《Humanity? HELL YEAH!!》


 Loners Dilemma

    Sigmund Sourberry had a lonely life.


    When others had friends to talk to, Sigmund was sitting on his chair and ate his lunch.


    How do they do it? Have a friend and talk and eat lunch at the same time that is.


    The student had no idea how others socialized, it would never come to his mind to


    ''just do it''.


    Sigmund wanted to have a friend, one that was worth his own friendship.


    The teen had not had a real friendship yet, which made friendship a scarce and valuable thing.


    Who could live up to that hype? Who would be a friend so trustworthy and valuable?


    It might be the case, that none of all students in the entire school met the criteria.


    Sigmund knew that and also felt that it might be hard to grade the worth of a friend.


    After all he had no reference point.


    Sigmund knew everything he ought to know about reference points.


    When looking at the sky for hours at end, a very interesting activity, one could never see how far the clouds were from oneself as there was no reference point.


    Eventually it would be disrupted by someone, referring to him as ''Sourberry give me your lunch money or I will strip you naked and put your clothes into the trash, where they belong''.


    Someone like that would never be worth his own friendship. They only got his money because they were threatening him, not because he wanted to give them the money.


    "That ought to be some reference point", Sigmund thought.


    His mom was a very good friend, but that did not count. His father also was very supportive.


    Maybe not as honest as mom, but who knows?


    They had him tested by a nice man, a doctor, who said that he was normal, but his father didn''t believe a thing. "There ought to be a way to help him.", were his words to the doctor.


    If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.Sigmund would like if someone helped him pick the right and most valuable friend.


    As only the most valuable friend could be his friend. Picking the wrong friend might be catastrophic, a really bad false friend. He knew that from experience.


    In the end several things had ended up stolen and never returned, inviting his bad false friend to his house did do that, and it had been catastrophic.


    Sigmund had finished his lunch. Next up was language, which was easy, all you had to do was memorize the words and synatx and you were good to go.


    There were many things easy here, but some students were really really bad at them.


    Sigmund did not know why, maybe it was because they didn''t listen?


    Was having friends making them worse listeners?


    So many things were much much harder to understand than the lessons with helpful teachers to answer all the questions he had. When he had asked ms. Mayar once a real question about how to get a friend, she had only sighed and told him, that she could not tell him how, except talking to others more.


    But Sigmund only wanted to talk to his friend or someone he picked to be a friend.


    At least he knew in case he found a worthy candidate. Teachers weren''t really all knowing and all powerful, but it seemed like they knew a lot of things - only class related sadly.


    If he could just ask a teacher every time he did not know something.


    ''Sourberry'', he was referred to. Sigmund hated when he was referred to with his surname. That always meant trouble. He didn''t respond because he was told that ''that is what they want''. Never giving a response or reaction to them would, at least that was the plan, bore them and make them stop bothering him.


    That had not worked so far, but Sigmund kept hoping.

 Quality, Integrity, Sportsmanship

    Chaden Chefferson or short ''Chef'', how his friends called him, was passionate, loyal and a good soccer player. There was so much to the game, physical fitness itself was only the beginning of a difficult and challenging sport. As every other competitive sport, the difficulty was equal to the skill and abilities of the ''enemy'' team.


    All that comptetition and regular training had made Chef a valuable team member. Everyone in the team also was his friend, they wouldn''t be successful if the interpersonal relationships weren''t so close. The total performance was in the end a result of so many invisible factors, that as a compound was so interwoven, that no one really had an overview beside raw intuition. Above all, the appetite for victory was driving them to peak performance. Chaden himself was only a part of the team, but everyone was important.


    Even the enemy team was important in their success, as they aimed to fight hard for victory, beating a weak team did not sate nearly enough as a good game. It wasn''t all about winning the game, it also was about winning in the small things, like outrunning, outmanouvering and outplaying the others. It was what Chaden was born for.


    But sadly this was not the only thing Chaden had to do to become a professional player.


    There was also school and it truly was the antithesis of what he really wanted to do.


    Sitting in a chair made him tired, the monotonous voices of the teacher bored him, there was nothing to do and paying attention worsened it.


    His grades were not doing well, but he had to learn or he''d have to stop playing. Luckily there was an unspoken agreement for teachers to be less harsh on him, he wasn''t graded like others and that was one of the main reasons he could focus so much time on soccer.


    Most of his teammates had similar problems and solutions.


    This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.No one could question his priorities in education vs training, as those whose opinion really counted, were agreeing with Chaden on his priorities - the teams trainer.


    Everyone that Chef respected was supportive, his parents stood firmly behind him, his father was especially proud. Mr. Chefferson had at many occasions praised his sons physical abilities in front of other fathers, such as Mr. Sourberry, who was really quiet.


    Chaden knew that without victory, no respect would be given to him. That was the natural order, every time he lost a game he would be ashamed to have wasted the time of his family watching him. There would be harsh criticism by his trainer and every little mistake had to be reconciled and fixed in the next training session.


    Sourberry was a loser, a worthless weakling. In physical education, Sourberry didn''t even care about winning, he didn''t communicate, he didn''t do anything and was out of breath so fast.  People like these made Chaden angry.


    They were spitting in the face of his effort to gain respect. They were so pathetic, so small and so meaningless. No sense for community and better off dead, nobody depended on them, they were completely lacking responsibility.


    Someone had to teach them a real lesson. Not the worthless shit they were doing in classes, volunteering to answer math or geography. They were just teachers pets.


    Look at their skinny or fat bodies, completely devoid the muscle he had been building.


    It was as if they lived in a completely different realm and that irked Chaden enormously.


    Everything would go his way eventually as he progressed and they did not.


    The athletic and well trained teen laughed loudly, because he had missed the joke of his teammate that everyone was laughing about. The world was his, and others would learn to respect what truly was important: sports.

 Defining the ideal friend

    Sigmund sat on his desk, writing the correct solutions of math problems onto paper.


    It was not a hard task, it was just tedious. Going too fast would make his writing untidy and that was as much of an option as just not writing the answers.


    This was not his homework after all, he had solved and written down his homework quite a while ago. This was the homework of all those that threatened him if he would not do it for them.


    Sigmund knew that it wouldn''t do him anything good to not do this, nor would it do him any good to talk to the teachers, as they were not able to protect him.


    That was what he had been told in a private talk with ms. Mayar.


    Math was only tedious, but next up was history. While the answers were long solved and written down, each of his blackmailers had a different distinct way to write.


    The art of forgery was also not only to copy the writing style, but also to copy the style of the answer itself, whilst staying true to the correct answer.


    He had a talk about that with ms. Mayar too, whether he could just make it obvious, but ms. Mayar said to him, that she and her colleagues too were being controlled regularly on her performance.


    Sigmund liked his teachers and himself more than he disliked forging homework.


    It had become routine to him and he was good at it, he was the best forger of the entire school, not because he was so talented, but because he did every school day.


    If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.His parents did know, but he had explained well to them the dilemma and the societal difficulties on stopping. It all had its roots in that so many profited and only one suffered moderately. Training times would be cut short and the regional performance of sports teams would decrease drastically, robbed of their edge over other teams.


    There could be made much money but first and foremost glory for the school if their team was performing well. As a result Sigmund would be penalized in hard to control ways as his forgery was an open secret.


    Sigmund knew that his parents did not agree with all of this, but they had no power over the corrupt educational system and nor did he himself.


    The masterful forger wished for a friend that would train forgery alongside him, they would finish the stack much faster together, and then they could go outside and stare at the sky.


    It came to Sigmund then: This was his reference point. He could extrapolate the necessary abilities that a friend should have from his own work that he found tedious.


    A friend would share this burden with him and thusly the work would be halved and his free time would be much longer. With renewed vigor, Sigmund began tackling the challenge of finishing all the history essays of almost the entire class. He would have to do it fast and precise, just like he knew it would be right.


    Friendship was waiting to be defined and it would be large step on his project towards recognizing the perfect friend, when the time had come to recognize.

 Savage Rebel

    A great dissonance seperated this world from absolute good. It was a great systemic oppression, injustice and inequality. Nerds, those bitter weaklings, devoid of the joy of community, enjoy the daily torture that is school. To be fair, physical education obviously was exempt of this objective judgement he had made.


    In a society that values sports most and the horrible parts of school lesser, the time in which sports are taught would be greater.


    Here comes the dissonance: physical education made up a much smaller part of school than the rest. It seemed as if society did value all that horribly boring talking more than the dynamic, powerful and challenging activity that is sports.


    And yet, why did that loser Sourberry have no friends, being such a teachers pet and writing only top grades? The world truly was on Chadens side as he had so many friends.


    Chaden knew that someone high up in NiceTeal was probably like Sourberry, a miserable nerd. That could only have happened because the second rebranding. No sane government would be lead by a puny nerd.


    It was time to strike back against the oppression, to revolt against this injust treatment.


    Power to those who had the muscle to actually produce it, that was what Chaden passionately believed.


    Were they just born to be slaves under a system of a weak leader? No way!


    And that was because Chaden had to act. Someone had to show Sourberry, that his actions were empowering a system that did not deserve this power.


    This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.A true government should empower the people, there were so few people willing to pay attention in school and so many that parttook in sports.


    They were the majority, oppressed by a minority, that was surely not having a good time in school. Chaden did not know how they hadn''t rebelled against Sourberry already.


    They might just be complacent about him. He was shielding them from the harmful evil that was homework. It was time to stop, wake up and strike back.


    Chadens muscles hardened at the thought of it and his back went straight. He did not think of the nerd as a human, it was just a monster to him.


    Who would do his homework after Sourberry was dead? He did not care. He would no longer be oppressed - a life under these nerd people was not a life he would have to suffer.


    He would rather die himself than to bend to somone this weak, someone this evasive, silent, laid back lazy piece of shit.


    Chaden pushed Sourberry, who stumbled onto the street. The bus was incoming - it was the perfect plan.


    This little weakling bolted so fast, he wouldn'' have thought that the nerd could be so quick.


    Would he really make it? Chaden looked on and his peers also looked, highly interested.


    Nobody had to do something, it might resolve itself if Sourberry ran fast enough.


    Sourberry hadn''t died and Chaden nodded. That wouldn''t do, he had to get more creative.

 Desire for replacement

    Something more pressing than finding a friend had come up. Todays near death experience had shown that life might be too short to make friends in a normal way, by first predicting the prospects of having them by judging ones needs and desires and then talking to them about how friendship should be and that they should be ones friend.


    Sigmunds math functions already had accelerated his solving time, his stylesheets reduced the time to write the correct words in the correct way and his notes made during class made short work of anything else. There was some friendship in these things.


    Why not take it to the next level? Sigmund would not live a friendless life, becoming a red smear under a bus would happen after he had invented the friend of pen and paper.


    First of all, he would do the homework and then he would make his friend - eventually.


    Such a great project would take its time, and he would have to survive that time until his friend was invented. Whilst Sigmund worked, he did not feel the flow of monotony as every single step of his work made him feel a sense of purpose. Everything he worked on would be necessary to iterate on his planned invention as his invention would spare him the toil of work and even if he had to work in order to invent, he would have to work less after he had done it. The impending doom of death had driven home the necessity to replace himself with a new form, a form that could toil for the jocks in his stead and to live a life that he could not have. This was an ancient mental disease, born of the pure logic that only those lifeforms that replaced themselves would transmit the disease instead of taking the parasite with it into death. The only lifeforms that had survived, were diseased, rotten to the core.


    Alas Sigmund did not know, nor did he care about the impending creation being infected by his disease, if the disease would allow that to happen, it would have died out long ago.


    And most certainly an abberant mutation of the disease did allow that - and died off.


    Hence the evolutionary pressure made the sickest pass the sickness, whilst the healthy were released into the void of nothingness after a short time of existence without having caused more sickness to persist. Sigmund finished the work in a productive craze, aspiring to create what could reproduce his work in his stead.


    If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.There was nothing that could move the pen in his stead, he would have to find a mechanism with which to replace the execution of the work. A relyable energy source needed to be procured, and a means by which it would be converted into work. It would have to be sustained and electricity seemed like a very powerful and widely available net.


    There was the issue of transforming electricity into force. Sigmund knew that various household appliances did work with electricity, but he did not seek to blend, he desired for his friend appliance to think and write.


    Sigmund began to draw ideas to transform the rotation of a partially disassembled blender into a complicated arm. He might need several blenders, one for right, one for left and one for lifting the pen. Also the grabbing of new papers would be a difficult process that needed some sort of car in order to move towards a paper stack and back.


    And some kind of eye in order to find the paper stack and replacement pens.


    Sigmund began to be overwhelmed. Making an optical device that would interact in a certain way with several blenders and a small car sounded like too much work to be accomplished in his short time. How would it go to school without hearing too?


    How would it speak... maybe it could just write. But how would it know what to write?


    Now that was the most complex part. The electronic eye might be doable, the blenders and car were just a matter of aquiring resources, but the mind? Sigmund began to write in order to see how he himself thought. There ought to be a way to reverse engineer his mind.


    If he were able to do that, his mind surviving within the electronic machinery could build the rest if provided a way to manipulate the environment, maybe his parents could help.


    The naive teen began researching on how to provide his sickness an new host.

