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Summary

Project Alicization is a secret military project for creation of the "Bottom-up AI", the world-first Highly Adaptive Bottom-up Artificial Intelligence, supervised and developed by Rath.

Development History (Continued)

Stress Testing

In the Final Tolerance Experiment (負荷実験段階 fuka jikken dankai, lit. Stress Experiment Stage), Underworld's Human Empire is subjected to increasingly greater attrition on part of the Dark Territory creatures to observe the resistance. During this final stage, the apocalypse counter called the load parameter gradually increases, causing increases in epidemics, boldness of dangerous beats, harvest scarcity, before finally beginning the invasion from the Dark Territory.

System Mechanics

Menu

Alicization has no game menu, as it is not a game. The familiar inventory shortcuts, quick gear changes, and logging out are thus impossible, since everything is meant to be realistic. Kirito theorized that death in Underworld would result in logging out.

Stats

The Sacred Arts do feature a way to get to a status pop-up for anything, however. Stacia Window is initiated by using one's hand to draw a seal in the air that looks like the letters S and C, and displays an object or person's ID, current and maximum life values, the Priority Class for a weapon, and Object Control and System Control Authorities for sentient beings. Interestingly, a lot more effort and Sacred Arts training is required to get the status window to display for the larger objects — possibly due to the way the larger objects are made up of many small ones that need their life parameters summed up before the main one is shown, which would overload the simulation if executed freely.

Unit ID

All objects have Unit ID, which is alphanumeric, where the starting letters denote the object category and the number seems to reflect the order of the object's creation in the category. As an example, "WLSS" for a sword can be deduced as meaning "Double-edged, Long Sword, Single-handed".

Human Units have their Unit IDs as well. In this case, the starting letters must refer to their birthplace. Integrity Knights have secondary IDs shown as "Integrator Unit" with three digits in each.

The IDs can be used via Secret Arts. The purposes are many and include locating a unit or modifying its parameters.

Life

Life ("Durability" in Stacia Window) (天命 tenmei, lit. life given by heavens) is a durability or hit point value that everything in Underworld has. Its maximum value may change over time, increasing for humans until they are around twenty and decreasing gradually, similarly to growing old. All objects have maximum Life that has approximately the same relative difference between them as the real-life counterparts; in this way, a granite stone's Life is much larger than that of a flower.

When Life reaches zero, not all is lost. Most objects turn into shards, fragments, pieces, carcasses which have their own counters. However, the remnant objects like that have much less maximum Life than the original objects, and will disappear completely this time. Food loses Life over time, the faster the warmer the weather is. After reaching 0, food becomes spoiled and will make its consumer sick. Clothes are recalculated for defects and stains; if it is not washed, it will have much less Life.

Humans lose Life quickly if their injuries and illnesses remain untreated. Bleeding causes a constant Life drain and must be stopped before any healing rituals can be effective, which is the most easily done by bandaging or using Sacred Arts. Fatigue count as an illness, so carrying heavy objects or marathoning decrease Life. The less life, the weaker the player feels, and may faint with a sufficiently low meter. Apart from the Administrator-level rituals, changing the maximum Life value is impossible, but taking medicine or using Sacred Arts can restore the current Life.

A human with zero Life starts dying as a shower of white arrows starts falling down on them, as the system starts wiping their Fluctlight little by little. Reviving them is possible, as long as nothing important was erased before the ritual. Since the revival ritual takes time, some memories will be inevitably lost; in the known best case, the person will forget the recent events.

Continued on page 4.

References

• Project Alicization - Fan Wiki