Recalculating Champion goal... Race change to demi-AI...

Extreme time dilation...

Boundless body modification...

Limited power duplication...

Bypassed non-living limitation...

Removed limitation on ...

Became Immortal...

Shared Immortality...

Forced System implementation, direct influence over evolution of implementation...

New total threat calculated: 300M

New goal calculated: The four major species and at least five of the minor species, including one from each biome on the plane, must survive the end of the world.

Three hundred million total threat... That was six times what it was when I was sent into the simulation. And my goal went from saving one person from the end of the world to saving nine entire species and I had no idea what 'major' and 'minor' meant. My interface to the System pinged me that a new display was available so I opened it.

Goal progress Species with which you have a treaty offering sanctuary from the end of the world. Major species 0/4 Minor species 2/5 (2/4) Beastpeople Biome Plains Population 103 Minimum Viable Population 60 Humans Biome Mountain, Forest, or Plains Population 209 Minimum Viable Population 120

I apparently had no major species under my care, humans and beastpeople were counted as minor species. The two of four after the minor species count of two of five I assumed was how many biomes I had covered. Population was the number of the species I had and Minimum Viable Population was the smallest number that had to survive. Humans looked as though they were a wildcard for what biome they counted for. I wonder what the fourth biome is...

A sharp spike of panic came to me from my connection to Chantelle and a communication negotiation with her digital platform dropped my perception of time to its maximum as it synced with hers.

"Help." Chantelle said over the link once it had established, followed by a sob.

I brought up a model of the Pocket Dimension where our biological sides were and then sent an invitation to join the simulated space. She appeared a moment later, represented by a floating ball of light, similar to the wisps we'd seen. I looked down at myself, I was using the model I had of my body.

"You're okay." I said, sending as much comfort as I could to her. I wanted to give her a hug, but she didn't currently have a body.

"It took minutes before you arrived." She said. "The pain stopped and I couldn't see, hear, feel, speak, or anything else. Our connection even felt frozen and unchanging. I was locked in darkness."

Damn. I couldn't set her time perception before she was hooked up, and I hadn't accounted for her being simulated at the maximum speed even though that is what happened to me. There wasn't anything I could have done to prevent it, but I should have remembered and warned her.

"This is time being slowed down like I mentioned." I said. "It took your digital platform a few seconds after you were hooked up for it to load up and start simulating your consciousness, after that you sent me a communication request and I brought you here. The five minutes that you felt pass was three millionths of a second at normal time. I'm sorry, I should have remembered and warned you. The reason you can't sense anything is that we are thinking so fast that your senses are too slow to pass you any inputs."

"I'm not blind and stuck like this?" She asked.

"You aren't." I said. "I left you a copy of my time perception program... Let me try something."

I couldn't modify her directly, as she was a separate consciousness and was off limits to my tampering, I couldn't even see her code running even from the hardware side. But we had a communication link. I packaged a collection of data on my time perception interface program, including the basics of how it was written. While I was at it I added in how the simulation we were in worked and gave her access to my memory that held the model of her body. I sent a request to initiate the transfer over the link and Chantelle accepted it.

"This is all..." Chantelle said.

She sent a request to be able to modify the simulation and I gave her full permissions to everything after making an instanced copy of the models. Suddenly she changed from a ball of light to a representation of her body. Entirely nude. She looked at me at my flash of lust, then down at herself. With a wave of her hand a purple dress that perfectly moulded to her form settled over her. Her lips quirked into a smile.

"Later." She said.

She looked around the simulation and frowned. It was built up from my senses, which included my sound sense that gave an extra layer of context to the model, how sound interacted with different surfaces alluding to how dense they were. I let her soak it all in for a few minutes when she suddenly nodded sharply. Another wave of her hand and there was one more layer to the model. I frowned, the input was completely foreign to me. I shifted it to a visual representation and saw transparent streamers of chaotic light flowing everywhere.

"I know this isn't accurate to the outside world." Chantelle said. "But I feel more comfortable with mana around me."

