Chapter 660: Chapter 660 - System Upgrade
The next step is looking for volunteers.
But that was also the hardest one.
Virel and Aniel had been fortunate. Their souls had resonated with his origin small world.
Lucien could not assume that would happen again.
So he did not rush.
The next plan was simple in wording and terrifying in execution.
He needed to find people compatible with hidden small worlds.
That meant he needed more than names.
He needed soul resonance, fate weight, and most importantly, the willingness and stability to endure an incarnation without turning the process into soul mutilation dressed as exploration.
Lucien sat inside the Origin Core Shrine again.
The Reincarnation Disc rested beside him.
The thin gold incarnation filament hovered above his palm for a moment, then dissolved back into a protected pattern within his authority.
Today was not the day to send it.
Today was the day to build the tool that would help him know where it should go.
Lucien looked toward the web of light connected to the Grace System.
Then he smiled faintly.
The Grace System had been good enough for yesterday.
It would not be good enough for what came next.
•••
The Grace System unfolded before him.
Lucien saw the structure beneath.
A vast web extending across Lootwell, chapels, branches, citizens, faithful practitioners, protected facilities, and growing public routes.
Lucien had built it by imitating what his own system allowed him to understand.
But now after studying the true systems, Lucien saw its flaws clearly.
It was too blunt, too external, too dependent on visible actions, too crude in reward classification, and too shallow in compatibility reading.
It could tell who completed a quest.
It could record contribution.
It could distribute rewards.
It could verify certain forms of loyalty, faith, and service.
But it could not yet read deeper patterns properly.
Not the way the True Liberator systems did.
Lucien’s embarrassment returned for one breath.
Then he crushed it into motivation.
A flawed system that worked was not shameful.
A creator who refused to improve it after seeing the flaws would be.
So he began.
•••
The first change was not power.
Lucien carved a new foundational clause into the Grace System.
He wanted to use the system to identify possible incarnation candidates.
...
The second change was the Resonance Profile.
It measured broad spiritual tendencies, law affinity, soul stability, karmic weight, compatibility with higher authority, resistance to foreign corruption, and tolerance toward memory seals.
For most people, it would remain invisible.
For administrators, it would appear only as a suitability range, warning marks, and recommendations.
For Lucien, if deeper study was permitted, it would help identify who might safely withstand an incarnation thread and what type of world might receive them.
...
The third change was the Grace Authority Filter.
This layer examined whether a reward, quest, warning, or authority transfer was appropriate for the user receiving it.
Before, the Grace System could be generous.
Too generous, sometimes.
Lucien had been careful, but the structure itself still lacked subtlety.
Now rewards would become less childish.
A young genius with arrogance would receive tasks that required cooperation before receiving techniques that made arrogance fatal.
A frightened civilian would receive safety, clarity, and small agency before being asked to act bravely.
A potential incarnation candidate would receive long-term stability quests before any dangerous offer ever appeared.
...
The fourth change was the Contribution Context Layer.
The old system counted deeds.
The new layer judged context.
Holding a line for ten breaths could be minor in one battle and heroic in another.
Delivering medicine could be a simple errand or the reason a village survived.
Killing an enemy could be necessary, excessive, protective, selfish, desperate, or all of those at once.
Lucien did not want a system that rewarded numbers blindly.
Numbers were useful.
They were also stupid if left unsupervised.
The Contribution Context Layer would weigh danger, intent, necessity, impact, difficulty, and restraint.
That made the reward system slower to refine.
But better.
This way, there were less loopholes on Grace Quests
•••
The hardest change came next.
The Will Layer.
The True Liberator systems carried the Primordial Slime’s Will so naturally that every function felt assisted from within. The systems corrected, guided, restrained, translated, and protected without making the user feel controlled.
Lucien wanted something similar.
Not a copy.
He was not the Primordial Slime.
He was Lucien.
He did not have the mind of a slime. Well, slimes don’t have brains so it worked perfectly well.
Lucien sighed.
Then, he sent his will into the Grace System carefully.
The first attempt nearly made him regret having ambition.
The web answered all at once.
Billions of faint impressions brushed against him.
Lucien’s mind shook.
Then Parallel Thoughts opened.
One thought became ten.
Ten became a hundred.
Hundreds branched into structured channels.
The Starlit Codex steadied his spirit. It arranged the impossible flood into constellations of meaning.
Perfect Calculation divided the load.
The Origin Core authority served as the central foundation.
The Grace System became less like a crowd shouting into one room and more like a vast array of linked processors, each handling its own region, category, priority, and pattern before sending only necessary summaries upward.
Lucien almost laughed.
’So this was what it felt like to become a supercomputer with a soul.’
No.
That was unfair to supercomputers.
They did not usually have to process divine faith, karmic nuance, spiritual complaints, and a child requesting a quest reward shaped like a glowing frog.
The Will Layer stabilized slowly.
It was not Lucien’s full mind inside every Grace System.
That would be dangerous and exhausting.
Instead, it was an imprint of his principles.
The Will Layer settled.
For the first time, Lucien felt the Grace System breathe with him.
As an extension of authority carrying his judgment in structured form.
The strain remained.
But it no longer threatened to drown him.
Parallel Thoughts kept branching.
The Starlit Codex kept his spirit ordered.
The Origin Core held the foundation.
The Grace System obeyed.
•••
Lucien then rebuilt the reward structure.
He made it into something sharper.
The Grace System’s old reward layer had not been foolish enough to allow obvious exploitation, but after studying true systems, Lucien now saw possible second-layer abuses, third-layer abuses, social manipulation abuses, reputation laundering abuses, and a particularly annoying strategy involving staged monster attacks that made him want to send several hypothetical people into community sanitation duty for a decade.
He added safeguards.
The Grace System brightened.
Across the five continents, countless users felt something change.
Most could not explain it.
Their interfaces became cleaner.
Quest descriptions became more precise.
Warnings became more relevant.
Rewards felt better matched.
In distant chapels, faint light moved through the walls.
•••
By the time he finished, the Grace System was no longer the same.
It still looked familiar to users. But the depth had changed.
It was still not equal to the True Liberator systems.
Lucien was not delusional.
But the Grace System was no longer a child’s drawing of a cosmic machine.
It had become a young machine.
Still growing.
Still awkward in places.
Still requiring supervision.
But real enough to stand straighter.
Lucien looked through the web of light and felt his control settle.
The whole structure lay before him as a complex but readable array.
With a thought, he could update functions.
With a thought, he could adjust reward logic.
With a thought, he could revoke access from someone who betrayed the system, though that function now required proof, review, and recorded justification unless the threat was immediate.
That last safeguard was necessary.
Power that could change lives with a thought needed friction.
Especially when the thought belonged to someone powerful enough to make mistakes at continental scale.
Lucien had no intention of becoming the kind of ruler whose mood counted as law.
The Grace System was his creation.
That meant it needed limits against him too.
He added that clause personally.
Then he sat back.
For a long moment, the Origin Core Shrine remained quiet.
The upgraded Grace System pulsed across his senses.
The complexity should have been impossible for anyone to manage.
For Lucien, it was merely exhausting.
He smiled.
It was difficult to explain what he had done to anyone who could not feel the structure.
The easiest explanation would be that it was impossible.
Unfortunately, Lucien had always found that word more like a suggestion than a rule.
The changes had only begun.
There were still too many things to fix.
But today, this was enough.
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