even people with customized powers. Then, the spawned individuals would simply be summoned from the game.”

“But the system doesn’t like cheating like that.” She shook her head, shrugging her shoulders. “A while back, there were some people abusing that loophole, myself included. I wanted an easy supply of weapons and materials. I think I was only a first rank Keeper at the time.”

“Regardless, the system clamped down on that, and it became impossible to pull items directly out of the game without first purchasing a new system that appeared on the market.” Sarah waved a hand, and a screen appeared in front of myself and Aurivy.

“Digital Realism. With this system, someone could export items from the game, but doing so came at a cost. If the proper materials were prepared, they could be used to pay this fee. Otherwise, the cost of such an export would be the energy of the user.”

“In short, it would drain your various energies so that you were forced to materialize the item yourself, as opposed to simply pulling it from the void.”

I read over the screen that Sarah showed us, and couldn’t help but be surprised at the cost of this system. A thousand points for this ‘equivalent exchange’ style system. Clearly, the Keeper system rated the ability rather highly.

Aurivy seemed to deflate slightly when she heard Sarah’s answer, before she rose up again. “Wait, what if you weren’t actually materializing anything? What if you were a Keeper, sending your forces on an invasion, but what you sent were their game avatars, fully equipped with legendary artifacts?”

“You’re really worried about your next match, huh?” Sarah asked, her smile turning more gentle. “To answer your question, that applies to this, as well. However, since it is the Keeper making this transfer himself, he is also the one to pay the price. The only price that a Keeper can truly pay, and one that is available only to himself.”

“It costs them points.” I muttered, and Sarah nodded her head. “So if Sanction wants to send an army at us like that, he’d need to pay a fine to do so.”

I didn’t think that was a very good deal on his part. Having to pay points for an invasion force when you weren’t certain that you’d be able to make back your investment, even if you won? It’d be more feasible to have a deity use the exchange system to supply an invasion with the proper items.

“Sanction’s an older Keeper.” Sarah pointed out, warning me. “It would be right to expect him to know these kinds of strategies. He might not be old enough to have been around when the loophole still existed, but he’s old enough to have figured out how to summon items from his games.”

I nodded my head, thinking about that, before I realized something. “Sanction bought Natural Seed.” There was no reason for me to hide this information. If anything, it was important for Sarah to know, as she was able to help me make plans to counter whatever Sanction could throw at us.

“That’s not surprising.” Sarah said with a faint sigh. “If that’s the case, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he threw people at you that possessed powerful elemental seeds. I’ll run simulated wars on my end, and see if I can find a way to counter the powers of those seeds.”

I thought for a moment about what she said, and then gave a firm nod. Most likely, she meant creating different games that had various types of laws, and then have them host inter-game PvP battles against one another. I don’t know how she would handle the problem of law merging, but perhaps it would be possible if she used her God of Games.

“Thanks, I’d appreciate it if you let me know what you come up with.” If I had considered these problems, I would have stopped by before this, but the thought of such a thing had simply not crossed my mind.

“No problem. That’s what the guild’s for, right?” She asked with that same, warm smile. “That said, you’re pretty lucky. I had an invasion myself about a week and a half ago. If they had taken it seriously, I might not be free to meet you like this yet.”

I blinked, having forgotten about things like that as well. I had simply gotten used to people like Sarah or Balu being free when I needed them. “Right, I’ll try to get here more quickly next time.”

“Eh, it’s fine.” Sarah shrugged her shoulders, shaking her head. “Anyways, I got the game now. If you’re busy, I won’t keep you any longer.”

While I wasn’t opposed to staying, and maybe seeing more of Sarah’s games, I knew that I did need to get back. Since I was facing a legitimate threat this time, I needed to properly prepare myself. “Thanks again.” I nodded, before turning to leave.

As soon as I selected the option to leave, I felt a blue beam rising up from the ground around myself and Aurivy. With a gasp, Sarah spoke up from behind us. “Oh, not this one…”

And with that, before she could offer an explanation, our surroundings shifted and we were back in our own Admin Room. I stood next to the wall, letting out a sigh and closing my eyes to focus. I had to sort through the information that I had acquired in order to help me plan against the upcoming invasion.

“Uhm… Dale?” A voice asked from next to me, sounding strangely familiar. It was clearly a male voice, but not deep enough to be either Tubrock or Tryval. Who else could it be, though? Those were the only two male deities within my Admin Room. Opening my eyes, I turned to the side, seeing… a giant.

Craning my neck up, my jaw dropped open as I looked at my own face staring down at me. “That’s you, right Dale?” ‘I’ asked me. Looking down at myself, I saw a pair of frail-looking smooth hands, a petite chest, and--oh my god I was in Aurivy’s body.

“I won’t say ‘new least favorite transport’, because of the mimic… but definitely up there.” I muttered, hearing myself speaking in Aurivy’s voice. Now I had to begin focusing for an entirely different reason, returning myself to my original body. Aurivy was already doing the same, the other form of me shrinking and becoming more feminine until it naturally shifted into her true look.

At least on the way there we had only gotten a simple door. I suppose that it was too much to hope for something nice on the way back.

Upon the lonely mountain peak, a figure sat, their body within an empty circle surrounded on all sides by snow. His eyes were closed, uncaring of what was happening around himself as he focused intently. His brows furrowed, feeling his energy briefly plummet, a feeling that had assaulted him dozens of times in the last month.

“What is real is false.” He muttered, focusing on an illusory world within the great cosmos he held inside his body. “And what is false is real.” Gradually, the world seemed to shift, the barren landscape becoming blue and green. Millions of people appeared along the surface of the world, all going through their daily life as if it were wholly normal.

“Realize the illusion, and bestow truth.” As he said that, his energy began steadily climbing once again. It was not to the point where he was able to easily regain what he had just lost, but it was certainly better than nothing.

He had earned the respect of the world, of every world, but few within it truly ‘worshipped’ him. His normal divinity only rose at a slow trickle, most of his energy coming from what Tsubaki sent him. It had been over a month now since he had begun work on ‘creating life’ within his internal world. Each attempt cost him a large amount of divine energy, which he was barely able to refill within a full day.

The process had actually been more difficult than Dale had first imagined. If, at any point, one of the illusory creatures truly realized that they were not real, and truly believed such… they would vanish from the world. If another one witnessed this, their faith would be shaken, and they would begin to doubt as well. This doubt would become viral, until all life within the world vanished.

At first, he had started small. Only one individual, created doing nothing at the time. This had not proven too difficult, but that individual then soon vanished. Coming into existence with no memories, no idea of what they were, it was easy for them to believe that they weren’t real.

So, he started working on creating his illusory residents with memories, placing them in actions that would fit their daily lives. This worked at first, but soon led to a ‘collapse’ due to the lack of other residents. Now, he was trying to create more and more, each one having their own soul. Like this, he wanted to prevent a collapse by giving them no reason to truly doubt their own existence.

Of course, there was an inherent problem with this. If they were to worship the ‘God of Illusions’, this would lead them to naturally doubt their own reality. Thus, after a while he had been forced to start from scratch, granting these illusory souls only the knowledge of his Mirrors domain.

“Let’s see if it works this time.” He muttered to himself, watching over this small world.