Limitless, John Gold [best novels of all time .TXT] 📗

was created by the keeper to ensure that Sagie learned to despise the gods. But something went wrong, and even the keeper lost control.

“After visiting Ferengar, Sagie’s mental body was altered partially due to the third world order radiation he was exposed to. He started controlling his abilities better, making unpredictable decisions, drawing unpredictable conclusions. In just a few weeks, the accuracy of the keeper’s forecasts dropped to 22%. He decided it was time to get rid of Sagie, so he engineered a situation where his abilities were guaranteed to kill his real body. And from what Miguel has told me, Anji really was clinically dead. He only survived thanks to your group stepping in. The keeper, in the meantime, forgot about Sagie and started working on other projects.

“First, Aurin appeared, a non-level player the keeper took through the Heaven trial and dumped in Papilio. Three years later, he came back to our world and started using spells he got from Papilio. The logic of the game had changed, of course, and he was able to do the same things you and I are capable of. He became a chimerologist, a universal mage, a unicorn who could develop his own spells, move through the astral, pretend to be a spirit, and inherit his victims’ abilities. Yes, he’s especially dangerous now that he has killed the keeper and stolen his body. Oh, right, keepers are players just like you and me, only from a ninth-order world—the primordial soup we all came from. They go from world to world accumulating abilities and becoming stronger and stronger. But just like us, they lose levels when they die. The more worlds you’ve been through, the more you lose. Keepers lose all their levels and get sent back to their own world if they’re killed.

“For right now, the problem is Aurin and the abilities he was able to pick up by swallowing the keeper’s body. Once Aurin reached the peak of strength, he didn’t start working on his legacy by focusing on new accomplishments. He started finding ways to boost his potential as a mage instead. He modified his mental body, creating new energy channels, key nodes, and compensator designs to handle overload. He also went looking for abilities that changed his body. When he moves to a higher-order world, he’s going to be a monster with incredible physical and mental potential thanks to the synergetic effects all the different manipulations he will have. Hlou bugs do the same thing to make defenders for their queens and battle marshals. But Aurin will be a monster’s monster if he can fulfill the potential he’s created. The synergetic effect in a third-order world would give him strength equivalent to a player in a second-order world. I’m not sure what he thinks of people or what he wants, though I can say that he’s impossible to control unless he desires it.

“He covered up his tracks really well, though I was still able to follow his experiment. He created a non-level player in Project Chrysalis and gave him the limitless ability. That’s how Reiji came to be—the guy who cut right through that planetoid. He has structural changes in his physical and mental bodies from the fifth to the third order. His physical body is closely tied to the energy channels, creating something like a life strength condenser out of his mental body. Ultimately, it was an experiment to see what kind of effect that change would have. When the result exceeded his expectations, Aurin modified himself to turn into a living fortress equipped with weapons of mass destruction.

“Then, Sagie came back to the world, and the keeper instantly reacted to the emptiness in his consciousness by sticking a pseudo-intelligence in its place. That’s how Sagie picked up the ability to be as empathetic as some animals. The keeper did his best to foster hatred toward people, throwing him up against the dregs of humanity. While Sagie was in this condition, the keeper loosened his nervous system until he became practically animal. The hints he gave the kid to see if he would remember his past didn’t come to anything. Then, the keeper rigged the results of a battle and threw Sagie up against some pagan god during the yearly tournament in Kkhor, but Sagie slipped the prediction and remembered who he really was. The keeper responded by working on Sagie via the pseudo-intelligence to instill specific moods and emotions in him.

“He was sent to the city of the dead under Kkhor, where he somehow survived after just about losing his mind. Then, he broke his girlfriend out of jail and picked up the demigod class rank. You have to hand it to him, he’s the only artificially created demigod this world has ever seen. Aurin achieved his transformation in the physical world, carrying around hundreds of kilograms of blood malachite. Anyway, when Sagie became a demigod, the keeper stepped up the range of effects his pseudo-intelligence would have on him. Sagie already hated people and the gods. With that in mind, the keeper got back to work undermining his psyche even further, attempting to push Sagie outside normal bounds and get him thrown out of the game. When Sagie got to my trial area, I was able to see for myself how the keeper made it twice as hard as it should have been. There was evidence of multiple other violations, too. His opponents were given abilities, strength, and knowledge they couldn’t possibly have had in life, but Sagie was able to insulate himself from the mental effect and make his pseudo-intelligence autonomous. After the trial, the keeper insisted that the boy had earned a reward and ordered me to resurrect his sister. It’s ridiculous, first of all, that the keeper was getting involved in the reward process, and I wasn’t sure why he was doing it.

“I sent Sagie to Tanatos after that, making a deal with him to remove the seal from the portal. The keeper insisted