After the funeral of Janick, the attendees at the ceremony stick around since a much more joyous one is getting underway. The induction of the couple of wizards who took out a loan from the Bank of the Frontier as seed money for selling magical data transfer scrolls into the Order of Magic.

  That said, that wizard couple wasn’t invited to Janick’s funeral because she treated them as a banking customer like any other in life. When they arrive:

  “After the tragic death of Janick, the pioneer of alcohol magic, we are assembled here to honor a much more joyous occasion. We’re here to celebrate the induction of two wizards who pioneered new spells that have the potential to completely change the world of magical education and training forever!” the grandmaster of the Order of Magic announces to the attendees.

  “First, I would like to acknowledge the Bank of the Frontier for making the sale of the magical data transfer scrolls possible, of which one was sold to the Order and another one to the Supreme Council!” Gyuron harangues the attendees.

  Once this ends, I’ll go repay our loan to the Bank of the Frontier! Gyuron muses, before being asked to kneel by the Order of Magic’s grandmaster, as with Vestoara.

  The grandmaster then draws his sword, as he had with Janick years earlier, and also has Seloniel fetch two mantles for them, before the ceremony could continue:

  “In the name of the Order of Magic, in recognition of your magical deeds, I, the Grandmaster of the Order of Magic, dub thee, Gyuron and Vestoara, knights of the Order of Magic!” the grandmaster then hits the two wizards’ shoulders with the flat side of the sword, while a platter containing two necklaces and two swords is then brought to him. “Rise!” he tells the two witches as the regalia of the order are handed over to them.

  And the mantles arrive afterward. Seloniel gives them to the grandmaster, before the knighting ceremony ends.

  Finally, we can focus on researching ways to shorten the revival time! We will have our own fief, and have someone else run the fief as a steward while we conduct our research! An overjoyed Vestoara muses while she realizes that shortening the revival time may require exploring more arcane ways of revival.

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  Which they eventually do, but at the risk of complications they could hardly have foreseen. They put on another prototype of their life force receptacle on a convicted murderer, which is simply a copper ring to be worn on the criminal’s hand. The stage is set for the execution of the convict:

  Gyuron feels a little uneasy but he feels it’s a necessary component of the experiment, and announces the public execution with that caveat to the fief’s public:

  “Ladies and gentlemen, today an experiment with the potential to create another method of immortality is about to take place. Today’s test subject, a convicted murderer, is wearing an experimental device!” Gyuron announces to the people, sword in hand.

  And with one strike of the sword, the murderer’s head falls and dies. The question is: how long until the murderer revives, with his head back on? That’s the whole aim of the experiment to his eyes.

  The crowd is amazed to see the criminal alive again, with his head back on, just a few seconds after the first attempt. Subsequent attempts take longer for the revival to take place, but they seem to cap out to about a minute after a while. As expected, the revive time is longer if the wearer died multiple times in a short period. However, the wearer started acting strange after certain revives, too, Vestoara realizes that something is amiss after a certain number of revives, whereby the unarmed criminal seemed to have lost control of himself.

  And not in a way consistent with any form of dementia. It almost feels like he became some form of remote-controlled ghost, with the remote control being somewhere they don’t know. But a remote-controlled ghost that can, at times, have some autonomy, and that he can’t control when he has autonomy.

  “What’s happening?” a surprised villager asks the couple.

  “It seems like revive times have reached a more satisfactory level, but is losing autonomy for periods of time the wearers have no control over!” Gyuron points out what’s happening.

  “And we have no control over that either! It seems like otherworldly forces are at play here!” Vestoara draws her conclusion.

  Speaking of otherworldly forces, what no one on that world realizes, at least for the time being, is that, with their solution to the revive time problem, the couple is about to cause the world’s control to be handed over to… a video game manufacturer on another world. In that the convict is actually controlled by game developers in the early stages of a video game’s development.

  Which ultimately became MAA, or Massacre à l’Alcool, an MMO. And little do the world’s residents know is that, from this point onward, their control over their future diminishes, as the game’s world expands. Especially since, at launch, MAA’s manufacturer only controls a small portion of the world.

  Under the reign of MAA’s manufacturer, Gyuron and Vestoara become NPCs in the game they had a hand in creating, as class trainers for wizards and arcanists respectively. Seloniel becomes a merchant of heavy household equipment, with management of the bank handed over to Samka.