Chapter 167: (Side Story) Deconstructed Flames

Something that not everyone knew about 'Living Jade Empire', but that anyone could look up, was that the 'wish fulfilling' quest system had a strong psychology component written into its base. Maybe that was obvious to anyone who'd ever studied the history of successful psychics, cults, and magicians, but it was an oddly scientific approach to player satisfaction for a game.

The game didn't just give you whatever you asked for either, not directly. You had to work for what you wanted. In general the quest system operated on a philosophy from the Nordic countries, perhaps reflecting the heritage of one of the core game designers, "Don't do whatever you want to, do what makes you happy."

If you could have watched the players of the game for awhile from the game's perspective, you'd probably have noticed that there was one exception, one 'condition' that would make the game grant you your 'happiness' without investing a lot of time and effort into it. Those who had suffered a severe trauma, those who believed that they didn't 'deserve' happiness, were gifted, to the best of the game's ability, with something that made them truly happy. Just one thing, one thing that remained constant for as long as they played. Sometimes it was something small. Sometimes it was something special.

It didn't always work of course, even as powerful and complex as the game already was, it wasn't omnipotent. But a surprising number of 'injured souls' began to heal beneath a game's care, and a surprising number of professional psychologists began to regard the new game as a tool. And that's how 'Ikadars' started his character, on a medical grade VR system that he would never have considered spending so much on for 'mere' pleasure.

The fire had hurt him in ways that went beyond the physical damage. He still flinched whenever a stove lit, or a candle flickered, and that made him angry. His psychologist, and wasn't that a damning phrase all on its own, had suggested the game as a safer alternative to the habit he'd developed of lighting candles at every meal to force himself to interact with flame.

His character Ikadars was a fire elemental, who lived in the etain racial capital, a city set within an active volcano's cauldron. It was a virtual life immersed in flame. His own body in the game was made of flame. If anyone had asked, he might have admitted that he'd overdone his exposure to flame, but at the same time the very extremity of it was satisfying.

He'd asked his mentor if he could choose the path of pyrokinesis, but had been informed that that was already the basis of his racial ability, and that the most flame controlling path outside of the racial abilities of the fire elementals and their halfs would be wizardry. And so, he became a wizard who specialized in fire. Ironically, he was a fire elemental who could summon fire elementals. As an etain he could also choose to accept the summons of other magic path users.

He'd been playing for weeks without receiving anything special from the game that he or his psychologist could identify. As far as either of them could tell, his etain character had the typical abilities of the race, and his wizard path while customized to his preference, was no different from any other flame loving wizard in "Living Jade Empire". It was a bit of a shock to realize that the people he was comparing his character to loved flame though.

It wasn't until he acquired the necklace, that a spark of love for the flames that he was learning to control and manipulate ignited within him. He didn't even realize at first, when the shift occurred. He'd been determined to control his reactions, aggressive toward what he feared, and relatively successful with his immersion therapy tactic.

The necklace was pure gold, and he melted it by accident the first time. He used his shape cantrip to restore its shape, and it was so easy that out of curiosity he tried melting it again and shaping it into a spoon instead. The gold would have been a little difficult to melt if he hadn't already put so much effort into learning to control his own flame, but at this point, it was easy.

Manipulating the liquid gold with the cantrip designed to manipulate liquids was even easier. He wondered how the game could tell what shape he was picturing, but like the original links of the necklace chain, he could shape the molten metal into any intricate configuration that he could picture clearly. If his idea of the shape wasn't completely clear, the shape would come out undefined, like something half molded. But if he could hold, for example, the intricate structure of a music box clearly in his mind, he could shape the gold into it, moving parts and all.

Fire suddenly became the warm friendly tool to Ikadars that so many humans had seen it as over the millennia. He played with it joyfully, spending hours in the game melting increasingly difficult metals and shaping them. He sought out contacts among the dwarves of the western mountains and acquired other pure metals, and then later, the alloys of dwarven ingots.

It wasn't that he'd always secretly wanted to be a craftsman or anything, it was just fascinating to be able to shape, well, anything that he could imagine. He learned a lot about machinery in a relatively short period of time, because it truly was a case of "knowing is half the battle".

He also developed some theories about how the game was "reading his mind". He was pretty certain that it was not just inputting things into his vision, but being able to basically "see" his "dreams". He had to be able to picture what he was shaping so well that he could see it if he closed his eyes. It wasn't really that big of a jump, if that was the way it was happening, because scientists had been able to "read" the visual processing that happened while people dreamed for quite awhile now.

He created a new "quest" for himself, that the game began to assist in. It gave him actual quests that helped move him toward his new goal. He was building himself a golem suit that his fire elemental could wear to visit areas inimical to a creature of fire.

One of his quests even led him to a sage who taught him a prayer of purification from the God of Separation. It allowed him to extract pure metals, which he could then melt together in carefully measured amounts to create his own alloys.

Ikadars realized something surprising one evening. His choice to play as a fire elemental had actually had the opposite effect of his original intention. A fire elemental could never really fear fire, because fire could never hurt it. But even so, he had not only conquered his fear of fire, but had found real pleasure in creating something with it.

"Living Jade Empire" had once again quietly lived up to its promises of letting a player find their "heart's desire".

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