by John Gold
Every tree I plant is special in its own way. For example, the one I’ve been growing the past three weeks is always on fire. The leaves burn, though they never actually burn away. Chipped bark, broken branches, and torn leaves are all restored in minutes. The tree has enormous survivability and health regeneration. Even the fact that the leaves are burning has to do with how fast they turn carbon dioxide into oxygen. At night, that stops, though it’s still an impressive sight. Femida, marauder that she is, strips the tree of everything she thinks might come in handy—leaves, bark, small twigs, and unopened buds. Once a week, the tree flowers, and she pulls tons of them off it.
Here in the desert people call Death Desert, in the heart of this anomaly of nature, the enormous tree throws out its branches. It grows so high, in fact, that you can see it as you approach the mountains surrounding the heart of the desert. Some of the spirit bots become material, and they show up twice as often. Their level has jumped from 1150 to 1410, threats to even the most advanced players. In other words, nobody besides Fem and me can even think about coming close to where we are. She, needless to say, is happy to see the bots. They’re a chance for her to make up the 90-level difference between us, something she’s hard at work doing. I have more important things to think about.
Today, the crown of the tree finally touches the red stake piercing the heart of the stone giant. Crawling out to the edge of the furthest branches, I jump. After flying through two hundred meters of air, I realize that I don’t know how to land. Even if I don’t take damage, I slide off the stone giant. For three whole seconds, I take 50 million damage and don’t heal the tree. Another twenty of those seconds, and it will die, though I’ve reached my objective—the red spike that killed the god and sent him off to be reborn is right in front of me.
Touching it gives me nothing. It’s one single object, and it isn’t highlighted as an item. On the other hand, the camera icon appears above the heads of the players in the distance. They’re filming, the bastards. Smile and wave! Everything is under control.
The whole red rock turns out to be a monolith made out of some material I don’t recognize. It isn’t palirin, it isn’t crystal, and it isn’t metal. It may be some kind of rock with special qualities. The dark red color… Could that be a hint? Blood malachite? Or something similar? If I had the time, I’d be able to figure it out. I don’t, however.
Fem, give me your sword.
Again?!
This isn’t the gate to the Gray Lands, though the material itself may be what you need to get there. The laws of physics here say you can’t have an item that can take more than 50 million damage. At least, that’s true for intelligent and higher creatures. Bacteria, mushrooms, plants, and trees have other rules. The overall balance may be shifted to increase the resistance to mental damage and cut the resistance to fire damage. But they aren’t immortal. That has to mean that nothing in this world is indestructible. This has to have a similar balance of resistances. It’s based on stone, so I need physical damage.
Femida doesn’t just give me her sword. She hurls it at the red rock behind me with all the strength she can muster. The tip buries itself halfway up the blade, and cracks run through the stake. Bingo!
It takes me two minutes, but I knock off a couple of fragments as long as my forearm. The stone itself, however, replenishes itself right in front of me. Whoa! It’s repairing itself!
The pieces I get turn out to be very odd.
Unique item received: Key
???
Type: Ingredient
Requirements: ???
Durability: 1/1
Weight: 40 kg
The second piece has the same description. Neither does mental or fire damage, and I’m more surprised by the weight than anything else. There are plenty of swords out there that don’t weigh that much, and these aren’t even that big.
The Hashan Desert was once a source of income for me, and it’s now a spot where a lot of players do something similar, so long as their resistance allows it. Femida collects one final harvest from our tree before we leave.
Instead of going to look for a magic-space eddy, we just use the one by my last tree’s place of strength. By that evening, we’re in Sural, the city where all travelers begin their wanderings around Kongul. Femida heads over to the auction to sell everything we’ve collected over the past four months. While she’s there, she’s going to see what information there is about us in the League of Hunters, as that’s probably where the requests for our heads are.
But that’s not the main reason we’re in Sural. There’s a person here who can tell me what my trophies from the desert are. The guild of monster hunters is still there, though there’s a girl seven or eight years of age sitting in Hela’s spot. She’s explaining to two kids how important the roll of monster hunters is in the game, and what an honor it is to be counted among them. As soon as they leave, the girl notices me. My white outfit from the clinic apparently looks like a laborer’s.
