[NR] Andrew's Backstory - Chapter 602 (Patreon)

Andrew’s Backstory

A frown graced Andrew’s face as he tried to scry on his favorite boy and companion. It had been interesting to see them handling mundane things in awkward ways. After all, who would force their way through a dungeon with four people? And then, when they neared the end and met up with an impossible trap, they forced that as well instead of waiting for it to be cleared!

Except now his scrying failed. Sure, he had expected it. They were heading towards the Deep Wilds, a place that even maxers need to respect. To even think that his spells would manage to scry into there was hubris of the highest degree, even more so than trying to scry on the Deities or the System. That place didn’t so much break the Rules as it did show that every Rule was truly a local phenomenon.

Andrew sighed, it was probably for the best. He had a bunch of other things to handle and using simulacrums could only get you so far at his level. The System was super touchy about anyone becoming a swarm in and of themselves.

His attention turned away from the pool of Water aligned mercury caught in the center of a gravity well to form a perfect sphere. The animal headed goblins had been settled and now just needed to live, which thankfully was quite quick. The non-sapient goblin’s having a much shorter lifespan, between five and ten years.

Except that meant he didn’t really have anything to play with. Andrew pauses and glances to the side, ahem, he didn’t really have anything to work on. Though that did mean he was left pretty open besides going around and checking on some other projects in person and maybe chatting with the rabbit empress afterwards.

Andrew flew out of his tower and headed towards a nearby mountain that was considered the local oddity. Almost every place in NeoRealm has such a location. That oddly high-level “here there be dragons” sort of place in the middle of lower-level stuff. Here, though, it wasn’t the System’s fault.

No, Andrew happily claimed responsibility for this unnatural blot of “red” in the middle of an otherwise “green” area. Though others don’t know just how much he had adjusted the place. Sure, the various near chimeric beasts were his fault, but instead of being the experiment, those beasts were actually the guard dogs.

In reality, Andrew had hollowed out the entire mountain. Well, his golem workforce hollow it out. In his mind, it would have been a waste to personally handle it. Though he did do a lot of work putting in various enchantments to maintain the stability of the mountain itself.

Anyway, within that hollowed out space there were various stone boxes, from the size of a cupboard to a small number that could hold an entire town each, including the farms. One of which did in fact do that, as this was where he had moved the goblins after getting them settled.

Now, each of the bigger boxes that didn’t just contain resources, there was a simulacrum grade golem. They fulfilled a role that he had overheard some travellers talk about once. That of telepresence. Those travellers used foreign words to describe it and the System obfuscated much of what they said, but Andrew was an old hand at figuring such things out and so not long after figured out how to maintain his experiments without stopping by in person.

In fact, he was even better off than the various telepresence bots allowed for. After all, the System restricted their minds to what was possible for them outside of NeoRealm. Whereas Andrew happily reinforced his brain with Mana, spread memory backups through his marrow and soul shell, as well as developed the ability for true multitasking. That last one being key as it allowed him to split off a strand of thought or seven to monitor stuff.

Andrew even found that he didn’t suffer from this if he was careful. It seemed that his brain’s raw ability to think about things was bottlenecked. There was a limit on how much he could think about a single thought, no matter how much brain power he had, or at least the limit scaled much slower than his growth in mental power. It didn’t even seem to be a limit placed by the System, but just how human minds seemed to work.

However, if he split off a strand of thought, the result ended up being greater than the sum of the parts. Andrew actually believes he manage four or so thought streams equal to four complete minds. It is just that he prefers one main mind that was vastly accelerated over four normal ones. Plus, it left him with those seven spare minor thought streams to do basic maintenance in his projects and would know exactly when to escalate a matter.

Andrew glanced around the area and decided to check up on one of his older experiments. The box being so old; it had originally been carved into the mountain itself, only being freed after the golems cleared the area around it. He phases through the wall of the mansion-sized box and grimaces.

His greatest failure and most amazing success. An Energy powered enchantment. Yes, Energy and not Mana. After all, Mana can turn Energy into more of itself, so why not have a few points of Mana stuck in the intake to convert any Energy that gets drawn in? The theory behind it being that you make use of ley lines to power the more mainstream enchantments. Of course, the actual implementation was much more complex than that.

It was also an Artifact and represented the first loophole Andrew had discovered. He didn’t really need to check on it, of course. From now until the end of the world, this room would float in this exact position. Such a marvel, force feeding a simple maintenance enchantment with cosmic levels of power. Andrew couldn’t change anything in this room. Not a single chair would move, his original body stuck with his finger on the activation tune, and of course his first apprentice who hadn’t been as lucky as him.

Andrew escaped by literally ejecting his soul and Mana core straight up with enough force to almost leave the atmosphere. His apprentice hadn’t even been able to realize what was happening, let alone try and save themself. Then the state of the room was locked down. You can enter and leave, but without a sapient as an anchor, anything left in the room would be forcibly removed. An unfortunate thing for anything of value as the room didn’t have an actual exit and so anything that was ejected would be forced through the very stone itself.

Andrew sighed, he hadn’t even really cared about his apprentice at the time. They were only taken on to help out, which might be why Andrew now used the simulacrums. That and to satisfy the System, which made sure to push anyone with a decent heritage to pass it on. Even now he didn’t quite care about who the apprentice was, but he certainly felt the guilt gnaw away at him during the quiet times.

Maybe, just maybe, Jason might find the key Andrew needed to right the wrong. Well, not “right it”. Nothing could ever give his apprentice the lost years back. Years over which all his relatives had grown old and died, though the line still lived, if only because Andrew made sure of it. However, at the very least, their ability to live their life would be returned.

Andrew was fine with waiting until he could personally research more about Energy. He had waited long enough already, but maxing your level wasn’t ever just a matter of time. None of the bottlenecks so far were able to truly hold him back, but when in front of his first apprentice? Andrew couldn’t muster the courage to truly claim nothing would stop him, that none of the bottlenecks would hold him. Sometimes, life happened.