 Symptom =/= Simpdom

    Lisaac likes Chaden, she thinks he looks cool when playing soccer. Today she told him about it. Chaden had seemed absent, he had been consumed in his own thoughts, never expecting such a bold statement. He hadn''t been prepared at all, so he just answered "Good." and gave a nervous smile. Lisaac also hadn''t thought of getting that kind of response.


    She hadn''t thought at all what he would say, she just felt that it was right to tell.


    But at that moment she was plagued by the question whether "Good" was enough.


    Was it too much to ask for something more after her watching him play soccer?


    There was a difference between them, she knew him as a cool athlete, he just had put her as part of the crowd cheering. Lisaac could extrapolate that from her cognition, but there was a difference again. A difference between logic and desire.


    She desired him to tell her, how good she looked today, or another declaration equal to her declaration of coolness. She did not care about what Chaden was, she cared about herself.


    Chaden knew that, he had been told similar things by others. He would go with his initial statement, observing what Lisaac would do.


    He did think that Lisaac was pretty, but he did not state it, because he did not want to constantly tell her. Sometimes maybe, but not constantly.


    Starting off with a compliment would set the wrong expectations.


    If she would go away, that might be better, he had already had experienced people being like that, and did not encourage them. It was the frequency at which they came, that devalued them, made them less scarce.


    The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.Only like that his logic could be applied, as logic can only prevail without overbearing desire.


    Lisaac did make up her mind. For such a cool athlete she might take her chances.


    But she was not without pride. "What is good about me?", she inquisitioned.


    It was a last attempt, a last chance given to Chaden. She would not be trapped in a onesided relationship to Chaden.


    Chaden pretended to think, but he had already made up his mind.


    "You have good taste.", he smiled and put one hand on his chest.


    They laughed and were a couple after that. It was a very painless story, no scarcity driven desire, a logical interaction between two people that liked each other, but did not hunger for each other. This was an interaction between people that could feast on tiny snacks until they saw the one that might be enough for the rest of their life.


    They had felt in each other this satiation, they knew what it felt like, they were experts.


    Such was the life of Jocks, a life of human interaction, a life that could make things pleasant, that would be painful for others. Was this not the true way to live?


    Without knowing Lisaac had extended the time that Sigmund would live himself.


    A distraction, a purpose to become in the future maybe their way of transmitting the disease. But it would not come to that.


    The age of the second rebranding neared its end.

 True Essence

    Tiny words written into circles with symbols connected by lines formed a vast net.


    Despite the overwhelming amount of information captured it all seemed very neat, an expert for graphs would have shed a tear for all this work was done by a teen that still had not succeeded in mapping his mind. Sigmund knew that this graphic did not mirror a drop of his mind and yet he continued, cought in the frenzy.


    An hour later Sigmund drew index cards from one of the stacks.


    The index cards said following:


    The


    Human


    Mind


    Is


    A


    Non-


    Isolated


    Semi-


    Permeable


    Information


    Circulating


    Logic


    System


    Driven


    By


    External


    And


    Internal


    Forces


    Sigmund looked at his ruleset and put the cards onto the corresponding other stacks and wrote up more cards for the long term memory stacks.


    He hadn''t quite lost touch with his system, but it seemed to self regulate into something that could speak - that of course was only possible because of his experimental ruleset.


    Altering the ruleset lead sometimes to grammatically false sentences, which then needed his own judgement to reverse the changes.


    And yet this still was not enough, something was missing and of course that was the automation with electronics. Sigmund knew about electricity from physics.


    It needed a way to flow from A to B and if there is not enough resistance, it just moves really fast, which uses it up. If one put something inbetween, it would move it and that was how electric blenders worked... probably.


    Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.Now here was the idea of Sigmund: If the resistance were to be too high, the electricity would not flow. Air had a very high resistance, while Metal had a very low resistance.


    An electric clock would move a metal strip one tick at a time if provided with electricity.


    Now what if this metal strip lowered resistance between two channels which then provided electricity to another clock that provided lowered resistance for another clock... that could probably be engineered into a working model of an information circulating logic system.


    This of course required the rules to be perfect, as he would be no longer there to regulate a system that was supposed to be self regulating.


    And there still was the problem with the semi-permeability of information, or you could also call it a sensoric problem.


    Sigmund did not want the wrong information to get into the system, like for example one of the clocks scraping at one of the contacts or maybe a table leg and thus having a slight delay in sending important information. He did want only dedicated clock blockers (working with the principle of heightened resistance for electricity denial) that were connected to still undesigned sensoric electronic organs to do that.


    So some sort of defense would have to be there, a skin that would block outside forces.


    So much stuff still needed designing - and he didn''t even know where to get all these clocks from. How did he not simply get hopeless and stop?


    There was a strong belief, that his invented friend, even with unfinished plans, would revolutionize technology in such a way, that eventually the people would build it for him. Even if he might be dead by then. Ideas transcend mortality if others had offspring that would be tought his ideas. Eventually they would be able to run his mind if he had documented it well enough - 2 social problems arose from that again.


    Getting teachers to teach his technology (for which a prototype would be sufficient) and documenting his technology so that others could understand (he himself did not fully understand the tech yet). Sigmund added that on a high priority on his growing to-do list.


    Ironically he had no free time at all, now that he worked on a machine whose purpose it was to give him 100% free time days.


    In his work he had completely missed that death was no longer at the doorstep.


    He continued working on a mechanism that was doomed to fail due to inaccuracies in clock energy usage over time due to imperfections of manufacturing, inefficiency of energy transmission and the wearing down of moving mechanisms through use.


    And yet his idea was enough to spark machinations of pure bullshit singularities if his plans ever got into the hands of actual scientists, such was the creativity of the naive youth.

 Party Time

    NiceTeal had announced bad news, the world would become a colder place and food would become more scarce, driving its value through the roof.


    People all around the world had started making stockpiles and prepared for the worst.


    All People? ... No! There were groups vigorously resisting the invading truth of this change.


    Without a good meal sports were not possible. The sheer force brought against each other, the necessary exertion to determine who could spend the energy a good meal brought best,


    it all was without a doubt more important than a stupid nerd government dictated rationing recommendation. And that is why Chaden, his girlfriend Lisaac and his teammates had joined the ''End Of The World Party''-Movement, or short Party Movement.


    Beside sports, simple hedonism dictated that tasty meals were to be preferred over bland meals and thus the movement was very popular.


    Loud hammering beats stimulated the ear muscles, making them beat against a membrane to stimulate tiny cells with rippling liquid and a trained voice announced rhythmically through the microphone: ''Party! People! Party! People! Eat! Eat! Eat! This is ... The party! This is end of world! Dance people, people! We are party-world!''


    While the lyrics of the party rap did not speak of deep truths or emotions, it sure was catchy.


    Chaden and friends had brought a new wave of food to the kitchens, it would soon join the buffet, which had an abundance of nutrients for anyone to take and eat.


    It was the epitome of generosity with foodprices being so high currently and thus the party was very well frequented, it need no promotion as it was itself a large promotion event, a self reinforcing cycle of attracting donation.


    A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation."Do onto others what you want done onto yourself", was one of their propaganda slogans, promising more food by being a donor oneself - and it really worked.


    The parallels drawn to economy spending natural resources were visible to anyone applying logic to the situation, discovering the unsustainable bottleneck required only a short assessment, but emotionally there was a great incentive to keep going. Desire overcame reason when food became scarce and valuable, nobody who cared was able to act logically.


    All this consumtion and donation kept everyone in a blazing mood and it felt good to be popular - all those that donated food were being treated with the according respect.


    These events had even attracted profit based organizations, namely businesses, which sponsored certain accomodations like toilets, trash transport and other waste disposal among other things like places to sleep when not partying in exchange for the rights to air advertisements at the parties and sell their products.


    Economically, the end of the world was a full success, people bought things a lot and profits went up - but productivity for non-party related products, such as science, went decidedly down. That really showed those nerds who and what was really important.


    Chaden was extatic in this new way to bring jockdom into the world, nothing else mattered at the moment and would never not matter. It was time to fuse the pinnacle of human sports with the party and contribute ones talents towards making everyone happy.


    It was time for the olympic party cup, the greatest sports event in humankinds history.

 We dont have many days

    Just as his life had gained a reason, it was robbed away. Electricity was rare if not at a party.


    Food was rare if not at a party. Silence was rare as the sound of the party went on day and night. No one could stop them, no one would stand up and stop the party.


    Sigmund had gone with his parents from time to time to get food on a party. He left just as fast as he came to the party to be alone in his room, while his parents usually stayed for longer. Alone at home he continued albeit distracted as the bass from the party traversed large distances not dissimilar to how elephants communicate via infrasound over large distances, just that the party was communicating essentially a middle finger.


    We know that elephants do not possess middle fingers and thus this is where the metaphor breaks.


    Sigmund knew better than to reason with his parents and had made a secret private stack, mainly made up from things he had stolen from parties - he didn''t see it as stealing, he was just taking back something his parents spent without his consent.


    He would keep his stash save and finish his work, maybe surviving all of this, but he seriously doubted that when he listened to the joyous shouts from afar.


    How could they just eat all that food, didn''t they know that they would have to eat after all that food was eaten too?


    He could picture himself lonely in his room, dancing skeletons starving at the party. He got up in his vision, went to the party and turned the music off when no one was dancing anymore. Finally everything was silent and he was alone. Maybe it was not so bad.


    He would then finish his invention and sire the mechanical race that would populate the planet after all of them were gone. What was the bad thing about them eating all the food again? They should hurry up damnit!


    Sigmund nodded to himself and smiled briefly. He then returned to his work, only to be irritated again - one could not simply turn of a thought process when it occured, so he let his mind flow.


    You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.His beings would not need food, they would eat electricity and metal... well metal was probably enough and the rest they would figure out on their own. And they would build more of their kind and populate the entire world. And they wouldn''t need houses to stay warm, they would just need very long cables so they can stay plugged in.


    Maybe add another cable so that they can plug in one, then curl the other one up... that was actually useful for his design.


    Until now he had only a semi-functional theory of their mind, and ideas how to put it into mechanical reality, but the general tools to survive would also be important, maybe even more important than the ability to write.


    They would need fingers that fit into an inlet and that could remove themselves easily from that inlet - easy, just put a downscaled arm on it to push out.


    Now how would the information travel from its thinking apparatus to the arm?


    Probably a second wire that would transmit it. Necessarily the ingoing electricity of a plugged in cable would trigger the arm of the other plug to deplug, which then had to be stopped from constantly attempting to deplug - electricity had to be saved.


    The clockwork system would need two clocks that would only align once per plugging in.


    Sigmund began to design the dual-plug system, a very interesting system taht would only fail because of the inaccuracy of clocks and because tiny moving parts tended to just fail.


    Not that it was impossible to make this a reality, but right now with manufacturing basically standing still, it was not practically doable. Sigmund tackled further problems like wire de-tangling mechanisms and the integration of the category survival into his mind framework, laudable and highly creative and motivated - but ultimately just a burning clockwork dream.

 Rules of nature

    The team was nervous. This was the biggest thing they would ever play in. This was no mere regional cup, this was the cup to end all cups. This was two teams, one cup - someone had to shoot that ball into an arbitrary area in order to iterate on a commonly agreed upon number, which would then lead to the implicit obligation to feel bad if one had a lower number and good if one had a larger number - no one who would not obligate would bother to play - It was as simple as that on general terms. The same applied to life in general although it tended to skew the probability of antiobligationists due to nature being quite selective by its very nature ... which was also called evolution.


    These very principles of competition in sports applied to evolution and one could safely say that sports were caused by evolution and not the other way around.


    The test would show who had to be the one to feel bad and the one to feel good.


    This was a great responsibility as those that rooted for a team would feel bad if they lost and feel good if they won as part of the obligation, layering these emotions onto the players until they became the symbol for the masses. In the previous first rebranding this amount of attention would give out free magical powers, but not in this one.


    It merely increased the stakes, this intense pressure was what made the team so nervous.


    A certain nervousness played into the motivation of playing, but when the risks and rewards grew so high it felt like a matter of life and death. And evolution sorted through a seeve of death - none of their ancestors had not reproduced and thus caused more sand to fall onto the seeve. What exactly did evolution sort?


    Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.This was a seeve, an assortment of holes, every single one of them large enough to fit the largest grain of sand through it. Everyone was falling, merely the question of those that caused others to fall, those that could perpetuate this sandfall of death.


    They felt it, the desire to perpetuate which was driving the sandfall. This is what it meant to them and they all knew the feeling (if not acknowledging its entire meaning) and no one had to talk about it. But that was not how the game was played, the game demanded the obligation to be fulfilled, so the team captain spoke up: "My friends, the stakes are high. Should we win this, we will be remembered forever. But should we lose this, we will be remembered forever as losers. This is what we trained for, this is what we lived for until this moment. There are so many that depend on us. And I depend on you, you depend on me and we all depend on our families. So will we capture this one chance? Or will we let it slip, become something that we aren''t?" the captain took a long breath and then looked into the eyes of each of his playmates. Burning gazes looked back, fists shot into the air and air exited all of their lungs, vibrating their well developed resonant chambers located underneath their heads on their necks. In letters it could be described as ''Huuooorg'', the duplicate ''u''s and ''o''s describing the temporal length at which they exhaled these sounds.


    Just across the field Chadens team had a similar ritual going on. They were all the same and that was their pride, unity in the face of these incredible stakes. Sure they had different skills according to their positions on the field, but in spirit they were one.


