World Keeper

Chapter 1145: Money Can’t Buy Everything

While Lifre was spending most of her time doing live streams with the new system, Lena was watching her and monitoring the donations coming in. For the most part, people seemed to be simply enjoying the stream for what it was, contributing to either mess with Lifre or help her out.

However, there were a few different cases, most of which weren’t visible to the public. As someone with a moderator account on Lifre’s stream, she was able to see the attempted submissions that were rejected by the system. These were things that people tried to enter into the stream as donation options, but were automatically rejected for one reason or another.

For instance, there was one that tried to submit a ‘legendary weapon that could be taken out of the stream’. Given that objects couldn’t be taken out of the stream at all, this was naturally rejected. Lena assumed that this was someone testing to see if Lifre and other members of the Greater Pantheon were getting preferential treatment with the system.

On the other hand, there were some that were trying to submit memetic effects, or items that would cause harm to the streamer outside of the stream. These were the people that Lena was specifically on the lookout for, as it meant that they were making a legitimate attempt on the life of one of the Keeper’s servants.

Whenever one of these people appeared, Lena immediately marked them. Most people believed that the accounts on this streaming website were absolutely anonymous, because not even gods or awakened AI were able to infiltrate it. And, in a way, they were correct. However, with Lena’s domains, she was able to track them down without needing to go through the site itself.

Instead, she would run a search for anyone using that username in the real world at that moment. This wasn’t something that she would normally consider doing, as spreading her domain to cover an entire universe, even for such a specific search, used a lot of her energy. Since she was still likely the least famous resident of Ollympus, her energy didn’t recharge as fast as the others.

Thankfully, that was not an issue anymore. The Keeper had given her permission to use the treasury of Olympus if she needed to use her divine abilities for the sake of Olympus itself or its residents. And this treasury was now constantly growing, faster than ever before. This was because the Keeper had placed a ten percent tax on educational streams.

It might be true that most schools had yet to adopt the concept of educational streams, given that there were still easier and cheaper alternatives, such as level spheres to help children study. However, the same could not be said for higher level fields, such as research teams or combat training schools. These facilities were streaming to their own people practically every day, whether to help their own research or to provide educational examples to their trainees.

From each of these streams, Olympus was able to accrue a small profit. When all of these streams were considered together, this profit became astronomical. It was more than enough for Lena to identify the individuals who were trying to act behind the scenes.

When she found them, she placed a simple marker on them with her divinity, making sure that she would be able to track any potential criminal activity from them. For the most part… they were just mischievous teenagers fooling around, seeming to know that their submissions wouldn’t go through. It was rather rare for her to find someone that expressed genuine annoyance that their harmful submission was not accepted.

While Lena was doing this, her other self was working on the cleaning and maintenance around Olympus. Unsurprisingly, Tsubaki’s avatars stopped functioning after she began her stream, so it was up to Lena to handle things until Tsubaki finished her improvised trial. Still, she was happy to be useful in a setting where she wasn’t being asked to just go out and assassinate or impersonate people.

Dana pursed her lips as she sat in a large room, a holographic monitor behind her while her two familiars sat across the table from her. “We need a better weapon for him now.” She muttered, the other two needing their heads.

“Ship… useless at this point.” Sienna said in a reluctant tone, Clara shrugging her shoulders.

“I mean, the Chariot was a great idea when we started on it, but with this last invasion, ships in general just weren’t that useful.” She pointed out. “Anyways, we don’t know for sure that that will be true in the future, do we?”

“We have to assume that invasions will only get more difficult as time goes by.” Dana spoke in a firm tone. “If there is something that wasn’t strong enough to be useful in a previous invasion, the odds are high that it won’t be useful later on, either. Furthermore, the Keeper has said that he’s expecting us to reach a new spike in difficulty soon when his rank advances.”

“Well, what sort of weapon are you wanting to give him, since the Chariot is out of the question now?” Clara couldn’t help but ask, crossing her arms and leaning forward over the table.

Dana closed her eyes, thinking. “According to what we know, it should be impossible for the Keeper to wield the power of an Origin directly. This is because an Origin requires a Saint Body, which itself requires all three steps of Perfection. The Keeper is unable to fulfill one of those steps, and is thus cut off from the path of an Origin.”

“Balance issues.” Sienna muttered, and Dana nodded her head in agreement.

“Right. If a Keeper was able to become an Origin, it is unlikely that there would ever be anything able to completely kill them, especially when you combine all of their other powers. However, we still have to consider the Keeper buff, the fact that he can access the upper limit of any power within his domain.”

Clara furrowed her brow at that, seeming confused. “If he could do that, why has he never used the power of the Origin of Fate?”

Sienna tilted her head slightly. “Forgot?”

