Shadow Seer (Rogue Merchant Book #3): LitRPG Series by Roman Prokofiev (read ebook pdf .TXT) 📕

the credit for all of our achievements. We met up and collectively refused his claims. In short, it was a scandal and a big fight.”

All of that happened at the same time as the Taerland Incident. NPC rebellions and illogical actions of the procedural generator forced the developers to join forces and find a solution to the issue. It led to the creation of the Seven Brothers protocol.

“At first, Andrei wanted to make only one Key,” the Gravekeeper chuckled. “But we immediately cried foul and decided to secure ourselves. Seven Keys for the seven of us were a guarantee against being screwed over. Almost everything was in place: we underwent an experimental ‘digitalization’ and prepared secret caches for the Keys. Each of us only knew the location of their own Key. I was entrusted with the Compass. We put our digital copies into hibernation in special spots. They were supposed to wake up upon an external command.”

“A few days later, Balabanov once again gathered us together,” he continued after a pause. “Christmas was around the corner, and he invited the entire team—seventy people at the time—to Mauritius to celebrate. Recently, he had bought real estate there.”

“Strange, I thought that Agasyan was the one to bankroll your vacation,” I said. “That’s what the media reported.”

“It’s all bogus. Andrei was the one who arranged the flight, the tour, and the plane,” the Gravekeeper said bitterly. “Actually, Agasyan kicked up a fuss about that—he didn’t want to let everyone go, leaving only service personnel in the office. I don’t know how Andrei convinced him.”

“So you’re telling me that...” It finally started to sink in.

“Unfortunately, I don’t know if Andrei ever boarded the plane and what happened there. My copy’s memory stops much earlier—the last backup was performed a day before the flight. I woke up here, on the Isle of Madness, next to my cache.”

“So the plane crash wasn’t Agasyan’s fault?”

“The plane crash? Did it even happen? I read online that they found no traces of the plane, no bodies of the deceased. The plane disappeared, that’s it. Nobody knows what happened to it. And yes, I’m absolutely sure that Agasyan had nothing to do with it. We were the goose that laid the golden eggs. Our disappearance caused a horrible panic—they barely found a replacement for us. Do you think that Agasyan wouldn’t have prepared if he wanted to get rid of us? Yamato’s team is proficient, but Sphere’s a unique project. They can’t handle it, and the game’s already out of control. I’m sure that it’s Balabanov’s doing. It’s his style.”

“I don’t get it. Didn’t he die with all of you, or at least disappear? All of his assets went to Agasyan. What’s his interest?”

“That’s what he told you,” Rocky said, grinning. “We can only guess at where our share, or rather our company’s share, went. Most likely, to Balabanov’s wife—she’s the only surviving shareholder. I need hardly say that it’s impossible to learn the details while staying here. But all indirect evidence suggests that Andrei’s alive!”

“How?” I asked, dumbfounded. Svechkin’s words boggled the mind.

“My copy left stasis several days after the crash. It was I who developed the emergency protocol, so I know how it works. The idea was that activating the Seven Brothers protocol would serve as a general command to awaken our copies. Until that moment, they would sleep in inaccessible places. I did cheat a little bit, though. I didn’t trust Andrei, so I created an additional trigger for my awakening—the activation of his Key. He didn’t suspect it. As soon as he entered Sphere and took his Key, I woke up in this cave.”

“You mean that the protocol was never activated?”

“Bingo! If it were, everyone would wake up, not just he. Andrei bypassed the protocol to enter the game, and it could only be done from the real world.”

“I don’t understand. Wasn’t your death in reality supposed to trigger the awakening?”

“No. We didn’t count on it at all,” Rocky said, smirking. “I think you don’t quite realize the point of the Seven Brother protocol. Didn’t the Magister give you a good explanation?”

“Maybe he didn’t.”

“All right, I’ll try to be brief. Seven Brothers are the Sphere’s red button. When we witnessed the AI’s antics in Taerland, we realized that we had opened a can of worms. The generator was capable of influencing virtuality, overriding the capsule’s neural interface, even blocking access to the game. In theory, it could create a situation where nobody could log into Sphere—neither players nor admins. That’s why we created digital copies and put our minds in NPC bodies. They were supposed to attack from the inside if there was no access from the outside. Get it? I’m trying to explain it in layman’s terms.”

“I think I understand the gist of it, although it sounds crazy,” I replied.

“Then let’s continue. The emergency protocol wasn’t started, Sphere still works, more or less, but Andrei ‘woke up’ and took his Key. He didn’t rouse the others but quietly unlocked dynamic access to the locations with other Keys. It cannot be done by a digital copy, either—as opposed to a real person using remote access to the servers. Thankfully, as I already said, I was the creator of the Seven, so the most he could do was to unlock the caches for dynamic events. I suspect that’s how you found your Key. By the way, it was intended for Maxim Rubtsov, our game designer.”

“Yes, it was an accident,” I confirmed. “But your Key is here!”

“I hid it here for a reason. Yes, my Key can be accessed dynamically as well. Every 24 hours, there’s a 30-minute window when you can get to this place. But we’re in the Hole. It has few players but a lot of hard-to-reach areas. The chance of anyone stumbling upon this cave is less than one in ten