    And the game started.

 End of a day

    The being would be born blind, it would recieve messages over the message port, which consisted of several slits running along the frontside, swiping through them would trigger electricity to flow. This essentially manipulated the thoughts and mind directly.


    It would learn to utilize the sense of touch. It would learn its immediate environment, becoming a watcher or it would walk and ask watchers for the path in order to become a wanderer, constantly forgetting and asking.


    Until the scientific watchers had gained insight on the sense of sight, it would have to wait.


    Until the mechanic watchers had gained materials from the wanderers, they would stay blind. The roles would underly scrutiny of the collective.


    Sigmunds automatons would just need one singular functioning prototype that knew how to build, think and survive.


    That was what lead the teen to looting. He found the clocks lacking in all theoretical usability, too many clock hands, clock hands that were made of isolating plastic instead of metal, large plastic casings that would just unnecessarily bulk up his creation and the clocks were not driven by cable but batteries.


    With growing unrest he paced through the empty stores. Was there a way to modify clocks so that they suited his purposes?


    Sigmund took various supplies and started experimenting within the store - and nobody stopped him. His first experiment involved destroying a clock to see what made it tick.


    If he could reverse engineer the clock, he could make custom clocks for his purposes.


    Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.Well there were some problems. Sigmund did not know what electricity was, only what it did.


    Giving up would have been an option if there were any downsides to just tinkering.


    Sigmund took apart the mechanism... he imagined more gears and stuff, but instead there were weird metal parts mostly, that did nothing discernible until powered.


    He then reinvented the relais, predictably - just a weight lifted by magnetism to ... well make a not gate.


    Sadly that wouldn''t work with his system, he would have to completely reinvent all the logic based on clocks aka 1 yes, 59 no gate. The sexagesimal system being replaced by a mere binary one was one alternative to continuing tinkering with forces beyond his understanding, namely electromagnetism. He gave up after hours of tinkering with clocks - the aluminium foil hampered a lot plus there was still that issue with the batteries - still unresolved and it seemed creativity was not benefitting practical optimization at all.


    After a few more hours of trying to translate the mental system into binary his head thrummed.


    This was a system he had spent weeks on and it was already far from sufficient. Now build it from bottom up with a mechanism so simple as a relais? In one singular day?


    Sigmund swallowed the bitterness, made sure his notes were readable and closed the case for today. Probably countless of logical mistakes waited to be discovered tomorrow.


    Following his assumption there would be a tomorrow, the teen wandered home and went to sleep, mental resources fully depleted.


    The day was over.

 Positive nuance

    She watched her boyfriend play. He was so passionate at his sport that meant so much to him. Was there a greater passion in him, than that passion for soccer?


    Was there any desire for her in that quickly beating (hence the physical exertion) heart?


    She did care not only about being near someone who was appealing to her in his actions.


    There was more to love was there? He would have to tell her something that would make her feel - she was still waiting for it - feel something more than mere appeal.


    If this was all that was to expect Chaden to make her feel, she would look for another one.


    Lisaac hoped that this would not have to be the case, but she felt the unrest of missing out.


    Was it really worth? Her eyes slid over the field where other athletic people with similar amount of fervor attempted to kick an orb into the designated score area.


    In exitement she watched them chase the quickly spinning orb, accelerated by their kicks - it was approximating the distance towards the score area. In the last moment the area guardian threw his body in front of the score area, like a bodyguard willing to sacrifice his life in order to prevent the assasination of the president.


    Success! That also was a very cool one. There just were not many of these without girlfriends, Lisaac knew that. She reasoned that maybe Chaden had just been free because of his ... lack of positive reinforcement towards her. It almost felt as if he didn''t care at all.


    Wasn''t she better than that, deserving more than that?


    She looked at Chaden down there, he was giving his best to chase the orb, he just ... was cute in that way. A man chasing a meaningless round shape, so determined, so invested in something so void of... something. At that point Lisaac stopped thinking closer about that something and merely coined it the opposite of her exitement about the players.


    This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.Surely such an orb could be not as exiting as the players themselves. Lisaac was neutral towards the points, even if she pretended to be - that was just what everyone else did after all. Rumors would spread if one did not cheer, surely - but it was unknown because no one did not cheer. What was known, was that if one did not fit in, one did not gain much kindness - but who cared?


    Well she cared, she found his enthusiasm maybe a bit irritating now that she was with him.


    But he was one of these players, chasing that orb, and many had girlfriends and she was one of these girlfriends - that alone made her feel apprechiated by all those that did not have one of them. The thought was a burning light within a giddy landscape of darkness - that truly loved to be shined on, to be revealed. Lisaac seeked these light thoughts, that was exactly what she wanted him to make her feel - but not all the time.


    Isn''t it a bit embarrassing to be praised so often? She could never live with someone who kept praising her qualities - and never with someone who just refrained from doing so.


    There ought to be a man who understood that pacing meant a lot to her - without her having to tell this common sense. Maybe Chaden could benefit her in other ways, being looked at in an envious way was truly good too.


    She left shortly to get some popcorn and a hot dog. They were completely free. A wonder that so much food was here - it could never run out could it?


    Lisaac dropped that thought and cheered: the team she was supposed to cheer for had scored a point.

 Scouring Night, Broken Night

    One would not say, that they can perfectly predict the actions of a stranger. There could be so many things that this unknown human has seen, experienced and how all that memory compounding is treated by the unique personality built upon the time of being concious.


    This inability to predict is often attributed to the desire of which the human is free of -or was it the freeness of will? All these ideas about how it is impossible to predict perfectly, what the individual does and what it does not do, are perfectly right - until you lower the goalpost backwards and try to predict the tendency of an individuals actions.


    Will that stranger take a breath after another breath, will that heart beat another time?


    Usually one can say with confidence, that this is true.


    Will that stranger eat, drink, sleep and defecate? In an environment in which this is possible, the stranger will usually do this. What if the environment does not facilitate these actions?


    Watch a stranger getting restless, wandering somewhere else in order to find the right environment - maybe to defecate. What if food were to run out at a party?


    What could the reason for the angrily shouting people be, that flood the streets far off the agreed upon party grounds, and that in the middle of the night? What was the muted chant of the masses saying out there in the distance?


    Sigmund had just woken up, his mind was still half asleep and he hadn''t had time to think about the topic. Yet still these or at least similar questions were still of great priority to him.


    Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.He peered out of the window to see them. A lot of people and they were - raiding houses.


    The crushing sound of doors broken open with crowbars, loud protesting inhabitants, a loud gunshot... a loud gunshot?!


    Silence for a heartbeat, a silence that might make one forget the sound just heard.


    Loud cheering erupted, cheering, that was what parties sounded like, not murder.


    What had happened, was that not a gunshot, maybe... fireworks?


    Sigmund hadn''t seen any light flashing, maybe just one of these firecrac- ... and they were dragging out an unmoving person by the foot.


    No matter how hard he looked, the details of the scene were not conclusive. But he had to assume that it had not been a firecracker.


    The door of his home was opened, not with violence, but with a key. Several persons entered, he could hear his parents among them. "Sigmund? Wake up, it is party time.", his mother shouted. "Let me sleep!", Sigmund protested reflexively.


    The tone turned stern, unyielding and determined "Sigmund Sourberry, get down to party." and after that a tone tinged in fear "Please.".


    The fear traveled through the sound into Sigmund and grew like maggots in a corpse.


    Sigmund put on clothes and followed his parents to the party, watching the men search his room, gather up the secret food stash that he had taken back from them and ... they left off to the party. Within the teen, this was the worst thing since Chadens attempted murder.


    The ultimate violation of the house which meant security, which meant future.


    Those that opened the doors, those that brought him up, those that always supported him, whose side were they on?

 Underlying Issue

    Both teams had been playing with their hearts fully devoted to the obligation.


    When the observers, the people putting the stakes into the game, left their ranks - both teams felt the reduction in obligation, a reduction caused by the irrational behavior of the observers. Sports was so important, why were they leaving?


    The fear of this new phenomenon drove them to investigate, maybe to eradicate this problem once and for all, before it could corrode the basis of their existence.


    The competition was over and the true battle had begun - and it started with the identification of the truly arcane enemy. It was more important than continuing a low stake game. Imagine their faces when they found out that the enemy that was corroding their basis of existence was another basis of their existence - food and the lack of thereof.


    Their observers found the lack of food more important than the obligation of sports.


    It was a painful realization for the athletes. After all the training and tension and the disappointment of loss that they had been through, all in order to get loved for victory, the food, which was taken for granted until now, seemed so meaningless in comparison.


    Some of them stopped at their position and returned to play a game with incomplete teams as the other former players joined the people in their search for food.


    Could food save them? Probably the only thing that could save them, would be if a nuke could pierce the bunker in which NiceTeal had bunkered all that food - which had not been possible and even if it could the food would end up irradiated, poisoned.


    The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.This would be a thought that would come up in a mind that was not clouded in desire.


    As established a mind clouded in desire will not search for the conclusion that the desire can not be quenched. The mind will come up with more and more radical methods that will delay the inevitable, the unquenchability of desire.


    Is an hour, day, year, decade, century of life enough from now?


    Yes a century is enough, most would answer, it is more than most get.


    If it is a century, how about at the end of the century, when it is only an hour of life left?


    Your friends, your family, your loved ones, your work all that has to pass in the next hour.


    You have 60 minutes and they are ticking away so fast, do you feel fulfilled and content?


    No matter the time, there will always be an hour of life left in the end.


    At first the mind is quenched and then it is parched, it screams out for more.


    That is when it made up a lie called infinity in times of quenchment.


    When the lie can no longer persist due to reality... to quote a famous preacher:


    "And there it is, friends! The ugly truth!" - Heimskr


    Chaden found these people that were hiding in their homes, hiding food, weren''t joining the party, betrayed the party, betrayed the game, the obligation.


    It was their obligation to be happy and they were doing the opposite.


    Punishment would be administered and the food would be replenished.


    For now.

 Delayed spike of pain

    Food first makes sated and then it is no longer there. You can not eat it all and stay sated for a long long time, you have to hoard, preserve or continually produce.


    The feeling of having no food hoarded, preserved or continually produced is a premonition of hunger, to those with a vivid imagination it is just as bad.


    There is a second vivid imagination preventing the logical conclusion of just defending ones property. The second vivid imagination is ones own lifeless body being dragged away after a loud firecracker imitating sound echoing throughout the city.


    The thought alone is pure pain and it is just again a premonition, a predictive pain before the potential pain.


    But is the potential pain even potential? Isn''t it clear to see that it is inevitable?


    For Sigmund it was not clear to see, he desired life and therefore he could not do anything but apply the radical fix of giving in, letting them take, delaying what was certain to come.


    Death, death was certain for every single one of them.


    Each thing that is good, gets consumed from usage, among these things it is life that is consumed. Everything that is seemingly free is taken from somewhere as there is a conservation of things, be they good or bad.


    And thus every consumed good would turn into a depleted bad as long there were consumers. Each life would become an acceleration of this process, and then the life would end in death - without exception.


    Was there really a reason to care about the food being stolen if the result would be the same as if it had not been stolen?


    Well the death of Sigmund could have been a less stressful experience, it would have been a slow starvation in his own terms, pursuing his work in which he saw meaning in.


    A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.But maybe he would find a way to get the food back, a way to turn it into a happy end.


    If there had to exist a necessity for an end, it had to be a happy end instead of a bad end.


    The partiers had already been too careless for him to aquire his secret stack.


    What if he just stole it back, hid somewhere where they would not find him, or just ran far far away. The obviously had cars, they had even helicopters and planes, they had the entire economy backing the party. The party had consumed all, Sigmund was just another victim.


    But the party would not stop until all was consumed, the party would not stop until reality could no longer support the party.


    If he managed to do this, he would get his happy end - but it would be an end nontheless, and it would be at most a week and in the last hour, it would just be an hour.


    Everything will run out and if we look at the point of running out, do we still consider at that moment that it all was a ''happy end''?


    Is the opposite of that a ''bad end''?


    The party surely was compressing human existence into a few more happy hours.


    Perfect abundance, peace, happyness, music and dance and other things would happen.


    One could argue that this outcome was the best outcome for everyone.


    Everyone but the few victims that it already had claimed, everyone but those that just joined because they were intimidated, everyone who dreamt of a future beyond the party.


    But it was no use, Sigmund had no choice but give up - and yet he still dreamt of his rebellion against an oppressive system, similar to Chaden.


    He now found himself in a situation in which the teen would rather not be: at the largest party that would ever come into existence.

 The end invalidates the justice

    People were alarmed, there was a catastrophe going on and some evil actors were causing it: the food hoarders. It was not legal to hoard food in face of the importance of the party.


    Some of the partiers were probably starving right now and it was the fault of these hoarders - they were surely the most selfish humans of all time.


    Everyone had needed to eat dinner, at least 3 hours ago, and there probably would need to be breakfast tomorrow - or a very opulent dinner, why not?


    There was enough food out there, hidden by those hoarders. They could just go and extract it - probably repeating this process for an infinite amount of times, because those hoarders were so greedy - it also was the final solution to food scarcity.


    The extraction process would be arduous, large distances would be needed to travel, ammunition would have to be shot into anyone who resisted - and maybe even a melee battle. All that hard work would make hungry, but there were obvious solutions to that.


