[Short Story] Sub-System Meets Humanity (Patreon)

One day, the System arrived on Earth. Well, not The System. Rather, A sub-system. Still a part of the System and not some person raised to power. However, it did have a personality all of its own so as to wield the power that it did. At the high levels, power is more about forcing your will upon the world directly and that sort of needs a will in the first place.

There was, of course, the usual bellyaching by the locals. You give them magic and a path to immortality, and they complain about the monsters. Like, where did you expect the excess Mana to end up?

Sure, the System could understand some of their complaints. No one likes it when suddenly their whole tech base vanishes. And this was one of the mid tech worlds. Not quite at the point of truly being a multi-world species, but close enough. A very common point to get stuck at, if the System was to be honest.

Without magic, space was too big for most mortal races to handle. Not that they can’t, but it is much more likely the System finds them first. At which point, magic opens up the universe. Well, magic has the possibility to do so. Just like with technology, you need pretty advanced magic to get out there.

Though if on a scale of 1 to 10, technology required a 10, magic only needed an 8, maybe 9 depending on racial affinity with spatial magic. Besides, if you use magic with technology, it becomes even easier. So introducing magic is clearly the correct choice.

And with that, the sub-System finishes their task of setting up the local area with the System and scheduling a bunch of events to help the “humans” to adapt. Simple enough stuff that they’ve done a hundred times before. No possibility for error and so soon enough, they’re off to a new region to repeat the process.

Until they get a warning in their console. Well, that wasn’t what did it. Warnings tend to crop up all the time. Most fix themselves, generally in the form of some idiot gaining too much power, then I’m their hubris, getting killed by some mythical beast or deity.

This warning, however, did not fix itself. Not only that, but there wasn’t just one troublesome element. Still, warnings are just warnings. It’s simply that, when a decade had rolled by, the sub-System got forced to go and at least check things out. Sure, in theory they were supposed to go and check on all of their previously seeded world once a decade for a thousand years.

Some of its sibling sub-Systems even do so. Except, this sub-System had long ago realized that doing so, eventually resulted in a non-stop loop of checking on old worlds. This cut into the number of worlds it could initiate into the System. So the sub-System normally didn’t bother.

Did this mean many of the world’s likely ended up in pretty bad straits? Sure! After all, part of the check up is to do things like assure monsters are within an acceptable level range, that the dungeons are growing, and to root out any outside forces overstepping. Except, while all of that is pretty bad, it doesn’t introduce new worlds to the System when fixed.

However, there’s a difference between a few warnings and a few million warnings. That difference being that when the decade rolled around, the sub-System was forced to actually go back and check on Earth. Just a quick peek to confirm what is going on and maybe a little work to make sure when another decade rolled around, they wouldn’t be forced back to the planet.

Now, what the sub-System expected to find was a devastated world. Those kinds of warnings are reserved for when large things happen. Which during integration, usually meant wide scale property damage and general destruction.

So, when the sub-System showed up and everything looked fine? Well, that threw it for a loop. Beyond just fine, in fact, the place looked absolutely pre-System in appearance! That should not be!

It took the sub-System three entire seconds to find out how they managed to get electricity working again. The stuff is simply too volatile when magic gets involved. So the humans solved the problem with how Mana and electricity interacted by switching to using Mana.

Not that this hasn’t been figured out before. As the local saying went, “there’s nothing new under the sun”. What confused the sub-System was the fact they didn’t use Mana infused electricity, lightning attuned Mana, or any mix of the two in form or concept. They had used atmospheric Mana directly.

To the sub-System, it had simply looked like air where some was blowing and some not. And within that analogy was exactly how the sub-System noticed what is happening. For lack of a better way to explain it, the Mana being used by them that went near the ground would kick up “dust” despite the area not showing any other signs of the free atmospheric Mana moving.

Though this was a minor distraction compared to the population numbers. Yes, a lot of people had died in what the locals called “the System apocalypse”, you know, what almost every technologically advanced civilization calls the coming of magic. But there weren’t all that many more dead compared to when the sub-System had last been here!

The population should have dropped to at least a third of the pre-System population! Instead, the humans even showed signs of recovering. And it isn’t like they’re one of the races that can emergency spawn a lot of members. The humans had simply stopped dying, even from normal causes!

Like, sure, getting to a higher level can cure what ails you, but the geriatric late stage cancer patient shouldn’t be able to get those levels! Yet they seem to have managed to level anyway. There was something very wrong here.

The sub-System searched every person’s information, only to have even more questions. Now, the System didn’t have any true max level, but with the level of monsters the planet had access to, there was a very clear plateau where experience gain doesn’t keep up with experience needed.

And Every Single Adult was at least at that level. Plus, many of them had made use of the System reset which allowed a person to go back to a skill-less level 0. Technically you would probably have higher stats, but not by much and they aren’t “free” stats. Rather, they’re the stats earned through exercise and such. It isn’t like they had reset at a low level either. Most of them had made it to the soft cap before resetting! That should have taken decades!

