I restrained the screaming dragon, peeled off its scales, crushed its claws and teeth, gouged out its eyes, cut out its heart, and extracted its magic stone.
After continuing this for about a month, the dragon turned into a silent lump of flesh.
It seemed that its brain had shriveled up from the pain and despair.
So, I tried casting a regeneration spell to restore its sanity, but its smooth brain apparently couldn’t recover.
Even regenerating the brain doesn’t bring the mind back.
Well, that’s true. Even if you restore the structural functions of the brain, the synaptic connections that were recorded there won’t return.
It’s like smashing a hard drive. Even if you somehow reconnect it, the data that was on it would still be lost. In that sense, it makes sense.
I also learned more about the ancient people, and I could update the immortality spell I’m working on.
The full implementation is getting close.
As for the dragon I destroyed, I’ve replicated it and placed copies in various locations.
I’ll treat them the same as “tool humans.”
Or maybe “replicated” isn’t quite right? More like dragon homunculi.
Still, those ancient people… or rather, elves? Whatever they are, they were foolish.
They created it, but then left it unchecked.
Leaving a great power outside of your control isn’t a sign of a superior being’s generosity or composure; it’s carelessness.
The fact that they’ve left my ‘unauthorized access to the world’s laws’ unchecked shows a lack of skill or security awareness, but even so, this is just beyond the pale.
This dragon here—sure, I could kill it in seconds if it were right in front of me, but killing it is one thing.
But if it were to engage in economic sabotage? If it put all its efforts into such schemes, I’d be seriously inconvenienced too.
Isn’t it normal to be cautious of anything that can even slightly siphon off your resources?
And if it’s something you created and abandoned, and it holds a grudge against you, shouldn’t you control it… or dispose of it?
I don’t like talking about vague moral philosophy without much basis, but I just can’t believe that people who work with this kind of mindset can produce meaningful results.
It’s like how companies that don’t take compliance, political correctness, environmental protection, or SDGs seriously tend to suffer losses in business, right?
Because of their stuck-up, ‘we’re above it all’ attitude, they didn’t even notice my personal hacking, and their core system was tampered with.
That’s just not good at all.
Well, it doesn’t seem like those elves are complete idiots, and they haven’t shown themselves in public, it seems?
Besides, who knows what power they have now or what they’re up to.
Actually, are they even still around? Isn’t there a chance they’ve gone extinct?
From what the dragon said, they were quite the villains… but if that’s the case, shouldn’t they be ruling the world?
This talk of elves and ancient people seems to be about events from thousands of years ago, and with that much time, shouldn’t they have managed to dominate the planet by now?
But looking for them myself is… well…
I have admin privileges and a program installed that can search for users connected to the ‘world’s laws,’ but… I don’t have the search terms. It’s impossible to identify the elves through the system.
Besides, this system is insanely hard to use. No wonder I’d want to mess with it.
It just wasn’t designed with this in mind.
If the system is meant to manage and run for users under the name of ‘life,’ then it might work for populations in the thousands or tens of thousands, but if you include all life on Earth, down to microorganisms, it’s in the trillions.
The tag management is horrendous… though, to be fair, the original designer seemed to have left some leeway in the system. But looking at the logs, a particularly awful update file was added about a thousand years after the world’s laws came into effect, causing so many bugs it’s ridiculous.
It’s like some third-rate programmer who, instead of fixing the core bug, just slapped a patch on and said, “It works for now, so it’s fine!” This world’s at its end.
Also, the code is a mess! Just because they were the only ones writing it, they put these incomprehensible long comments right into the source code!
Stop reusing debugging code in the live environment! Stop hardcoding things here! Don’t just suppress errors and output something for the time being! Don’t return default values just because you don’t know what else to do!
… I don’t know if they were ancient people or elves, but I’m seriously starting to want to kill them out of personal spite.
Well, anyway, the system of this world is garbage.
So, um… as expected of such a crappy system, I can’t find the elves.
I don’t even know if they exist.
Even if they do, if they can’t even control a planet of this level, then… well, I can’t say they’re not worth worrying about.
As I mentioned earlier, those elves could potentially siphon off some of my resources.
But, unfortunately, their priority has dropped.
As I’ve been saying, the ‘world’s laws’ are, for all practical purposes, in my hands, so I can’t waste time chasing after ‘elves who might have authority over the world’s laws.’
I have too much work, you see…
What if the elves have some hidden ace up their sleeve that I couldn’t anticipate?
I’ve thought about that, of course, but rather than worrying about unseen threats, it’s better to steadily deal with the problems in front of me.
Even if I wanted to fret about their secret weapon, this world runs on such buggy code that it’s impossible to predict when it might collapse…
I’m dealing with the world’s laws’ errors myself…
“Well then, back to work! The fun vacation is over!”
I finished my thoughts, clapped my hands, and started giving instructions to my employees in the office that used to be a slum…
