A Bit of Boring Technical Stuff~

"I'm planning to ditch you and go solo."

When Wang Shui casually said this to Shino, his mind elsewhere, the atmosphere in the little living room suddenly grew heavy.

For a moment, Shino couldn't express how she felt. She didn't even answer right away, just looked at Wang Shui. She vaguely felt that this guy, who spent all day thinking about slacking off and fooling around and knew a pile of useless things, might not be joking.

Why? We were happily doing little craft projects together just last night.

"Of course, there's a reason... I could even explain it to you in detail, but after thinking for a few minutes, I reached a conclusion-we're not the same kind of person."

Shino had already sat down across from Wang Shui, waiting for him to spin his tale.

"I'm not a strong person. I don't enjoy fighting. Of course, a fight I know I can win feels great, but even a little risk makes me tense, so I'd rather grow stronger slowly, without being so reckless about it."

"But you're different, Shino. You like adventure and fighting. You like challenging yourself, and you have your own thoughts and opinions. You dare to take the initiative and decide your own fate. Honestly, I envy you, but that kind of thing has to be cultivated early on. It's already too late for me."

Wang Shui sounded like a washed-up middle-aged man crushed by life.

"Right now, I have something more important to do than maintaining frontline combat strength. For a long time to come, I won't have any spare time to level. I don't want to keep you tied to my side. There's no point in that. I think you should go experience this world instead. You really like it here, don't you?"

Shino fell silent for a long time, and Wang Shui wasted that time with her.

"Are you... not going to protect me anymore?"

Tsk, don't show me your vulnerable side and make me blame myself. Has Little Shino already grown enough to know how to use psychological weapons?

"I'm only leaving the front lines, not the land of the living. We can still meet up in some major town when we have time."

Shino said nothing more. After spending some time with Wang Shui, she knew that if he said this, he had already made his decision. He might even have finished making his backup arrangements.

"You don't need to worry about me. You, on the other hand, would be courting death if you went leveling somewhere dangerous with your feelings all tangled up. I found you a new teammate this morning, a lone-wolf female player who solos. Remember the purple-haired girl with the giant scythe at the first-floor boss fight? Her name's Mito. She recently lost her partner and has been soloing."

Shino stood up, looking displeased.

"If you're going to ditch me, stop sticking your nose into my business."

"My mistake. I should've finished arranging everything before running my mouth. Just take it as a suggestion. Mito's understanding of the game and her skills are no worse than mine. No, they should be far better. She's the kind of expert with both talent and dedication. It's hard for girls to find parties, right? Having an expert looking out for you wouldn't hurt."

As he spoke, Wang Shui sent Shino a trade request.

"What are you doing?"

"Just a little breakup compensation~"

Annoyed that he had taken verbal liberties with her, Shino saw the enormous quantity of materials and the huge sum of 200,000 Cor in the trade window-the five jars of black powder weren't there.

"...You're not the sort to secretly kill yourself, are you?"

"Don't worry, I'm not giving it to you for free. I just don't need money for now. These things will only keep depreciating if I hold on to them. I'm investing in you, and you can invest an appropriate amount in Mito to ensure both your combat strength and safety. When I return, you'll be responsible for carrying me through leveling and paying me back double. How about this: for every five labyrinth floors cleared, the repayment doubles."

Shino paid no attention to the doubling. Her first reaction was:

"You'll be gone that long?"

Wang Shui was suddenly at a loss for words too, then nodded very casually.

"I chose the path of the weak. Of course it'll take me more time. Isn't that fair?"

Naturally, Wang Shui's answer wasn't referring to the world of SAO,

so Shino didn't understand, but she wasn't in the mood to ask more now. "In that case, I'd like regular updates confirming that you're still alive," Shino said with a touch of coldness.

"You can check your friends list or send me messages, though I might not see them right away. Some places block communications."

As they spoke, the trade completed. Shino suddenly felt her body grow heavy, leaving her almost unable to move-she was overencumbered.

"Heh~" Wang Shui grinned mischievously after his prank succeeded. "I moved the storage chest into a corner of the room last night. First, you have to guess where it is, then move over there while severely overencumbered. Ha, if there's nothing else, I'll be going. Teleport, Town of Beginnings."

The blue crystal in his hand turned Wang Shui into blue-green motes of light, leaving only a speechless Shino in the room.

