Guild Wars

｢Boundless System-wide Announcement

Welcome to Update 3 of Boundless!

A few changes have been made to the core system to enhance gameplay while some new mechanics have been introduced. Please check the changelog below to verify;

- Event Generation

- Item Projection

- Player Forums

- Genetic Compatibility

- Tier 3 Realism

- World Expansion (Mapped Zones increased)

- Item Limitation

- Resource Stat Quantification - Level 1

- Marriage System opened.｣

Upon re-entering Boundless the next day, every player in the world saw this menu before them. However, only the Evil Trio could fully understand the effects and ramifications of all these things in full.

There was once a time where they feared the effects of reincarnation and disrupting the timeline, but they had long dispersed that fear and had begun to strut about with confidence.

That lack of fear and respect towards the butterfly effect directly led to this consequence.

More than half of these new features were from future Updates!

However, the Evil Trio were not bothered. Even before they reached 100%, Draco had long theorized that they would have gone to the sci-fi world by the time Update 3 or 4 came about.

For now, it was time to assess the specific changes and see how they differed from their memory.

The first was Event Generation. This was something from Update 6, when players had reached the minimum threshold of Rank 5 and could display a healthy amount of power and wealth.

At the time, the players had become so strong that there was no easy way for them to level up anymore. Despite their power, they were mostly land-locked like the NPCs and couldn't conquer the seas like the current Umbra could, despite their power.

So how were they supposed to level up with competition higher and competent enemies scarcer?

Say hello to Event Generation!

It was nothing complex, basically the literal meaning when you first looked at it. It was the ability for a competent player, upon satisfying some conditions, to make the AI generate an event that would be either on an Area, Continent, or World level!

We had already seen such a thing in action when Elle had hosted her livestream in the Demon Realm and when Draco had punished all the impudent Rank 7s who had attacked the Vita Kingdom.

The conditions to fulfill were not harsh, but they were not easy. There were two ways one could generate an Event and each of them had required different things from the player involved.

The first type was free generation. This was where a player generated and Event with no cost to their person, the AI bore all the cost and provided the rewards.

The requirements for this were stringent. One had to be in the Top 100 of the Universal Rankings to even be qualified to generate even a basic Area Event. The Top 50 were able to generate a Continent Event and only the Top 10 could generate a World Event.

That wasn't all, one also had to have partaken in an interesting event or caused something of interest that the AI could bounce off to generate the Event. It had to be something exemplary and really worthwhile.

The second type was paid generation, which was basically what Elle had done. A player who was in any of the Area, Continental and World Leaderboards could announce an Event that was sponsored by them. As for the Events type, that would be related to the leaderboard they were on.

This one was straight forward and very rare in the previous timeline. However, given the monetary situation of the playerbase in this timeline it would likely be far more frequent.

Event Generation had been important in the previous timeline for many reasons, but in this one, it was just something of interest. Umbra were about to conquer and unify the world, what was the point of such things?

The next thing was a much loved feature from Update 4. It was something that had initially taken the world by storm in the previous timeline, and the Evil Trio were sure it would do the same in this one.

Item Projection!

This was something that was experimental technology in even CERN, but the AI casually unveiled it and blew the world away. It was basically the ability to project items from reality into the game, and items from the game into reality.

The introduction of Item Projection was what led to the talks of Boundless becoming the second world of humanity in the previous timeline. Before that, and even in this timeline, everyone had treated it as just the latest VR simulator that could be used to do various things like have sex, train warriors and some other things.

But even then, most people and companies did not invest much except to take advantage of the 4x time dilation. National armies trained their troops in Boundless loosely, but apart from that they were not really invested into the world itself.

They knew Boundless was valuable, but if you asked them, many wouldn't even know the basic info of that world. It was just a tool really, and the only companies that invested in it where entertainment companies that made use of the Intermediary Trade Center to make money.

But Item Projection changed everything. Now, resources from the game could be ejected into reality! This meant that Boundless could be 'mined' for resources, and we all knew that in this world, the two most important things were energy and resources.

What was crazy was that Boundless' resources would never run out like the real world, so it was like discovering a dungeon that could give out a chest at the end endlessly for adventurers!

Boundless alone could completely solve all of Earth's resource issues leading to a revitalization of the planet!

It could propel humanity 200 years or more into the future if used well, not to mention that even a basic piece of grass in Boundless from some random field contained bit of Worldly Energy as it had been nourished by the world.

Even common rice from Boundless was superior to the best rice on Earth! If done well, Worldly Energy could be generated on Earth!

Sounds great right? Heh, of course, there was a price to pay though.

