**Chapter 9: Feedback Loop**
The transition from Aethelgard back to reality was always the hardest part.
In the virtual world, I was Nameless. I was hungry, I was tired, and I had dirt under my fingernails. I felt the wind on my face and the ache in my muscles. I felt *human*.
Then, the connection severed.
My consciousness snapped back into the Sarcophagus three miles beneath the Atacama Desert. The weight returned instantly—not the heaviness of exhaustion, which was a sweet, dull throb, but the crushing, metaphysical weight of simply existing. The gravity seals whined, ramping up to 500 Gs to keep my body from warping the local spacetime.
I opened my eyes. The darkness of the facility was absolute, save for the blinking blue lights of the server racks in the distance and the glowing text of the System hovering in my retina.
**[Session Complete.]**
**[Duration: 4 Hours.]**
**[Bio-Feedback Integration: Successful.]**
I lay there for a moment, mourning the loss of my frailty. For four hours, I had struggled to kill a slime. Now, I could blink and vaporize a mountain range. The contrast was enough to induce spiritual whiplash.
"System," I whispered. The sound of my voice caused a microscopic fissure in the tungsten floor plate beneath me. "Status report."
**[Day 1,098 Active.]**
**[Daily Growth Applied: +10%.]**
**[Current Multiplier: 3.4 x 10^144.]**
I sighed. The numbers were meaningless now. Scientific notation had given up trying to describe me a year ago. I was simply "Too Much."
But then, a new line of text scrolled into view. It was gold, not blue.
**[Passive Skill Unlocked: Tithes.]**
I frowned. I hadn't unlocked a skill in years. I had maxed out every resistance, every mastery, every physical attribute. The System had been silent on the progression front because there was nowhere left to progress.
"Explain," I commanded.
**[Skill: Tithes]**
**[Origin: The Order of Truth Network.]**
**[Description: You are the Source. All power flows from you, and by the Laws of Thermodynamics and Mystical Resonance, all power must eventually return.]**
**[Effect: Whenever a subjugated entity (Player) increases their capacity to hold your energy (Levels Up), the expanded potential generates a resonance echo. You receive 1000% of the energy gained by the subject.]**
I stared at the text.
I read it again.
Then, a low, rumbling sound began to fill the chamber. It took me a moment to realize I was laughing.
"You have got to be kidding me," I wheezed. The laughter shook the room, knocking a stack of spare server blades off a shelf.
I had built the game to alleviate my boredom. I had distributed the Black Boxes to create peers—or at least, pets that wouldn't break when I touched them. I had given away my energy, siphoning off the overflow of my existence to empower humanity.
And the universe, in its infinite sense of irony, had decided to tax me for it.
"I'm trying to get rid of the water," I said to the empty room, "and the System just installed a bigger hose feeding back into the ocean."
It was a feedback loop. I gave them power. They grew stronger. Their "container" expanded. That expansion created a vacuum that pulled more energy from the ether, and because I was the anchor of the entire network, the surplus slammed back into me with a ten-fold multiplier.
"Zero!" I barked.
The holographic avatar of my fragmented intelligence materialized instantly.
"Architect. You appear distressed. Did the session with Subject Ren go poorly?"
"The session was fine," I snapped, waving a hand and accidentally creating a sonic boom that rattled the Sarcophagus. "The math is the problem. Run the numbers on the 'Tithes' mechanic."
Zero's avatar flickered as it processed the data.
"Analyzing... Confirmed. A recursive loop has been established. For every unit of Prana a player gains, you receive ten units back."
"It's a drop in the bucket," I argued, trying to rationalize it. "Ren gained, what? Five hundred experience points? That's a microscopic amount of energy. Even ten times that is nothing to me."
"Correct," Zero replied smoothly. "Currently, the input is negligible compared to your daily 10% compound growth. It is equivalent to throwing a pebble into a supernova."
"Good. Then I can ignore it."
"However," Zero continued, and I hated the dispassionate logic in his voice, "you have authorized the distribution of 50 million standard headsets and 100 Black Boxes. You are planning a global rollout."
Zero projected a graph in the air. It was a curve. A steep, terrifying curve.
"If the player base reaches 1 billion, and the average level reaches 20, the 'Tithes' feedback will exceed your natural daily growth by a factor of four."
I stared at the graph.
"So," I murmured. "By trying to cure my boredom, I am inadvertently accelerating my ascension to... what? Total existence failure? Becoming a living universe?"
"The endpoint is undefined," Zero said. "But the trajectory is clear. You cannot give power away, Architect. You can only lend it. And the interest rates are predatory."
I slumped back in the chair.
It was perfect. It was hilarious. It was horrifying.
I was a cosmic Ponzi scheme.
***
I needed to see it in action. I needed to verify the data before I spiraled into an existential crisis.
"Show me the players," I said. "Filter by 'Active Combat'."
