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The Gamer Chapter 924 – Uncompromising Himself
🕑 Added 2021-01-26 22:32:02 +0000 UTC
‘That’ll have to do then,’ John thought as he dismissed both windows. Following the acquisition of Corruption Resistance 2, he had immediately entered the next dungeon. That one had been more focused around the temptations of the flesh than the mind, which had made it a lot easier for John to resist. As horny as he was, he was also surrounded by the most beautiful women on the planet. Even if his appetite was endless, the willing buffet he could get on his own merits made it difficult to actually compromise him in that regard.
It was the monopolization of things that John knew he had to be wary of. His desire to not share things and just decide things by himself, those were what he was most vulnerable to. Patience and cooperation were virtues he had to steadily remind himself of to follow them. It only got harder the smarter and stronger he got. Listening to people who struggled to understand concepts he grasped instinctively and those he could kill by using only his little finger could get frustrating.
‘That frustration is how elitists are born,’ John thought and sighed. ‘How much I would love to transcend those human flaws. The second I think I do, I probably fall prey to them though.’ He scratched his scars, feeling the surface of his bones vibrating. The remaining Lorylim influence inside his body dying was a thoroughly unpleasant experience. It was like having a migraine in his arm.
He watched the Lorylim scar on his right arm. It looked a lot like a tattoo meant to show a shadow of his bones. There were four ‘lines’ making up the entirety of the scar, running across the upper and underside of his lower arm. Each two joined at one side of his elbow. The entirety of those bones was affected by the pressing pain.
John kept an eye on the corruption bar and how it depleted. It moved at a moderate speed, like the loading bar for an old computer game. A progress steady enough to follow but slow enough to be boring. Given the importance of the removed matter, the Gamer stayed vigilant in his observation.
As the final slivers of the bar drained away, the crawling on his bones ebbed away and the scar changed. Like a chemical cocktail carefully combined to create a harmless chain reaction, the colour quickly switched from a bright red to a pure black. “Stealing my look, ey?” Salamander asked, watching the process come to its conclusion.
“I guess so,” John answered and conjured an Arc Lance. The spell hovered above his palm in the shape of a silver-white sphere. The Gamer wasn’t interested in firing it, only in seeing whether or not his scars were identical to Salamander’s in all aspects. The answer was a clear yes. Just like Salamander’s black lines turned golden when she channelled her fire magic through it, so did John’s turn silver when his mana travelled down his arm. The magic channels the presence of the Lorylim had occupied showed their damage purely through that visual change. ‘It definitely beats having my skin look like it was ploughed through by fish hooks,’ he thought and turned his attention deeper inwards.
Now cleansed of corruption, he tried to see what thoughts were no longer impeded. It was a difficult thing to test, given the fickleness and extraordinary complexity of thoughts in a basic setting. That he found nothing in this test was a cause of relief rather than concern. As predicted, the grasp on his mind had been rather loose and removing it left him in the same state as before.
He pulled out his phone to write the conclusion of this affair into the harem chat. It felt odd to write such an important discovery into simple text, but he had to let everyone know. “Just out of interest,” Salamander spoke up after he pressed the send button, “what would you have done if Corruption Resistance had only given you resistance to new corruption?”
“I would have tried to stay out of as many important affairs as possible and delegated a lot of military and administrative obligations to people I can trust,” John told her. “Even now that might be a good idea. Lorylim seem to be able to stay in touch even with those they don’t actively influence anymore, if Marathyu is anything to go by.” The insane blacksmith was just that, insane, driven so by the spore-spreading horrors. He was also clean, however; John had made as certain of that as one could.
John would have loved to know how Marathyu had cleansed himself, but getting a coherent story out of that man was strictly impossible. That also went to show whatever method he had used was ill-advised to apply on the wider public, in case of mass infection.
“I’ll have to consider if it’s worth reorganizing things… for the moment, I’ll go to my office,” John said and looked expectantly at Salamander. “You coming along or…?”
“Sure, I’ll take the blowjob job.” The apocalypse elemental grinned.
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“No, that’s just strictly impossible,” John said, sitting in one of the many conference rooms of the Fusion Capitol. The room smelled of coffee and buttered bread, an incredibly pleasant mixture that clashed vehemently with the gravity of the topic he was discussing. “Scanning every single citizen of the Federation is logistically beyond our capabilities, not to mention that it goes completely against the values of Fusion.”
“What are those values worth if we all get wiped out?” the leader of Project Shield pointed out. Next to him, the leader of the Wrath Party nodded. It was one of the many topics where the militarists agreed with the law-and-order party.
Those two were joined by the heads of the other eight major parties of Fusion’s current parliament and other influential political figures, such as Horace, in a meeting outside of the planned schedule. As the leadership of parties became more apparent and the number of people John had to actively negotiate with became confined to a few dozen people, backroom deals became easier. Even though the Gamer strived for transparency, there was no denying that it was more effective to discuss certain topics outside the public eye and the protocols of law-making.
