“I have a lot of things I want to ask about. But first...how was your trip?” Quin asked.

“Ah, fine, I guess. I went to the adventurer's guild like you said and registered. Fought some River Rats afterwards solo. Well, only the first one was solo I suppose. I ended up accidentally selecting Necromancer as my class and using up my skill points there. After using 'Raise Dead' on one of the rats and naming him Tewy, he was supporting me afterwards. Speaking of..” I looked around the room. Tewy was nowhere to be found. Actually, I seemed to be back in my original clothes which I had been first wearing when I arrived here. The beginner's equipment I had just been wearing seemed to vanish.

“If you are looking for him then you will be disappointed to hear that he cannot be brought up here. This space exists..mostly separate from the world of Proda. None of your skills or effects will carry over up here. Not that you would need them.”

“That makes sense I suppose.”

“It is interesting that you chose Necromancer.”

“Why?”

“Well. First of all, whatever preconceived notions you have around Necromancers is likely partially true. They are not viewed so poorly that people will be outright hostile to you. However, you will find it difficult to join parties. As a commander of monsters, you go against the adventurer instinct of attacking them on sight. Not to mention, it is difficult in the heat of battle depending on the opponent to discern the two.”

“Ah. I experienced that already. In one of our fights I had accidentally killed Tewy.”

“Exactly. It's not always a problem, but it is a strong consideration, especially if they are choosing between you and someone else. But that scenario is not always the case, and so lower level parties may still be open to taking you on. That changes of course once you reach a higher level.”

“How come?”

“For that... I will leave up to your imagination.” She gave a small wink. Necromancers being hated at higher levels? Oh well, that shouldn't apply to me for a while, if ever. “Now then. On to your main job. Have you discovered any issues with the changes which we released?”

Quin's aura turned serious with her last question. Although there were definitely issues, I was curious to know if she had any realized any of them. Since we will be working together, it's in my best interest to know what she is capable of and how observant she can be while she is up here. Assuming, of course, that she had been staying up here this whole time.

“Have you seen any issues so far?” A question with a question. Let's see her response.

Quin's expression did not change. She simply continued to stare at me, but I wouldn't give in. Finally, she relented with a slight smile. “Good. It's been good so far, it seems. Groups of adventurers largely appear to be no longer forcing themselves to remain motionless after killing monsters. Some seem to still continue the tradition, but overall from what I can see from the lighthouse, our changes have at the very least taken place. Whether only the things we intended took place, however, I am unable to tell. I did notice that some of the towns seem a lot more, lets say, lively, but I cannot tell what people are saying.”

“Ah. It seems you've at least caught wind of some of it. Well, let me start off by saying this. When you kill monsters, you gain experience. So far from what I had seen, I believe this part worked fine. I was only able to fight level one monsters though, which give fifty experience each, so I'm unsure of if higher level monsters give the proper amount of experience, but I have no reason to believe that they wouldn't, since fifty lines up with the formula we created for experience based on monster level.”

Quin nodded her head. “Alright. That's good. So what have I caught wind of?”

“Sooo, there's a few, lets say, unforeseen consequences from the changes we did. It might be wrong to call them bugs perse, since I am not entirely sure if we don't want these things to happen, but..”

“Out with it, Zero.”

“I've caught wind of two things. One, is that it seems as though people are able to trade experience.” Quin's eyebrows raised briefly, before returning to their original position.

“And the other?”

“It seems as though people are going a bit nuts with obtaining experience from killing summons. I can confirm that summons do provide experience- when I accidentally killed Tewy, my rat, he gave me experience but no items. People are essentially either trading kills on their own summon to others for money, or probably killing their own summons to gain experience. I guess you can call it spawn camping, in a sort of way?”

Was Quin's face always so red? Oh boy, she seemed mad. “I see. Well. Thank you for your update. I can definitely tell you that 'unforeseen consequences' and 'bugs' are both highly accurate here. So now I must ask, when are we going to have a fix for this?”

“Uhh, not sur-”

“WHAT?! How can you not be sure?! If we let this go on, the entire balance of the world will be thrown off! People will reach a level far higher than intended. Do you understand the consequences of this?”

“Well I have a fairly good ide-”

“On earth, a single person can only become powerful through the support of others. In Proda, if a tyrant gains a high enough level, there will be nobody capable of stopping them. They will force others to summon for them and continuously grow stronger, reaching a peak that others could not obtain.”

“Al-, well, look, I know the situation is not ideal. But yelling at me isn't going to fix anything. You said it yourself when we first met. If I die I get reincarnated somewhere else and I don't have to deal with this. I can walk away anytime.”

“You would just break the world I'm in charge of and leave without taking responsibility?”

“I would, I would, pfft. I'm sorry, I never thought I would hear that phrase, let alone in a situation like this. I would say that I'm doing my best here. The change that was made was approved by BOTH of us. I helped make suggestions and build a lot of it, but it was up to you to go over and approve it.”

