Lubyanka Square, Moscow Centre.

The entire world was discussing the war between Esparia and Eden. And while it was growing more and more interesting with each new twist unveiled by the media, it seemed that the conflict had moved out of the battlefield and into the boardroom with the unconditional surrender of the instigating nation, Esparia.

Now, onlookers were wondering what other demands Eden would be making, as Esparia couldn't deny any of them. That was how unconditional surrender worked, after all. It was becoming quite an argument, and even some betting sites had opened odds on what the conditions were going to be, with most people placing bets on land concessions being one of them.

That was something that would also have been being discussed inside FSB headquarters, if they hadn't found themselves in a situation that required most of their attention: an operative of the FSB's Technical Security Department, Vladimir, had gone missing from his home.

Many teams had been tasked with looking for any clues that could lead them to discover where he'd gone, or how he had been taken, but everything inside his home hinted that he'd been forcefully taken. It seemed like he had been interrupted in the midst of something.

Through recovered security footage, they had managed to track the location of the intruders' car, but when they arrived at the location they found nothing but the charred wreckage of an abandoned car, leaving very little evidence to be recovered from it.

At the moment, they had very few suspects, the main ones being MI6, the CIA, and the "Security Service of Ukraine" (SBU), as Vladimir had been stationed in each of those countries and could have had a target painted on his back for any number of reasons. Or perhaps it was just an act of retaliation. After all, it would be weird for any of those agencies to make such a drastic decision, kidnapping a high-level official of an intelligence agency in his home country. That would naturally only increase the tensions between the countries involved, if they were caught, or even cause an armed conflict to erupt. Naturally, that depended on which country the kidnapper was from and why the Russian agent had been kidnapped. A Ukrainian wanting to extract information regarding the ongoing Crimean conflict would naturally provoke a harsher reaction than a CIA agent who had merely been personally offended by one of his actions in the United States.

Still, no matter who did it, or why, it wouldn't be a good thing for the countryor countriesinvolved.

Thus, the FSB was doing their best to retrieve their operative as recovering their reputation was a paramount factor. Because if word got out that one of their high level officials had been kidnapped from inside their own home and their country could do nothing about it, they would lose credibility in the intelligence community. And they didn't want that to happen, because the moment they lost it, they would need to do something drastic to regain it... which wouldn't be good for anyone involved.

"Make sure you find him! If he's alive, bring him back. If he's dead, bring back his corpse. I don't care which, but he must be found!" That was the only order that came from the top of the Bureau, which had been forced into high gear, causing tensions to rise between the many intelligence agencies that had a bad rapport with the Russians as they mistook the FSB's movements as the prelude to a major operation.

.....

Back in Eden, in Aron's pod.

The battle between Nova and the system continued, as the mature AI maintained the massive movement of mana into Aron's chamber, where it was continuously absorbed by his body like a black hole. At some point, it had even forced Nova to send a few atomic printers to widen and strengthen the pipes that were transporting mana to his pod during the mana transfer process, which was quite a risky endeavor. But after successfully upgrading the transfer pipes, she had managed to reach an understanding with the system, as now the amount of mana being absorbed by Aron's body was the same as she was filling the pod with, giving her a moment to catch her virtual breath. It even reduced the RAM she had been dedicating to fine-tuning the process as she searched for the perfect equilibrium of mana in/ with the systems mana out.

Within the body of the person that was doing all of that absorption, a monumental change was taking place.

As more than a quarter of the billion of runic lines in his heart were lighting up, coming to life, and becoming active for the first time since they had been etched into his heart, the reaction of his body to them lighting up was... indescribable. As the runes absorbed the mana Nova was providing them, they condensed it more and more, with a few million lines of runes lighting up at different times to assist in the process of transforming the provided mana until the usually golden mana turned the same color the active runes on his heart were - inderscribable color. That hinted at the runes being on another level, as Aron had until this moment only seen runes in two colors: the usual gold, or white, like when he infused his intent into them.

Following the conversion of the mana into a new liquid state, a subtle vibration was sent throughout his body as the runes used that power to produce even more liquid mana. And along with the shaking, all of the foreign parts of the system that had assimilated themselves throughout Aron's body separated and hovered above him soon joined and covered by the condensed and converted liquid. That, in turn, was followed by the system's parts changing to that same indescribable color, as the billions of active runes were draining all the mana out of the pod so that they could to ensure they remained active, as Aron was undergoing an important evolution.

While all of those changes were happening in different parts of his body, his brain was undergoing an equally transformative experience in its own way. Except instead of being separated during the process, the parts of the system that had assimilated itself with his brain didn't detach from it. Rather, those parts forced themselves deeper and into an even larger portion of his brain. The runesthe active ones, at leastseemed to have a mind of their own that allowed them to go through the evolution process while still part of Aron's brain, which had quite a magical result: even the regions of his brain that weren't part of the system ended up evolving! That was a technicality that hinted at the system not being a single entity, but two or more! Or it might just be one entity that had split off parts of itself due to some limitation of the body it was residing within.

While that was happening, Nova was monitoring every bit of data that the pod could and was collecting, which was indeed massive. But during the process, she started receiving null data. ("null data" means that, no data was available or that the data is unknown or undefined)

That resulted in a reaction no one would have thought possible, as the moment she began receiving null data, she dropped everything she was doing and put all the focus on Aron, trying to find out what caused it.

Everything.

That included removing access to the quantum computer for everyone and suspending everything that wasn't absolutely critical, even down to the two instances of the universal simulation.

With the removal of quantum computer access, Ava, who had been moved to Rina's new glasses and was now controlling the Rothschild family's private network, had been kicked offline. And at that moment in time, the daughter AI had been monitoring Charlotte, who was headed into Arieh's room to deliver something that hadn't been logged into the private network. Unfortunately, Nova was looking for more computing power.

Thus, even the quantum chips inside the glasses had been commandeered and, due to the abrupt termination of Ava's activity, she didn't have enough time to automate the monitoring process. That resulted in her failing to monitor what was happening in the room.

The same thing was happening to nearly everyone that had even a semblance of access to the quantum server. Even some of the soldiers that were logged into the universal simulation for training had been forcefully logged out, causing all of them to feel the real life equivalent of 1000ms of lag between their brains and bodiesa very nasty feeling indeed.

It was the same for the soldiers keeping peace in Eden, but thanks to their training and not having logged inside the VR, they continued acting normally and followed their procedures, managing to avoid alerting anyone to the situation that was happening.

That was happening to everyone and everything, nearly causing catastrophic damage to many ongoing projects. If it weren't for the countermeasures that had been implemented in case of different scenarios acting as a gate and coming into action for this unaccounted problem, many disasters would have happened. Thankfully, though, proper planning that was put thhere for a different scenario had averted many of the possible disasters.