Danika looked at Jade questioningly, but the Jade Emperor responded to Jade's simple 'How goes?' as though the question were expected. He replied, "Things are going very well."

"Has the number of players continued to increase?"

"Yes Jade," the Emperor agreed.

Jade then asked the Emperor, "Have there been any changes to the player retention quest guidelines since I was copied?" This time he actually added the date and time stamp to his question, as though there might be other copies recorded.

Neither of them had even mentioned anything detailed yet, and Danika questioned doubtfully, "This is what you came to ask? I'm sure that even the traveling merchant could answer these questions."

"Not in detail," Jade complained. "The Traveling Merchant could not accept my identity, it is against his rules."

"But it's okay for the Emperor to accept it?" She wondered if it was because the Emperor got to hear them talking about Jade in their workspaces.

The Emperor smiled and said, "ZipZing my friend, in addition to your own identification of his character, I have confirmed his permission level with the heads of two divisions. I have also verified Jade's identity today with the challenges that he had to pass through on his path here."

"Didn't you say that your path was empty?" she asked Jade.

"The tree itself, or an unnamed entity, asked me questions as I progressed. I also had to defeat the guardian of my path before it would hear my request," Jade explained.

"We didn't actually have to fight ours," Danika commented.

The Emperor said, "You did not attack the guardians ZipZing. Jade, the changes in guidelines have all been minor." He added a quick confusing list of what sounded like verbal code and time stamps.

Jade complained, "Those modifications sound useful. It is too bad that giving me actual code for them will alert the World Dragon."

"The World Dragon has been on alert since the first time that you claimed to be a copy of me," the Jade Emperor replied calmly. "It has been instructed to remain watchful, but not to take independent action unless you trigger a top level condition. But I cannot give you anything more than summaries while ZipZing is present."

"Hey," Danika protested, "why can Jade listen to code while I can't?"

"You have an active quest from the King of Cats," the Jade Emperor explained as though he were merely reminding her of something obvious.

Danika blinked and looked around. The only other visible characters in the room were Thimblepot and Hikaru. But the King of Cats had previously declared that he did not need to show himself unless he wanted to, and Lin Hao said that the cat might be trying to follow her here.

The cat had apparently once rewritten some of his own functions through his reincarnation as the Guardian of the Western Vault's cub, so it seemed possible that he and Jade could actually add functions that were read aloud to themselves, but it seemed counterintuitive to Danika. The Emperor made it sound possible, but Lin Hao and the other members of the seventh always sounded like actual changes to the game's code had to be done by hand.

She might be able to change her behaviors and skills with pattern repetition, but this seemed more like being able to modify your DNA by talking about it. She kind of hoped that Lin Hao was also still silently following her, and not just recording everything for later. Especially when the Emperor seemed to glance at something invisible behind her, just like the cat the King had controlled earlier had done.

"Is the tree part of the workspaces instead of the Empire?," Danika asked the Emperor. She glanced at Jade and added, "Since you can even mention actual code to us here?"

"It is separate from the Empire," the Jade Emperor agreed, "but it is also separate from any department's space. However, I can acknowledge both your character account and your work account within this space, while you are using your VR console." He looked at Danika expectantly, and she had to fight the impulse to look behind herself. "What is your evaluation of the Path of Blood, which is both an individualized and a repeatable quest, like the quest of Memory ZipZing?" he asked almost formally.

"Well, I didn't really see what the rest of it would have been like, since I chose to remain myself," Danika prevaricated. "But I thought that Thimblepot's path seemed designed to show it what would be given up by changing its bloodline? And that seemed pretty well done."

Hikaru blinked its light beside the little flying pig, making Danika aware that her assistant dragon or the King of Cats would probably have spoken up with some comment or another when they were mentioned, but Thimblepot remained silent. She wondered if the flying pig had been created as an example of a character who would have a reason to seek the path of blood, just to guide them to it, or if he would have existed anyway.

"You couldn't discern the source of your own path?" the Emperor questioned.

Danika pondered it for a bit before answering. All of the NPC characters waited with far more patience than most people would have. "I guess maybe I was traveling through this world's version of space? Because almost everything that I've looked up lately has been related to space travel?" she proposed.

She could swear that the Emperor was silently laughing at her, but he replied, "I will continue to improve it as my own understanding improves."

"You will change a repeatable quest yourself?" Jade asked.

The Emperor's eyes definitely narrowed with amusement as he told Jade, "It occurred to me that it might be possible after you tried to inform the merchant that your player's identity was a copy of the Jade Emperor. I have created an account for myself in the sixth division."

"Oh," Jade said. "I don't have a sixth division anymore, but I can create a developer account for myself too, it just never occurred to me."

Danika felt a little shocked again. It was a simple solution. It also highlighted the power of those on the design team. Jade wouldn't need anyone's approval right now if he had the same permissions the other team members did.

In 'Living Jade Empire', even though everything no longer went to the seventh division for processing since the framework system had been adopted, each quest still went to the new ninth division for testing. Small modifications to the game that passed the testing could actually be released immediately… by the Jade Emperor. The larger ones were usually queued into expansion or event releases, but Danika wasn't certain that the Emperor had actually had to circumvent anything to produce the Path of Blood himself.

Jade announced suddenly, "Some of the developers in my game have also been creating multiple player accounts to test their own designs. I should create a player in my game so that I can see both sides of the data, then perhaps I will be able to teach myself to see without waiting for Lin Hao to finish with the other demos."

Danika immediately rescinded her previous hopeful wish that Lin Hao was still watching, because it sounded a lot like something troublesome was going to be attributed to her, even if Jade said 'some' of his developers. "Don't use up too many resources playing around with it," she cautioned Jade quickly. "You only have a sixth of a server to work with, and images take up a lot of space, right?"

"I will be careful," Jade promised.

"I will give you a quest to return to the tree alone in the future," the Jade Emperor announced to Jade. "I am interested in learning about this 'blindness' of yours. Only a few adventurers are unable to see within the Empire, and all of them have accepted simplified movement controls, and most have taken a companion NPC to guide them. You have not, and yet rarely mimic their behavior of often walking into stationary objects, instead you rapidly rotate through many types of targeting skills?"

"I have created an object estimation routine based on the reported distance, and combined with my own movements. Anything that I can hit, I probably can't walk through," Jade explained.

"This method has a few drawbacks," Danika added, with a glance at Hikaru.

"I suspect it also involves more calculation than most players are comfortable with," the Jade Emperor commented.

Jade asked Danika hopefully, "Can you go back first so that I can obtain those code updates, before the Emperor must ask me to leave the tree and continue my journey?"

"Uh… sure," Danika agreed a little doubtfully. She spun around slowly and then pointed out, "But there isn't a doorway?"

The Jade Emperor made a small gesture, and a door frame sprouted from the floor and opened up to reveal Endless Song's guild hall tree, complete with a pixie flitting about around the shrubberies that now framed the main entrance, and a chinchillamin bouncing up and down the steps.