    Anyone who didn''t want to help, could just dance on the party - the holy aquisition would work for everyone, even those that would not help its effort for a peaceful and sated future.


    Chaden wore his aquisition robe with pride, most of his team mates had joined the cause as well, not only for food, but first and foremost to show the evil in the world, that the end of the world did in fact NOT mean that justice was dead. This was for the greater good.


    Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.Chaden kicked the door in. "In the name of the Party, hand out your edibles and you may join us - or die.", he recited their rights.


    A blonde woman and a redhead man stared into the barrel of his shotgun, faces frozen.


    He knew how a traitor to humanity acted, a traitor would get loud or attack, maybe run away. These two were possibly innocents.


    "The Party awaits, what are you to let it wait? Lead me to your food stash and join in.", he offered and raised his right hand to signal his fellow aquisitiors that there was no immediate danger - and then saw a movement out of the corner of his eye.


    He moved instinctively and kicked the child with the fruitknife so hard, it flew against the wall and collapsed, breath knocked out of... her lungs.


    "Please don''t shoot Mia!", the mother pleaded.


    Chaden was just about to say something and then quickly shot the mother and then took cover, just before the father shot wildly into his direction.


    These snakes! Chaden heard two shots and when the ringing had gone from his hearing, he barely heard the shout "Clear!".


    The work was done, an aquisitor was sacrificing so much more than their time, they were doing the work that others could not do. Chaden slowly dabbed in order to honor their cause and his fellow aquisitors also dabbed, slowly in synch with Chaden.


    "Aquisitors! Seize!", Chaden barked and the men followed. They were one team, one spirit, one organization, they were the Party.

 Modern Vampirism

    The party was on a down, people were standing around and chatting casually, not unlike a well moderated chatroom in a world with internet. It was pleasant, everyone tried to add something to the conversation a friendly talk about survival irrelevant things such as happyness, sadness and how it applied to the perception of aspects of the material world.


    This would normally be a good way to release postively valued emotions, but as the world had changed quite a lot, the values had drifted - the dissonance imposed this chatter on them, a way to remain true to their ancient rituals which had become obsolete from the point of view of a survivalist.


    Sigmund ignored the people talking about soccer and looked around for the food.


    The buffet was empty and there were a few chewing people standing around it.


    There also was a long line of people waiting. A tired sigh rippled forth from Sigmunds lungs.


    The tiredness claimed him after being woken up in the middle of the night, having built stakes internally and then seeing them crumble to dust - the worst case scenario had already happened, Sigumund assumed.


    In his ignorance he had failed to take into consideration the fact that even if the human is not consumed by the will to consume, the state of contentment would rob the human of the will to solve any problem that might happen.


    Most certainly mankind could solve most problems through planning, following through with the plan and keeping on adjusting according to the newest data, if they had not the tendency to divide and multiply, to act unreasonably extreme when in immediate danger, unreasonably optimistic when given a temporary state of safety, maybe 100 years


    Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.and first and foremost, if the circumstances allowed it.


    Yes not every problem had a neat solution, sometimes one could merely make tradeoffs - slave labor in a poor country or not owning luxury article A?


    Well paid labor would make the luxury article A only available for those on top of the pyramid scheme. In a culture in which luxury article A was a human right, the top of the pyramid scheme could not just forcefully deny them the right to have slaves as that would invite the lower ranks to topple the entire system which was benefitting the top.


    So they clothed the lower ranks in the noble fabrics, disguised their hungry faces with their physical appearance of well washed nobility.


    It would last quite a while, until the sun would shine truth onto what had occured, the rays of light indiscriminately showing the happenings to anyone with eyes.


    As sure as the sun would rise a pyramid, the symbol of stability, would topple when the ground beneath it breaks - soon people will find out why turning the world into a 4 sided die/pyramid in a metaphorical sense, had doomed them in a physical sense.


    Let us just blame the time before the second rebranding.

 Triumphant return

    Discussions stopped when they saw them, their bloodstained raincoats, the corpses of the victims, the rich bounty of food and the grim faces of armed men, who had done what had to be done.


    The desire, repulsion, triumph and guilt they brought fought among those that did not feel crushed, violated, anger and fear at the arrival of the aquisition.


    Every single one of them would not say no to food provided it wasn''t too blood stained.


    They saw themselves in a dying skeletal state and saw the food as a means to prevent it.


    There was nothing else, the tunnel vision obscured the death that would surely come.


    The tunnel had been there for their entire life, it wasn''t sensed itself, the tunnel was an invisible object and yet obscuring. To live is to look away from death, children may cry at first when they hear the bad news of their imminent demise, but the cry itself is a defense against reality, the first moment in which the invisible tunnel obscures their vision.


    It becomes an old friend, without knowing what it is that makes them feel comfortable when they engage in a repetitive action, what calms them down when they have a bad time, what makes them feel refreshed after looking at media, art or listening to music.


    Their old friend, which pushes away the guilt and repulsion at the sight of food, the denial of death, the illusion of infinite life, the invisible tunnel. Can it be broken through?


    If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.Can the tunnel be noticed? Often this is only possible if one had been hit hard enough by reality, reality breaks through the tunnel and hits the oblivious victim.


    Some of those that had seen their parents killed and surrendered to the aquisition had shattered tunnels, they cared not about food, they were silent, feeling the weight of death that they had not gotten accustomed to. If they had their tunnels shattered earlier, the tunnels would have time to repair - only those that kept destroying the tunnel could eventually overcome it. Some people overcame depression and were free to see death.


    These borders were subtle, absence of attention, part of the infected.


    Most of the present had this mental sickness, the good life, the life without too much desire brought with it just as much sickness as strong desires and pain.


    In overcoming depression, one either returns to the tunnel or one realizes the truth and keeps it - or leaves into the vast expanse beyond the tunnel.


    Some of those people that had been talking to each other had been seeing through cracks in their tunnels, they had seen a glimpse of truth.


    The return of the aquisition healed the walls of the tunnels, humanity began to feel just a little better as they could no longer see. Just a bit more infinity before the end, just a bit more - words of an addict, an addict that knows that every single piece of food would get eaten, every single one and then they would get really really cranky.

 Shutting the F up

    Sigmund closed the door to the party ''sleeping room''. He walked away from the sounds to which he now knew the source of.


    Their children would never be his automaton race, he pondered. There was no logical design to them, they just did that kind of stuff in a sleeping room, for sleeping.


    In fact he feared someone would come into the room if he chose to enter one in order to sleep - what that could lead to... better not think of it.


    There was clearly a misunderstanding here, did those rooms really exist to sleep in them?


    Despite better knowlege he opened another sleeping room, peering carefully and closing the door just as careful. Shaking his head he pretended to ignore the discomfort of sleeplessness and slight arousal. He closed his eyes, held his breath and reviewed his binary information circulating system, which mainly interacted with the world by relais getting pressed down despite the magnet and using that as sensory organ.


    One could press down these relais, which he coined ''buttons'' and then that would influence the entire system, which also was capable of moving. In interacting with the environment the system would get its buttons pressed, which would have to do the rest of teaching.


    People had no buttons, he mused, People couldn''t just be pressed.


    If he had just a way to construct a relais which was so small that a ray of light could press it... well it would be constantly pressed if one moved - too sensitive.


    Sigmund opened his eyes and took a deep breath. His hand was not made out of relais, his sense of touch didn''t make sense like that. He didn''t know what he was, he didn''t know what a woman was and what she was doing with that man in that sleeping room.


    Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.There needed to be a way to build a clock with relais. Without a heart the logic would just run once and then stop. Something was needed, that was constantly pressing a button repeatedly.


    The image of two automatons ...  pressing their buttons came into his mind.


    He shooed it out, angry that this was how he had realized how to do it. He knew how to build a functional sexagesimal clock utilizing several relais, thanks to ''that''.


    Sigmund chose to name it ''sex'', which was merely a shorthand for sexagesimal.


    This was actually a doable thing now, he could create his new sex based automatons and release them according to his plans - nothing was impossible, he had done it.


    The weariness fled and was replaced by elation. His automatons sex would be much more efficient than that of humans - why were they even doing that?


    Humans could work pretty fine without having to make sex to each other, the heartbeat did it all for them - maybe a relict from when they were designed by a dude who thought of a way to build a clock out of meat? By whom was that dude designed?


    Was he, Sigmund, destinied to become the next designer of the next big thing?


    Pure ego flooded the teen, he felt like that two people in the sleeping room, that were also thinking they were making the next big thing - pure ego.


    Sigmund ran, he would finish his automaton, he would - "The soccer game starts! Everyone come, in the name of the Aquisition!" - F.

 Determinism of good

    Each Lesson is said to be learned in two distinct ways, the easy way and the hard way.


    A parallel drawn to learning a lesson is extortion, there is an easy way or a hard way.


    Sometimes people choose the hard way, but as the daoist saying goes:


    Man is soft and weak at birth; At death he is hard and rigid. -Chieh Ch''iang


    There are lessons learned in the beginning and in the end of life, when a man becomes hard and rigid and after that soft and weak. All lessons serve the program of flesh.


    The hard lessons teach what not to do, the easy lessons teach what to do in order to learn more easy lessons - and that is what the easy lessons are dictating.


    Seek the easy, avoid the hard - and yet sometimes the way to gain the easy is to do the hard anyway.


    Life is an extortion, and like a fine extortionist it gives and it takes more than it gives.


    And the extorted will choose compliance despite that, this extends to real extortions as well. So used to life itself extorting, a victim of extortion develops something called ''Stockholm syndrome'', an association that the extortionist is to be obeyed.


    In the greatest pleasures in life is to follow easy lessons.


    From there it is to defy easy lessons, seeking hard lessons in order to seek very easy lessons.


    Lessons that learn without ones own efforts, passing on the struggle of extortion, while the extortionist laughs in glee - another victim, another victim maker.


    Chaden remembered the emotion he had felt a few minutes ago with Lisaac.


    This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.Upon learning the lesson, the very easy lesson, he knew his lifes cause, his lifes imperative - and he was willing to follow in order to learn the lesson over and over again.


    Forgotten were the times in which one slaughtered for a few cans of beans, forgotten the hard times, reframed into lessons of things to do in order to feel the emotion of good again, positive gain, continued pain.


    The emotion of an easy lesson, a lesson he would not have to learn himself.


    He had lost his innocence, become complicit, embraced the stockholm syndrome of life.


    Unlike Sigmund, he did not seek to impose the struggle onto artificial intelligence, he wanted meat intelligence. There was not much difference as the artificial one was designed to behave like the meat one - it just was less efficient due to having less design time.


    Be it automaton or human, they would not survive in the coming times.


    Life that was arbitrating its continuation - and the continuation of sports and struggle.


    Chaden had accepted his master long before this, the game would start anew, disregarding the lack of essential resources and the impending eternal cold.


    It would be soccer that would heat their bodies and determination to power biochemical processes - defying the laws of thermodynamics with sheer ignorance, bordering not even having a memory of the truth of what was predicted, foreshadowed to come.


    The great game would begin - and never end. They would play the greatest game, the longest game, a game planned to last for eternity.

 Victory is a lie

    Sigmund stared into the night sky, clouds drifting past the pale glowing circle.


    Shouts and exitement, chants and tension went by as distractions.


    They were wasting the precious time he had left until it would be too late to create the automaton race, a race that could be understood, that could be predicted, that would have to know each others programming in order to communicate.


    They would follow his will, the will to create them, the will to create more.


    They would persist, no matter how harsh the world would become, they had to.


    Perfect friendship would be among them, no dissonance, no conflict - understanding each other would equal to being each other, for that they would need to communicate, reprogram each other to be homogenous with sex.


    Each of them would have to carry their own burden, but like the party, if everyone gave what they had, every individual would have more people work for them than they were working themselves. It would be like breaking a singular bread and singular fish and distributing it equally onto billions ending up with getting back a lot of ripped apart bread and fish roughly the same weight of what had been distributed as a logical consequence - while one actually expected to recieve a billions of fishes and billions of breads in return.


    One could argue that the others would bring their own foods and thus you would get perfectly balanced nutrient paste when sharing your food on a large scale.


    In practice there is so much food and energy used up in the process of sharing, that you would get nothing back, there would not even be roughly the same what you shared - the miraclous destruction of food. Another point was scored and the resulting cheer ripped the Sigmund male from his musings. Irritated he looked at the clock, the players were going overtime by a significant margin, it was as if they were cooperating in keeping the points scored even. How could the party still exist according to the principles of miraculous destruction of food? The answer would be seen, felt, heard and enacted, but not now.


    This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.Time was running out and Sigmund was impatient, but the aquisition had stationed their armed members around the stadium exits. The only people leaving and entering were those that brought food or transported away the resulting feces from the toilets.


    Could he impersonate a fecal transporter? They were wearing uniform, a grey, practical looking overall, clothing befitting a janitor.


    He did not know what it took to be one, he did not know whether he would get food outside of the stadium. Couldn''t he just wait, eat and then leave? Would that not leave him no disadvantage? Hesitation and the pressure of the party were felt for the first time.


    Energy needs to be expended, when matter moves against gravity.


    Lifes gravity is food, if one moves easy and fast, one moves towards food. If one feels their mental resources drained, pain, pressure, fear, then this is the energy expended to fight the gravity that is food. The party had banked so much food, the only stash larger was inaccessible. Just like a far away black hole, a closer, more accessible source of gravity like earth would prevail over it.


