Guild Wars

The world of Boundless was slightly different after the Update, but the key things had not changed much. Umbra was still the strongest guild with the most power and they were right where they had been when they had logged out. 

In the case of the core members, they returned to the game to see that they were still on the airships, leading the other members of Umbra and the various NPCs that made up the Vita Army into war. 

They had just finished taking down Cario Continent and were spreading out to massacre all the monsters in the seas to cull their numbers and clear the path for ground troops to establish order between controlled territories. 

Territories in this case spanning continents. While portals were fine, if portals alone could satisfy all the needs of intercontinental trade, the Sea Route would not have been so profitable. 

The goal was to rebuild after conquest, and Umbra intended to make the rebuilt world far more prosperous than even the old era. It was clear that the ambitions Draco and his two beauties held were extremely high, but they had the capital to achieve it! 

The core members also understood this and they were poised to achieve it! Since they were still covering the seas in all directions around Cario Continent, they could not regroup. 

However, they did not need to. With the Guild Voice Chat, they were all sharing their ideas on how to tactically deal with the changes from the new Update and how to proceed. 

Even as they spoke, they couldn't help but crick their necks and flex their muscles. After entering the game and merging their body with their avatar the feeling was like night and day. 

The balance between the power of their real bodies and their avatar's stats had been perfectly harmonized and brought out, so for someone like AP who had far greater physical strength in reality than in Boundless  - even with his Divine Class - he could not manifest all that strength without having to use his bloodline. 

However, it wasn't just the core members, but all players. Thanks to the heap of Origin Energy Draco and Eva had sent, the AI could now perfectly represent true stats up to 100,000 points in each field. 

As such, many of the players began to experience a direct increase in their connection with their game avatar. Those who had 200 points of Strength usually felt it only in proxy. 

They could punch through solid walls and destroy many things with their body alone, but that was just their character doing it. Their physical body didn't feel it directly, just like a person controlling another with a remote, or an even better comparison would be a normal person wearing an Iron Man suit. 

It would allow them to perform superhman feats, but the one with the strength would be the suit, not them. When that person lifted something heavy, they wouldn't feel the direct strain of their muscles and the exhilaration of exertion. They would mostly feel the strain the suit would go through, but they themself would be fine. 

This had changed. Now even the average player could directly feel the power of their stats, and many struggled to adapt to the sudden changes. They might have had 300 points in Dexterity for example, but their running speed and movements had been handled by the game. 

Now, the training wheels had come off, they would have to handle their own body and the discrepancy was real. 

This also meant that stat feedback would begin. Players around the world would slowly feel themselves getting stronger, smarter and faster depending on how quickly the AI decided to feed them back. 

If they used a helmet, the rate would be ten times slower than having a pod. So then, how fast was it when using a pod? 

To answer that, we'll need to talk about what 'benefits' the AI got from Draco casually tossing his members into the world and solidifying the teleportation channel for those few seconds. 

The AI had faced many difficulties in order to get Boundless World up and running, there was the creation of the world, the florescence of history, the source of energy to power it all and how to keep it running. 

However, the biggest problem it faced from the get go had always been the matter of linking the two universes. By this point, it was obvious that Boundless was not just a game but a whole entire universe of its own that was constructed digitally. 

Caelo and the World Will of the Eternal World had both acknowledged this fact. 

However, the situation of Boundless World was similar to Draco's Morningstar World compared to the Main Plane. One was a sub-set of the other and not necessarily connected, being relatively independent, but its origin and fundamental functionality could be traced back to the source. 

Draco created the Morningstar Universe in the Western Fantasy section so its basic Laws, while being mostly rewritable, were based off off it. 

Likewise, the AI constructed Boundless World while in the universe, so Boundless' fundamental rules were based on the main universe, like Worldly Energy, Origin Energy and so on. 

But the problem was that the AI did not have something conveniently like an Eternal Tree that not only was able to connect to anything in Time and Space, but provided infinite energy. 

It had to do all the heavy lifting itself, and that limited its expansion.  It was definitely a fact that if Draco did not have the Eternal Tree, the utility and growth of the Morningstar World would not have been anywhere near as good as it currently was. 

The problem the AI faced was linking both worlds, so it could not let players directly come to its world nor could its created denizens enter the main universe. 

Up until of course, Sengo discovered how to do so through luck, intention or some other trick. 

