章 97: Hit the Road, Jack!: Hit Samantha!
If one of your friends entered the game, the small "friends" window would begin flashing.
If you were in the game, then that meant you would be able to see it clearly. However, Jack wasn't on the game right now - that is to say, he wasn't looking at his player's U.I.
So, his mother logging in was something he simply didn't see.
Not only that, since he returned to his nest, it would be impossible for him to receive any messages about that.
[ - Babe, I'm back!]
- That's good! Come and tell me the news already!
Jack, having returned to his Red Dragon form, was quickly greeted by his wife. The children didn't come, as they were currently resting.
Wyrmlings had an activity-sleep ratio just like grown dragons - except theirs was much shorter.
Jack had a sleeping ratio of 1:3600. Elicia had one of 1:50. However, they were exceptions. Elicia counted as an Ancient Red Dragon, while Jack was a Dragon King.
Most dragons became more powerful with age, and their sleep-activity ratio increased as well. However, one needed to be aware of what that meant.
Elicia, being an Ancient Dragon, should have something like a 10:1 ratio - meaning to sleep 10 years and remain awake for one.
However, she as an ancient Red Dragon, so the sleeping period was five times greater than that.
As for a young dragon, that should be something like 1:1, that is, one year active for every year of sleep.
However, their children were even younger than that. They were Wyrmlings. Dragons could be classified according to their ages. At the egg, they would be hatchlings. Then, after being newly born, they would be wyrmlings. Then young, juvenile, teenie, teen, adult, mature, old, venerable, ancient, legendary and demigod.
In a certain sense, Jack could be considered a demigod dragon of the "Dragon King" race.
So, as young dragons had a 1:1 sleep-activity ratio, it was only expected for wyrmlings to have even smaller ones. However, things didn't work quite like that. Wyrmlings had a 0.12:0.12 ratio. So, while young dragons would sleep for a year then remain awake for another year, wyrmlings would sleep for a month and then be awake for another month.
However, since they were Red Dragon Wyrmlings, they remained sleeping for five months, instead.
In a sense, that was a good thing, since regular Wyrmlings would have become young dragons a long time ago - usually, five years were enough. As Red Dragons, however, the time needed would be five times greater, so, even their eldest, Sandro, which was 20 this year, was only a Wyrmling still.
Jack and Elicia had little time to play with their children - twice a year, basically - however, they had been doing so for the past twenty years - quite a fulfilling life.
Besides, most of the time they would sleep while their children slept as well, so, it wasn't much of a pain.
Indeed, it was their plan to remain doing so while the children grew. They didn't want for them to retrieve their memories so soon, so, making they gain resistances through grinding was something completely avoided.
This way, they would be able to enjoy their children for a longer time. As young red dragons, which sleept five years for every awaken year, then, juveniles, which slept ten years, teenies, which slept fifteen, teens, which slept twenty, adults, sleeping twenty-five, mature, thirty… at that point, well, then it would be almost sure that the children would have regained their previous lives' memories.
Still, since they would take around twenty-five years to become young Red Dragons, and then seventy-five to go from young to juvenile… if one was to make the math, Jack and Elicia would enjoy their childrens' warm for not so long of a time, and they would probably move out of their dungeon in a thousand years or so!
Regardless, this was something for the future.
[- Well, I made a little mess at the Thousand Kingdoms, but I got results…]
- Samantha is in this world? What about Shabe?
[- About that…]
***
Elicia remained pensative.
- She was the air, the water… everything? Are you sure hon?
[- Yeah, pretty much.]
This was a big headache. That made her a goddess if nothing else. An omniscient, omnipotent being which controlled the whole world.
Not that Samantha was a bad person, but could they trust her? What did she think about the state the world was in? What about the whole Demon Kingdom and Goblin Empire thing?
All their preparations, all the power they had accumulated, all of that would be for naught if their own bodies and mana revolted and attacked them! Indeed, it might be even more dangerous than having nothing!
They could only reincarnate… or maybe not even that. Could she have control over the minds of those who entered Another World as well? The fairy dust could connect people's minds with Another World, it seemed to be something like the "fundamental particles" of the world. Could she do something to people's minds if she wanted to?
Anxiety filled the room.
[- So, what do we do?] - Jack said, while leaning against the wall as well. He had been building such a powerful defense, an impregnable fortress, all for the sake of avoiding letting his children and wife be threatened by external influences. Thirty years of sheltering them, all for the sake of living a comfortable life, of never losing the ones he loved again...
And now, all of that might have been for nothing. Had he not [Abnormal Emotional State Resistance] and he might have had a fit of anger there and then.
- I guess there is nothing we can do. - Samantha sighed, shoulders dropping in the act - is there something higher than what you can access which we can use to avoid being under her?
Jack looked at the General Administration Panel. The last time he used his Player U.I. was a long time ago, so he didn't even bother looking at it.
[ - There seems to be nothing babe. At last…]
- Not without leaving the Main Server.
[- Yeah.]
Another World had a number of servers. The Main One, where they lived, was also the most complex and well-administrated of them.
However, there were others.
Every time a new Game Patch was added, the Main World would be moved to somewhere else and the old world would be divided into smaller worlds, up for grabbing by the first one which wanted it.
Those people would become rightful owners of those small worlds, and, indeed, some of those people had managed to enter Another World and remain there. In a sense, they were like Samantha, capable of merging with the world itself, high and mighty beings which had control over the whole of the fairy dust in there and mold it to their will by writing programs from scratch.
Everyone with access to the General Administration Panel could check the state of the old Alternate Squeam Servers and administrate them - however, to the moment, only five of the thirty servers were active, and only seven small pieces of them had someone "in charge" of them.
They had been nicknamed the "small worlds" or even the "perilous worlds", due to the fact that, being of free of the Deep Code Autocorrecting tool, any neuromancer with a minimum amount of skill would be able to remodel the world as they saw fit. They needed only to mess with the connection between the world's "owner's" mind and their world, and then they would have the whole thing for themselves while the brainless mind would then become inactive - something like a slave to their liking.
To the moment, no one knew that Jack could access and administrate these worlds, since he hadn't told them. It would be a big problem if he did - the people at the Demon Kingdom wished nothing more than to connect these worlds to the Main ServerP, and many neuromancers had been consumed to bits under the Deep Code Autocorrecting tool in order to try and reprogram parts of the main server's space to become Teleportation Pads which connected to them, instead of connecting to places inside the Main Server.
That not to mention that, by doing so, they would become eligible to be banned!
Small-World accessing was a complex topic, and "owning" one of them was something most people, even if they had the power to do so, would avoid at all costs - since the Deep Code Autocorrection tool wasn't present, those who altered the code to become "lords" of these worlds would have to defend them by themselves. It was a battle of programming might, in which being the owner did not protect you from getting your mind separated from your brain and trapped as an eternal slave to someone else. The ultimate hacking game!
Now, if people were to discover that Jack could not only move people to those worlds by himself, but also administrate them, being able to punish people who used them in the wrong ways according to the Squeam Rules of Conduct and also appoint people to rule those without owners…
Jack looked at the direction where his highest-level treasury was - which was also where his children slept.
He was no master programmer/ white-hat hacker, and didn't want to pay to see if he could overcome a bunch of level 100 neuromancers with extremely high programming skills meddling with the Deep Code with no regards to whether they would be banned or not.
Some things should be always kept in secrecy.
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