The main display shifted. A mosaic of video feeds appeared, thousands of windows into the lives of the awakened.
In Seoul, a teenager was casting ice bolts at a swarm of pixelated rats in a sewer dungeon.
In Berlin, a grandmother was using a telekinetic shield to block attacks from a goblin archer, laughing as the arrows bounced off.
In Rio, a group of friends were coordinating a raid on a Bandit Camp, shouting tactics over voice chat.
I focused on a specific feed. **Subject 042: Maya.**
She was in the Weeping Woods, not far from where Ren and I had killed the Construct.
Maya had embraced her class, the *Blade Dancer*. In the real world, she was still paralyzed, sitting in her wheelchair in a Chicago tenement. But in Aethelgard, she was a whirlwind.
She was fighting a pack of Thorn-Wolves. Solo.
"She's reckless," I observed. "She's pulling four mobs at once."
"She is testing the limits of the Phantom Step," Zero noted.
I watched as Maya blurred. It wasn't just speed; it was a manipulation of friction and visual perception. She moved like smoke. A wolf snapped at her ankle, and she simply wasn't there anymore. She reappeared behind it, her twin daggers flashing.
*Slash. Slash. Crit.*
The wolf shattered into polygons.
**[Maya: Level Up! (Level 4)]**
At that exact moment, I felt it.
It wasn't a sound or a touch. It was a sensation inside my chest, like a warm droplet of water falling into a still lake.
*Thrum.*
A tiny packet of energy arrived. But it wasn't raw, chaotic radiation like my own. It was... flavored.
It carried the imprint of Maya's determination. It tasted of her joy at being able to move, her aggression, her tactical mind. It was refined energy. Processed Prana.
And then, the System multiplied it.
The droplet became a splash.
**[Tithes Received: +0.00000004% to Base Strength.]**
It was nothing. A rounding error. I wouldn't even notice the increase in strength physically.
But then another notification popped up.
**[Player 'xX_Slayer_Xx' (Russia): Level Up!]**
**[Tithes Received.]**
**[Player 'Kenji' (Japan): Skill Mastery Increased!]**
**[Tithes Received.]**
The notifications began to scroll faster. A waterfall of tiny increments.
*Thrum. Thrum. Thrum-thrum-thrum.*
It felt like being rained on. A constant, gentle patter of power soaking into my skin.
"It works," I whispered. "It actually works."
I closed my eyes and focused on the sensation.
For three years, my power had been a lonely, cold thing. It was just math. Compound interest. Volume.
This? This was different.
I could feel them. I could feel the collective struggle of humanity clawing its way up the food chain I had built for them. It was a chorus of millions of tiny voices screaming *I want to be stronger*.
And every time they succeeded, they pushed me higher.
"Zero," I said, opening my eyes. The blue light of the room seemed brighter, sharper. "We have a problem. But also... an opportunity."
"Elaborate," the AI requested.
"The energy coming back to me is refined," I explained, looking at my hand. The skin seemed to glow faintly, not with radiation, but with a softer, pearlescent light. "Raw growth makes me heavier. It makes me denser. It destabilizes reality."
I clenched my fist.
"But this Tithe energy... it feels stable. It feels controlled."
I looked at the Tungsten coffee mug on the console—the replacement for the one I had crushed yesterday.
I reached out.
Usually, this was a calculated operation involving gravity dampeners and extreme mental focus.
I grabbed the mug.
I lifted it.
I didn't crush it. I didn't melt it.
I held it.
My eyes widened.
"Zero," I breathed. "Do you see this?"
"You are holding a cup," Zero stated. "Congratulations on your basic motor skills."
"Don't sass me, machine. I'm holding it without the Sarcophagus fully engaged. I'm holding it with *intent*."
The realization hit me like a thunderbolt.
My own power was too vast to control. It was like trying to perform surgery with a tsunami. But the energy coming back from the players? It had been filtered through human minds. It had been tempered by human limitations. It was *domesticated* power.
By feeding on their growth, I wasn't just getting stronger. I was regaining *control*.
"The Feedback Loop," I said, a smile spreading across my face. "It's not a curse. It's a stabilizer."
If I could get enough people to play—if I could get billions of human minds processing my raw energy and feeding it back to me in this refined state—I might eventually layer enough "human" energy over my "god" energy to interact with the world again.
I might be able to hug someone without turning them into plasma.
"Zero!" I shouted, standing up. The floor still creaked, but I didn't crack it. "Change of plans. We don't just need a server farm. We need a global religion. We need everyone online. Now."
"The current infrastructure is at 94% capacity," Zero warned. "The stolen servers are running hot. If you increase the user base, we will melt the mountain."
"Then we build a bigger heat sink," I said, pacing the room. "And we need a place to dump the excess energy while we wait for the infrastructure to catch up."
I looked at the map of Aethelgard.