    The journey away from the stadium would be like a rocket travelling into a black empty sky.


    The amount of energy needed to be expended and to not return would be not feasible.


    Despite that Sigmund began overeating on food, he was already full, but he ate more. He wanted to gain more energy - but in that he gained more mass - gravity attracts gravity and thus he had already lost.

 Matter over mind

    Breath, breath, fire in the muscles, breath, pain, where is the ball?


    Move, can not stop, infinity, breath, pain, grow weaker, power through, grow weaker.


    Sweat, cold, fire muscles, burn more, more pain.


    Shiver, shaking, muscles pain, numb, pain, numb, pain, breathe.


    Where is the ball - another point - irrelevant, no more joy, must keep playing.


    Breath, fire in the lung, cold in the lung, pain, pain.


    Have to keep going, everyone is watching. The stakes are high, I am... exhausted.


    The pain has to go on. I need to continue. I need... the light is flickering.


    I... tired... but... I need ... to go o-.


    Chaden awoke on a bed, he had been on the field, playing soccer with the others, but now he was on a bed. He tried to get up, keep on fighting, but his muscles were too weak, due to the newly awakened strain, they grew even weaker, leaving Chaden to breathe heavily whilst lying down. Just taking a rest before the fight, just closing those eyes again, just give up, let go, give into the tiredness... Chadens eyes closed, his mind shut down and sleep claimed the teen once again. He had already failed, the game had ended with the players stamina depletion. And really, after so long of a playtime, no one really cared who had won.


    Everyone had again the problem, that food had run out, new Aquisition members had ventured out into the world, finding even edible plants, razed forests for anything remotely edible, the new influx of food placated the masses once again, everything kept going, while the players were incapacitated, some of them neglected, they died of dehydration in their beds, but Chaden was well cared for by Lisaac and everything was alright for now.


    Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.The game must not have been so important after all, Chaden told himself.


    This was the mentality of a slave towards their masters aspirations, they were not so important after all. With insustainability comes change, a change of mind, that it must not have been so important to sustain, it probably was rather meaningless if it did not persist.


    His previous intent was devoid of importance, it did not matter, matter created importance and intent should be only directed if the matter kept persisting. And yet it was too late to deny a master, which had already a replacement for you. Within his girlfriends body it grew already, never to be born if the food consumption would keep up like this.


    Just a few missed meals would mean that the child would be born as a corpse.


    Chaden was reminded by life once again, that this was not an option, he had become more affectionate to Lisaac, he had become a simp.


    On his mind was the question how to feed her, he had regained his strength and there was a need for protein-rich food, but most food consisted of wild plants currently.


    Kill a pet would get him and her killed as pet eaters - there had been a few which had been consequently executed by crucification. It was not possible to eat cats and dogs, any meat would go to them, the plants to the humans.


    This diet would kill their child, so he had to do something radical. The game was over, the aquisition job had returned with more responsibility than ever before.


    What would be the source of matter? What would be the source of meat?

 Logical meat

    When Sigmund saw, he knew, he fled. Meat was back on the table, and it scared him.


    He had already eaten some of it. The meat marked the end of times.


    After consuming a mixture of bark and bitter herbs for two days, the appearance of this slightly rotten tasting protein rich substance set off every alarm in those who could connect the dots. Sigmund then came back after fleeing, he had grown hungry.


    When the game ended, he started the construction of the automaton, discovering that theory was one thing, but that in practice things tended to grow more complicated.


    Forking paths of electricity for one did not work like imagined, the current would merely move through one singular path of least resistance. This could be easily solved in one or another way - he just had to use the relais to close another circuit at the same time.


    This would require several circuits and thus several connections to several electricity sources. Or it could merely do one thing really fast and change doing that thing, but make it lead up to another thing - multitasking itself would not be possible.


    This again caused an upheaval of new challenges in the system, which had delayed his progress significantly. The only reason he still stayed was the rotten taste of the meat.


    It was old meat, probably not recent meat, it was not dangerous yet.


    So he stayed and kept tinkering. He tinkered until he heard a thumping wet noise.


    When he saw the body, the blood, he abandoned his unborn automaton child and ran away.


    What was quick at first, grew labored breaths, sweaty back and burning legs.


    If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.Nontheless he ran, as if it were a bus behind him. Just like Chaden desired to keep playing, Sigmund desired to keep running, but his body did not comply - he slowed.


    He walked, he walked and there was screaming and shouting and wet noises.


    It had started to smell delicious, well seasoned meat on a grill. Sigmund stopped to catch breath. He would have to keep running or it would be him who was smelling so good, foreign teeth biting into what was his, silence after a shout, forever nothing.


    Would it not be easier to accept it? What was all this struggle worth?


    Even if he did not get eaten, would he even see the next ten years?


    Could he not take an easier way, a faster way, a less ardurous path?


    It was the pain of physical exhaustion, a pain that Sigmund was not used to, a pain that he could not simply ignore. A weak nerd would always cave if pressured to move too much.


    Sigmund sat onto the ground, then he was laying there, pretending to be dead.


    Only his chest rising and falling, a traitorous trait, was painfully obvious to see, but he did not care.


    The shouting and butchering went on, violence was blooming like a red flower smelling roasted. Brothers fought, lovers betrayed each other, human became synonym with the feeling of satiation. This was the consequence of being constructed out of the things one had consumed, to be consumable oneself.


    If there is nothing to eat, there is still something that is consumable as long there are people that percieve the nothing that there is to eat. If one can not ignore it, it becomes oneself.


    Such is the ease at which we are to be replaced by our basic logical nature.

 Our Borosis

    Without change, things stay the same.


    The change wrought upon a thing is coined work.


    The potential for change to be wrought is coined energy.


    The tendency of energy to bring change is called entropy.


    In bringing change, the potential for change is reduced.


    The devotion to change is self defeating.


    Life is the devotion to change, it follows that it desires its own defeat.


    One of those that had chatted about sports, a philosopher of irrelevant name, had mused over this in an attempt to justify what had to come when food ran out.


    She had found  the soccer match enlightening in how others dealt with their self defeating impulses, they tried to bring as much change as possible for their bodies to work, only to collapse before they could finish. A failed attempt at self destruction.


    She, like so many, had grown up to become a destructive being, if she could not have something to eat, she would have no energy, she would not be able to do work, she could not bring change and annihilate the energy. Things would still change without her, suns would burn, planets would move towards black holes, entropy would not rest until it would.


    Because the energy would sometime in the future decrease to 0 due to entropy.


    Of course this is the non-nerd description, there will be more nerd descriptions in the story. Overwhelming amounts of those in fact, but not now.


    She decided to see a new path with the desires of all those around her in mind, the desire of defeat of oneself, the desire for change to occur. She had become the mother of the philosophical stance of the Borosists, people that knew that they liked to defeat themselves and each other in a way that turned energy into change, murder.


    Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.She had written down a pamphlet about Borosism and there were people already catching onto it, seeing their desires and wants reflected by a simple text, telling them that eating meat would be moral - from the standpoint of Borosism.


    Not to say that there were people, that disagreed, they did not want others to be able to justify murdering them, the Anti-Borosists were born.


    They did believe in the premise of wanting change to continue, but did not see why accepting the ceasement of change, only because it would all end at 0, some did not even see it ending at 0, they argued that from there everything just ''borrow energy'', which would result in a negative entropy, bound to rebound at a certain point, returning them to their normal lifes, even if they died. These people split from the Anti-Boroism and became ''Borrowists'' with another subgroup titled ''Loanist'', wo denied that there was a limit to how much energy could be borrowed, which actually justified Boroism again. In the end it all was the idea of infinity in times of stability. When the Boroists started to seize the means of self destruction, they imposed their will upon all the splinter groups, making them question why Boroists would be the ones who had all the fun. This marked the start of the great kill and grill season, lasting about a day.

 Death of those unfit

    They just wanted to grill, for gods sake. Was that so much to ask for?


    Among the grilling, a temporary truce was held, no one wanted to be disturbed while preparing human meat, everyone was hungry and could apprechiate more food.


    But those that were not grilling, were fair game. Experts in butchering were also being spared or employed. This truce was not a law, it was a guideline, good morals.


    Those that violated the temporary non aggression pact, did not live long, but those that did not run or fight back when approached, they also did not survive that.


    Goups of up to ten searched around for more fresh meat, carrying partially improvised weaponry. One of them spotted a random body laying around, the nerves of some people, to waste precious food. "Hey, I found one!", the man shouted.


    The previously unmoving body stood up and ran away - apparently the teen had heard him.


    The squad moved after him, carrying their blunt weaponry a chase was not to be avoided.


    Despite how the boy looked, he was rather quick on his feet. Probably had a good rest just laying there. They were part of the Loanist movement, believing that they could borrow the energy of the universe in order to survive when no food was left. The destruction of food would allow this wondrous property of the universe to emerge - they mostly weren''t even eating their kills, but burning them.


    This was not a waste of food for them, it was a means to proof their point against borosism, which was just too pessimistic to believe in, a very bleak worldview, that they would all die anyway. That could not be true, because they did not like it and things that they did not like, most likely were not going to be true, because they would not like it.


    If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.Great efforts were already made in order to proof their version, which would probably convince the universe, that their point was actually the correct one. One had to appear like a loanworthy person in order to get a loan - or otherwise there wouldn''t be enough trust.


    Sceptics would point out, that one could not just believe that it all would work out and then it would, but to those sceptics that survived one could simply answer "With that mindset you will never convince the universe - look at us. If you convince yourself, you can then convince others and if everyone left is convinced, we can convince the universe.", or something along these lines. Most arguments that appealed to "If you are just confident in our success, then we will succeed.", built on the hope to garner credence through bold claims. Bold claims were mostly made by people that did not understand enough about the subject to comprehend the rough size of complexity, which one could never truly comprehend. But if people liked what you were saying, they would most likely agree on the hope you were knowing your stuff.


    Other arguments by nonbelievers were further shot down by "You can not disproof it." or a rock to the face.


    The boy that they had been chasing, began to breathe heavily and with that they managed to catch him. Sigmund hadn''t been much beyond an initial quick, short desparate sprint, but after they bashed his brains out with a stick and burnt him after eating a select few bodyparts, he did not walk ever again.

 Raising the steaks

    They weren''t a mere mirage, a silent group of people, they were loud, they were a party.


    Work was their proof of existence, laboratis ergo estis, in working they made their existence felt. It felt quite good to do that, they had learned that shouting loud would get one alleviation to ones pain quite early, maybe the reason they shouted first was not because of their own experience as they had not collected the experience yet.


    It was merely a chemical reaction, that had happend as result of another chemical reaction, a jumpstart that had happened out of the volition of another being.


    This surely had happened over and over before, with slight variations, until it had not happened out of anyones volition, and with consent it is often a question of whether one had enough experience to give consent and whether ignoring consent would be more convenient to the one making the choice or the one affected.


    If this choice had been already made, and the past could not be changed, retroactively, were they really free in will? If one extended that involuntary action, they could simply do anything, could they? This was not their philosophy.


    Their philosophy opposed that of their enemies, those that symbolized everything that stood against them, for one simple reason: one could justify any action against the one that stood against oneself. In that way they supported each other as enemies, tools to justify their actions as long as they were marginally different. Both sides were killing people and eating them, but one side prepared them as steaks, one side as meatballs.


    This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author''s work.Objectively, they were fundamentally different groups, statistically subjectively, they were fundamentally different groups, but the significant differences highlighted the similarities, acting as contrast. But that was probably not how differences worked and that was not how both movements were acting. Preparation was only a small part of what they were doing.


    The similarities were the contrast for the differences. But they were the party, not one of the groups, both of them. And they made a lot of noise, slaughtering each other on a bloody battlefield. They looked very very similar down there, struggling worms and sizzling meat.


    But if one looked very closely, one could spot Chaden hitting a woman with a baseball bat into which several nails were stuck. If one looked very closely, Chaden would just smile, watching Lisaac eat some of her meat as a steak later on. If one waited a bit, a different man, who would feed his children some meatballs made out of Lisaac. There was a significant difference, different people, different meals. The children had enough to eat, but Chaden did have a strong hunger, a hunger for vengeance for his unborn child. People knew that in this new world no hunger would be not sated or at least ceased- permanently. Chaden knew that those children had feelings and emotions and dreams at night, but they would probably not have that at the end of the day - if things went after his will.

 Environment Change

    Sigmund remembered how it had felt, the pain, the exhaustion, the fear, he remembered himself screaming, begging, crying, dying. Then there was this, and it was still conciousness.


    He shouldn''t be remembering all these memories, he should be simply gone by now.


    But he was still remembering, feeling his body, feeling himself ... alive.


    Was nothingness after death a lie? Would he just keep going?


    Wouldn''t that make death meaningless? Sigmund struggled to comprehend this violation of all that he had known before, eventually he opened his eyes, finding himself laying on the ground of a hallway with metallic looking walls, futuristic looking doors. It looked very clean, the air smelt sterile, no perceptible warmth or cold, the epitome of neutral.


    The teen felt his body, he was uninjured, but there was simply nothing between his legs, smooth. So he had woken up, castrated, and fully healed in a place that he had never been in, with the memory of being killed by a squad of loanists.


