Ascendance: The Rebirth Of The Unknown Gamer

Laura was feeling rather ill.

She had mostly figured out what kind of person her master was, but knowing and seeing were two different things.

The level of torture he had employed on that man was simply unnecessary.

And she was his assistant for the entire duration.

Three weeks, and every single day, they would walk into that room, roll out the tools, and begin work, cutting the man into pieces until he passed out, then forcing their way into his mind before spinning all sorts of horrible nightmares until he woke up, only to find all his injuries healed and those same two figures walking into the room, unfurling the tool pouch onto the cart, and starting all over again.

Understandably, having been tortured herself, this was quite extreme, or rather, the only thing this could be called was extreme.

And her master seemed to have no sort of feelings towards the matter at all.

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Naturally, Aura felt no guilt towards the torture of the Heart's Light guild members, unlike Fiona and Laura, he was well aware that these were players and that even if they used the emergency log out function, the AI that would take their place was inherently different from the true AI that the NPCs used.

The AI used by players was completely different, and was merely a cold reproduction of the system's analysis of a player, and simply followed actions that the system determined the player would take in the same scenario.

Meanwhile the AI used by NPCs was a true artificial intelligence, as demonstrated by their ability to think and act for themselves.

Of course, Aura wasn't going to argue about whether or not NPCs were 'real' since he, along with most philosophers of the modern era were of the belief that anything that the individual could not distinguish from reality was in essence 'real'.

At the core of Aura's beliefs lay the the fact that Ascendance as a game, took place in a world that was functionally indistinguishable from reality, and as such, was real to him.

Thus, to Aura, what was wrong was wrong and what was right was right regardless of whether he was in the real world or the digital world.

He took actions free of guilt not because he didn't understand that they were, objectively speaking, evil, but rather because he simply didn't care whether or not others perceived him as such.

Why should it matter how others see him? It's not as though everyone has lived the same life and are therefore qualified to judge others.

This was actually one of the most well doc.u.mented side effects of Ascendance, a drastic drop in racial violence and discrimination, as well as a near complete cessation of s.e.xism.

Because people in the game could actually experience what it feels like to be a woman or an individual of a different race or skin color, people began to understand each other better.

Many people praised Forgotten Industries for this achievement, but they gave a disinterested response of 'isn't that something that everyone's understood for centuries? That discrimination is based entirely on an individual's inability to see from another's perspective?'

And that was the end of that.

Interestingly, before Aura settled on what character he wanted to play, he had played with a few avatars out of curiosity.

Some features were removed from the human body simply because they were inconvenient, but for the most part the difference was negligible.

Aura played two characters before he settled on the avatar he played until his death.

The first was a basic handsome warrior, while the second was a beautiful young female druid.

He had taken both to several brothels and was well versed in the enjoyability of both s.e.xes when it comes to s.e.x.u.a.l activities.

He preferred the male body simply because he was more familiar with it, though he had most certainly enjoyed the experience of being female.

Neither of these characters had ended well, and he had spent a month after his second death researching and deciding upon his next course of action.