by John Gold
Femida nods silently.
“Second, eat that blood tie potion, and you’ll find out why I grew this island.”
Pulling a red dumpling out of my pocket, I do the same.
“Cool! Our health is 200 million and climbing.”
“The island has one single root system that serves as the base. I don’t know what kind of plant that is, but it coexists symbiotically with the other plants on the island. It doesn’t have a crown, just a thick network of roots. Maybe, it isn’t even a plant at all. I guess it could just be what happens when hundreds or thousands of plants work together. But do you know what the most important part is?”
“What?”
“Technically, the whole island is the crown. Samarus the Bloody’s mark works under it, which is why I picked the sea instead of Hashan Desert. Think, Fem! Physical, mental, and electric damage all in one place. Once we get down to the bottom, we’ll even have cold damage.”
“You’re crazy!”
“And you’re the idiot who followed me!”
That was really a compliment for my savvy, and we both know it. Femida heads over to the edge of the island and starts collecting crabs. They’re the first sign of a complete biome, which means we’ll soon be getting seagulls and other little creatures.
We spend the rest of the day relaxing and cooking over an open fire. During that period, we have to move our camp four times, getting closer to the water. Every three or four hours, the grass, thick shrubbery, and young trees fills up where we’re sitting. I dump all my strength in the life aura. The island is drifting, and that’s no good—unless the roots reach the bottom, a wave could pull it away at any moment, leaving me to die from the enormous damage.
When we run out of little creatures, Femida logs out of the game, so I dive under the island. It definitely grew evenly. I have to turn off my aura and use my Life Magic contact spells to direct how I want the root system to grow. My creation reacts quickly to the disappearing aura and the source of strength in the roots, and after an hour of working laboriously in the pitch dark, I’m able to latch the roots onto a ridge on the seabed. Judging by the intensifying aura of death, its source is somewhere farther down.
Using magic for almost the whole day has burned through just about all of my astral source. Without coming back up, I open a portal there. I climb into my tree and drift off.
LJ appears and starts pumping mana into the source so I can sleep.
It’s been almost four years, and I still haven’t figured out why I keep having the same dream. The girl in the white dress is leading me through the field the way she always does. Every time, it gets clearer, almost like it’s turning into reality. The warmth of her skin, the luxuriousness of her hair, the petals on the flowers, the light breeze playing with her locks… I follow her, the rest of the world be damned.
The dream always ends exactly the way it begins. I never get to the other side of the field, and I never see the girl’s face. Oddly enough, even though she’s just a dream, I miss her.
I sleep in the astral until Femida gets back. It takes half the day to get back to the island in the ocean, and I use panacea again to make sure my island will be wide enough for us to work on our resistance beneath it.
While she has the chance, Femida dives without Isaac. His living armor gives her too much resistance, though she puts him on once every ten minutes to make sure he doesn’t start rusting.
We get down to about a hundred meters. The sunlight doesn’t filter down to where we are, and it’s so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face. The water-breathing spell changes our metabolism for a little while to the point that we don’t need air. It sounds strange, but we’re breathing water. The deeper we go, the harder it is to breath—the water pressure is getting stronger. Still, humans are nothing if not adaptable, and we’re no exception to the rule. Difficulty isn’t the same thing as impossibility.
Our first dive is coming to an end when our legs touch the layer of slime only little plants can grow in.
Damage received: 28500 (ignored: 12581422)
128459620/128459620
We’ve only gotten a hundred and thirty meters down, where the damage is three-quarters mental. Our survivability is more than enough to cope with it. And considering Fem’s monstrous survivability, I have to imagine we could take a lot more.
Just in case, I turn on my life aura to make sure the plant life keeps growing.
We’re walking along the edge of the underwater ridge, our legs barely moving. It’s so hard to move that we have to use amplification. Yesterday, when we were preparing for the dive, we thought about it. The more we use amplification or battle skills, the faster we’ll get hungry, so we have a month’s supply of food in our sacks. Hopefully, that will be enough for today.
The firefly I pour strength into six times over does a good job lighting up everything around us. At the edge of the ridge, we start heading lower down. The plants hinder more than they help, though I still don’t turn off my life aura.
Twenty minutes slip by, and we’re still going down. New inhabitants of the sea abyss greet us the farther down we go. There are predatory plants, giant fish, enormous crustaceans, overgrown squid, and even shells that try to eat us. We end up having to work on our resistance to electricity sooner than planned.
At a depth of seven hundred meters, only three types of magic work: light, dark, and air.
Lightning proves to be most effective, as it’s guaranteed to strike home. The only disadvantage is that the charge is dispersed over an enormous area. Lots of new and deadly opponents are attracted, and I kill them with Dark Magic while Femida holds them off. The light scatters too much for me to do full damage, so killing them takes longer.
Damage received: 422750 (ignored: 12581422)
128459620/128459620
The last mollusk disintegrates, and Femida starts collecting the loot. While I have time, I think to myself about what’s coming next. The water pressure is rising exponentially. Magic shields are useless, swept away in seconds, which is why all the local predators have enormous survivability and resistance to all different kinds of damage. They’re quite the opponents. We’re up to Level 1700, and they’re just getting stronger. They have the advantage, too—even if we have our arsenal for attacks and defense, they’re in their natural environment.