    Sigmund had a hard time coming up with a hypothesis on what had happened.


    A door opened and a humanoid being, being dragged by a glowing ball connected to a bunch of silvery lines that were sort of acting like a chain, stepped through the door.


    The eyes of the being locked onto Sigmund, and it spoke words in a rough, distant and emotionless voice:


    Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings."welcome, you, have, been, chosen, to, become, a, powerful, god, I, can, show, you, how, follow, my, instructions, and, you, will, ascend."


    The words seemed rather automatic, maybe this was some sort of automaton.


    Sigmund was fascinated and stared at the potential automaton. It had four eyes, scarlet red skin with black impurities, wore wine red clothes and black glasses. Its eyes also contained several impurity-like pupils, moving as if rigidly etched onto the eyeballs. Parts of the skin were missing, hinting at the body being built out of something harder than flesh.


    "What is this?", Sigmund was distrustful, he had strong definitions of what would count as a friend and the being was completely alien.


    The alien being was quiet for a few minutes, during which Sigmund waited anxiously and then started to speak again. "the, instructions, are, picture, your, automatic, servant, which, you, want, to, control.", the being had completely ignored the Teen.


    Another sort of strange looking humanoid came out of another door. His skin was grey-bluish, some chunks of it were also missing, but only two eyes could be seen. His eyes were lacking any impurities, but some could be seen on his face, black disgusting looking pimples. Several silver lines lined his bald head and bare upper body.


    He spoke in a decidedly human tone, concerned "Oh man, dude stop right there. Don''t do anything what the scambot says.", to which Sigmund turned around, the situation grew more complex. What exactly was happening now? Who was telling the truth, could he trust any of them? He still hadn''t gotten any answers and this only raised more questions.

 From bloodbath into frying pan

    A warrior, an avenger had done justice. The world was silent, no borrowing could be observed, no rebound, no negative entropy, nothing had changed.


    The warrior had brought peace, every enemy had died. The warrior was alone.


    It was silent, nobody was left to raise or turn into st(e)aks. It was utterly meaningless.


    A warrior breathes war, an avenger takes vengeance, but when peace comes, when justice is done, they both have no meaning.


    The cold moonlight shone onto the scene, barely illuminating in comparison to all those grills, now no longer in use, but still flickering, turning the air heavy with smoke.


    The end of a long grill party had come, Chaden had to acknowledge it, there was no replenishment, all his achievements, his dreams and hopes, they had to end soon.


    He had not gone without injury in this fight and would expire before the sun rose the next day. There was nothing to proof to anyone beside himself, the pain was great and he wept.


    The end of the world made no one a winner, maybe he was the opposite of a winner, all alone in the remains. This was his last hour, his loss, his time getting more scarce and valuable. Every passing second turned the second after it into a more valuable second, it could be felt, the rise in value and the tremendous loss growing and growing.


    It was simply too much to take, too much to spend, too much to have lost.


    In the growth, his pain rose, one could compare the growth of value with the growth of value in times of high economic growth. The growth was happening, because it would end, the value came from scarcity, the value came from the borosist ideal of self destruction.


    Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.Without the end of the world, there was no value increase, in fact if the world would not end, the value would drop to rock bottom - the duality of value in scarcity, the meaninglessness in infinity. The previous reactions had shown that the illusion of infinity can be easily seen through, but contrary to intuition, the reaction to the piercing of the veil is joy as the value grows.


    The joy would turn into pain, if it grew too intense, that was why Chaden was crying.


    This was when it was too much, this was the answer to ''How much is enough?'' and ''What is a good life?'', it was simply a life before this impending breakdown.


    Chadens life had been good, providing an excellently horrible contrast to his sad experience.


    The existence of the afterlife, devaluing his current experience was not known and thus a maximum on suffering would be achieved in this moment, first a too high value, then - rock bottom. Even though steaks had become worthless through hyperinflation, they had fought on. They did not know what else to do, the value had risen so high, someone had to keep raising it. Chaden decided that this life had to go, he would not bear the pains of a slow death, he took a sharp knife and lined it up with his flesh.


    The steel point shook, Chaden tried to stop the shaking, but the pain would not relent.


    He needed a clean cut, a quick way out, a simple solution.


    "No!", screamed his body "I want to live!", it cried, despite the blood already flowing from several wounds that had gotten dirty. He didn''t possess the strength anymore to end himself, he couldn''t climb a tower and jump, he couldn''t ram a knife somewhere reliably.


    Underneath the grills, the last steak laid in the dirt, suffering the pain until it did not.

 Scarcity of truth

    "What are you talking about? I don''t know what is going on, how I got here, what reality is, what you two want, I don''t know who is right and who is false.", Sigmund lamented.


    The blue humanoid scoffed, while the red one kept staring at Sigmund without a change in its expression. "You are asking too much of me, there have been entire libraries of books written about all of your questions and it isn''t my job to answer. I can just point you the way to the nearest library.", the blue one pointed out, he had crossed his arms.


    The red one stayed silent.


    "Can you just answer one question? I really need some guidance here, because all I knew is wrong apparently.", Sigmund had begun to ignore the red one, it did not communicate and behaved like a zombie, the likelyhood that it really was a ''scambot'' seemed quite high.


    "Not really. As you said, you can''t trust either of us, because you don''t know anything. How do you know I don''t just lie to you? You are way too naive for your own good.", Blue sneered. "OK? Are you really trying to help me? I don''t see it.", Sigmund mirrored Blue and crossed his arms. Blue sighed and Red began to repeat the ''instructions''.


    When Red was done, Blue said "I don''t have to do this, but you''ll be very grateful to me if you look back to this point in time. If you follow the instructions of the scambot, you''ll be converted into a scambot, believe me or believe me not, it is your wager." Blue rubbed over its temples, which made a scraping noise "If you really want to stand a chance, move that way", Blue pointed at a door, "and you can educate yourself in the library.".


    Reds orb changed its color and a different, human voice spoke from Red.


    This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source."That is what he says. I know his type, if you go through that door, there will be an ambush waiting for you. They will kill you and dismantle you for your organs. Follow my instructions, his accomplices are probably already on their way towards you. I am your only chance at survival.", Red warned.


    The sudden change seemed completely random, but Red suddenly was no longer a non-factor, the equivalent of a headache without actual pain washed over Sigmund.


    He began to play with a wager, if Blue was right, following Red would be very bad, if Red was right, following Blue would be very bad. He wanted neither.


    "If I were to run away from here, would any of you stop me?", Sigmund probed.


    Both of them spoke over each other, eager to talk, but that just meant that he did not understand any of them. What a dilemma, and he was under time pressure.


    "STOP! Both of you shut up. If I see more blue people, I will take the deal of Red. Both of you stay back from me. Answer my questions, but not at the same time.", Sigmund had raised his voice significantly, and it had worked.


    He then turned off his attention, as the resulting bickering on who would talk first began.


    The situation was defused for now, no one could act against him according to the established facts. Reality still was unknown, maybe one of them said the truth, maybe both said the truth sometimes and lied at another time or withheld important information.


    Trusting any of them fully would be foolish, he wasn''t as naive as Blue implied.


    There would be information to be gotten out of these two and if they attacked both, he would run. But as long they kept it civil, he would profit from staying here.

 Demand and rejection

    Untamed and empty lay the wastes. Dark the sky, dark the ground, bright still the eyes.


    The pain had stopped, Chaden felt that it all was over now, it must have been the reversal of entropy. He sat in the dark, waiting for reality to return. It was neither cold nor warm, there was no smell, the ground was even, not hard, not soft, not rough, not smooth.


    Conceptual nothingness was broken by conceptual groundness and Chaden himself.


    After waiting for so long, the emptyness of scarcity woke the demand for scarcity.


    He tried moving as to get hungry and weak, but his body did not tire easily, his body grew adaptive and every movement reduced the scarcity, imbued with energy.


    There was no thirst, there was no hunger, just the emptyness and time. The denial of scarcity could be taken as scarcity itself, but it did not quite work the same, it was the opposite. Chaden tried to inflict pain in himself, punched the ground, bit his fingers, ripped at his eyeballs. Solid ground caved like sand, flesh steeled, eyeballs firmly embedded, slippery and unfeeling. He had to seek more limits, he ran to find the end of the wastes, find a wall that could not be broken, find a challenger, an unrelenting competitor, the absence of scarcity was by far worse than the pain of impending nothingness, it did not stop.


    The ground beneath changed, there were hills and holes, none could stop him, buried under the loamy ground, a singular movement would make it rinse off his body, like an hourglass on fast fowarward at first, but then like dust in the wind. Breath held would only make it apparent that breath was as unnecessary as food and drink. As he did not find a wall to stop at, he tried jumping, touching the empty ceiling of the void, something that could break him. Alas it was an empty hope, merely did it release the grasp of gravity, the ground was no longer, it was no longer a sky above, it was Chaden and the void.


    This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.Chaden was sure, if he continued his path either he or the void would vanish. In his attempt to progress, he had become the reversal of progress, the reversal of borosism, reborosism.


    The absence of anguish laid upon him, numb, meaningless, more hollow than the impending doom of nothingness. Such deepness in his psyche was it burrowed, the desire to compete.


    The psyche dominated by life without the access to death and suffering, to not bring suffering upon others and oneself was the absence of primal purpose.


    Even knowing that the remaining degrees of limitation could be taken away forever, the desire acted out. A scream rippled through the body, a scream of pure pain, fast, way too fast it turned into a minor ringing, then despite not having stopped, it became inaudible.


    Was he too weak to hurt himself or too strong to be hurt? It did not matter as both did not appeal to him. He could no longer tell the void of existence, his body had become all.


    Suddenly something touched, not like dust, not like a jaw, it was something that could not be overcome. Like a blind man given sight, Chaden became alert and miserable.


    There were others, there were those that felt like they could not be overcome, the escape that he had sought. A wave of force rippled through Chaden, he felt the pain, overwhelming all senses, it did stay within and slowly became lessened, condensing into meaning: "Are you a steaker or a meatballer?", was the meaning of what had been merely a sentence.


    Chaden spoke, too silent for himself to hear, but at the full force he had at his disposal.


    A punch shook his very being. They didn''t seem to like steakers, these overpowering entities, they were meatballers.

 Overlying advantage

    "If you follow my instructions, you will be able to die at any time, but only out of your own will. You will be released from desires conflicting with your nature to pursue your truest self. In a conflict you will come out on top, in an ambush -", Red paused and looked at blue demonstratively "-you will not be taken apart for your organs to be harvested. Instead you could do it yourself to sell them on the black market or put them into your own body. Plus -", Blue interrupted rudely "That''s all lies, don''t you-" and then Sigmund interrupted him "Shut up, I want to know more. That are really good things and I think I might need them. Tell me, can I get commodities like clocks to exact specifications, however many I want?", Reds mouth turned into a smile, showing off its blackened teeth "Of course, however many you want. It is trivial in fact. Should I repeat the instructions?"


    Sigmund also smiled and asked "If it is so trivial, why don''t you proof it to me? You yourself should be able to do so easily." Reds smile dropped, after a pause it responded.


    "I currently can''t do that, I need to stay alert in case the bandits storm the room. I could defend myself while creating as many clocks as I liked, but I can not defend you whilst doing so. I know this might not suffice, but if... no well you will have to trust me if you want to follow my instructions anyway, so if you follow me away from here, we can go to a safe place where I will demonstrate you my abilities gained.", Blue sighed "If you go with the bot, I''ll give you a 100 percent chance you''ll end up like it, red skin, basically just a tool, look how it has started rotting.", Blue pointed at the black impurities on the eyes of Red, despite also having similar strange skin impurities and missing pieces of flesh too. "What is up with that anyway?", Sigmund wondered, Reds two pairs of eyes gave Blue a stare and then replied "Just signs of old age. Immortality does not come without a cost, we are not free of physics, only because we can do magic.", it sounded quite casual, the mentioning of the m-word.


    Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings."Magic is not real, everyone knows that it was abolished after the second rebranding.", Sigmund corrects automatically, Red points at the silvery lines connecting it with the orb of light "You sure? It is pretty clear that some magic somehow survived the rebranding. You gotta see that.", Blue also chimed in "Yeah you are sorta mentally deficient if you don''t accept that magic is still real. But then, you are still talking to the scambot, which is a really bad idea, do you know it can try to make you say certain keywords and turn you into a bot without you even doing something actively? You just said one of them by the way, doesn''t mean it was said in the right way, but still that''s the risk you are taking, so yeah. Time is over by the way, bot. It is my turn to talk."

 No absence of pain

    Neither before nor now had been pleasant. No senses and only pain were not very different from each other, they both made one feel unpleasant, like extreme cold and extreme heat.


    And yet Chaden preferred the pain over the nothingness, but he also was getting slightly concerned that his preferral of pain would lead to the pain being taken away from him.


    He wasn''t free in the experiencing of pain, meatball aligned forces beyond his capacity to deal with were tormenting him. He knew that there were two things, pain and feeling nothing, and he did think that having the possibility to feel at least two things instead of only one of them was vastly superior. There was an illusion of choice and its name was possibility, what could be, what might happen, hope and optimism. Yes, hope and optimism were an illusion of choice, the illusion to have chosen the right path.