That being said, the party heads were all getting established but to John they were barely worth remembering. He knew who they were, his paranoia wouldn’t let him rest unless he had a basic understanding of everyone with power, but they were all ideological voices. Rather than forging new paths or frameworks through which to interpret the reality they found themselves in, they all represented the one of their party. That wasn’t a bad thing, that was their job as party head after all, but it made them rather dull in terms of personal interaction. They could have been any shape and nothing about them would have changed.
“I continue to insist that we should mandate a monthly check of every person,” the leader of Project Shield declared, tapping several times on a stack of paper. The fifty-five pages thick document outlined the draft of the Lorylim Defence Act that had been created while John was grinding. As per his plans, the Gamer had tried to stay out of it in order to show the legislature that they did have the power the constitution granted them. It was a gesture of goodwill and principle.
Now that the bill was getting ready to be passed, a backroom meeting had been called in order to make it fully agreeable. It wouldn’t have been a good look on parliament if they couldn’t get a defence bill passed and so they had to all agree on the outcome of the discussion before it even started. Things like that were completely normal in politics. Predetermining outcomes and discussing the exchange of favours, those were only the most basic games played.
John had to engage in a lot of that because he didn’t have any direct legislating powers. Still, this meeting hadn’t been arranged by him. He had been requested to give the President’s opinion on the final draft and discuss aspects of it.
“I tell you that it is untenable,” John returned. “We won’t agree on the moral issue here, so let’s keep it purely pragmatic. Fusion does not have the administrative capacity and specialized expertise to check the entire population for Lorylim infection every month. The best we could do is make it a voluntary check for which people have to come and seek out certain locations.”
“That would be a start,” Project Shield agreed. “We could take their names and countercheck them with the population roster to see who is avoiding the voluntary checks. That would give us a good initial list.”
Much of the room grew dissatisfied upon hearing that and the Fusion Libertarians were the first to put it into words, “We are not putting our people on lists.”
“Lives are more important than a bit of privacy.”
“My life is worth very little if it’s not my own. Possessed by Lorylim or owned by an authoritarian state, makes fairly little difference to me.”
“Easy to say while your mind is not being liquified.”
“Gentlemen, ladies.” John knocked twice on the wooden table and instantly captured the attention of the room with his presence. He leaned back in the tall swivel chair and tried to exude an aura of relaxation. Any subject of ruling would naturally get people heated, but he wanted to avoid things turning into a shouting match. “Let’s discuss realism before we lose ourselves in abstracts for the sake of morals. Such a counterchecked list wouldn’t get us anywhere. Primarily because we lack a proper way to identify any kind of infestation at the moment. For all we know, people who are infested could come to get themselves checked but we don’t find anything, making them the last we investigate later on.” He made a dismissive gesture. “It would be an intense waste of resources.” He looked over to the leader of the Centralists. “Please, let’s resume the discussion.”
The Centralists weren’t Fusion’s largest party, they weren’t even in the top five, but their name was reflected in their program. Having the most balanced manifesto of all parties made them the ideal mediator between the different ideas represented in the House of Commons. Hence, the Lorylim Defence Act they had put together was the one everyone agreed on enough to consider it for passing.
After a thankful nod, the Centralist representative raised his voice, “I think I speak not only for my own party but the Fusion Libertarians, the Economists and the Individualists if I say that putting mandatory infestation checks in place is not going to pass.”
“We maintain that these are only stopgap measures,” the Wrath Party spoke out. “Intensifying the check-ups on people migrating into areas with a population density higher than 100 per Protected Space isn’t going to find anyone. As you admitted, we don’t have a reliable method of finding people whose infestation hasn’t progressed past the mental stage yet.”
“The check-ups will allow us to investigate any oddity in their backgrounds, which is the best indicator we have at the moment,” the Centralist returned. “In order to be thorough with this, we have to limit the number of people we look into. That aside, the most important provision of this bill isn’t the way we look into potential infected, it’s what we do in case an infestation breaks out.” Picking up the paper, the Centralist waved it around. “The creation of a nation-wide emergency plan will hopefully prevent any infestation from spreading beyond local containment.”
“It’d be much better to prevent the infestation in the first place.”
“Yes, but not at the cost of everyone’s freedom. The Lorylim are a threat older than any of us and they will probably outlive all of us. Thinking that we can just prevent them from ever affecting us is raw arrogance,” the Centralist pointed out.
“For what it’s worth,” John chimed in, “as I understand it, we can ease off on the measures as months ticks by. Normal hosts of the Lorylim succumb to madness or their influence within time, meaning that the number of bodies they have to infiltrate us with should decrease. It is the several thousand former Gestalt members which we have to be wary of. They are what makes Lorylim attacks so much more likely than what we should reasonably be afraid of.”
Discussions continued for several hours.
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