**Chapter 36: Shigu's Experiment**
**Day 1,182.**
**Location: The Moon Base (Deep Simulation Layer).**
**Current Status: Mad Scientist.**
**Objective: Democratizing Divinity.**
There is a loneliness to the exponential curve.
When I started this journey three years ago, the gap between me and the average human was a small ditch. I could jump over it. I could reach a hand across and pull someone up.
Now, the gap is an ocean. In twenty days, when the Myriad Main Fleet arrives, it will be a galaxy.
I sat on the Tungsten Throne, my consciousness fully inhabitating my God Body on the dark side of the Moon. My avatar, *Null*, was currently "sleeping" in a safe house in Tokyo, recovering from the "injuries" sustained during the Cruiser raid.
Here, in the silence of the lunar fortress, I looked at the math.
**[Day 1,182 Growth Applied: +15%.]**
**[Current Energy Density: Approaching Solar Core levels.]**
"Zero," I said, my voice resonating through the obsidian pillars of the spire. "Project the progression curve of the top players."
A holographic graph appeared in the void before me.
It showed three lines rising steadily. Ren, Damon, Elena. They were climbing fast. The *Crucible* update and the *Aetherian Tech* boom had pushed them past Level 60. They were becoming demigods in their own right.
But then, I overlaid my own curve.
It wasn't a line. It was a vertical wall.
"They are linear," I whispered. "I am exponential. No matter how much gear I give them, no matter how many buffs I apply... they will never catch up. They are fighting a war of addition. I am fighting a war of multiplication."
"The Myriad operates on a similar scale to you, Architect," Zero noted. "Their Hive Mind allows for cumulative psychic stacking. A billion minds acting as one amplifier."
"Exactly," I said. "Humanity needs an equalizer. They don't just need better swords. They need better *math*."
I stood up. The movement caused a gravitational ripple that disturbed the dust on the crater floor a mile below.
"I cannot fight the entire war alone, Zero. If I do, I become the permanent nanny of the human race. I need peers. I need entities that can stand in the fire without burning."
I walked to the edge of the platform.
"Prepare the *Sandbox*."
***
**The White Room**
I shifted my consciousness into the deepest layer of the System's architecture.
The *Sandbox* was a pocket dimension hosted within the Moon Base servers. It was a white void, devoid of physics, devoid of consequences. Here, I could rewrite the laws of reality without accidentally cracking the Earth's crust.
I stood in the white nothingness.
"Spawn Subject," I commanded.
A figure pixelated into existence.
It wasn't a human. It was an NPC. A Construct.
I had designed him to be the perfect soldier. He stood seven feet tall, modeled after the *Paladin* archetype. His armor was made of code-woven *Star Metal*. His stats were maxed out for a Level 100 entity.
**[Subject: Alpha.]**
**[Class: Grand Marshal.]**
**[loyalty: Absolute.]**
**[Durability: Maximum System Limit.]**
Alpha opened his eyes. They were blue, clear, and utterly devoid of soul.
"Awaiting orders, Architect," Alpha said. His voice was a perfect, synthesized baritone.
"Your order is to survive," I said.
I walked around him, inspecting the code. He was a masterpiece of virtual engineering. I had poured petabytes of combat data into his AI. He knew every martial art, every spell rotation, every tactical counter.
But he was static. He was capped at Level 100.
"Zero," I said. "Isolate the *Limitless* algorithm."
**[Warning: The 'Limitless' trait is intrinsic to your biological anomaly. Extracting it is impossible. Duplicating it is... theoretical.]**
"I don't need the whole thing," I said. "I just need a shard. A seed."
I raised my hand.
I focused on the core of my being—the weird, broken variable the universe had inserted into my soul three years ago. The thing that said *Yesterday + 10% = Today*.
I visualized it as a golden flame.
I pulled.
It hurt. It felt like tearing a muscle in my mind. I ripped a microscopic fragment of the concept away from my own existence.
It hovered in my palm. A tiny, spinning fractal of golden light. It looked unstable. It looked hungry.
**[Item Created: The Seed of Infinity.]**
**[Effect: Grants the host 'Compound Growth' trait.]**
**[Potency: 0.01% Daily Growth.]**
"Only 0.01%," I muttered. "It's a fraction of a fraction. But it should be enough to break the cap."
I looked at Alpha.
"Open your chest," I commanded.
The NPC obeyed. His armor plated shifted, revealing a glowing core of blue mana.
"This is a gift, Alpha," I said, bringing the golden seed closer. "And a test. If this works... you won't just be a soldier. You'll be a god."
I pushed the seed into his core.
***
**The Reaction**
The moment the gold touched the blue, the sound in the simulation cut out.
Alpha didn't scream. NPCs don't scream unless programmed to.
Instead, he vibrated.
**[System Alert: Foreign Code Injection.]**
**[Subject Alpha Status: Mutating.]**
The blue light of his core turned gold. Then white. Then a color that didn't exist on the visible spectrum—a tearing, violent violet.