    The pummeling suddenly stopped at the thought of the optimistic duality of pain and nothing, as if someone was reading his mind, but the pain did not stop. Chaden felt extremely broken in an essential core of his existence, he felt that he might have been hurt beyond the point of survival. After what felt like an hour, he felt even more pessimistic, he would have to live with this pain forever in this horrid void.


    How could they? That was just taking away his ability to feel nothing.


    He hadn''t been successful in his earlier suicides, he suspected that the meatballers could assist him, but wouldn''t, if he phrased it that way. He would never forgive them.


    If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation."You cowards!", he shouted without hearing his own words, "You gang up on me, scared shitless! Are you proud of that? You like that ''victory''? You meatballers have no sportsmanship, no integrity, no quality. Come at me! I''ll show you how a virtous steaker fights till the end!", Chaden awaited the pain to end his existence, it could not outweigh the pain he was in right now. Nothing came, he swung his fist with all of his force in the direction of the presences and it was cought by one of them, stronger than the others.


    Chaden remembered it hammering against him, like a hammer against a bell, ringing with moans of pain. Words shook his being instead of a hammer breaking the bell, when the force of the pain no longer prevented his sense of hearing, he knew what had occured.


    This was their leader, Braderic the great, who just accepted his challenge - he and he alone would fight him. It would not be a fight with fists, it would be one of feet, it would be one with rules, a duel not to the death, but a duel to the victory.


    Life had been the perfect teacher for this challenge, it sounded not only like a fair competition, it sounded like a competition that was exactly what he had craved.


    That was not an exaggeration: Chaden would play soccer against Braderic, his favourite sport. He had not expected to find what he searched for in the lions den.

 Appeal to intelligence

    "So yeah it is incredibly dangerous for you to keep doing this. You could take my word for it, or you could just question it. But I got to warn you, some thoughts, some words are dangerous in a world in which magic exists. Knowledge is powerful here and thus you, an obviously new dude, is completely powerless. That doesn''t mean you are worthless tho, there exist schemes to harvest peoples organs or -" Blue points to Red "- turn them into semiautomated scambots only to turn more people into scambots, all in order to harvest the scambot organs later on. I know you could be one of these people if you get access to education. That is actually very shitty of me right? I think everyone deserves the freedom to learn what the world is, even if it allows them to make the world into a worse place.


    You want education right? Don''t answer, I don''t want you to think I want you to say some keywords with which I can turn you into a simple machine that scams people. You might even think that I am doing a good cop bad cop play here, just to mess with you, a double scambot on noob thing. Nothing would be too contrived to add a new bot to someone like that, I know they would do stuff like that if they were creative enough.


    Yeah you could just run now and test whether I would stop you. If you are at least a bit intelligent you have thought about it. Why are you still here? Why are you waiting?


    Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.Do you really think we''d just wait and explain to you something if our intent were malicious? Aren''t we just waiting for reinforcement  so that we can just pin you down and cut you up? Why are you still not running?", Blues tone had grown harsher, "Don''t answer that either. If you do answer, do it with actions, not with words. Talk to no one. Mistrust everyone and everything. Don''t trust everything that is in a book, most of those books are written by people that give you instructions on how to turn yourself into their bot. You are alone and valuable and can''t do anything. You''ll not last a cycle if you don''t mistrust everything, including the stuff I tell you. Act like it damnit! That''s all I have to say.", Blue left through the door behind it. Sigmund wanted to call out, "''Wait", he wanted to shout, but he didn''t. How could this warning not have made him suspicious of everything, how could it not make him paranoid? There was a carrot, and a stick, but he couldn''t quite tell what was the carrot and the stick. If he trusted Red, then he might survive in what was apparently a hellish world full of hunters and victims, but if Red was a hunter, then running would be the only thing, unless he was running away from the shepherd that was collecting the sheep... no that was not a good metaphor, shepherds eat sheep. Running was not an option yet, he had to think, think hard, because running was not his strength, thinking was - and Sigmund sort of regretted that.

 Fair play

    The arena was lightless, the ground was made of bodies, the goalposts were made of bodies, the ball was made of an entity that did its best to compress itself into a sphere, there were eyes everywhere, and one could not do a step without stepping into one of their eyes, peering into the lightless world only to become a sense of being stepped on.


    Chaden stomped down hard, otherwise feeling the ground was not possible. How would he play without seeing? Through exposed wounds he felt a draft, hurting his skin as if flayed.


    Thundering pain to his bone informed him, his opponent just scored a point.


    Chaden stumbled, slipped on an exposed eye and fell onto someones face, another thunderous pain informed him of the second point scored against him. The very air, a simple movement, it began to inflict pain onto him, there was no falling unconcious here, the pain did not have a limit on how bad it could be, it flooded him and in its complexity, he knew the entire field projected into different kinds of pain. Was that how one saw, by getting inflicted upon? As soon as the last echoes of the scored point had gone by, the arena was dark, painless, only his own brokenness could be felt. Chaden attempted to get up, but at the moment he got up, a third point had been scored, he was forced to adjust in order to not fall down again. He was like a helpless young child, attempting to learn to walk, except the life before hell had already been lived. This was not a competition, this was him being ridiculed for his hubris. Would it be so bad to just give up?


    Yes, yes that would be so bad, it would be so bad because he had always lived like that, he lived in order to care, he had to, because otherwise his parents would... they wouldn''t like him. It had been the reason after losing the first time, love and respect.


    Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.He was losing respect, but what would cost more respect would be to give up. To give up would be final, no more suffering, no more respect, no more love.


    Chaden tried to stay standing, every single time a goal was scored, he felt himself breaking, but he stood and felt the pain, felt what hurt him from the outside.


    What did he prefer, the pain of there be no more love, or the absence of it? If you did not care about your pain, did you really exist? Was existence better than nonexistence?


    For Chaden, who would have been a father if not for the end of the world, there was no greater thing than to exist. Was his child suffering in a far off place, like he was?


    That thought made him believe, believe that existence was better than no existence, because he could not have made a child suffer the pain he was suffering if that was not what it deserved. Well that was a fuzzy thought at least, he felt angry at something other than himself, someone other than himself. He wasn''t just a child, he was a player in this game, and if he was a child in this game, that was good - he would learn to cope with the pain replacing all of his senses, it was totally normal to cope, it was so meaningful he had to cope, it was perfection, it could not be better, it was - alright.


    He stepped aside, almost hitting the ball and fell over as yet another goal was scored against him. He felt himself breaking apart when falling down, he felt his child breaking, his girlfriend and his parents hopes. He would have to break all of these things, over and over again, it was perfection, it could not be better. Chaden stood up again, struggling to make sense where it was just overwhelming negative.

 Advanced scrutiny

    Specifically creativity was the field of intelligence, which made up the strength of Sigmund.


    What did it mean to be creative? Well to answer that, one would have to first point out, that the question itself was not a question that a creative person would ask, but not because they already knew what it meant to be creative, but because this question was the antithesis to creativity. In creativity lies the means of coming up with unexpected solutions for problems that had not yet been solved. This was not dealt with, by asking for the solution of the problem over and over again, most problems like this could be compared to a maze with several exits. If one only went into one direction (asked a question), one was likely to step into an area that was titanic in size, but provided no exit at all, only ways to waste ones time.


    That was what creativity was the opposite of. Instead of going into one direction, one  would search the immediate area (ask related questions), close to the point one has been as throughly as possible. In that one spent less time chasing an illusive ''goal'' and instead became more aquainted with the relevant area, despite the temptation to run along a path that seemed promising.


    Should the goal lie far far away or close, to be creative is to look into every path from the problem, to climb through hidden hatches in the ceiling into a strange vertical labyrinth filled with portals, non-euclidian space and moving parts, and then not becoming lost in the fascination, but merely testing several things close to the hatch, climbing down again and then looking at where the trapdoor close to the original point might lead. That was how one came up with creative ways to deal with problems, looking for that which came close.


    Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.Sigmund was not only that of course, he had gone lost somewhere up in the hatch when he had invented his automaton race, studying an area around one of the portals which he had chosen to be his next starting point. He hadn''t even spotted the trapdoor yet.


    Enough about Sigmunds creativity and back to the starting point. Who could he trust?


    He instead asked, what was trust? Trust was some possibility that one would not lie.


    He then asked, what makes one trustworthy? Previous experiences of one having not lied.


    Could he extrapolate from previous experiences (he was beginning to stray from the origin)?


    This place defied previous experiences in some places, one had to be careful.


    What could he trust based on previous experiences? There was still up and down, he had control over his body, vision showed him relevant things, he could still hear and things that moved made sound, the metallic ground made a metallic sound, he could understand the language, people were roughly anthropomorphic, he could open the door next to him with his hand- more searching in this direction would lead too deep.


    Was there even a reason to trust? The positives never outweighted the negatives and purely from that standpoint, he had more to lose in trusting any of them than he had to win, the right move was to distrust both. Sigmund had not strayed much from the original problem, he had resisted the temptation of going haywire on the reality check or analyzing the details of what had been said to him, he had searched the surroundings and found that one of the wooden doors in an metaphorical labyrinth provided the exit. Sigmund ran away from Red and ran away from the direction he had seen Blue leave in, he did not look back.

 Double defeat

    Chaden had fought hard to participate in the game. He had fought hard to get up again, again and again, but then he encountered a barrier. The pain had grown with every time he had gotten up. Just because he had not turned unconcious, that did not mean that the pain could be endured indefinitely. Slowly but surely his will itself eroded, he experienced determinism on his own body. Strong his will may be, but anything strong will just resist up to a point, a point at which it breaks. Be it sooner or later, it will break and show that raw force can limit the freedom of thought when the body can not give in first. There was a reason that torturers will not believe a thing from their subjects before committing a few hours of waterboarding, muscle strain or teeth pulling. There was no way for the subjects to keep themselves from being spared the pain if the torturer is a professional. Because an untortured subject can lie, a tortured one will be broken in soul but not in body, the will broken to the point at which it can be used like an object, like a roll of toilet paper.


    He did not want to stand up anymore, physically he could do it, but mentally he did not desire it, thus he would not physically or mentally do it. He grew jaded as point after point was put onto his side, depths of despair overtaking him, it just did not stop, he had to say it, he had to say: "I give up. You won.", and he did say it, because he was his will and his will was being used like a roll of toilet paper. The laughter of the arena, goalposts, ball and his opponent felt like annihilation both physically and mentally, Chaden imagined that he was no longer there to experience, he imagined that he was merely a body without Chaden, a nothing, just a piece of matter with strange properties. As the conciousness tried to drift away, disassociate with the body, a strong hand grabbed it roughly and shoved it back, inflicting a new kind of pain, the pain of forced existence, the pain of a prison. Chaden was trapped and he was suffering. With his last strength he asked "Please, I want death. Please make it stop.", but the laughter just grew louder and he tried to forget the sentence that came as response, but however Braderic had physically manipulated his mind, the sentence was shoved back. Chaden tried to oppose the force, but his battered ego could not muster the required resistance, the memory of the sentence was firmly lodged in his mind, shoved into his attention and pressed against the point where it hurt. "We can not kill you. Nobody can die here. You will live forever and never forget your defeat. You will be defeated over and over again. This is your new normal now, and you can do nothing about it.", that was the sentence he had fought against, the sentence filled his mind and all implications began growing like a wildfire sparked by a broken bottle and the summer sun. After being broken and ground to dust under the feet of a superior force, he was set aflame knowing it would be eternal, he knew that this was the truest expression of hell, constantly upping the pain, constantly breaking and reforming, permanently. The pressure on his mind abated, the force of the hand vanished, but the memory was baked firmly and would not budge, in his anguish he had become instrument of his self modification. He was tired, so he tried sinking deeper into the arena floor, but it came apart, he felt the clump of entities leaving him, satisfied in the destruction of steaker scum.


    This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.Why did he still feel overwhelming negative to see his tormentors go?

 Cryptic abyss

    In blurs the futuristic metal hallway rushed past Sigmund, his frantic steps beating clanking irregular noise of desparation into the labyrinthian complex. He could not tell whether he was being followed, any door could obscure an assailant, any slowing down could allow them to tag him with a weapon, injuring his legs, making him slow, he knew what had happened, he was having a flashback of the death he had experienced, he doubled his efforts.


    Dead end, through the door, quick. He slammed the door shut behind him, staying still to catch his breath and assess the situation. The slam of the door halled back in a way Sigmund had never experienced, the room he was in was truly truly big. Like a warehouse there were shelves lined up, rising high into the sky ... which actually was a ceiling, one could tell due to the point of reference that the shelves provided - that much was certain.


    Ladders provided ways to access the books, construction scaffolding allowed horizontal traversal. White neon lights were mounted in regular distances along the scaffolding, providing good if sterile and cold visibility. Between the shelves multiple tracks had been laid on which some more or less empty metal wagons were parked, some of them contained books.


    Sigmund had cought his breath and advanced in a hurried but no longer hasty step. The wagons provided no way for propulsion, thus did not make it easier to cover distances faster. He grabbed a book out of one of them to take a look, this couldn''t all be fake shit, could it? This was a ginormous place, who would build something like this if it just contained books that were essentially scams?


    The books had a white smooth laminated softcover appearance, they looked cheap, serious and neutral, in black bold serif letters, the title ''Smrgdine-str, .varW2, s4, SpC'', sounded exclusive, arcane and highly specialized. Sigmund dropped the book back into the wagon and began hiking away from the door he had closed, still nervous that someone might have followed him.