“Well of course I approved it, I thought you knew what you were doing!”

“Are you telling me that you NEVER ran into an issue after releasing something to Proda?”

Quin averted her eyes. “Well..”

“There you go. If you think I'm some kind of savant programmer, then you're wrong, and if that's what you need then please drop me off at the closest Build-A-Harem. Arguing like this isn't going to build a solution for us.”

“Very well. So how do we fix this?”

“The first thing we can try and do is damage control. We know that people are trading experience, and we know that people are getting it from summons. So if we write off the experience already traded and gained as a loss, we can instead focus on how to move forward on this problem.”

“Alright.”

“So first, since you're the expert and most knowledgeable on most of this world, I need you to first tell me if there are items that you can't trade.”

“Yes, there are lots of items. There are rare items such as gems, for instance, that give skill points when used. They are very, very rarely dropped by monsters and cannot be given to others.”

“Alright. What controls their property to not be traded?”

“It's true for all items of that kind, so it's set at the item level.”

“Okay. Could that same property be used for experience?”

Quin seemed to flinch. “W-well, yes, but I sh-should have set that when I created the experience item.” She stammered.

“Just open up your machine.”

I stood behind her as she sat down and opened her laptop. Within a few minutes, she had brought up the item which she created inside of the database table. Underneath the “Tradeable” column appeared the words, “TRUE.” Quin stared silently at her screen. Although I had expected her to change the value, she simply sat and did nothing, as if awaiting punishment.

It seemed she still hasn't learned. “Alright, let's change that to FALSE. I'm guessing that's what you use when the item isn't tradeable. Maybe we should check that to be sure.”

“I'm sorry,” she muttered. It sounded as though she were on the verge of tears. My immediate reaction was to just ignore it and push onward, but a tinge of guilt seemed to hit me. Memories of some of my mistakes when I had first started my career seemed to flood my head. The feelings of fear. Disappointment. Embarrassment. I recalled what my senior at the time had told me.

“It's alright. There is only one kind of mistake that is made on purpose – the one which you choose not to learn from. This was our first release together and yes there were some issues, but we will come up with a way to fix them.” Quin shook her head in agreement. “Now lets find out what the value should be. Query the table and lets see how many distinct values there are on this column.”

After a few minutes, we came up with the query and saw the result. TRUE and FALSE were the only values ever used here. “Alright, good. So FALSE is the correct value to set. Let's change the Tradeable value to FALSE, and we'll have one of our two issues fixed.”

Quin typed away at her keyboard, writing a simple update statement to change the value to FALSE. “Is this good?” She asked.

I went over what she wrote. I wasn't entirely sure, but I think there was a slight typo in the ID of the item we were changing. “Yeah, it seems good. But lets try something a little different this time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let's just make sure that the row we're changing is the correct one. Instead of updating this particular item, why don't we try changing the query to be a select instead?”

After adjusting what she typed slightly, she ran the select and indeed returned a different item. “Oh..” Although it's Tradeable value was already set to FALSE so our update would have had no impact, it was still worth it as a demonstration.

“Don't worry about it. Doing something like this is always good as a just-in-case type thing. We wouldn't have caused any damage in this scenario either. I think the last digit was supposed to be an eight instead of a seven.”

She quickly fixed the ID and ran another query. This time it returned the experience item. “This is it.”

“Yup. So we can change it to an UPDATE now and run it.” She hesitated for a moment, but finally ran it. After a quick refresh, we saw that the value changed.

“Looks like the change went through.”

“Nice. So that's one problem down. Now for the other one.”

Quin turned in her seat to look up at me. “So what should we do onii-chan?”

“Well, for starters, we- ...please don't ever say that again.” A rejected Quin avoids my gaze. “We can break down the problem a little bit.” Quin nodded in agreement. “The issue is that people get experience from monsters which they summoned. Which before, I'm guessing since you were the one dishing out experience, you always manually avoided.”

“Yes.”

“So, this started when we added experience to every single monster's drop loot table. Sooo. One easy way of doing damage control would be, rather than trying to work out who should be getting experience and who shouldn't we just delete experience as an item from every monster.”

Quin frowned at my suggestion. “I don't like the idea of flipping back such a drastic change.”

“Alright, noted. So with that not being an option, then we probably need to work on coming up with a direct solution. We'll have to figure out how to separate the summons from other monsters and remove experience as an item for just the summons. Not sure how we will do that yet though. I'd like to spend some time doing a bit of research and thinking about it.”

“Okay, what should I be doing?”

“I would say you should be doing the same. Maybe you'll be able to figure out some way to separate the two. We can reconvene, in lets say.... an hour?”

“Sure...except, you do realize, there is no concept of time here?”

“Huh? So what are my working hours?”

“Uhm. Well since you love your 'sister' so much...”

“I, nope, I never said that.”

