20

Lakeside Enlightenment

After a few minutes of sprinting and dashing, Rian slowed down to check his map again and found that he was about halfway to Elmguard. Off to his right sprawled a lake in a clearing between the trees. He found a nice spot to sit on the slope leading down, making sure he was out of view from the footpath, just in case Torgo came looking for him. He took off his sunglasses, opened up guild chat and watched for any approaching adventurers as he started to type.

: wow, pvp in this game is insane

: !!

: did you fight someone Cob? how’d it go?

: great, actually

: hold tf up, where you at

: uh… somewhere at the start of Elmguard, in the forests I think

: omw

: gimme like 5 mins

: wow way to abandon ur healer Kat

: it’ll take a moment i swearrr

: >: (

He stared at the window. What the hell? She was coming all the way out here? He wondered how she was going to find him, but she probably had some kind of special way to track down her guild members. When he looked at his friends list, with Azure #003 still on it, he could see their general location, but nothing specific. Hopefully that was all Torgo could see of him, right now.

Meina went frolicking through the grasses and stopped to drink the water. They occasionally peeked up at him as if to see what he would do. He was only level nine, but he wasn’t sure if leveling past the requirement for job advancement was a good idea, so he hadn’t fought or killed anything on the way. That, and he especially didn’t want to draw any attention to himself. The local creatures seemed to appreciate his lack of hostility, as more of the docile mobs like the meina had spawned nearby.

When Corvis sat a few steps away from Rian, the more curious meina suddenly froze and started bristling. They slowly backed away, glancing from side to side, looking for something they couldn’t see.

Yeah, I don’t blame you, Rian thought, watching them retreat. The aura Corvis gave off was more like the grim reaper than a butler.

This area was beautiful, at least. Even while he knew it was really nothing more than graphical rendering, the effect of the light through the trees and shimmering on the surface of the lake was mesmerizing. It was so peaceful that he didn’t want to get up.

He had some time to kill if Kat was really coming here, so he brought up his stat page, remembering that he had an entire six attribute points to distribute. He was slightly curious about the Intelligence stat for its boost to perception and how that worked. But before he potentially screwed up his build, he turned to Corvis.

“Stat changes aren’t permanent, are they?”

“For a small fee,” Corvis said, “they can be redistributed at will. You’re free to harness your power however you wish.”

Nice. That gives me some room to experiment.

He put a point into INT.

Blinking, he waited and looked around. The lake and the trees seemed a bit sharper than before, but he couldn’t discount the possibility of a placebo effect even in a virtual game like this. He certainly didn’t feel any smarter either, but he doubted that anyone could simply become literally more intelligent because of a stat increase. Something like that didn’t seem possible given the restrictions around full-immersion games, since they could only manipulate the senses and not the rest of the brain itself.

Or maybe I’m just too small-brained to begin with, he thought.

A more harrowing thought immediately followed: he didn’t technically have a physical brain at all, anymore. His consciousness no longer resided in his body but the construct of the Cognitive-Mirror. Maybe, in some way, the game’s restrictions no longer applied to him.

Still, buffing up his INT didn’t seem worth pursuing just yet.

As for the other stat he was ignoring, Spirit, the magical defense it offered was the only source of it he knew of, so a few points to lessen his vulnerability wouldn’t hurt. Literally, he guessed.

He spent one point on Spirit, boosting his max MP a bit. There hadn’t been any sort of feeling when he’d received the free points from Corvis’s lore entries, but this time…

It was almost as if he were dissociating from his body, but it was pleasant and calming. His sense of self had lessened by the merest degree, fading against the sense of nature surrounding him—the grass, the trees, the creatures roaming about. He was connected to everything, and everything was connected to him. He wasn’t exactly a spiritual person, but what he felt was distinctly spiritual.

He kind of hated it, to be honest.

“How come I didn’t feel this before,” he said to Corvis, “when you told me some of the game’s lore?”

Corvis, gazing at the sky, said, “Because you must be open to spiritual enlightenment before you can experience it. Of all the four attributes, Spirit is quite the tricky one. It is but a measure of one’s potential to withstand divine knowledge. Just because you receive it doesn’t mean you can understand or use it.”

“I didn’t feel it before because I wasn’t expecting it?” That sounded a bit circular, but whatever. He wasn’t going to bother with the stat anyway.

For the remaining four points, he put two into Strength and two into DEX. He felt the same rush of power as before, along with the almost indescribable sense of his bodily control cranking up a notch. It was the feeling of being aligned with himself, as if he’d suddenly gained the knowledge of how to backflip on the spot.