When Draco connected the portal that day, he had solidified it and given the AI a personal tunnel into his universe. When he closed it and stopoed using it, it did not mean it disappeared, but it was just currently in a passive state, and the AI was definitely using this passive state tunnel. 

Previously, it had to pay a huge price to get players into the world of Boundless, using the elite virtua helmets of great technology to send the souls of players over to the world in order to take advantage of its services. 

Due to the weak connection, the players could not manifest their stats in reality and their souls could not benefit from the empowerment from growing stronger in the digital world. 

Now though, all of that was on the plate as not only had the AI become stronger, but the difficulty of doing so had greatly reduced thanks to the passive space tunnel. 

You could picture it like this: 

There is a large forest with with two lakes in the middle of it. One lake was huge and even had tributaries that snaked outwards and connected to a wider sea. 

The other lake was near the huge lake but was completely cut off, with not a single meandering branch connecting it to anything. 

There were fish in both lakes, with a huge amount of thick and big fish in the large lake and many small but special fish in the small lake. In order to reach the plankton from the smaller lake, the large fish were forced to jump. 

This was inconvenient and did nothing for the fish because once they came over, the plankton they consumed was spent jumping back to where they came, so they did not get bigger or stronger. 

This continued for a while until a tiny otter from the side river casually dug a hole in the soil in a random direction and ending up creating a passage to the main river. Hover it sealed the hole and only opened it when it wanted to travel between both. 

Then a powerful great whale from the main river saw the tiny fish, swallowed it up and then rammed its head into the hole it created, widening it and making it firmer. 

Some large killer sharks rushed in through the hole to the small lake and swallowed the plankton, but they wisely stopped and returned. The whale guarded the hole and allowed the nutrients from the main river to enter the side lake and enrich it greatly. 

Afterward, it left the hole alone. With that, the fish that used to have to jump over could now easily use the hole to cross over to the other lake and back, able to enjoy the plankton whole without wasting much energy, allowing them to gain more by digesting their food. 

This was a very loose way to explain the situation. 

A more perfect, simpler and astute way to describe it would be that the AI before the tunnel and the AI after the tunnel in terms of difficulty in facilitation player's existence in the current digital world would be like the difference between trying to hack an intranet network from outside the building/data center compared to being inside. 

In the previous timeline, the rate of return was about 0.001% of the game characters stats per week to players with pods and 0.0001% per week for those with Virtua Helmets. 

In numbers, if your Boundless character had 200 points in Strength, you'd only get 0.002 strength per week, and the week here was calculated in real time, obviously. In one year of 52 weeks that meant you would be fedback 0.104 points! 

Dayum! 

My Brother in Christ, if you thought that was small, there was literally no price paid for this. Not to mention there was no hard cap since all of your stats would be fedback in due time. 

Heck, some bodybuilders who went to the gym 52 weeks in a way did not see this much stat gain. The average human stat was 1 in each field according to Boundless, and you got 10% stronger in a year for just lying in a game pod and doing nothing but play. 

And it was not like it was the end. If you had higher stats, your fedback would be greater. As for the problem of lifespan, are you here to joke? If a human had 1 point in Constitution and it meant the average, wouldn't your lifespan increase if your in-game Constitution was fedback to you every year? 

Using an average human lifespan of 70 years at 1 point to calculate things, assuming you were fedback 0.1 Constitution after a year, that would result in an increase of 10%. 10% of 70 years was 7 years, so just by playing around, you would have earned yourself 7 years of extra lifespan! 

As for in this current timeline, the rate was even scarier. The feedback rate was set at 1% for those in pods and 0.1% for those using Virtua Helmets! 

Heck, the AI could easily feedback more, but it did not want to uproot the world order and cause chaos so fast. People also needed time to acclimate to the growing power and governments needed time to regulate everything. 

1% per week in a pod meant if you had the same 200 strength, you got 2 points of Strength per week! In a full calendar year, that was 104 points, you were already halfway to maxing out your stats and reaching the level of your game character! 

The human race would be completely different after this! Even the Primordials wouldn't be able to easily bully humans anymore, and it was likely that after a year or two, humans would finally be ready to step into the stars with their power and conquer the galaxy! 

Of course, all of this would need to be guided by a hand, and who better than the Evil Trio? They had the power, ability and knowledge to led the human race on a conquest of their local area, shoring up their forces and taking over the universe until it was time to clash with the damned Gerdo Galaxy!