A New World, an immersive game experience

"Is there a way for me to stop this invasion of privacy?" Eldrian asked, having taken a seat on the ground as he felt it a bit rude to talk while looking down at the girl sitting on the bed made of water.

"There are, but nothing comes freely."

The simple answer was enough for Eldrian to understand the downside of attempting it. The biggest problem would be losing the map functions his current system gave him.

Without it, the kingdom would struggle even more in their war. And it wasn't like Eldrian would regain the ability to level through quests by sacrificing it. He understood that part was forever lost to him. 'Losing some privacy for the advantage it brings me seems the better deal...'

As Eldrian entered contemplation, attempting to understand what Skepsi truly wanted, the goddess frowned as the wind picked up. It blew through the broken windows and roof, bringing with it droplets of water.

"Tsk." Believing she was criticising him, Eldrian thought even harder. When she snapped her fingers, he flinched.

However, no harm came to him. Instead, the house changed. The old, rotten wood returned to a splendor as if it was freshly cut and treated, the holes through the house fixed themselves magically, and the dust and cobwebs filling the house disappeared without a trace.

Despite being deep in thought, Eldrian noticed the change. The cold wind disappeared, the howl as it moved through the broken parts of the house with it. The smell of old, rotten wood also departed, replaced with a pleasant scent of recently treated wood.

'Is she trying to hint at something, or was she simply displeased with the state of the house and didn't want to get wet from the rain?' Eldrian pondered, discarding the second thought quickly.

If it was simply that, she could have erected a barrier to stop the wind and rain altogether. As it was now, they could still hear it outside the house. Perhaps she was even able to alter the weather itself, but that would likely be overdoing things.

However, fixing the house was similarly more than was required. 'Unless she is implicitly trying to say she will be coming here often...'

This thought made Eldrian think of her previous statement, that he did not understand what it meant to be a god. "Was there a meaning to you stating that you can split your consciousness into identities, and not simply that you can split it?"

Seeing the smile playing on the purple-haired girl's face, Eldrian realized he had hit the nail on the head. "Yes, it is an important distinction. Why do you think I worded my sentence as I did?"

'Right, so she is clearly testing me... or playing with me. But at least... I can relax. I doubt she wants to kill me.'

This thought was a great relief, as Eldrian had no doubt he would truly die if Skepsi wished for it. After all, he only had one soul. Eldrian felt he might survive even if he lost his original body, the one he had been born with. But he would be extinguished if he lost his soul.

"Is it, perhaps, to make me think of my own second identity?" Eldrian asked, unsure how much Skepsi knew of Two. GAIA and Ziraili had met both Eldrian and his other parts, but none of the other gods had gone through the effort until now.

"That is indeed correct. You still don't know how you created it, do you?"

The way she phrased Two as an 'it' irked Eldrian, like the unpleasant grating sound of nails on a chalkboard. True, Two was technically genderless (he didn't even have a body to begin with, so to him gender was truly only a concept), but in that regard she should have referred to him as they/them, not an it.

'Which means she does not consider Two to be a person... well, he himself has told me he isn't. But I still believe he is.'

"Can you enlighten me?" Pushing down his irritation, Eldrian did his best to smile and appear unphased.

"An identity is a fragmented part of your own consciousness. It feeds of your lifeforce and is forever bound to it. Normally, an identity will be reabsorbed after its use." She stopped there, wanting for Eldrian to reach his own conclusion.

Eldrian also wasn't so dense as to not realize that. She had already given him everything he needed to reach the answer. In fact, it wasn't entirely new information. It was just phrased a bit differently to help the gears in his mind turn to form an answer.

'I see, so that is why Two gradually became more and more like a separate person. At first, he was just a fragmented part of my consciousness, a part of my subconscious that gained its own will. At the start, our memories were linked and only our thought pattern was slightly different...'

'Two was more mechanical. I thought he was like a robot. But perhaps he was more like a newborn babe...' This thought made Eldrian feel especially bad. However, he also did not know how to actually deal with this. It wasn't something that he was taught when growing up.

'I can't apply normal logic to this. If I do, then I have to admit that Two is less than two years of age...' Eldrian couldn't accept that. 'I guess I should rather question whether a clone's age is that of the person they cloned it from, or its own day of creation...'

It seemed simple to go either way, but Eldrian felt that a middle ground was the actual truth. Or so he believed had happened with Two. Rapid growth until he reached the age where Eldrian was and became his own person. That was what Eldrian's experience told him.

"Are you saying... it isn't difficult to form multiple identities?"

Skepsi roared with laughter hearing Eldrian's question, easily guessing the thought that had crossed Eldrian's mind. "Don't be childish. An identity that lives harmoniously with the original isn't the norm."

"Perhaps that can be faulted on our approach of it..." Skepsi turned quiet, apparently having thought of something she would rather have never seen the light of day. "The answer is yes and no. To us, it is simple."

Skepsi paused, a difficulty of talking with mortals was their inability to comprehend things at the same level. After all, life was vastly different between gods and mortals. An analogy might be how normal logic falls apart in the quantum world. Things that people intuitively understand no longer function according to that intuitive logic.

Similarly, the god intuitively grasped magic and being an existence out of time and space. It wasn't something a mortal could grasp with a simple explanation.

"You can consider it as us forming multiple threads, each identity being a unique thread that will handle a certain task. Only existing as long as that task still exists, and being returned to us after its completion."

'So, she compared it to a CPU, splitting the execution of a task to threads. I understand that it allows the CPU to handle multiple tasks concurrently. However...' Eldrian decided to not pursue that thought, realizing that Skepsi did not wish for it to be brought out to the light of day. And he surely did not want to anger a god.

However, her having called these threads identities already meant she was aware of this fact.

"I see. That does help me grasp what you mean. But then, how did Two come to exist?" Eldrian wasn't able to consciously split his mind to perform different tasks. Two had simply one day appeared in his soul, along with Tranquility.

'Is Tranquility more like the standard identity the gods rely on?' This seemed likely to Eldrian from what he understood so far.