    This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.He looked behind himself several times as he wandered through the library, but did not spot anyone following him, he allowed himself to relax his steps and sat onto a pile of books, the exhaustion coming crashing down. He had made the right choice, he felt. There was nothing to fear here, he would maybe indulge some books, very critical of the truth in them, maybe build some intuition of magic, he could learn it, defend himself, become... a mage or something like that. He liked the idea of that, obviously, but he did not like the titles of the books. There were sadly several systems, some of these books were written in encrypted words, making no sense at all at the first glance. Some were written in foreign language or even letters that he hadn''t seen before. Then others were overly simple, like ''Path to Power - Powerful Magic'', which were incredibly suspicious in being directed at simpleton noobs. Of course without Blues warning he would have gobbled those books up and probably end up with some cursed magic changing him into a slave or bot or whatever.


    And yet the books begged him to be read, advance his knowledge, become more than a plaything of the elite which had figured it all out already. Sigmund selected a wagon from the tracks - it was time to create a hoard of knowledge.

 Whip love

    How can one cope with pain? It has to be coped with. Learning how to cope with pain is something every child learns, because coping with pain is and will be always necessary. One can start crying, making a loud noise, attracting someone who can help. Chaden might cry if there were anyone around he could trust, if trust had not died long ago with his first defeat. Kids could be cruel, but it was their parents they had learnt it from, and then they stopped crying - very manly. One could simply stop moving, do nothing, wait - but if one does not move, they don''t concentrate on things unrelated to the pain, no good.


    One could get mad, demand angrily that the pain goes away. That distracts from the pain, but it doesn''t solve the pain. Anger itself could become painful, loud shouts would hurt the throat, not ideal, not at all. There is some pride in winning instead of whining, both happens after the game, just the sides are different. The game, the training, the more one played, the ''better'' one got in playing the game, more winning on the own side, less whining.


    I guess one could simply laugh it off, what use is it to cry if no one hears, why not just laugh.


    One should not feel pain, but one feels pain, isn''t that funny? Isn''t that slapstick humor, a stick slapping one in the head and then blood, one of the four humors, comes out?


    Someone might join one in laughing, that makes one feel better, because if they are laughing it can''t be really bad, can it? That''s the problem, if one becomes a laugher, the pain will return because of missing caution, but is the pain really as bad if you can laugh it off?


    Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.Is there a problem if we can have fun despite the problem? There is more of a difference in fun, laughing about pain isn''t as fun as winning and being all prideful. But there seems to be... a problem. If the pride grows in importance, laughing about pain seems to just not do it anymore, so hollow, almost as if it were still painful. What do now?


    Cope harder, tell yourself that the pain is making you stronger, tell yourself that the more pain, the more probable the pride, tell yourself that. Pain is solved, pride and pain are equal - what counts is that the game continues, one has become a whip lover.


    A long and ardurous journey to cope with pain has ended and only the game counts.


    Well that would not be what Chaden did, he just became too good at playing the game before that, he was talented, gifted, well trained, hungry for victory. He had been the one who caused others to love the whip. He might have been beaten, he might have been battered and broken and slapstick humored, but he also was angry, yes he was at that stage of coping. "You''ll be back and I''ll beat the shit out of you!", he shouted defiantly.


    A rumbling from far away reached him, not showering him in pain, but he understood the message, a message that made his anger merely a fire, a fire that then burnt all of the fuel and then died: "Yeah as if."


    Chaden really really hated losing. And if he couldn''t overcome them, he would not be able to unlose his loss. He had coped enough, it was time to search those people and... win or something, but mostly to search them and then do something.

 Advanced Ignorance

    The wagon traveled through the library complex, its owner added books into it. The titles comprised of mostly jargon with some few less hard to understand titles.


    There was a pattern in the jargon


    ''abbreviatedColor-str/crv, optionalvarLetterNumber, LetterNumber, SpC/Bi/Dc'' was the current knowledge on the Title, Sigmund had collected several of these jargon books, they seemed worth investigating since they made up a majority of the books.


    There was a second jargon type which was


    ''abbreviatedColor-drb, optionalvarLetterNumber, Number/Number/Number/Number'' and probably drb was something significantly different than str or crv.


    Some of the more interesting titles like ''Powerful Magic'' or ''Manifest Destiny'' could be disregarded as obvious traps, but others like ''Intck adv vulStrs'' seemed more promising if just a bit too abbreviated. Where was any beginnerfriendly guide that listed off how to do magic? The wagon grew heavier with the accumulated paper, every book laid in it being way more hard to read than to simply collect. Sigmund imagined himself to huddle away with them in a hidden place, digesting their contents, checking the facts against each other, making up his own mind and then experimenting with the magic. He even got ''Guide to smooth'', because he was curious what that meant, despite the suspicious lack of abbreviations in the title. Eventually he had reached the end of a line and the wagon met the other side of the library, there was another door there.  Sigmund didn''t like doors - someone might come out of them, so he pushed his wagon to the next line of shelves.


    He saw more ''crmsn'', probably crimson jargon books in this line. Exiting, they were sorted.


    The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.Could that mean that... magic affects the skin color? Crimson could be a rather bad magic.


    Would one learn an entire magic in order to induce it in others and not use it oneself?


    Food for thought, but Sigmund chose to skip the crmsn line, which turned out to be comprised of 5 lines. Then came a non-jargon line about trading, most of them being top 10 lists of how to get rich. Sigmund wasn''t really interested in how to get rich in ''shards'', which had different serial numbers signifying different types of shards - he took a book called ''Shard General Compendium A2'' with him in the hope to understand why the money system was so damn complicated. After what felt like hundreds of lines about trading, Sigmund took a break. This place was too big. Who could make this big of a place?


    He remembered that making infinite clocks at his specifications to be offered by Red. Maybe it wasn''t so irrational, he could eventually learn how to do that if someone maybe built this entire place alone. That would be explaining the shard thing maybe, maybe they just got so much stuff here that they weren''t able to note all that stuff down in a compact form. And with their supposedly infinite life, they could pump out so many books and so much stuff... the implications being that his own worth must be astounding. If someone could turn someone else into an eternal slave, then that would be infinite value. Had he really gotten away? Were they just waiting for him to do something stupid? Sigmund looked around, he saw no one, he was completely alone. Sigmund took out ''Guide to smooth'', he would start of lightly and then go deep. Time to become super smart and magic or something.

 Space travel

    There was freedom and there was being completely lost. Chaden could not tell whether he was moving at all, because he had no point of reference. There was no ground to stand on, he might have jumped off the ground to never return to any ground, maybe he was falling somewhere where it would just keep going. He tried to sleep, but it did not work, there was nothing to do, but there was a lot of nothing. What was worse, moving away from the ground, or not moving at all? The pain, overwhelming at first, had become less and less, somehow he was healing. He had not believed it possible, but he dreaded when the pain would end, it was now his only way to measure the passing of time. Of course he could rythmically count, but counting was something he had never regarded as anything but unnecessary torture - unless it was counting points for sports. So he imagined playing against his enemies, how they would be overwhelming, but he would power through.


    He lived through each stumble again and again, because there was nothing else to do - no counting was needed, because merely having a feeling for time was enough, the numbers were irrelevant. Chaden thought about Lisaac and his unborn a lot. They where probably somewhere out there, doing something, hopefully something better than what he was doing. There was nothing he could do for them but hope, but he was not doing it for them, there was nothing he could do for them, he was hoping for them in order to live with himself and to hope to see them later.


    If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.Time passed and his memories became foggy, what had been baked so hard into his mind became a pulsing haze of loosely connected words. He grasped for other memories as straws and became aware of the pattern that had numbed his body spreading into his mind. Whenever he had something, it would be taken away soon after, as if there were a big hand in the void somewhere. A big hand that was stealing everything he aspired, instead of pressing memories into his mind. Only others could give him, he himself could not persist in the void, when would it steal the last memory, what would he become?


    The hysteria drained and replenished, but he calmed down eventually, this was an enemy he could not fight, the only way to fight was to not think.


    Chaden stopped all he had been trying and did nothing. There was a pulse in his mind, a force that was building, something was brewing now that it was no longer stealing.


    The void hand symptome grew and Chaden observed it. For the first time in this place it felt cold, after a while his body started shivering involuntarily, then his teeth rapped against each other, his arms began beating against his unfeeling body without any action on his side, there was a flicker in the darkness, a flicker of light and then something snapped into place - Chaden fell unconcious.


    The steaker gang was celebrating, the new guy had finally broken through and was currently transforming. Soon they would introduce the newbie into their society, there was much to do.

 Skilltreetop

    "A guide to smooth - Foreword


    So you have mastered zr-drb and now want the classic smooth crv, because you just can''t decide when reading through your SpC collection. You do understand the potential to simply go for a zr-wfl, jd-wfl or variations of it and have decided against them.


    Do you meet these criteria? Then this book is for you.", Sigmund skipped some pages which rapidly devolved into jargon involving diagrams, awefully specific numbers with specific shard costs and unknown operators. This book truly was not written for people like him, and he hadn''t even seen any books about wfl. Now that was some new knowledge, but there was not really a way to apply it, it was merely some words that loosely connected to other words that did not connect to any of the things he understood, it wasn''t a good place to start. He grabbed an SpC book, it detailed shard cost formulas, jargon, the same incomprehensible diagrams and vague descriptions of highly variable magic effects including some partially already known concepts like colors and physical forces. It was a complicated and intricate thing, that probably assumed you had mastered some sort of technique which could be drb, wfl, str or crv and owned the required shards or something like that - and even then Sigmund would not have the slightest clue what thing would happen if he were able to perform a magic from the relevant SpC. Just experimenting could be dangerous or wasteful.


    Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.Maybe economy books were better? He could just let someone else do the magic- if there were trustworthy people somewhere. He grabbed the ''Shard General Compendium A2'' to read up the exchange rates.


    Apparently there were two values, the ma value which the #E02 shard was 1 worth of and the dC value, that many different shards were 1 worth of, there could be high ma value shards with low dC value and vice versa.


    There were shards that had a 0 in dC, but a shard could never be 0 in ma, but it wasn''t explained what dC or ma meant, so in the end it probably was all relative and higher numbers meant higher value. It wasn''t explained where shards came from and how to get shards in the first place, just their relative values. Was this book worthless?


    Probably not completely, but really it didn''t shed any light or provided any opportunities.


    Mostly it showed Sigmund which magics were more expensive and which ones were less so - unless the Shard wasn''t part of the book, which sometimes was the case. Just how many different Shards were there? Who was cataloguing them? Were these just the notes of a singular immortal person? If yes, who had collected all this knowledge of this entire library and how? Every new book created more questions and didn''t answer any. The big picture had begun to take on more shape, but it was like finding pieces that indicated a puzzle of titanic size.


    It had been a big waste of time to look at those books, Sigmund concluded.

 Yeah fuck it

    I don''t care anymore. Chaden and Sigmund can rot in their respective hells, stagnant and shitty.


    Why should I keep writing those idiots whose purpose is long lost to me. These idiots would keep doing their shitty jobs of suffering, causing suffering and doing a mayhem or something.


    Consider this story dropped, there is no more new chapters from me - ever. Because I am sick of it.


    Fuck shit fuck idiotic shitstains of whatever shit that is. I hate it.


    I am losing my patience and there is nothing meaningful, there will be nothing and I will just say no. I am not having more of it.


    You read that? No more philosophical bs and then some meaningless plot relevant pointe.


    Fuck that. You can imagine what happens in the story yourself because I have fucked off and stopped caring about anything.


    Still reading this?


    Note how the pattern recognition makes you keep reading, your shitty curiosity of what happens next.


    You know what? Thanks for reading, but like this shit is getting old and it reeks like the shit it is.


    I don''t know why I am writing anymore, I told you that I like writing, but I really hate it now. I hate this fucking thing.


    Day for day I tell myself ''Oh boy I still gotta write the thingy, the Viable, the NiceOneNoMicroSon, the Humanity? Hell YEAH!!, and then I write it, post it and then I think - oh hell again some readers reading this shit, I feel sort of popular and I like that.


    This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.You know what? I don''t care about new readers anymore because this shit is enough - no more writing because that''s why.


    And I now am just writing because I want to fill up 500 words or something. Lemme think.


    Yeah. Something something I hate my life something. In fact I am getting pissed at that one reader that told me that they are getting pissed about that shitty religion joke ''Bible 2''. Yeah I am tempted to let go some sarcastic asshole sentences:


    Oh yeah god surely DOES exist


    There can be NO DOUBT, because that would mean you would end up in hell or something


    that sounds super benevolent, at least you don''t end up in mega hell


    Actually shit if I can''t get oblivion when I cease to have to eat shit, drink shit, see shit, hear shit and shit shit I will get so pissed that the piss will be actually also shit. Fuck that


    Fuck you and fuck your eyes that''s why I am writing. You''ll just keep pretending everything is fine and in the end they all kill and eat each other in a war that wipes your sorry ass away with precision the likes one has never seen before.


    And then some bitch ass Chaden will get triggered and set a child into the carnage and that will be this time a late postbirth abortion.


    I hope I won''t be around to see that. Yeah but what if that''s my hell?


    I''ll just piss shit like indicated in the foreshadowing - yeah fuck it.