Chương 14: Everyone has their own problems
Time restarted back on the Earth's plane and no one except the external observers was any wiser. Harrison got moved into a normal ward whereby the lack of moaning and the sound that was made by only his equipment he judged he was alone in.
Laying on the hospital bed he tried to keep himself occupied by multiplying large numbers while on the other side of the USA, in Las Vegas to be specific a man was occupying himself with his situation.
As soon as Ambroise Ananta noticed the lack of connection to his guinea pig he hired a private detective agency to gather information for him. The report he was eagerly awaiting came by email within a day which was even surprising for him.
'They were surprisingly efficient as they should be for how much I am paying them,' he said in his mind as he browsed the report.
There was the crime scene report from the internal investigation which showed the diagram of Harrison's house. It included the transcript from the emergency call and also listed all the participants in the raid and how many rounds they fired. They were especially including the photos of his gun replicas which would supposedly lessen their fault in the incident. It was very detailed. It was so detailed that Ambroise was sure they had a man inside the police force as it looked like an official report.
The destroyed headgear was lying on the scene by the side of a pool of blood and Ambroise put special attention on any report document where it might be mentioned.
He finally found it in the list of evidence collected.
Harrison knew his headgear was somewhat special since he received it after winning an event but only Ambroise knew the actual reason.
For anyone else it was just a better air conditioned model upgraded from the first batch. Since sweaty hair and sweat coming into the eyes was a common complaint from their players, they decided to add ventilation on version 2.0 and this was like a preview version or one might even call it a prototype.
Only Ambroise knew that it was not the only thing he added.
Why he was so eagerly looking for it were the control and energy arrays engraved in it. The control array was already destroyed but the energy array was something Ambroise could reuse. He didn't really even care about the control array since it was easy to make but it was useless without the energy one.
The key problem designing his conspiratorial helmet was linking a part of his soul over distance to the subject. It was easy to engrave a soul with a contract with physical contact but doing it remotely took tremendous energy no human-made battery pack could supply.
It made things especially troublesome due to the lack of spiritual energy in this plane so he could not use an energy gathering array on it. For this purpose he used an array he got from the black market which used quite exotic materials even for his immortal means. They were not especially hard to find but they were expensive. He collected only twelve sets of them to start his minor side project.
It was a design he didn't fully comprehend since he was no array expert but he didn't need to be. Together with the control array the energy array and the twelve sets of ingredients to make them cost him almost all of his wealth he collected in his over two millenniums long life.
It pained him greatly but the potential profits far outweighed the initial investment so he jumped at the opportunity with open arms. His subjects or with another word slaves, could earn him back the initial cost in the next century multiple times and he would reinvest and make more subjects and experience exponential growth.
'I have to retrieve the headset,' was a thought that kept repeating in his head as he read.
'If I throw money at them someone is sure to return it to me so that is not a big concern,' he mused in his head as he contemplated the greed of mortals.
It was somewhat ironic since the greed of an immortal led him to this junction.
As he browsed Harrison's medical files, he noticed the lack of optimism of his attending physicians and he concluded his first guinea pig was useless to him and after he retrieved the headset, he would distance himself from him completely.
What he and the physicians failed to understand was that the energy array he used has implanted itself directly onto Harrison's soul as the side effect of not having to feed the controlling array.
What he also did not know was it was an array made by a void deity used to fuel his clones over different planes as a means to enjoy his harem and would automatically change the temporal laws of that plane once it left it and put them on pause.
The physicians were not to blame since it was something incomprehensible by Earth's standards and Ambroise was also not to blame since any information about void deities was above his pay grade. The leaders of alliance strictly guarded it as they liked to represent themselves as the highest authorities.
That resulted from them being used to being on top of the food chain and once they found out, there was a mountain looming in front they were reluctant to admit they were the proverbial frogs in a well. Although such knowledge spurred on further cultivation, it was mainly kept by the highest levels as top secret to make themselves seem untouchable.
The main reason they could succeed in doing so was also that the beings who could reach and live in the void usually did not concern themselves with the lower plains since the lower planes had nothing much besides maybe some entertainment or sentimental value for them.
They found a new battleground when breaking through the void of the higher planes. A battleground that was infinitely bigger than the higher planes that were just stable offshoots of the void and the lower planes were just stable offshoots of the higher ones. It called the void for a reason it was mostly empty. You could travel for a billion years with the speed of light and not meet any other living thing in it.
Luckily for the beings occupying the void they have found a way around it. The main thing that differentiated them from the lower and upper planes was that they no longer needed a physical body for their souls to survive. At the lower level of existence the souls would start to dissipate as soon as the container was lost but they could make a new container with a thought as long as the materials were or even just energy was available.
All that they need was their soul and energy so they were no longer constrained with things like distance and time in the void. As long as they had a clear idea of where they wanted to go they could just teleport there directly.
It was a dream and also their greatest fear for all the apex beings in the lower realms of the void to get there. The dream was to reach a higher place and the apex of power and the fear was to start once again from the bottom. Any random existence from the void could destroy an apex existence from the higher planes with but a thought and they were aware of that threat since it would not be the first time it happened. They were at their mercy and at the same time they also wanted to join them and any idea of provoking them was ludicrous.
For Harrison the void was of no concern as he was trying to multiply a long string of numbers with fervour and since he found he had nothing else to do. After reaching level 11 in mathematics he tried longer digits but hit a bottleneck as the difficulty was raised more than his intelligence that would allow him to calculate effectively. All he got from trying is a headache but if he tried calculating at a lower difficulty, he got nowhere in terms of leveling mathematics.
He was starring into the void but he had no wish to go there. Harrison just wanted to fall asleep and restart his day on Atreus where he at least had some semblance of life. Being stuck in a hospital room with no ability to do anything was psychological torture for him.
Humming the first few line lyrics from Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody he finally got his wish and woke up on the other side. He stood up and looked out the cave. The sun was slowly setting, and the shadows were filling the forest. He did not want to waste anymore time, so he went down the cave wall anyway and collected some firewood for later and filled the empty water-skins from the spring. As he stood there in the twilight of the evening, he thought what to do going ahead.
The obvious thing was to get stronger in this world and find a way to get out a hospital on that one. He took out a one-handed sword and started practicing every move he learned from the book and repeating it over and over again.
After two hours he wiped himself off and recycled the clothes in the inventory. He would not go swim in the pond in the darkness. He quickly built a fire sat down and ate the rest of his roasted ratbit as he contemplated on how he could faster switch to this world since the other one was now completely useless to him.
'I need to find a way to fall asleep faster!!!', he thought as he lied down next to the cozy fire which colored the cave in an orange hue.
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