A New World, an immersive game experience

Chapter 201: Magic and Mana (1)

"That would be nice, I also want to ask them what magic is," Eldrian replied, believing that they must know since they made it. They should at least have some theories seeing as they had been working on it for years.

"You can ask them, but you won't really get much of an answer. Come, let's go. I actually have a good friend who has his fingers in all types of things. He is not really part of a single department and should be able to answer your questions the best, at least broadly. When you meet others later you will have some knowledge to back you."

Eldrian quickly agreed and followed Gengxin as he took him to the fourth floor of the same building. The building he stayed in actually had a total of six, Eldrian only knew what the first two were about. He also did not see much on the way, other than hallways.

Following Gengxin he entered a brightly lit room, the furthest wall made entirely out of windows. "This is where executives live, if they want to stay on-site that is. Think of it as a hotel, similar to the room you are staying in. Only they have an entire luxurious flat to themselves."

"So is your friend someone really high up?" Eldrian asked as he looked at all the expensive furniture and state-of-the-art TV set installed in one corner of the living room. The floorplan was an open style and also allowed one to see the fancy kitchen from the living room.

"No, not really. He just brought a couple of really important matters to light." Gengxin replied as he led Eldrian to the right-side of the room, where a keypad stood. Typing a pin into it, and then placing his finger on a sensor, the wall in front of them slid in on itself and revealed what looked like a simple bedroom. "He doesn't like it when just anyone can come into his room," Gengxin replied even before Eldrian could ask.

"Is that Gengxin?" A man in his late thirties with long black hair shouted, standing up from the table he had been working on. "What brings you here, and who is this?"

"The person who brings me here, Eldrian. He wants to talk with you about the ANW project. Let's just say he is really invested."

The man turned to Eldrian and smiled, "Is that so? What type of investment?"

"Introductions first!" Gengxin quickly interrupted, "This is Constantin Eldrian, ask him what you want. I'll be heading back now." Gengxin said, turning around just as he started walking, "Oh right, he has signed a non-disclosure so you can just tell him everything. At least all the basics of the simulation, don't go into too much detail." The last part was added as a warning, Constantin not having much of a limiter to his words.

Once Gengxin left, Eldrian returned his attention to Constantin and extended his hand, which Constantin promptly shook in a vice grip. "Nice to meet you,"

"So what interests?" Constantin asked while Eldrian nursed his hand which was reddened from the shake.

"Many, but mostly why the company treats it like it doesn't matter," Eldrian replied.

"It does matter, but only on a scientific level. I don't think Gengxin told you who I am right?" To which Eldrian nodded, "Good, that means you won't have a preconceived notion."

"Do you know why we made the game at the start? Do you even know how we made it?" Eldrian shook his head to show he did not, other than the brief explanation giving during their court hearing. "As I thought, you might think at this stage that we made it to try and discover magic. But that is a bunch of bull, though it is what the current focus is on."

"Before, when Miracle was just a budding company with barely any backing, they only had one goal. To figure out the unknown. Naturally this is still very much at the company's core, but it has become distorted with time as it grew."

"What do you mean?"

"Simple, the game, was not made to be a game. Rather it was made as a simulation, to see what would happen if we arranged for the most extreme circumstances to all exist at the same time. Our first aim was to see if such a galaxy could even exist. It could, though it all had to be kept in balance constantly."

"The second aim was to try and figure out more of all the unknowns in our world. Such as antimatter, dark matter, anti-mass particles, dark energy, spacetime, black holes, and so forth. We hoped to be able to see how these forces interact right at the edge, before one of them would rule over the others."

While Constantin's words were basic, Eldrian struggled to follow where this leading. Still, he listened attentively, hoping to make sense of it all once everything was said.

"What we ended up with was an extremely interesting place. For example, the planet where the game takes place on is stretched in such a manner, with different theoretical objects added here and there, to give it a massive size while keeping its gravity very close to that of Earth. It is not made out of magical stuff as was said in the court meeting. Rather it is made of things that should not exist, but technically could if conditions were perfect."

"In any case, this all does not matter too much. You should just know that we tried to figure out how the fundamental principles of our universe would function at their extremes. This was the aim of GAIA, and how it all started."

"We then started shifting our view of this place we had created, hoping to marvel and discover things in a blooming of knowledge. Instead, we quickly found ourselves unable to observe anything as GAIA needed all its power just to maintain the balance of the place it had created. But with time we found this specific planet with very strange readings. Though all planets, stars, and moons had strange readings. This one was far stranger and we just knew it was special."

"Wanting to observe it better we created more AIs, once we found a way to allocate more data to GAIA. Giving it enough spare energy to allow these additions without losing its balance. The AIs were made in the form of gods, as you know. We gave each of them a task. To observe and stimulate the environment. This should sound similar to what you heard at the court hearing."

"Yeah, I remember that he also said you told these AI to make all the beings on the planet," Eldrian replied.

"This is only partly true. We let these AI control bubbles of areas on the planet, to perform their own experiments and return the data to us. Finding ourselves unable to just look at how things were made as the amount of information was simply too much. We could only see the effects of everything. While these AI could stimulate the environment, they could not do much more. We couldn't figure out how things worked, only how it reacted."

"Thus while we confirmed that the planet had other fundamental forces, other than the standard four we know, we did not know what they were. Observing the world we determined that one was mana, and another magic. Strangely these two are certainly connected, yet not the same thing. Wanting to know more we determined to send in trained personal to explore this place."

"They are what we now call game testers, but rather they were more explorers of the unknown at the start. The start really was not pleasant too, hence those people are heralded as heroes inside the company. At that stage, we had yet to make another AI, the system. Hence there was no pain reduction, no system protection, no translation. Due to this things quickly turned ugly when they met a native of the planet. We had to quickly stop the tests and first ensure a way of protecting them, naturally, this took a couple of tries."

Eldrian flinched as he heard this, quickly thinking of the goblin caves and other rumors he had heard of devils and demons. Being helplessly in their mercy would certainly have been terrible for those early explorers.

"Thanks to them, and our observations, we have an inkling of how magic and mana works. We even managed to bypass the need to actually understand it."

"How is that possible?" Eldrian asked, unable to accept there was a way to bypass something without understanding it.

"Due to the nature of mana and magic. These two are inherently related, but not the same. You see magic is a special force, while mana is a special free energy." Constantin stopped, "It is hard to explain without actually seeing the raw data."

"The best way to explain would be that magic is telekinesis that works on mana with but a thought. Being able to interact with this free energy and change its form. With time, as the natives developed and spell modules developed, we could simply task the system to interact with mana when a spell module was envisioned. Using the spell module as a trigger, and letting the system actually do the connecting as it can affect the world in small amounts. Leading to the fact that our people did not need to connect with mana themselves to learn magic."

"This naturally led to a problem," Eldrian said with a thinking frown. It sounded similar to the problem most races had. How they were unable to use dynamic magic because they can't truly control mana. Only in this case, people can't even will mana themselves.

"Yes, we believe we lack magic. Or simply that no one has the talent to use magic, even though it seems to be a fundamental part of all beings. This is more likely since some natives are unable to use magic too, even though their environment is perfect for it. While ours is horrid."