“Okay. Well, Xun Guan, I’m not going to do a ton of boring quests. If I wanted to waste my time doing nothing, I’d go back to that hill and stare at the sky. At least then it wouldn’t be both boring and tiresome. Also, there is no way to assure a feudal noble’s loyalty. It’s better to just lop the heads off this hydra of a political system, eat them, and grow bigger ourselves rather than constantly trying to use someone else’s resources.”

“But that won’t work. The nobles will just respawn, and then you’ll be left without anything,” she answered.

“Not really a big problem,” Lucas continued. “If the AI works like you say it does, and you can prompt it to create quests based on how you interact with NPCs, then all I need to do is make sure that it spawns the right quests to kill the right people—namely the leaders already in authority.”

“But players kill those same people all the time. That’s exactly what boss encounters are in this game. How will you killing them be any different from another player doing the exact same thing?”

“Because, unlike the other players, I’ll be negotiating with the AI differently. I’ll be working from the perspective of someone in the Imperium. So, why would the encounters ever be the same? The only thing I need to do now is to find out which one of those nobles is the easiest to pick off. I’ll start small and work my way up until I’m king of this noob island.”

Xun Guan’s agitated expression didn’t fade completely, but it softened a little once she realized that he actually had something resembling a plan. “Well, if you’re set on that . . .” She turned to her butler and said, “Hans, could you fetch the political maps.”

The butler in the corner of the room nodded and then silently disappeared from sight. “While he’s gone, I am curious: Do you have any plans for how you’ll build your character? Are you going to go for the sword-wielding Barbarian warlord, putting most of your stats into Fortitude and Athletics? Or are you going to play as the Ranger, focusing on Athletics with some points put into Fortitude and the remainder into Luck? Maybe you’ll go Paladin so that you can stay alive through long encounters, making it more fun for the players who are trying to kill you as you keep bouncing back from the verge of death?”

“Well, I was thinking about something sneaky and cool, a dagger-wielding Scout or a double-katana Ninja,” Lucas admitted, “but, sadly, this game doesn’t give people starting skills for physical damage classes. Without a proper trainer to teach me how to execute Chi attacks, that idea is going to be useless for now.”