However, Dana shook her head to deny that. “No, he’s familiar enough with his powers now that that wouldn’t be the issue. Especially after Leowynn’s second death. If he can’t use the powers of an Origin, there are only three potential reasons.”

“The first reason would be as Sienna said before, a balance issue. We know that Origins are beings that belong to the upper levels of the Fifth Rank, while Dale is only at the Fourth Rank. It’s possible that he will gain access to the Origin of Fate’s powers after he ranks up.”

“The second possibility is because the Origin of Fate is only a ‘pseudo-Origin’. In order to tap into her power, both of the twins have to combine, a result of their special ‘anomaly’. Dale doesn’t have an anomaly like that, so it’s possible that he simply won’t have access to that Origin’s powers. And the third is…”

“Energy?” Sienna asked, to which Dana nodded her head.

“That’s right. We know that Origins use a higher form of energy than divinity, and even higher than the raw power of the void. Even when converting divinity to Origin power through the use of specialized domains, the exchange rate is abysmal. Dale might be able to mirror the Origin, but the power required to sustain that transformation could quickly deplete his reserves, even as the Keeper.”

“Okay, so what does all of this have to do with creating him a new toy?” Clara asked with a raised brow.

“Simple… we need to make him a weapon capable of combating Origin level threats. Thanks to Terra’s incarnations, we have a rough idea of how Origins work, at least enough to speculate what it would take to kill one. Until Chel’s work progresses, we won’t be able to finish this project, but we can at least get the framework started.” As Dana said that, she stood up, moving to the holographic board behind her.

“Originally, we believed that the power source of an Origin was accumulated over time, like divinity. This was because we saw that Terra’s incarnation had to charge up her energy over a long period of time to use her power. However, this was a false assumption caused by the simple fact that she is not a true Origin.”

“Now that we have seen what effects the Avenger had on her, we can combine this with our previous knowledge, and say that an Origin’s power supply is more akin to a Fallen God. That is to say, they will never run out of energy. It is only their maximum output that has a limit.”

“Their energy itself will come from the world that they fuse with when becoming an Origin. This world will always exist within themselves, wherever they are. Furthermore, they are not forced to regularly expend their power to prevent any kind of overflow…”

Clara’s eyes widened as she saw where this was going. “You want to bring back the Reality Marble concept.” She said, to which Dana nodded her head.

“That’s right. Our original Reality Marble was a self-contained world that was able to grow exponentially due to constantly generating its own base energies, and using that to expand. It could be considered the earliest prototype of customized world creation. However, these worlds were flawed in many ways. Now that proper world creation research is under way, we can correct those flaws.”

“What I want to make isn’t a pseudo-Origin like Terra, but an Origin item. By analyzing the energy makeup of the Origin of Fate, we can determine what it is that allows someone like her to store an entire world within themselves. After that, if we can recreate this type of energy structure within an inanimate item, we should be able to manufacture an artifact with Origin-level power.”

“Potential problems.” Sienna spoke up, causing the others to look over at her. “Manufactured Origin… unique?”

Dana took a moment to translate Sienna’s words, before shaking her head. “We don’t know. Terra said that Origins were truly unique in every Keeper’s realm, meaning that there will only ever be one of the same type of Origin. However, we don’t know the mechanics behind this uniqueness. My current theory is that the Origins resonate with the void on some level. If an Origin already exists for a certain domain, and another tries to take that same domain, what would happen?”

“Either one of the two will have priority, or they will fuse in some way. Most likely, it would be the former, but the matter of priority is hard to determine until we see it for ourselves. It could either fall to the first one that obtained the Origin, or the most powerful of the two.”

“Most powerful?” Clara asked, confused.

“Right. The Origin’s power could be determined in a number of ways. For instance, it could be the compatibility of their initial domains with the desired Origin domain, the completeness of their Origin world, or even the number of Origin worlds used.”

“Let’s take someone with three domains as an example. They also have three Saint energies, and thus require three Origin worlds to complete their promotion into an Origin. Someone like this might have priority over an Origin that was created using only one domain, Saint energy, and Origin world.”

“So, there is still a benefit to becoming an Origin with multiple domains?”  Clara asked with wide eyes.

“Possibly. However, the benefit would be limited to maximum energy output, and priority over keeping your Origin domain if that was how the resonance worked. Again, we won’t know until we see it ourselves.”

Hearing Dana’s remark, Sienna lifted a hand. “Why not buy an Origin expert NPC?” She asked with a tilt of her head, and Dana smiled bitterly.

“Because Dale would get really mad at me if I suddenly put Olympus in debt. I looked at the price of an Origin expert before starting this stream. Even if we combined the total divinity from the entire Greater Pantheon, as well as Olympus’s treasury, we’d only be able to have their services for an hour. That should give an idea at just how high level the Origins are.”