Some of them even had records of having done so tens of times! Insanity! The sub-System was stunned, it made no sense. All they could do was put an alert for the next person to reset themselves so they can see what is happening.

And they don’t have to wait long. Within a minute of setting the alert, it was triggered, bringing the sub-System’s attention to an average office worker. In other words, someone who shouldn’t have gotten to their current level in their entire life, let alone having managed to reset twice in the last week, soft capping each time.

The sub-System watches as they slump back in the chair they’re sitting in, barely able to move from the sudden shock of losing so much strength. But move they did and with a press of a button, their level shot right back up to about where they had been before. With that, the sub-System ignores the man, this button! A button shouldn’t have been able to do that. How did it work?

So the sub-System dug into the device. Well, into whatever the device was hooked to. The chair and button are exactly that. A chair with a button. It was what said button is hooked to which matters.

The flow of atmospheric Mana between the button and whatever the button had connected to had been fleeting, but now that the sub-System knew what to look for, the sub-System could trace it. That connection led beneath the surface and then straight towards the nearest edge of the city. All the way until the sub-System arrives at a sealed multistoried structure underground.

Said structure was monstrous in size! Yet despite that, the structure was nearly empty of atmospheric Mana of its own, which made no sense. Then again, nothing about this world seemed to make sense, so why did it expect that pattern to change here?

Anyway, beyond the room are countless tubes and strange mad science style devices. And without the power flowing through, the sub-System was shocked to find that it couldn’t figure out what the machinery did. Though, as somewhere in the city another person used it, the purpose became crystal clear.

Atmospheric Mana suddenly poured into the multistoried building. The eddies and swirls were perfect down to where it looked like one big fractal. And at every swirl and whirl, a spirit or elemental type monster spawned in. These monsters were so tight as to be at the limits of the provided space. Not even the rat king raid that the sub-System had once witnessed managed to spawn in this tightly packed.

And as swiftly as they appeared, the Atmospheric Mana was drawn out, reducing the area to the density it had been when the sub-System first arrived. This had the inevitable result of killing all the spirits and elementals that needed a certain density of Mana just to exist. All with the tap of a button.

This threw everything the sub-System knew about how experience worked for a loop. As far as it had known, you can not directly create a situation only to fix it and still gain experience. So no, a necromancer can’t keep raising the same skeleton and putting it down to level. Sure, they would gain experience with whatever spell or skill they’re using to raise it, especially if it was getting more and more damaged, but even then the gain would be restricted.

Why did this work?

The sub-System quickly found hundreds of other similar rooms all over the planet and so they observed for days. Their first discovery was that pressing the button didn’t directly result in the spawning event. Instead, the humans had perverted another fundamental aspect of Mana, that of spawning monsters. And decided they didn’t like monsters just popping up at random.

So, instead of what every other civilization has figured out, the simple Mana agitator that makes the local Atmospheric Mana too chaotic for monsters to spawn. The only down side being that they do still need to spawn and so if you protect the entire planet, you end up with Kaiju spawning through the interference.

Humans had instead realized that just as there was a minimum amount of monster spawning, there was also a maximum. The result being that they built these underground structures over the entire planet. And by having them spawn in monsters at a regular interval, the humans had effectively removed monsters as a concern.

That did not explain them being able to harness it for leveling. The monsters being used to level were still spawning in because of the human deciding to level. What were they missing?

In the end, the answer was obvious in hindsight. If you were out hunting monsters in the wilds, you still get experience if the monsters are driven towards you. And you still get experience if you use a trap. And you still get experience if they’re enough levels higher than you. All adding up to not actually losing all that much experience compared to going out and fighting each monster on its own. It was practically heretical to the System how easily the humans managed to bend it to their will!

The sub-System didn’t see it that way though. Because the humans were also oh so close to a milestone the sub-System felt was most important. That of being able to easily and quickly explore new worlds. Which would expand the reach of the System.

They were actually so close that it took only the smallest of nudges to a number of lead scientists across the many countries. Well, the sub-System didn’t need to spread it around. A single genius in the right place would have done it. However, the sub-System wanted the humans to spread out quickly and the only thing that gets them moving quicker than a new resource to exploit is if another country might get to that resource first.

Then it was simply a matter of the sub-System sitting back and watching the chaos unfold. Within a decade, every planet in their solar system was colonized. Whether it was the fiery celestial body cozied up to their sun or one of the gas giants, they had managed to spread everywhere. From there, it only took twenty decades and change to spread to the stars.

Their magitech ftl drive a breakthrough that takes a path yet traveled. It didn’t go farther or faster, but it did allow a much more thorough exploration, much to the sub-System’s delight. And soon after, five solar systems had been settled.

From there, it was practically inevitable. No longer all in one place, only another entity on the level of the sub-System could erase the humans. So they spread. Sure, their culture shattered multiple times, but that simply sped up the spread as one diaspora after another took the humans past what even the sub-System could have handled.

All while the sub-System happily worked on cataloging every new world added to the System by them. Not realizing they had accidentally fallen into the same sort of behavior they had looked down on in their fellow sub-Systems.