DEX and INT were mirrors of each other, in a way: one increased bodily perception, and the other increased his perception of everything beyond himself. But even that sounded more like a description of Spirit than Intelligence. Maybe there was more to it all, some kind of hidden overlap between each attribute. The four stats certainly weren’t as one-dimensional as they’d initially sounded to him, at least.

He looked over his character page, feeling a tinge of pride at his progress. The game was holding a knife to his throat, but there was still some comfort in seeing himself grow in spite of it. He wasn’t just playing a game anymore; he was fighting the game itself. And for now, he was winning.

Cobalt

[Moonlight]

Level 9 Beginner

HP: 226/226

MP: 189/189

STR: 12

DEX: 10

INT: 5

SPR: 8

—

PVP rank: E+ (Iron) (#11,829,107) (Top 51%)

(1-0)

Damn. He was already nearly in the top-half of the PVP rankings from that one fight? He’d played out of his mind, but he hadn’t expected it to reward him with that big of a leap.

Closing the page, he checked his in-game time. He was finally coming up on his fourth consecutive hour in Mirage. Originally, he’d planned on waiting for the game to boot him out as the time-limit hit. But now, having died once already, letting the system force anything on him was the last thing wanted to do.

How had Corvis done it, before? Command: half-sync, Rian thought, but nothing happened. He sat up straight and closed his eyes, then cleared his mind and repeated the thought.

Returning to half-sync.

Achievement unlocked: “Half Here, Half There” (Initiated half-sync)

The light, coming down through the trees and reflecting off the lake, dimmed as if the sun were setting. Everything that was in his mom’s living room—the couch, the TV, the coffee tables and lamps—suddenly appeared in their places. It was exactly as it was before he’d entered the game, except there were no walls; the sprawling lakeside view remained, though dimmer than before.

His corpse was still there, too.

He wondered how long it would be until it started to rot. He looked down at it until he couldn’t any longer.

“I don’t want to see this,” he whispered, turning away.

Corvis, walking up to him through the living room, snapped his fingers. When Rian looked over his shoulder, his corpse had vanished from the couch.

“Very well,” Corvis said. “A favor for a favor.” He produced the daemonfruit Rian had given him, and then gently tossed and caught it before pocketing it again.

So he could manipulate what he was seeing after all. Or at least in half-sync, he could. Rian sighed, then nodded his thanks and stepped past him. Walking through the holographic furniture, he found the spot where he’d been sitting before, by the lake. He sat, crossed his arms against himself, and waited for the half-sync timer to end.

His old life was entirely gone. And there was no apparent way of escaping the game anymore. He closed his eyes and focused on his breathing, trying his best to let these thoughts pass him by.

He wasn’t sure that finding what had happened to his mom in-game would lead him anywhere. If he went through with all of this—leveling to cap, gearing up, activating the locator item and finding Yindra at last—what if all of it was for nothing? If, all those days ago, his mom had simply logged without even a mention of what was happening in real life, then all of this was pointless.

If he was going to move forward on nothing but faith that things would turn out well, he couldn’t get his hopes up that there would be any answers at all. But…she’d promised him, hadn’t she? Her note to him, if he could recall its exact words, had said that she’d be “waiting for him” in the game. Maybe she wasn’t here anymore, but if so, she would’ve at least meant for him to find her.

She had to’ve left something behind here—to guide him to her or at least explain what had happened. Using Yindra’s AI to scour the game’s logs would almost certainly point him to it.

He had so much to ask her.

When he thought about it, he was a bit taken aback by the thought that she’d been playing Mirage while he was comatose—that she’d found the emotional bandwidth to escape into a game despite grieving over her son. But given that it had been nearly a year and a half, he supposed he couldn’t blame her for finding something to take her mind off him. It was the same thing he would’ve done, after so long. It was half the reason he played games in the first place. To get away from reality for a bit.

But even now his sense of what was real and not was coming into question.

If he did find out what happened to his mom, what difference would it make? He was dead. There was no way he could directly affect the real world now.

When the half-sync timer ended a few minutes later, drawing him out of his thoughts for a moment, he finally relaxed his arms and shoulders and realized just how tense he’d been. The game automatically returned to full-sync, and the living room faded into nothing, and there was only the sprawling view of the forests and lake.

Rian looked down at his palms.

Am I…real? What makes me any different from an NPC, right now? What does that make me?

He didn’t understand what this feeling was or how to deal with it, but it was horrible, and he knew it was going to come back each time he revisited the living room every four hours.

What am I?

Before he could ruminate any further, someone appeared on the other side of the lake.