Road to the Crown

Chapter 330: The owner

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Sitting down on the bench in the small park beside the institute, I was slowly sipping on the starrybucks coffee. In reality, I could never guess what made it so popular. For my own tastes, it wasn't any different if not worse than the coffee that I could get from any other coffee-shop. 

Sadly, every single consumable product that I could get in the institute was imported, making it impossible for me to order any other type of coffee. 

"So, did you manage to sort through all the stuff in your mind?"

Suddenly appearing beside me, the same man that attempted to calm me down back when I woke up, sat down on the same bench as me. Keeping a respectable distance of one meter away, he started in the distance while ignoring the probing glances that I kept sending to him literally every second.

"More or less. But I still can't wait for you to actually explain everything to me."

Under the pretence of my calm demeanour, I was actually full of anxiety and fear. There was definitely something in the sedating material that they used on me that managed to block those feelings, turning my head to be far calmer than it would be in this peculiar situation.

'Elia'

The first thing that I was told once I woke up, was that I took part in the testing of the super-new alpha version of the virtual reality product. The man sitting beside me was not only the singular owner of the entire company, but he also held the ownership of this countryless island lost on the pacific. 

From one side, if I were to treat everything that happened to me over the past year in that apparently virtual world, then the outcome of the entire situation wasn't that bad.

Recalling the moment when I tripped on the stairs only to appear in that different timeline of mine was quite hard after all the time that passed for me since then, but after long mental training, I managed to bring back all the details of that moment. But what was the most surprising about this, is that my memories of my real-world didn't end there at all!

Every time I returned to the attempts of recalling my real past, I could peer further and further into my actions. From receiving a strange job offer, through over a year of preparing to take part in it, all the while all my living costs were covered by the Institute along with a huge, monthly premium on top. 

Yet, I still had to be told literally anything. Was that world that I lived in for nearly a year, real? Or was it just a product of the supreme computer calculations? Or maybe it was a mix of the two?

The idea that it was all just an illusion could be ignored right away. There was no way that Elia was fake. Sadly, I was too scared to ask about it as I knew that either I wouldn't receive the answer at all, or it would break my heart despite all the drugs currently tempered my brain activity.

"Let's start the explanations then. Sorry for doing it out in the open, but surprisingly"

Suddenly, the CEO and owner of the entire island and institute on it stood up and pulled a small, half a litre big bottle with a strange, yellow liquid. Uncorking it, he splashed half of its content on himself without even a shred of hesitation, before doing the same to me!

"Wha"

"... this is the only place and way for us to talk comfortably and without someone listening to us."

The rest of the man's sentence managed to quickly shut my mouth. Right, there is always a bigger fish. This was something that everyone who ever worked in any company knew. After all, even the owner of the countryless island had to be responsible to someone, even if one was seemingly as powerful as the man that stood before me right now!

"First off, let's get to know each other. I'm Bart Hec Katernari. I'm Bart Katenari."

As the man uttered those words, a strange aura of insanely deep sadness appeared in his eyes, as if just mentioning his own surname brought up some incredibly unpleasant memories to him. The fact that he stuttered while saying what his surname was didn't escape my attention either.

"I don't think there is any need to introduce myself. I have this lingering doubt that you know more about me than I do know myself"

Uttering this slightly ironic sentence, I noticed how the light returned to the man's eyes as if I just said something incredibly funny.

"That is most likely the case. But going back to the topic. By now, your real memories should already start returning to you. You shouldn't worry about this, as it's pretty normal for the artificial amnesia drug to be cleared out of your mind. As strange as it sounds, if not for my own ambition, just by selling that chemical I could become the richest man in this world"

Sighing out deeply, the man in front of me seemingly lost all his energy, powerlessly clasping his body down back on the bench. Even if it was only virtual, the last year that I spent in the other timeline taught me how to judge the character of someone that I interacted with. It was a skill that I simply had to pick up in order to not be eaten alive in the political games of the senate. Yet, for some reason, I couldn't see through this man at all.

As if he was some kind of black hole, or as if he wasn't a human in the first place.

"Moving on, I will speed up the process of you recalling your true memories. The moment that you remembered last, happens about an hour before you received the package with the explanation letter and the first dosage of the amnesia drug. Form that time onwards, you forgot everything that happened the moment the drug was activated. But thankfully, the story isn't long or hard. To put it in short words, after a year of training to prepare your body for the stress of our little experiment, you took the plane here, decided what kind of system you would like to have and entered the world that we constructed for your sake. That's the gist of it."

The story of that man was pretty on point with the memories that were slowly returning to me. It was true that the one thing that I could vividly remember about the time after tripping on the stairs was how extensively I trained my endurance and strength as if there was no tomorrow and my life depended on it. 

Well, according to the content of the letter that I could somehow fully remember, it was actually the case.

"You are speaking a lot, but you have yet to answer the two, three questions that actually are important to me. Was that place, real? Can I return there? And most importantly, Elia. Was she"

Before I could even finish my sentence, the man suddenly reached with his hands towards my mouth, forcing me to stop talking.

"The blockade is about to dry up, meaning the electronics in our clothes will start working again soon, so we need to hurry. The world that you were in, was completely virtual. It was something that appeared when your consciousness filled the physical frames that we set for it, basing on the guidelines we could implement inside it. But"

Taking a deep breath, the man scanned his own outfit in search for some kind of clues about something. Suddenly raising his eyes, the owner of this island looked at me with a mischievous smile on his lips before asking me a strange question.

"But, does it make it any less real?"