"But it's not like his new incarnation has to look the same, and he'll at least have a different name, if it's like the King of Cats being reborn as the snow leopard," Danika pointed out. "So it will probably be tricky to figure out what we're even looking for."

"I wonder if he'll have an ordinary sort of name?" Shrubbery questioned.

"Are you sure he didn't give you any other hints?" Danika asked Kit.

"No, after he said he can also be someone else, he just squeezed my hand and said, 'when you find that person, it will be announced to the world.' Oh, I guess he also told me, 'good luck in your quest this evening,' which I thought meant that maybe he'd just given me a new quest, but he hadn't," Kit explained.

"What was your current quest then?" Danika asked hopefully.

"It was just to set another boundary. Silvam even went with me, and there was nothing unusual about it," Kit replied helplessly.

"We should go there and look around, to see if you missed anything," MatchlessMinion announced.

"Okay, you start on that and I'll go see if we can't cheat like Kit asked. I don't have to wait until I'm at work to ask my a.s.sistant about the merchant's instances," Danika said with determination.

--

After she logged out, she didn't even fully disconnect herself from the VR-medi pod, she simply asked her a.s.sistant, "Can you tell me where the instance of the traveling merchant's avatar that isn't named the traveling merchant is?"

"No," her little celestial dragon replied promptly from her phone. "All instances of the traveling merchant are named 'The Traveling Merchant'."

For a moment Danika was stumped. "Can you look up which ongoing quests in the system might be announced to the world when completed?" she asked uncertainly.

"Yes," her a.s.sistant replied. Danika waited impatiently, and just as she decided that the AI had only agreed that it could, her a.s.sistant finally replied, "There are only two ongoing quests that might be announced to the entire empire, but there are 897 quests that might be announced to an entire kingdom, and 3,742 quests that might be announced to a smaller area that could possibly be described as 'to the world'."

"What are the two that might be announced to the entire empire?" Danika asked quickly.

"One involves the great library, the other involves the eastern vault," her a.s.sistant replied promptly.

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Danika asked for more details, but neither quest sounded like it was related to Kit in any way, or involved a new NPC that might be an instance of the travelling merchant. She wasn't sure how to narrow down the other four thousand and some odd quests that might be described as announced to the world on completion either.

Her a.s.sistant announced, "Lin Hao has just sent you a message that asks: 'Are you trying to find out information about Kit and the travelling merchant? Can you log in for a few minutes?'"

"OK, I'll log in to my work account," Danika replied.

--

Danika was immediately transported to a beautiful oriental hall crafted of different woods, with a lovely view of the sky palace islands and gardens in the sky, that was almost completely obscured by rows of large display screens filled with lines of text. Several small celestial dragons hovered attentively, which indicated that they were, or had just been, involved in active tasks since they would fade out if left idle.

Lin Hao, Josh Beagle, and Devon Yu all stopped what they were doing and walked over to her with hopeful expressions.

"Um, hi? How did you know I was trying to look up information on Kit's new quest?" Danika asked nervously.

"I had the system flag inquiries on the traveling merchant, in case one provided a good clue. The problem is that she hasn't activated the quest, or we're missing something, or it isn't actually a quest and it's something completely new," Lin Hao complained.

Devon Yu grinned at Danika's confused expression and told her, "What he means is that he's been trying to find out about it all afternoon, and he dragged us in to help a while ago."

Discovering that two department heads plus Josh had already been sorting through quests for hours was disheartening, even though Lin Hao did compliment her with, "That was good thinking, trying to look it up by the 'announced to the world' result."

After discussing it for a bit, Danika decided that trying to discover what they should be doing from outside the game wasn't going to work. "I'll just return to the game and see what happens. Maybe some kind of guide will appear to her, or she'll stumble into him naturally, the way the game tries to bring players together," Danika suggested.

"I'll come with you!" Josh said quickly. Lin Hao turned and frowned at him, but Josh pointed out, "This is supposed to be my day off too."

Devon Yu laughed and said, "Go on you two, have fun with it."

Josh vanished immediately, but Danika paused before logging off and asked, "Why are you spending so much effort looking into it anyway?"

Lin Hao shrugged and replied, "Don't worry, I'm not trying to prevent her from marrying a copy if she wants to."

Devon Yu grinned and asked, "Isn't it exciting? It's like the game might almost be creating a player account for one of the NPCs isn't it?"

"It's not just another incarnation?" Danika asked.

"Maybe, the point is that we don't know. We should know. The game has become ma.s.sively complex, but we should be able to find this new ident.i.ty or whatever, and how the system decided to generate it for Kit much more easily than this," Lin Hao complained.

Devon Yu winked at her and then held up his hand and said in a mock whisper, "He's actually incredibly proud of it, and wants to figure out how it did it so he can say, 'See! I wrote this!' Don't worry about him, just go play with your friends and see what really happens."

Danika smiled and logged out of her work account. She logged back in as ZipZing in 'Living Jade Empire' a few minutes later, and immediately zipped upward and across the city to the portal platforms.