It was a beautiful world, but it was finite. A single continent.
"We need an endless mode," I decided. "Something that consumes massive amounts of energy to generate. A procedural dungeon that scales infinitely."
"The Tower of Eternity," Zero suggested. "It was in your original design documents, but you scrapped it because the energy cost was prohibitive."
"I have energy to burn," I said. "Spin it up. Make it hard. Make it brutal. Give the players a place to dump their rage and their XP."
I walked back to the main console.
"And Zero? I need you to introduce a new mechanic. 'Guilds'."
"Social structures increase player retention by 400%," Zero agreed.
"It's not just retention," I said, staring at the feed of Maya, who was now resting by a campfire, inspecting her loot. "It's resonance. Groups of players amplify each other. If they sync up, the Tithe quality improves."
I was no longer just a bored god playing with dolls. I was an engineer tuning a massive, biological engine.
"Draft a global announcement," I commanded. "Tell them the Tutorial is truly over. Tell them the Tower is opening."
***
**Meanwhile: The Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia.**
Director Miller stared at the screen in the secure briefing room. He hadn't slept in twenty-four hours. The coffee in his Styrofoam cup was cold and tasted like battery acid.
"Say that again," Miller said, rubbing his eyes.
Dr. Aris Thorne, the agency's lead physicist, looked nervous. He adjusted his glasses and pointed at the satellite thermal imaging map.
"The heat signature, sir. It's not just Chile anymore."
The map showed the globe. Usually, thermal maps showed cities as hot spots. But this map was showing something else.
Tiny, pinprick anomalies were appearing all over the world.
"Chicago. Tokyo. Berlin. Moscow," Thorne listed. "We detected microscopic spikes in localized Hawking radiation."
"Radiation?" Miller frowned. "Like a nuke?"
"No, sir. That's the strange part. It's... clean. It's a type of energy we've never seen before. It behaves like radiation, but it doesn't decay. It integrates."
Thorne tapped the keyboard. A video feed popped up. It was grainy footage from a traffic camera in London.
A young man was running to catch a bus. He was moving fast—Olympian fast. He tripped.
Instead of face-planting, the man twisted in mid-air—a move that should have snapped his spine—and landed on his feet in a crouch. The concrete beneath his sneakers cracked.
"We scrubbed this from the internet ten minutes ago," Thorne said. "But there are hundreds of videos like it popping up on TikTok and YouTube. People doing impossible things."
Miller leaned forward. "Super soldiers?"
"Gamers, sir."
Miller blinked. "Excuse me?"
"We've correlated the anomalies," Thorne said, bringing up a logo on the main screen. An eye weeping a golden tear. "Every single subject identified so far has recently downloaded a mobile app or logged into a VR service called 'Order of Truth'."
"A video game is giving people superpowers?" Miller asked, his voice flat.
"It sounds insane, sir. But the energy signature matches. And..." Thorne hesitated.
"And what, Doctor?"
"And the source signal," Thorne whispered. "We traced the data packets. They aren't coming from a server. They're coming from the ground."
He pointed to the map of South America. Specifically, the Atacama Desert.
"The signal originates from three miles beneath the crust. And sir... the energy output of that location just increased by ten percent in the last twenty-four hours. It's now putting out more power than the sun."
Miller stood up. The chair scraped loudly against the floor.
"Get the Joint Chiefs," he ordered. "And get me a line to the Chilean government. I don't care if it's a game or God himself. Nothing puts out that much power without us controlling it."
***
**Back in the Facility.**
I felt the shift.
It wasn't the game. It wasn't the players. It was something else.
My perception, expanded by the growing network, felt a prick of attention. Like someone shining a flashlight into a dark room.
"Zero," I said, my voice low. "We have eyes on us."
"The governments of Earth are reacting," Zero confirmed. "Satellite scans of the Andes have increased by 5000%. Defcon levels are shifting."
I smiled. A cold, sharp smile.
"Let them look," I said.
I manipulated the interface, spawning a massive, crystalline spire in the center of the virtual continent of Aethelgard.
**[System Announcement: The Tower of Eternity has appeared.]**
**[Challenge: Climb to the top to claim a Wish.]**
I sent the message to every screen, every phone, every headset on the planet.
"They think they can control power?" I whispered, watching the chaos unfold on the screens. "They don't understand. The power isn't a resource. It's a test."
I leaned back, feeling the hum of the feedback loop, the Tithes pouring into me, the control slowly returning to my fingers.
"Let them come," I said. "The humans, the governments... even the things from the dark between the stars."
I looked at the ceiling, my vision piercing through the rock, through the atmosphere, and into the void of space.
I knew they were out there. I could feel them listening to the noise I was making.
"I'm not bored anymore," I told the universe.
I closed my eyes and began to draft the blueprint for Level 2.
**Chapter 9 Ends.**