We’re surrounded by darkness and the plants my Life Magic is growing. With no light to speak of, they take it on themselves to create it, so there are phosphorescent corrals, anglerfish, shimmering plankton, and other ghostly, glimmering fish. Life Magic transforms the lifeless depths of the sea. That puts me even more on edge, however, and my perception strains so hard I start to feel vibrations in the water fifty meters away from us.
Perception +1
Your perception skill has reached the maximum value
New ability: Synesthesia
Sometimes, people are born with phenomenal sensitivity and cerebral function. They can see sounds, feel the taste of water with their skin, smell pure strength, sense everything, and be everything. They aren’t to be envied.
At first, it’s like someone hit my whole body with a sledgehammer. The lantern shines so brightly that it burns my skin, even though I don’t take any damage. LJ pops up in my subconscious to switch over from my life aura to lesser healing. It’s painful, unpleasant, nasty, cold, and hot. Are my bones broken? Why is my arm rising and falling by itself? Oh, that’s the current! What I’m feeling in my bones is apparently the water pressure. It’s an illusion built on erroneous sensations, and LJ calms down. He’s just sounding a warning, though he continues healing.
My body is enveloped in an enormous, glowing plant that feels almost like a sheet.
The plants think I’m a life source, so they start wrapping themselves around me in an attempt to soak up as much of the magic as they can. Darkness turns into an entire glowing forest as I get my bearings about me.
Femida is just sitting there waiting for me to come bac
k; Isaac is running around somewhere nearby. I can sense Slender a lot better though—he didn’t want to come close to the glowing forest of seaweed. Why? Afraid of the light? No, it has to be that there wasn’t anywhere for him to hide. Now I know his weakness.
A message pops up from Femida.
How’d you sleep?
Fine. I got an ability for maxing out my perception. It’s awful, though I’ll get used to it. As it turns out, our friend with the tentacles and weird outfit is only semimaterial. The fact that you can see and touch him is just the ability of his mental body to create temporary connections similar to a physical body. He’s sort of a semispirit who can live in the real world, but it’s the fact that he’s semimaterial that lets him move faster than us. The laws of physics and magic work differently on him.
And you figured all that out in the twenty minutes you were relaxing here?
Not exactly. That parasite—and he is a parasite—has been getting on my nerves for a long time now. You can’t feel it, but I can’t stand the way he looks at me. Even though he hates us, he still follows us around. That shapeshifter probably gave him the job, and I’ve been figuring him out the whole time he’s been with us. Okay, so there’s silt in the currents, right? I know exactly where Slender is, and when he appears, the silt stops going through his body. That means he’s only mental.
Why don’t you think the ability to fuse with shadows is an ability his physical body has?
That’s nonsense. It would be like a player who can resurrect himself an unlimited number of times, and as a spirit, not a player. I can imagine that and even have an idea about how it could theoretically be done, but it’s almost impossible in practice.
Our conversation about Slender over, we keep going, trying to avoid confrontations. The gentle decline leads to a steep drop-off, however. The darkness is so thick that the lantern doesn’t reach the bottom or the opposite slope.
Evening comes, and Femida logs out of the game while I get ready for our next move. I put out my lantern, sit on the edge of the drop-off in the absolute darkness, and sense the tons of water being carried past my legs by the powerful current. The impenetrable gloom is compensated for by the synesthesia that creates a picture in my head. I’m deep in the emptiness, the silt, the swaying seaweed, and my even breathing moves with the thousands of tons of water moved by the current. Strength! It’s the unlimited strength of natural phenomena.
I turned off my lantern so I could switch that stream of consciousness over to a life aura. The water pressure is enormous, to the point that only mushrooms and simple seaweed can grow. Five minutes later, I’m pulled away from the quiet and my meditation by the fact that I’m no longer sitting on the drop-off. Instead, I’m on an enormous, glowing mushroom. My life aura has everything growing around me, and the little guy under me was smart enough to push me away from the rest. That works for me—I have what I’m looking for, and the clever mushroom fits in perfectly with that.
Switching over from my life aura to lesser healing, I start feeding the mushroom only.
Its cap will work for a large “crown.” I do have to go back to the drop-off, though, as I’m just about at the edge of the area the floating island covers. Sitting on the edge of my new friend’s cap, I look over the path we’ve taken. It’s crazy—the aura of life has made a trail of glowing plants from the edge of the gentle ridge to where I am now. There’s a whole coral forest where I was wrapped up by the seaweed.
Femida comes back an hour later, though one glance at the blue creature growing under me is enough to make her change her mind. The semitransparent mushroom glimmers with a cold blue light. You can see the microorganisms appearing and multiplying in its biome. Considering the fact that we’re so far down, it’s a miracle of life and nature.
Achievement received: Herald of the creator. Second rank.
You were able to create a location out of nothing.
