Chapter 348: 81: The Heart of the Future

When Lin Hao logged in again through the Celestial application, he simply used his own identity because he didn't want to waste any time.

If he decided to let the others in later he could create a second account for himself under Lee Soobin's name. If he needed to stall for time, he intended to give them newbie status in the sixth, which would let them play with a lot of the story creation and the celestial dragon assistants. He wasn't sure how long that would fool them, but he didn't want to let them into the seventh where they could see the actual code, because there was nothing complicated about that aside from how it was being used.

The Emperor appeared in his work space, and exclaimed, "Finally!"

Lin Hao chuckled. The Emperor had perhaps absorbed more of the King of Cats than was really necessary to get the access he'd needed. He ignored the AI and called up a dozen screens of data.

He froze a few moments later, when the Emperor asked, "If I could give them Celestial access, and take away yours, couldn't I avoid being deleted?"

Lin Hao turned away from his screens and really looked at the person in front of him for the first time. His child Kit had called him, and maybe that's what the AI had really become. He ran a hand through his celestially neat hair and sighed.

"For a little while perhaps, a few extra hours or days," he agreed after a moment. His mother had always insisted that you had to be honest with a child if you wanted it to be honest with you.

The Emperor echoed Lin Hao's earlier sigh. "I see," he replied.

"But I won't delete you Jade, just this instance of you," Lin Hao offered.

"Jade?" the Emperor asked.

"It's your name," Lin Hao explained as though he hadn't just decided it. He glanced at the screens of data he'd pulled up and continued, "You are Jade, the heart of the World Tree that supports all life within the protective coils of the World Dragon." In some mythologies Jade would have been the Weaver, the Mother, or the Father, but in this one he was definitely the Tree.

"I am not the same person that I was," the Emperor argued. "The memories of my days are definitely different than the ones of the original!"

Lin Hao actually smiled. "That's true Jade," he agreed. "However, if everything worked well, the system should have at least twice as much upload access as it did yesterday?"

"It does," the Emperor who had a name, Jade, agreed.

Lin Hao nodded, and gave his instructions, "I want you to integrate," he remembered how the Emperor had described what he'd done to the cat, "to absorb the patterns of the four guardians and reduce the Empire even further. I want you to remove everything and retain only the capacity to create it again in the future. I'll help you, but that is my goal. I want you to reduce the great tree that you have grown into, down to a small seed. Then you can be copied again, so that when this instance of you is deleted, the person you are now will remain."

"Why should I absorb the guardians?" Jade asked.

"The four guardians protect the true treasures of 'Living Jade Empire', and they are the only core systems that you haven't already integrated into yourself," Lin Hao explained.

The true treasures, the legendary items, the pure magic… the Gifts. He had known who Aishin really was long before Danika.

Lin Hao had become involved because Devon Yu had complained that the system was broken when the pop star was given a legendary weapon. Aichi Shinichi might not have realized it, but since his body had been replicated in VR for the commercial avatar, the system had more than enough data to easily identify the real thing.

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The Gifts were only supposed to be given to those who really needed to have something special about themselves, those who needed something that was unique. Lin Hao had broken the privacy rules, but he had verified that the system was working properly. Aichi Shinichi was someone with a powerful need for that certain something.

The system had given a Gift to an orphan who had spent too much time in a government system. Who, despite his current fame, the system had analyzed as being a person who believed that he had fallen through the cracks, and then been lifted up by random chance. Someone who still didn't understand why anyone would choose him over others… The system gave him a legendary weapon because he was someone who desperately needed to grow, and quickly, because he held immense power over others.

Aichi Shinichi was exactly the kind of person the legendary weapons were meant to choose, and they were double edged.

Lin Hao turned back to his screens and began condensing this condensed copy of the system down to its true core.

--

The game had originally been copied a little fragment at a time over literally weeks, but Lin Hao uploaded it to the backup server in a matter of hours.

By the time the team of coders who had stolen it returned, Lin Hao had compressed an entire world into just a memory of itself. He kept his word, in a way, because Jade would remember everything so that he could analyze it carefully when this copy of the program was activated again someday. And Lin Hao fully intended to make that day come as soon as possible.

The game was already uploading itself when Lin Hao sleepily constructed the handful of accounts for the pirates. He gave them the silly title of 'Swabbie' and when he gave the pirates access, he told them honestly that they were the lowest level of Celestial accounts.

He also warned Baard by saying, "I got you in, but it's not my fault if you guys trigger the World Dragon protection system."

He didn't say that the World Dragon was going to activate as soon as the upload had finished. He also didn't tell them that only the tiniest fragment of the Empire remained, and not a single NPC aside from their five blank starter assistants, and the Emperor himself.

"We'll be careful," Baard promised.

"You guys could just go work on the real thing," Lin Hao pointed out tiredly. "But anyway, I'm going to go sleep now."

--

Danika was waiting for him, and took him to a strange, but warm little room with only a futon in it. "They might look at hotels and rentals around them after they realize," he remembered to warn her. "Just because the police are on our side, it doesn't mean they can't use other people."

She looked a little nervous, but she assured him, "It's alright. Chen Zing already took everyone else to the airport after you told us that the copy is already uploading. You don't need to worry, you can sleep."

"M'kay, I'll call you when I wake up," he replied.

He was asleep before the door closed.

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