“From now to..forever.”

Sounds like the print on the brochure for hell. “Uugh. This is just burning time. I'm going to go think..somewhere.” Frankly, looking around the room, the place is fairly empty. There's Quin's desk, and then my cubicle. I sat down at my desk and thought about the issue at hand. What I would do for a pencil and paper...the moment I thought that they both appeared atop my desk. I began jotting down some of my thoughts and making sense of things, while occasionally taking glances at the laptop screen.

After a while, satisfied with what I had come up with, I stood up and walked over to Quin, whose hands were placed as though she were squeezing her head like a lemon. I stood silently nearby before finally interrupting her once I realized she didn't seem to notice me. “How's it coming along?” I asked.

“Oh! Uhm, well, I definitely thought of some things, but I want to hear what you came up with first!”

“Sure. Well Quin, to put it simply, its impossible.”

“What?”

“There's just no way to do it. There's no obvious flag saying that something is a summon. I tried digging around at some of the skills logic and what things they can summon, but it gets pretty messy and there's just not enough time to look through it all.”

“Not enough time...so what do we do then? If that's the only path forward, how else can we do it?”

“Well, you could manually go over every single monster...”

“Rejected.”

“Now hold on, I think I can get us most of the way there though. Let me first ask you this. Why wasn't this an issue before?”

“What do you mean? Summons getting killed for experience? Because I was the one who was giving out experience.”

“Alright, but what about regular items? How come people who could summon, say, an iron golem or something, couldn't just keep summoning it for iron?”

“Because summons don't normally drop any items at all. That's why this became an issue all of a sudden.”

“Aha! Summons don't drop items. In that loot table we have, we have a giant list of every single item any particular monster can drop. Right?”

“Right...” Quin slowly responded, not sure where this was going.

“So. Since summons don't drop any items, then one assumption we might be able to make is that, after adding experience as a drop to every monster in the world, monsters who have only experience as a droppable item in the loot table are likely to be summons.”

“Hmm, I see. But is that assumption true?”

“For that, I have no idea. I would have to look to you to tell me that and whether it's alright to move forward with this kind of logic. It seems like most monsters have parts or resources which they drop, on top of the experience they provide, so reason tells me that it should be mainly summons...but if there is some monster for some reason that existed purely just to give experience and nothing else, then they would get caught as well. You'd be the only one who might know that though.”

Quin scratched her forehead. “Nothing immediately comes to mind, but what happens if we're wrong?”

“Then when somebody kills that monster they just wont get experience. It'll suck if that happens, but I can't come up with any better plan.”

“Alright. Let's go with your idea then. Can we at least make a list of all the monsters we removed experience from so that I could go over it at some point?”

“Sure... but it's a long list.”

“You've already figured the query out?”

“More or less. I wanted to come prepared to explain it to you. Here.” I placed a piece of paper with some of my thought process spilled out on top of her desk. “This is the general logic of what we need to do.”

1) Find all monster_ids inside of monster_loot_table which have an entry for 'XP' item

2) Within the list above, find the monster_ids which only have a single entry inside of the monster_loot_table.

3) Delete entries in monster_loot_table which have monster_ids in the list above.

“Hmmm, I see. So like you explained before, we're going with the assumption that things that exclusively only drop experience are summons. So we find the monsters which only drop experience, and then kick them out of the monster loot table, thus causing them to never drop anything?”

“Correct. We can make a copy of the list that we're going to delete so you can go through it and see if you find anything that should give experience. Of course, people won't get any experience as long as they are missing from the list, but we'll have to deal with that when the time comes.”

“And you're sure these are the right monsters?”

“Take a look.” I sent over the final query to Quin, and she brought it up as well as a second query which shows which monsters will eventually be losing their entries in the loot table. The list seemed like a whole lot of 'Undead X', mixed in with some of the other types of creatures which people can summon within other classes. I saw 'Succubus' at one point as she was scrolling through and made a mental note to try and find which class could summon that. Just curious, that's all.

“I don't see anything here that seems wrong. I think... I can sign off on this.” The way she said it sounded like she was signing a contract with the devil. She receives my code, I get...hey wait, what am I getting out of this? I nodded in affirmation. She copy and pasted the code I handed to her and ran it. It took a while for the update to finish as what I created was frankly bad performing, but I never was good at this kind of stuff in the first place. Finally, we received confirmation that the entries were deleted. Quin refreshed the table and saw that the correct entries were deleted, but the rest remained. She breathed a sigh of relief. “Huuuu. So, are you heading back to Proda now?”

“Soon. First.... we discuss my pay.”

Validissimus

Hey all, thanks for reading my story so far. I've been bouncing back and forth with the idea of including code as part of the story. I've normally kept things relatively simple (I hope) so far when it comes to programming/code, but wanted to experiment a little bit with this chapter. Let me know how you feel about the 1), 2), 3) section in this chapter. Thanks again!