Just like using a 3D printer, you needed materials to do it. However materializing from Boundless did not use any materials and only required a special tool sold separately.

So what was the cost? Obviously energy!

You, the player, wanting to send anything into Boundless or out of Boundless required energy, sending something out required exponentially more energy than to send something in.

Hmm, why does this sound familiar? Using energy to create something?

…

Wait a minute, wasn't that the final stage of Refinement??

Gasp!

Well… Refinement was the path undertaken by Norma and while she was a great being in the world of Boundless because of it, one shouldn't forget that she was ultimately a character created by the AI's subroutine, so it was obvious that it would have the full grasp of the ability.

Item Projection was not just scanning and creating, but actual transportation! To be able to do this, one could imagine the kind of energy it would cost the AI to do.

However, apart from its special relationship with Draco would the AI be so kind? Of course not! Players had to bear 90% of the energy cost while it only bore 10%, so you had to find a suitable amount of energy to materialize.

Of course, the only type of energy people had access to currently was electrical. You could be sure that various power grids were about to go down in the next few days!

Demand for energy was going to skyrocket so high that energy suppliers would be full of fear. After all, almost the entire world would be breathing down their necks to provide sufficient energy so rather than a blessing, it was more of a calamity for them.

Item Projection was also something that Eva personally hated because it was the reason for their downfall! Shangtian had only identified Draco's ideneity because he had gotten some of his blood from the game and materialized it in reality.

His goal was to find some way to use it to take down his old rival in Darkrow, so imagine his pleasant surprise when it reacted with the blood of the Lucifer Lineage women who they had trapped as birthing slaves.

Not to mention, it didn't just resonate, but it had literally suppressed them to the point where they couldn't easily move. At that point, how could Shangtian not understand everything?

That night, Shangtian had been in a daze the entire time because he couldn't understand how fate could play with people like this.

The third new feature was the Player Forums, the first authentic Update 3 additions from the previous timeline. One thing many players had complained about with Boundless since launch day was the lack of in-game forums.

It had made the exchange of information very difficult. After all, nobody got time to scroll through all the chat logs!

Now with this, it should become easier for players to chat and exchange information. It was not as good as having something like a chat system which had an area, continental or world chat where they could type in real time, but forums were the next best thing.

After the forums was naturally Genetic Compatibility.

Ptui, what naturally??

What the fuck, where did this special feature from Update 5 come from?!

The Evil Trio were stunned. Naturally, they didn't do something as banal as watch the news, so they did not see the announcement of the pods being released when the Update came out.

However, seeing genetic compatibility here, they could already ascertain the fact. Once they saw it, the faces of the Evil Trio became hard and full of solemnity.

After all, while the average player might become excited at the idea that they could finally have children with NPCs or their fellow players, the Evil Trio knew that things would spiral out of control.

By now, many players and guilds had already started settlements around the mapped zones, beginning their path of dominance. Yeah Vita Kingdom existed, but that was extremely high end and did not affect the operation of the average player's settlement.

But these settlements, no matter how rich or how strong the guild who owned them was, could not upgrade even if they had the method to because they lacked one thing: population!

Everybody had their own home or territory in which they had lived since the new millennia began, so why should they move to your ramshackle settlement?

Even if the terms you offered were good, there were too many uncertainties, not to mention that there were hundreds of thousands of other player settlements competing with you.

In truth, this shouldn't have been a problem. With the reproduction rate of humans, the mapped zones should have become long congested beyond reason and the new settlements would welcome people flooding in crazily from afar.

However, the now extinct demon race had kindly lent their help in eliminating the overpopulation problems of the human race, so every 1000 years, the weeds would be uprooted.

Since the demons wept through the entire land at that time, all the established kingdoms and empire would fall and become history. This paved the way for new territories and settlements to rise through the gaps and become the new rulers.

This would have been the perfect time for these player settlements to appear and sweep the world. However, they rather appeared at the tail end of the millennium, when the next culling was supposed to happen and the world had already settled down.

It was no wonder they would suffer such a thing.

At this time, the players previously did not have genetic compatibility, so it wasn't a problem. The most they could do was buy or capture NPCs to have them copulate and give birth to make residents.

However, now that they could also spawn kids, why go through so much hassle? Now they too could join in the fun and speed up the process by making as many NPCs pregnant to give birth, consent be damned.

And then, they would become enlightened and realize that they didn't necessarily have to limit themselves to only NPCs, now did they?

The eyes of a certain few fellows would flicker with maliciousness as they gazed at their fellow players, realizing that an even better option was right next to them!