After a stretch of silence, a system window appeared before Shino:

[Player Half a Heavenly Book has left the party]

Appearing in the first-floor plaza, Wang Shui didn't linger. He found a random corner in an alley and teleported again.

His new location was a room that didn't exist on the map. It was only the size of an ordinary classroom, with an overall futuristic, metallic-gray decor. Several computers stood along two walls, and there were sofas inside for resting.

"This is where the development team used to run tests, a space they made for themselves. The computers here directly use some of the server's processing resources, but their storage paths are already linked to your NerveGear. The one in the corner is a test environment. It can simulate a very small area for testing code."

Akihiko Kayaba, who had already been working in the room, gave a brief introduction, then began assigning tasks.

"I've already given you all the materials. Filling out the lore and creating the related documentary items are your top priorities. The interface manual is at the top, and all the computers have the development tool installed. It's called [SAO Edit Tool]. Why don't you get used to it first?"

Wang Shui nodded and picked a nearby office chair. The instant he sat down, long-absent phantom pains returned to his lower back and shoulders.

How nostalgic.

Wang Shui checked the operating system first. It wasn't Windows or Linux, but a homemade windowed operating system based on Windows concepts. It was quite easy to pick up. If it was only for game development, there was no need to worry too much about versatility or security.

The development tool hadn't copied quite so much. Its various simple effect buttons and function libraries were very intuitive. The only problem was that the game itself was too massive. Extracting a single module revealed an enormous number of lines referencing other things and being referenced in turn. This wasn't a matter of decoupling anymore; the sheer scale itself was the problem.

Fortunately, Wang Shui had also worked in game maintenance back when he was a low-level code monkey, and that game's systems had been more mature and larger. Although he had only made event pages, added reward items, and the like, he at least had some overall familiarity with large games.

Wang Shui could be considered lucky. At his previous workplace, several senior colleagues had held things together and answered his questions, keeping the game's systems very orderly. Now SAO had the genius Akihiko Kayaba holding things together too, so Wang Shui could ask questions directly and receive one-on-one guidance from a master.

Of course, there was no need to write code yet. The immediate priority was creating a history for SAO. Wang Shui used a virtual machine to connect to a bastion host, accessed the outside internet through it, then quietly began gathering the knowledge he needed.

Guns, Germs, and Steel, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, Capital, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, Beyond Left and Right, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.

These were only some of the sociology books. Wang Shui also dug up a small number of psychology works along the way. These certainly weren't the full fruits of modern social-science scholarship. What Wang Shui needed was some dross, and neutral theories that analyzed that dross.

Fortunately, the internet was a good place for sharing knowledge, and many resources could be obtained quickly and for free. If he needed paid literature or relatively recent papers, he would have to get the boss to open his wallet.

Under Akihiko Kayaba's puzzled gaze, Wang Shui began skimming through the books at tremendous speed, turning pages extremely quickly. At first, Kayaba thought he was searching for specific information, but he soon realized that wasn't the case. After going through the first book, Wang Shui closed his eyes briefly in thought, then immediately opened the next and scrolled through the document from beginning to end.

"What are you doing?" Kayaba couldn't help asking.

"Boss, could you please focus on your own work? I'm not yet able to split my attention and explain things to you. I'm just reviewing this knowledge. My memory wasn't particularly good the last time I read these books, so I need to memorize the text again and read commentary and explanations by leading scholars too. Time's tight. I have to thoroughly digest dozens of books within half a day."

Kayaba fell quiet. Although what Wang Shui said was very... arrogant? He actually understood. Yes, he had experienced similar things himself. When studying interdisciplinary subjects, there had been things he mastered in only a few hours, such as so-called programming.

To him, programming was simply an ability that came naturally. He understood mathematics, those algorithms, and the principles of logic, so learning to program had been like learning to play a board game. Once he understood the framework and rules under which programs ran, understood data structures, and read about the principles of computer architecture, he had mastered programming.

When he learned board games, he first understood large numbers of recorded games and variations, then learned the rules. This certainly couldn't be called genius, merely accumulated knowledge coming to fruition and allowing him to draw connections.

Wang Shui wasn't a genius either. He was an awakened one. His [Thinking] attribute was 1.88, making his thinking, learning, and computational abilities almost twice the high end of human capability. Combined with his talent enhancing his learning ability, he had already studied many miscellaneous fundamentals during the six months since changing jobs. Thus, when reviewing old knowledge, he could quickly master it through associative memory.