This was how she sensed mana. I dropped the sense back out of my visual range, back to where Chantelle had it. I could still detect it, but it was all chaos and noise with no real pattern to it. I extended the simulation to the Ward room in the fortress then reached my hand out to Chantelle and moved the simulation around us in an instant to place us there. The model I had of it was accurate to when I'd last seen it, which was when it was covered in Maaata's projects.

"Tch." Chantelle said, waving her hand to clear all of the clutter.

She looked around the room and began wiggling her fingers.

The ambient mana, the chaotic noisiness, came in first. Though this time there was a definite flow into the mana crystal pillar in the center of the room. The next thing was the pillar itself which was vibrantly full of contained mana, like a liquid rainbow with the brightness of the sun swirling within the confines of the pillar.

The only places where the mana was coming out of the crystal were in angular lines that led from the center of the pillar to the table, and one thick line that went out of the door to the stairs. And finally multiple flat discs of mana appeared made up of symbols. They were flat until I studied them, at which point they projected into three dimensional space.

Chantelle nodded, and I could feel her satisfaction.

"This is magic?" I asked.

"Warding magic, yes." She said. "How did you send me the data packet about the models before?"

I packaged up how I was packaging up data and sent it to her. Half a minute after she accepted the transfer she sent a request for me to accept her transfer. I did and received a data packet. I unpacked the data from the header and loaded the first section of data. It was a highly complex understanding of how wards could be diverted to add modifications and I had no context for any of the information in it.

I frowned, trying to wrap my mind around it when I realised that the packaging was working in a first-in-last-out fashion. I cycled through all of the sections of data until I got to the last one and loaded it up. It was a primer on the basics of warding. The magic system, or warding at least, worked based upon forming symbols to match your intent for the ward out of mana and then looping them to draw mana from a mana source like a mana crystal.

The whole thing ended up being a cursive script of symbols that were all joined together. The first symbol that connected to the mana crystal was a push, like a one-way valve that controlled the mana that went to the rest of the ward.

"I just loaded the basic primer." I said. "The warning about not letting symbols touch each other? I don't think you'll have that limitation anymore."

"Why not?" She asked. "There are some advanced techniques where you conditionally short out symbols into other symbols, but getting them wrong can cause random effects where your intent is bypassed to mean something entirely different. The detailed explanation is near the end of the package."

"The size of the symbols isn't dependant on how much mana will flow through it, right?" I asked.

"Right." Chantelle said. "They just need to clearly hold the intent for the symbol and be able to join to the symbols on either side. Technically the smaller the symbols the faster the mana flows through them, which improves their efficiency. I've played with making huge symbols to see what gains can be made. Doubling the size loses about a fifth in efficiency, halving gains about a quarter."

"You might be able to zoom in so that the symbols you make are tiny." I said. "I've done exactly that with the stuff that makes up the world, zooming in billions upon billions of times. It may not work exactly like that with magic, there is probably a much larger individual smallest piece that makes it up..."

Chantelle was following along caught up in my enthusiasm and being able to talk about her obsession, warding. But we'd wandered off track.

"You wanted to get back to your normal senses." I said. "I can see why you jumped right into updating the simulation, that was the last thing I put into the package I sent you which means it was the first thing you got out of it. If you cycle through to the last section in the package there is data on the time perception interface program."

"Got it." She said after a minute. "So I just t-w-e.." And she disappeared from the simulation.

Hmm. Our shared simulation protocol went out of sync when she slowed down. I would need to rewrite the protocol and the programs that implemented it so that it could adjust to different simulation speeds and buffer the time differences... I was just finishing it half an hour later when Chantelle reappeared in the simulation.

"What happened?" Chantelle asked.

"I fixed it." I said, sending her the packaged new implementation that would work on top of the communication link.

"You fixed it." Chantelle said. "How long was I gone?"

"Only thirty minutes." I said. There was a slight stutter as the protocol between us was renegotiated. "I'm going to head back up. I still need to finish the village. Oh, this is what I got as my new goal."

I recreated the two blue screens in the simulation, the Recalculating Champion goal one and the Goal progress one, and sent them to hover in front of her.