Arc III--- Games and Goblins

The soul.

It was a mysterious existence more profound than I could imagine. Even with the system, I would not hold any confidence in completely understanding the soul. And here I was, daring to commit blasphemy by experimenting with how to create such a thing.

I knew that dabbling in something I was not fully cognizant of could be the end of me. For example, look at Skynet, or Victor Frankenstein and his Frankenstein monster. "Focus, me, focus!" I stopped with the movie references and focussed on the job at hand.

"Let's see..." In front of me was my monitor screen displaying a humanoid green monster barely three feet tall. 

The Goblin was a monster of greed and savagery. They were creatures that were a staple in the fantasy genre, and I was planning on bringing them here in this Cultivation World. I was definitely playing with fire... and I loved it. My passion for games and fantasy stuff was through the roof.

"This should do..."

The Soul Editing Software on my PC was one of my recent add-ons. I grinned at the finalized basic goblin blueprint. It had been 72 hours since I posted the Beta Expansion Pack, and my players must have been impatient that in the time I was busying myself, they had already slaughtered hundreds of beasts in the Butterberry Forest, and that they had been slowly encroaching the Desolate Mountain Ranges.

Ping! -100 Quintessence.

[You have acquired a Hyperdimensional 3D Printer!]

I activated the printer immediately and randomly spawned the Goblins on the Butterberry Forest. 

One thing I learned about quintessence was that they were the fuel that powered the soul. Through my telepathy empowered with quintessence, I forcibly contained the souls of random beasts lacking any spark of intelligence.

After that.

Through my Soul Editing Software, I edited their traits highlighting their greed, savagery, and more primal emotions. I also constructed a body for this freaky ugly Goblins which I took my sweet time on creating. I must say, I still have that artsy touch in me that it took me no time to draw a satisfactory fantasy green goblin. These little monsters were really ugly... genuine goblin ugly!

I grimaced as I watched an ugly goblin through my Mind's Eye building a slingshot in a matter of seconds. These little creatures possessed impressive intelligence, and they were capable of building basic weapons. If given time to grow, these goblins would establish a technology tree that could scale up the difficulty.

Perfect! Just perfect!

I continued on my voyeur as I skimmed on many goblins that I had spawned in the Butterberry Forest. The power of creation from the tips of my fingers was fully displayed in the form of the goblins. I felt like an evil overlord by creating such menace. Mwahahahahaha! 

That aside, what I was actually creating was a farm.

Each goblin was made only using one-tenth of a quintessence meaning they have a weaker life force. However, unlike most lifeforms where vitality was judged by lifespan, the vitality of goblins was solely based on HP or Health Points which would decrease over time through the erosion of the soul. The erosion of the soul was a side-effect of the fragmented soul. That was why goblins had become fragile creatures not just simply because I was devoting myself to the theme of fantasy creatures.

In order to remedy the goblins' fragile bodies, I made special goblins called Goblin Shamans who could stop the erosion of the more common Goblins. This way, the game could be more challenging.

I said something about farms. The real nature of the Goblins was cattle. These little goblins here after living for some time would raise the value of their souls the longer they live. I have studied quintessence eagerly and I have gained some results. The nature of quintessence was that they were nurtured from the soul as a seedbed. By living, surviving, and existing, a creature could elevate its state of existence by advancing in cultivation levels and as a result, enrich their souls with quintessence! The longer my goblins survived my players' onslaught, the more their soul value would increase, and the more quintessence that their souls would harbor.

I would like to say that the soul generates quintessence, but I was not confident with that theory yet. I still have so much studying and researching to do. I felt bad for these goblins though, just slightly, but from the perspective of a humanist, what I must have been doing was quite a sick activity.

After all, I was creating life only to slaughter them!

But too bad for the goblins, they have someone like me as their creator.

The idea that I made my players earn Experience Points was in parallel the same as how quintessence was to me. In essence, Quintessence Points were an elevated form of Experience Points!

I wrote in my notebook the few findings I realized in the past three days, while simultaneously using Mind's Eye to watch the Goblins create tribes in a matter of minutes. They sure were fast. While the party of two: Nee Chen and Xiang Ya was busy scaling the Desolate Mountain Ranges in pursuit of a jaguar, Bi Yuan was already hunting goblins.

Bi Yuan that little bunny was surely a solo player who loved being alone. The goblins she was killing were only earning me a 0.2 quintessence since they were only recently spawned. But I could wait. I could just recycle my quintessence and spawn more goblins!!

While my 3D Printer continued to summon goblins randomly from the Butterberry Forest, I continued to modify and improve the Goblin Template. Goblins were creatures of greed and lust. I toned down their lust aspect a little bit since I would not want to disgust myself too much or the society or the players. Heck, I could imagine a few players being traumatized if I went further on my programming of goblin behavior. I was content enough though with the Goblins particularly not targeting human women or players in general as a counterbalance to these fuglies' more immoral behavior.

Still, that would not mean their libido would not be any lesser.

In fact, while skimming with my Mind's Eye, I have already seen a couple of goblins forcibly impregnating a few monkeys. It was a disgusting, yet curious sight. I made it so that the goblins were all males, and that they could fertilize any mammal that walked the earth. Now that I was seeing it, I realized that the idea was more terrifying than I thought.

However, I had no plans of removing such a feature though. Goblins should be like this! 

Heh~!

I guess I was really on the path to becoming an evil lord huh?

I left the goblins to their own, while I returned to studying the nature of souls and their relationship with quintessence. This could help me elevate my cultivation. Moreover, this would also help me create a more perfect monster for my players to subjugate. 

In my hand was an orb of light only visible through my Mind's Eye. The souls that my goblin monsters possessed came from the souls of beasts. The thing in my hand though was different. It was an agglomeration of quintessence which I had been trying to mold into a soul for some time already.

I felt bad for kidnapping innocent souls of beasts and warping their traits through my system and Soul Editing Software, and while this might sound hypocritical, I think I would feel better if the souls that functioned on my monsters were more soul-less or rather, less innocent. I could not find a better word than soul-less, but perhaps an artificial intelligence? But that would defeat the purpose of creating a genuine monster...

Hmmm... Perhaps, the more correct word was creating an artificial soul.

Yes, that's it!

I opened the software used to remotely control the Mindless Monk. I made a few taps and initiated conversations with a few merchants. I investigated the locations of loose bandit groups, and while the Mindless Monk was on his road to the Azuon Empire, he might as well take his sweet time and hunt for a few villains.

Mwahahaha!

I should be able to start with the souls of these poor fellows for my artificial soul project so that I could create more genuine monsters.

This would be fun! I guessed that games never failed to amuse me. Yes, this was just a game to me. I reckoned my sense of morality must have been distorted since coming to this world but I try not to be. Experimenting on souls was certainly not a righteous thing!

But what could I do? This was necessary for the sake of my ambition. Despite being exposed to the cruelty of this cultivation world, I wished to continue with my vision of turning this world into a game and carving my own paradise.

The creation of goblins was just a start! And while this would describe me as being equally cruel, then so be it! To study the soul and further advance my cultivation, I must come to terms with the reality of my situation that I was not going back to the 21st-century modern earth that I always knew.

"It is games and goblins now... and clearly, I will be doing more than that in the future..."