Just as with Kayaba, the more knowledge Wang Shui possessed, the easier it became to learn other things.

By the afternoon, Wang Shui had begun editing and fleshing out the lore documents.

The existing lore was relatively simple. Apart from the dark elves, forest elves, and fallen elves, there was only a little plot concerning the nine united human kingdoms and the dwarven realm. Just simple faith and wars for survival, Western-style thinking stripped to its barest bones: civilization's progress meant the emergence of feudal dynasties.

But now there were new changes. A mixed-blood elf named Watt improved early waterwheels, windmills, and early steam engines, giving mechanics its start. Next came advances in fuels and materials. The alchemical sage Jabir ibn Hayyan and others standardized chemical experiments and created many technical terms, followed by blah blah blah.

Wang Shui copied many names from the internet, then divided their accomplishments among many people while extending the development timeline, creating an arduous age of seeking knowledge through pioneering hardship.

What immediately followed wasn't the benefits and social progress brought by the Industrial Revolution, but destruction.

Yes, cheap, efficient weapons allowed ordinary people to band together and kill high-level elites, thereby threatening and overthrowing feudal rule before descending into self-destructive infighting. This drove the elven races and their civilizations to the brink of extinction.

Then religion saved them! The sacred great trees saved them! He was making it up anyway, and the two trees had magic, so writing it this way was more scientific.

Next came the [Earth Severance] incident. He would write that the priestess had actually received a revelation from the great trees and sacrificed her life to cut the earth into circular pieces of land, then stack them into the floating castle-"Aincrad."

The great trees didn't hate technology, but they didn't want cheap violence in the hands of the blindly ignorant. Such people cared only about immediate gain, and upon obtaining weapons called "guns," their first choice was to plunder others.

Naturally, there was more than one account of these "historical facts," and they couldn't be described from a single individual's perspective. Wang Shui spent a considerable amount of time describing them from the differing perspectives of twenty-two historical figures. Of course, these famous figures were all fabricated.

Wang Shui gave them different personalities and placed them in different eras. For instance, how would a visionary in the early industrial age consider the value of machinery? How would rulers treat firearms after they began to flourish? There were also judgments from different contemporaries, and these people's assessments of their predecessors.

Their views weren't all the same, and some would even completely refute others. Some would be extremely conservative, while others would turn extreme. Ultimately, however, Wang Shui used historical facts to tell present-day rulers what kind of destruction would result from allowing firearms and technological development to run unchecked.

Guiding thought and instilling ideology were very delicate work. Wang Shui even specifically found information on the current elven rulers and personally monitored their lives and administrative work, building psychological profiles of them and designing different hooks for each.

As Wang Shui designed these documents, he also reported to Akihiko Kayaba and discussed how to get the NPCs to discover them and guide them to keep exploring. At the same time, he laid out the industrial age's technology tree and eliminated a great many detours to make industry efficient and well-developed.

Over ten days of work, Wang Shui went almost four or five days at a time before sleeping for a few hours, showing tremendous personal initiative. In a FullDive world, purely mental labor really wasn't constrained by a body of flesh and blood.

The looks Kayaba gave Wang Shui grew increasingly strange, while Wang Shui's feelings toward FullDive technology grew increasingly-pained.

If this thing spread and those capitalists learned that people could work continuously for 120 hours using only their brains... As a chosen wage slave, Wang Shui wanted nothing more than to destroy this technology.

Kayaba's progress was also smooth. He had completed the framework for integrated systems covering new weapon types, resistances, consumables, Sword Skills, and so on. Only specific item information and numerical values remained. He had also imposed restrictions on rapid-fire automatic weapons, though Wang Shui still had to fill in the lore for those.

All of this was still preparation. Integrating these things into the game's systems bit by bit and testing them until they worked correctly would be the bulk of the work. In fact, much of the time spent developing programs went not into planning, but into the ongoing process of coding, testing, and revision.

The more complex a system, the more unexpected bugs would arise when new features or data were added.

Before officially starting to code, Wang Shui requested leave for the first time after ten consecutive days of work. He went to let Shino know he was safe. In the surveillance footage, Shino's mood had been growing increasingly irritable lately. He needed to go out and let her vent, or she might get herself killed.

What? Surveillance? No, no, it was just that a screen happened to appear there, that was all.