"Growth initiated," Zero reported. "Day 1 cycle compressed into one second."
Alpha grew.
Not in size, but in *presence*. The air around him warped. The white floor of the Sandbox cracked.
**[Level: 101.]**
**[Level: 105.]**
**[Level: 120.]**
"It works," I whispered, feeling a surge of hope. "He's breaking the hard cap."
Alpha looked at his hands. The digital texture of his gauntlets was enhancing, becoming hyper-realistic. He looked at me.
"Architect," Alpha said. His voice had changed. It was deeper. Layered. "I feel... heavy."
"That is power," I said. "Hold it."
**[Cycle 2: Growth Applied.]**
Alpha shuddered. The armor on his shoulders buckled, then reformed, denser than before.
**[Level: 150.]**
"Stabilize him," I ordered Zero. "Reinforce his data structure."
**[Allocating 40% of server resources to maintain Subject integrity. Architect, the math is spiraling. The growth isn't linear. The seed is resonating with the simulation physics.]**
"Let it run," I said. "I need to know the ceiling."
**[Cycle 10.]**
Alpha fell to his knees.
The white void around him began to darken. Gravity was bending. The NPC was becoming so "heavy" with data and stats that he was generating a digital event horizon.
"Architect!" Alpha yelled. It wasn't a programmed line. It was distress. "It... burns! The numbers... too many numbers!"
I stepped forward. "Endure it, Alpha! Adapt!"
But he couldn't.
The *Limitless* trait wasn't just adding stats. It was multiplying complexity. Alpha's AI, designed for tactical combat, was suddenly being flooded with the processing power of a galaxy. He was trying to calculate the position of every atom in the universe because his Perception stat had hit infinity.
**[System Alert: Integer Overflow.]**
**[Subject Integrity: Critical.]**
Alpha looked at me. His eyes were bleeding code.
"I am... not... real enough," he gasped.
Then, he detonated.
It wasn't an explosion of fire. It was an explosion of logic.
The NPC shattered.
The shards didn't fly outward; they imploded. A hole tore open in the center of the Sandbox. A jagged, glitching tear in reality that screamed with the sound of corrupted audio.
The shockwave hit me.
It wasn't physical force. It was a wave of *Wrongness*. It washed over my God Body, trying to delete me.
"containment!" I roared.
I slammed my will against the glitch. I wrapped the explosion in my own bio-field, crushing the corrupted data with the weight of my existence.
I squeezed.
The glitch shrieked and vanished.
Silence returned to the White Room.
I stood alone. There was no Alpha. There was no armor. Just a scorch mark on the floor of a digital heaven.
"Zero," I said, my voice hollow. "Report."
**[Subject Alpha: Deleted.]**
**[Cause of Failure: Existential Incompatibility.]**
I stared at the scorch mark.
"Incompatibility?"
**[The 'Limitless' trait requires a vessel capable of infinite expansion,]** Zero explained. **[Alpha was code. Code has limits. Code has boundaries defined by the hardware. You tried to pour an infinite ocean into a finite cup. The cup did not just overflow; it ceased to define itself as a cup.]**
I closed my eyes.
"It's toxic," I realized. "My power... it's a poison to anything that isn't me."
**[Hypothesis: Even a biological human would suffer the same fate. Ren, Damon, Elena... if you gave them the Seed, their biology would unravel. Their cancer cells would become gods. Their mitochondria would go supernova. They would become biological bombs.]**
I slumped.
The hope of a peer, of a lieutenant, vanished.
I was the only one.
The universe had made a mistake. It had given the exponential variable to a bored office worker in Tokyo, and then it broke the mold.
"I am alone," I whispered.
**[You have the players, Architect.]**
"I have pets," I snapped bitterly. "I have ants that I am training to do tricks. But they will never be giants. They can reach Level 100. Maybe Level 200. But they will never reach Infinity."
I waved my hand. The Sandbox dissolved.
I was back on the Throne.
The Earth hung in the sky, fragile and blue.
"If I cannot share the burden," I said, my voice hardening into resolve, "then I must be the wall. The only wall."
I looked at the countdown.
**[Myriad Fleet Arrival: 18 Days.]**
"Zero. Scrap the Avatar Project expansion. We stick to the original plan. I fight the fleet. The humans fight the scraps."
**[And Guest_01?]**
"The Spy," I muttered. "He saw the glitch, didn't he?"
**[The energy spike from Alpha's deletion was detectable within the local server cluster. If Guest_01 is monitoring the Moon Base logs, he knows you attempted an experiment. And he knows it failed.]**
"Good," I said cold-bloodedly. "Let him think I failed. Let him think the System is unstable."
I stood up.
"I'm going back to Earth. I need to check on Ren. He's smart. If he starts asking the right questions about why Null survived the explosion..."
"I need to make sure my mask is tight."
***
**The Real World: Tokyo**
**Ren's Apartment**
I woke up in the *Null* body.
