Chapter 62: Chapter 58: System Patch

Amelia woke up, feeling for all the world like she had fallen asleep only moments ago.

“Ah, good, you’re up.” Jerry said. “How are you feeling?”

Amelia paused, taking a moment to confirm she was still in that same room, then looked inwards. While her regular magic reserves were more or less unchanged, her Hero power had been…locked down. It was still there, but she instinctively knew she couldn’t use it as freely as she used to.

“That’s not power from being a Hero.” Jerry said. “That is raw bits of the system that were thrust into you when it broke.”

Amelia frowned. She hadn’t even felt his presence in her mind, something that disquieted her to no end, just another reminder that he was significantly stronger than she was. “What’d you do to it?” She asked warily. “I thought you were getting rid of it?”

“You’ll need it in the future as my assistant.” Jerry said calmly. “But the way you’ve been using it is dangerous to both yourself and the world at large. As such, I have restricted it to only interacting with the parts of the system dedicated to the swarm. And, even then, any changes you attempt will be sent to me for manual review, so don’t think you can get all change-happy just because you still have the ability.

“I have also taken the opportunity to clean up your existing changes to the system, integrating them in a way that isn’t going to cause more errors with the system and polishing up some of the more…frustrating artifacts you couldn’t quite get rid of. I’ll be pushing that update to the world the moment I send you back, but, before then, do you have any questions for me?”

“How long was I out? How will this affect Lia?” Amelia asked. “And what did you change?”

“You were out for roughly two weeks, and Lia will be perfectly fine. More than fine, since in this patch I took the opportunity to apply a fix for her as well. Nothing nearly as drastic as what I did to you, I just needed to make her body a little better suited for using the system’s power.

“As for the changes, it’s mostly minor optimizations and fixes that make the systems you’ve put in place work with the existing ones. I’ve made a record of those, and I’ll expect you to read through and understand them once you start work as my assistant. Aside from that, the user-facing changes are as follows:

“First, I’ve removed the “Swarm” prefix from species names. It’s going to become redundant when every sapient being is part of the swarm, so there was no point in keeping it around. Second –”

“You said when, not if.” Amelia pointed out, a glint in her eyes. “May I take that to mean we have your backing and our goal is all but guaranteed?”

“No.” Jerry said quickly. “But, at the rate things are progressing, I think it is more likely to occur than not. You should not get complacent, however; your victory is certainly up in the air, and dropping your guards will lead to your demise.”

“But if I die –”

“If you die, then I will keep your soul up here, to serve as my assistant full-time for however long it takes to untangle your mess. I am fully capable of giving you the necessary abilities to make that work, so you will have no special protections of any sort. Now, as I was saying, the second thing I did is refactor the evolution system entirely, for both regular monsters and the swarm. Evolutions will no longer see any sort of limitation or penalty based on how strong the monster was originally, and I have standardized all evolution and conversion times to be a flat one hour.

You are reading story Swarming Sovereignty at novel35.com

“The biggest change is to the frequency and nature of evolutions; evolutions will come much slower, but each individual evolution will be more impactful, and will no longer reset your stats. The Skill acquisition system has likewise been updated, giving a flat limit to skills per evolution which will roll over, much like the change Lia made for herself. To compensate for limiting Skills in this way, I have given the ability to delay Skill acquisition once the requirements have been met, allowing you to ignore Skills you do not wish for. And that is the end of the notable changes, do you have any other questions for me?”

Amelia thought for a moment. “My only other question is what happened to the modeling wax of my cocoon and the items that were within.”

“They have been placed in your dimensional storage, with the rat pre-cocooned for your convenience. I’ll be placing you next to Lia now, try not to die out there.” He waved a hand, and then Amelia was whisked away, back to the dungeon.

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There was a sudden, brief moment of pain in Lia’s head, and then suddenly Amelia was in front of her, smiling widely. “Your friendly neighborhood Hero is back to save the day!” She said exuberantly. “I assume you got all the details about the system change?”

Lia blinked in surprise. “System change? Is that why my head hurt for a second there?”

“Probably.” Amelia confirmed. “Jerry did a bunch of changes while he was fixing me. I’ll give you the details later, but we should get me converting now. One of those changes is that converting and evolving will always take one hour, so by the time I’m done everyone should be gathered and I can brief everyone on what’s going on.

“Now, I’ve got that rat cocoon with me still, and I’ve got the modeling wax for mine, so I’m going to dump it and the rat on myself, and I fully expect you to convert me into some rat-based race, okay? I’m not that attached to being a vampire, and getting you access to every single type of magic is far more important than my race. Worst case scenario, I just transform away all the rat bits, so seriously don’t worry about it.”

Without leaving Lia a chance to respond, a torrent of modeling wax appeared over Amelia’s head, swiftly covering her. A moment later, a smaller cocoon appeared in that same spot, falling onto her and absorbing into the cocoon.

Lia sighed, glancing around herself warily. She had cleared all the enemies in this area, but there was no telling when more would be coming. So, she had her guards set up a small perimeter around her, where they would alert her at the first sign of trouble. She hadn’t wanted to bring the guards along, but everyone else had insisted, and they were coming in handy now, so she supposed everyone was right this time. That out of the way, she began to skim through Amelia’s myriad options for conversion.

And, like she had suspected, there were a lot. Fortunately, it was pretty easy to filter out those that weren’t rat-based or magic-focused, so she was able to narrow it down to a few options after only a few minutes.

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