Shadow Seer (Rogue Merchant Book #3): LitRPG Series Roman Prokofiev (great books of all time .txt) đ
- Author: Roman Prokofiev
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All of that happened at the same time as the Taerland Incident. NPC rebellions and illogical actions of the procedural generator forced the developers to join forces and find a solution to the issue. It led to the creation of the Seven Brothers protocol.
âAt first, Andrei wanted to make only one Key,â the Gravekeeper chuckled. âBut we immediately cried foul and decided to secure ourselves. Seven Keys for the seven of us were a guarantee against being screwed over. Almost everything was in place: we underwent an experimental âdigitalizationâ and prepared secret caches for the Keys. Each of us only knew the location of their own Key. I was entrusted with the Compass. We put our digital copies into hibernation in special spots. They were supposed to wake up upon an external command.â
âA few days later, Balabanov once again gathered us together,â he continued after a pause. âChristmas was around the corner, and he invited the entire teamâseventy people at the timeâto Mauritius to celebrate. Recently, he had bought real estate there.â
âStrange, I thought that Agasyan was the one to bankroll your vacation,â I said. âThatâs what the media reported.â
âItâs all bogus. Andrei was the one who arranged the flight, the tour, and the plane,â the Gravekeeper said bitterly. âActually, Agasyan kicked up a fuss about thatâhe didnât want to let everyone go, leaving only service personnel in the office. I donât know how Andrei convinced him.â
âSo youâre telling me that...â It finally started to sink in.
âUnfortunately, I donât know if Andrei ever boarded the plane and what happened there. My copyâs memory stops much earlierâthe last backup was performed a day before the flight. I woke up here, on the Isle of Madness, next to my cache.â
âSo the plane crash wasnât Agasyanâs fault?â
âThe plane crash? Did it even happen? I read online that they found no traces of the plane, no bodies of the deceased. The plane disappeared, thatâs it. Nobody knows what happened to it. And yes, Iâm absolutely sure that Agasyan had nothing to do with it. We were the goose that laid the golden eggs. Our disappearance caused a horrible panicâthey barely found a replacement for us. Do you think that Agasyan wouldnât have prepared if he wanted to get rid of us? Yamatoâs team is proficient, but Sphereâs a unique project. They canât handle it, and the gameâs already out of control. Iâm sure that itâs Balabanovâs doing. Itâs his style.â
âI donât get it. Didnât he die with all of you, or at least disappear? All of his assets went to Agasyan. Whatâs his interest?â
âThatâs what he told you,â Rocky said, grinning. âWe can only guess at where our share, or rather our companyâs share, went. Most likely, to Balabanovâs wifeâsheâs the only surviving shareholder. I need hardly say that itâs impossible to learn the details while staying here. But all indirect evidence suggests that Andreiâs alive!â
âHow?â I asked, dumbfounded. Svechkinâs words boggled the mind.
âMy copy left stasis several days after the crash. It was I who developed the emergency protocol, so I know how it works. The idea was that activating the Seven Brothers protocol would serve as a general command to awaken our copies. Until that moment, they would sleep in inaccessible places. I did cheat a little bit, though. I didnât trust Andrei, so I created an additional trigger for my awakeningâthe activation of his Key. He didnât suspect it. As soon as he entered Sphere and took his Key, I woke up in this cave.â
âYou mean that the protocol was never activated?â
âBingo! If it were, everyone would wake up, not just he. Andrei bypassed the protocol to enter the game, and it could only be done from the real world.â
âI donât understand. Wasnât your death in reality supposed to trigger the awakening?â
âNo. We didnât count on it at all,â Rocky said, smirking. âI think you donât quite realize the point of the Seven Brother protocol. Didnât the Magister give you a good explanation?â
âMaybe he didnât.â
âAll right, Iâll try to be brief. Seven Brothers are the Sphereâs red button. When we witnessed the AIâs antics in Taerland, we realized that we had opened a can of worms. The generator was capable of influencing virtuality, overriding the capsuleâs neural interface, even blocking access to the game. In theory, it could create a situation where nobody could log into Sphereâneither players nor admins. Thatâs why we created digital copies and put our minds in NPC bodies. They were supposed to attack from the inside if there was no access from the outside. Get it? Iâm trying to explain it in laymanâs terms.â
âI think I understand the gist of it, although it sounds crazy,â I replied.
âThen letâs continue. The emergency protocol wasnât started, Sphere still works, more or less, but Andrei âwoke upâ and took his Key. He didnât rouse the others but quietly unlocked dynamic access to the locations with other Keys. It cannot be done by a digital copy, eitherâas opposed to a real person using remote access to the servers. Thankfully, as I already said, I was the creator of the Seven, so the most he could do was to unlock the caches for dynamic events. I suspect thatâs how you found your Key. By the way, it was intended for Maxim Rubtsov, our game designer.â
âYes, it was an accident,â I confirmed. âBut your Key is here!â
âI hid it here for a reason. Yes, my Key can be accessed dynamically as well. Every 24 hours, thereâs a 30-minute window when you can get to this place. But weâre in the Hole. It has few players but a lot of hard-to-reach areas. The chance of anyone stumbling upon this cave is less than one in ten
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