Minimum requirement: The creation of a complete ecosystem
Created: 4 complete ecosystems
Reward: +10 to all attributes
That’s a nice bonus for all the work I’ve been doing. Judging by the other achievements I’ve gotten, this one works exponentially, too. The one complete ecosystem was first, this was for four, and the next will be for nine.
Twelve hours go by before Femida returns. Underwater battles really take it out of close-combat fighters, while I try to sleep in the game when I can. I end up having to swim over to the mushroom and take cover right under the cap. Regardless of the cold, the fact that I’m underwater, and my need to drink underwater-breathing potions regularly, I sleep wonderfully. Claude is probably going to be ticked—I’ve already missed two pool sessions.
I wake up when Femida gets back. The mushroom has become a small place of strength, expanding significantly over the last eighteen hours. I still have plenty of mana left in my source, too, since weaker healing doesn’t burn any of it.
We continue our trip down into the darkness along the drop-off. It’s getting harder to breathe, and Femida’s movements are more limited, but she loves it. In fact, she tells me as much in the chat.
So, basically, I perfected my mastery of swordplay. But then this happened! It turns out that the way you move and work with your sword underwater is completely different. That doesn’t sound like much to you since this isn’t your thing, so it’s probably hard for you to realize how important that is to me.
My life aura helps so much more than I was expecting. The incline is practically vertical, and fighting in this kind of environment is suicide, so I have to turn off my lantern. But we aren’t completely in the dark. My life aura grows whole harvests of glowing mushrooms, so they show us where we’re going. The aura of death intensifies. Also, the water pressure is so strong that rocks sometimes crumble in my hands.
Damage received: 26715160 (ignored: 18218422)
280772210/280772210
We’re three kilometers down. Sometimes, very rarely, I sense enormous monsters the size of trains swimming by. Twice, we see whales with whole cities on their backs. I can’t remember ever coming across more terrifying sea creatures. When the whales swim by, their wake is so strong that it nearly throws us off the rocks we’re clinging to. Both times, it’s Isaac, the lightest and weakest in the group, who gets the worst of it. Femida isn’t wearing him, doing what she can to boost her resistance, and it’s hard to swim in armor anyway.
We have to drag him back to the cliff both times. The archmage showed me a good way of using telekinesis with living objects, and I use boulders to pull Isaac back to shelter both times he gets pulled away.
When we get five kilometers deep, we find that there aren’t any underwater creatures. Enormous turtles off in the distance are all we encounter. They have abandoned cities on their backs, and I thoroughly enjoy watching them. I could be wrong, but I suspect there’s an entire continent deep underwater that flooded thousands of years ago.
Ever since my first day at the Academy of Magic, I knew for sure that I wanted to be a life mage. Players at Level 10000 can do approximately 25 million damage, so I know I have until then to get my hands on an absolute shield that will protect me from every possible attack. That will be my resistance to all kinds of damage. My sword will be an unstoppable line of attack. Every time I unlock a new level, I dump the points into my intellect, as the key to my fight with the gods will be the perfect sword and the perfect shield.
Damage received: 29548150 (ignored: 20850402)
280772210/280772210
I’m not exactly sure how deep we are—probably around seven kilometers. It’s looking like we stopped working in the city of the dead too early. My weaker healing, which doesn’t have a recharge time, heals 4.2 million damage at a go, while eleven streams max out at 46 million, short of 50. What saves us is that the damage is three-quarters physical down here. That means that when I get down to the bottom, the damage will be 37.5 million, 12.5 million of which will be mental.
I don’t know if ther
e are people who can get their resistance to any damage up to 100%. In fact, I don’t think there are. You’d need a team of healers, a particular environment, and the voluntary consent of the warrior. Femida is bent over double. Ten percent of the pain may not sound like much, but when your bones are breaking and regrowing every second, it gets to you. The aura of death casts the sense of inevitable death, and there’s also the constant fear of falling down below. You have to have absolutely iron-clad nerves for something like this. Rather, you need incredible willpower, the preparedness to fight through the pain and anguish to reach your goal. Femida is that kind of person.
We’ve been going down for a week now, and the cliff has yet to end. Femida leaves the game every sixteen hours to rest. I leave it every thirty hours. The deeper we go, the more frequently I have to grow new mushroom caps so I can use Samarus the Bloody’s mark. Far from making things worse, they let us relax and sleep in the game. Every time, the mushroom is different, though my creations always do their job. I rest underneath them; LJ thanks them for both of us.
Logout
In real life, Claude gets on me every time I skip physical therapy. He makes me swim two kilometers twice now, once after I log out of the game, and again before I log back in. Even though I’m stronger than I used to be, he gets a kick out of carrying me to my capsule for some reason.
“Claude, why don’t you get mad at me for spending so much time in the game?”
“I don’t know why you’re here at our resort. I don’t know what experiment you’re running or why you spend so much time in the med capsule—maybe, that’s like medicine for you. Maybe, it’s part of your experiment. Regardless, my job isn’t to keep track of your schedule. All I’m supposed to do is make sure you do your physical training.”