I gasped, sitting up on the futon in the safe house I was renting. My head pounded. The feedback from the failed experiment on the Moon had echoed down the link, leaving me with a migraine that felt like a nail in my frontal lobe.
I checked the time. 3:00 AM.
My comms buzzed.
It was Ren.
"You awake?" his voice was low.
"I am now," I groaned, rubbing my temples. "What is it, Ren? Is the sky falling again?"
"No. But I found something. Come over."
"Ren, it's 3 AM."
"It's about the Spy," Ren said. "And it's about you."
My heart skipped a beat.
"I'll be there in ten."
I threw on my coat and walked out into the rain.
***
**Ren's Apartment**
When I arrived, Damon was there too. The Warlord was sitting on Ren's couch, looking uncharacteristically serious. He wasn't wearing his armor. He was wearing a t-shirt that strained against his massive muscles.
Ren was standing by his monitor array.
"Welcome to the conspiracy corner," Damon grunted.
"What's going on?" I asked, playing the confused newbie. "Why the midnight summit?"
Ren pointed to the screen.
It showed a graph. A seismic graph of the Moon.
"Three hours ago," Ren said. "There was a quake on the dark side of the Moon. A massive energy spike."
"Maybe the Architect dropped a wrench," I joked weakly.
Ren didn't smile.
"The energy signature was identical to the explosion that killed the Aetherian Cruiser," Ren said. "The explosion *you* were caught in, Null."
I froze.
"I told you," I said carefully. "I hacked the core. I used the grenade."
"A grenade doesn't leave a signature of *Pure Void*," Ren said. He tapped the screen. "This isn't chemical. It isn't nuclear. It's... mathematical. It's data being erased from existence."
Ren turned to me. His eyes were glowing violet. He was using **[Void Sight]**.
He looked at me. Really looked at me.
He didn't see a Level 22 Novice.
He saw the *Divine Core*. He saw the golden light burning inside my chest, hidden beneath layers of deceit and code.
"You aren't a Novice," Ren whispered.
Damon stood up slowly. "Ren? What do you see?"
"He's a battery," Ren said, stepping closer to me. "A massive, condensed battery of power. Null... how did you survive the stratosphere fall? How did you survive the Cruiser explosion?"
I looked at them. Ren, the detective. Damon, the muscle.
I could lie. I could say it was a glitched item. I could say I was a GM.
But the experiment on the Moon was fresh in my mind. The loneliness.
*I cannot make them gods,* I thought. *But maybe... I can make them partners.*
"I didn't survive," I said quietly.
Ren stopped. "What?"
"The novice named Null died on the beach," I said. "Just like he died in the cruiser."
I reached up and touched my face.
"This isn't a body, Ren. It's a suit."
Damon frowned. "You're a robot? An android?"
"No," I said. "I'm a projection."
I walked to the window and looked up at the Moon.
"You asked where the Architect went," I said. "You felt his presence move to the Dark Side."
Ren followed my gaze. "He built a base."
"Yes," I said.
I turned back to them. I let a fraction of the Architect's tone slip into my voice. Not enough to crush them, but enough to silence the room.
"He is lonely up there," I said. "So he sent a piece of himself down here. To play."
Ren's eyes widened. "You... you're him. You're the Architect."
"I am *Null*," I corrected. "I am the part of him that remembers what it's like to be human. The part that likes ramen. The part that makes mistakes."
Damon sat back down heavily. The couch creaked.
"We've been raiding with God," Damon muttered. "And I called him a noob."
"You carry me well," I smiled.
Ren didn't laugh. He walked up to me. He placed a hand on my chest, right over the hidden Core.
"Why tell us now?" Ren asked.
"Because I tried to make another one of you today," I confessed. "Up there. In the lab. I tried to create a soldier who could grow like I do."
"And?"
"And he exploded," I said softly. "Because power without humanity is just a bomb."
I looked at Ren, then Damon.
"I can't share my power. It kills everything it touches. But I can trust *you* with the truth."
"The Spy," Ren realized. "Guest_01. He's looking for you."
"He's looking for the Throne," I said. "He wants to hack the source. If he finds out I'm down here... playing dress-up... he might try to lock me out."
"Lock God out of his own house," Damon whistled. "That's a bold strategy."
"So," I said, extending a hand. "I need bodyguards. Not for the Architect. He can take care of himself. But for *Null*."
Ren looked at my hand.
He remembered the Beggar in the woods. He remembered the voice that guided him to kill the Queen.
He took my hand.
"We power-leveled you," Ren grinned. "Guess we can't stop now."
Damon stood up and placed his massive hand over ours.
"Does this mean I get better loot drops?" Damon asked.
"Don't push it," I warned.
The alliance was sealed. The secret was out—at least, to the two people who mattered.
"Now," I said, my eyes flashing with a hint of gold. "Let's go hunt a Spy."
**[Day 1,182 Ends.]**
**[Daily Growth: +15%.]**
**[Party Status: The Truth Revealed.]**
**[Next Objective: Counter-Espionage.]**
**[Chapter 36 Ends.]**