“We don’t need porters! All we accept are monster hunters.”
Mm, what a smart little kid.
“Miss…where is Hela? I came here to see her, and not you, young…lady.”
It takes a couple seconds, but it finally occurs to her what I want.
“Mama! You have visitors!”
Hela walks down from the second floor, having barely changed at all since we first met six years ago.
“What can I do for you?” Hela looks at me openly and confidently. She doesn’t recognize me!
The whole neighborhood can probably hear my gleeful laughter.
“You must be sick! Why would you behave like that in front of other people?” Hela glances over at her daughter, and she’s right to do so. I’m a bad example.
“You haven’t changed a bit in the last six years, though I don’t remember you having a daughter.” Hela still doesn’t recognize me. “Let me give you a hint: I gave you those epic life mage boots. I killed more monsters in Hashan than any other player, all at Level 0. I helped you work on your identification skill, too.”
“Sagie…? Everyone’s looking for you! What, did you go through the rebirth ritual? You even have a different name.”
After a five-minute conversation in the store room where nobody can hear us, I find out quite a bit. Hela doesn’t have kids after all. The wanderer girl just latched onto her, started calling her mother—apparently, another orphan.
She’s gotten questions about me twice over the past five years. The first time was right after the battle for Airis Castle; the second, three months ago, after we broke out of jail.
But the trophies I brought with me from the desert are a mystery. She isn’t able to identify them, even with a maxed-out identification skill.
“I’ve come across items like this a couple of times before. They stay hidden until you complete the requirements for activating them. Judging by the durability and the information we can read, you need to do something to it or activate it some other way. Both, maybe.”
I can’t figure out how to use the key. In the meantime, Femida takes until the evening to sell everything we’ve collected over the past four months. She’s able to find a clan of crafters and alchemists who bargain with her to deliver and sell directly all the “special ingredients” she was able to find “in her travels.” The flowers from the last tree I grew offer a strong boost to health regeneration, while everything else from the tree offers a lighter version of the same boost. I suspect the alchemists struck gold with the deal. Still, I care more about how much they paid for the flowers we’ve already collected.
“I sent you your 1.7 million credits. And don’t look at me like that! I bargained with them for a long time, even signed an agreement via the auction just in case. That’s the whole amount. There are some unsold lots left, though we’ll pick up the money after we collect a new load. Hey, we are going back for another load, aren’t we?”
There are some things we still need to do in the desert, so I’m fine headi
ng back once a week to collect flowers.
The fact that I wasn’t able to figure out what the keys are wasn’t much of a surprise. If it were that easy, crowds of players would already be making their way to and from the world of the dead. The gods certainly would have combined their forces to pick up the key to the gate.
We head off into the desert again, though we take a different route, from north to south, rather than from the eastern shore. This part is almost uninhabited, as it butts up against the villages belonging to the steppe orcs. The snow troll mountains loom behind them. All are wild tribes with almost no contact with the outside world, and so the players generally just leave them alone.
The next day, we find a good spot a hundred kilometers from the center of the desert. It’s an enormous tract of sand far away from the trade points that have been set up over the last five years.
While Femida chops up the local population, I start preparing the area. First and foremost, I need a pit, the bigger, the better. A full-strength meteor is the simplest solution for that. One thing I didn’t think about, however, is the shock wave that sweeps along the sand and nearly buries us alive. The explosion is so powerful that it kills everything within a hundred meters.
Down in the crater, I even out an area covering about a hectare. Then, I stand in the center and activate a dragon breath with maximum strength and dispersion. After a few walks around the glassy lake, I realize that it’s going to need to be bigger for the ritual to work. The deeper the earth bakes, the better.
Without giving the glass time to cool, I even out the area to create a perfect circle. Setting up walls is next. I use the remains of the melted glass, building layer upon layer around the perimeter of the circle until I have a five-meter wall. Telekinesis serves as my shovel and fastener. With sand as the base, fire melts everything into a single whole. That, incidentally, is how they used to make things out of concrete on Earth, though nobody ever used glass the way I do.
The hardest part is erecting a dome over where the ritual is going to be held. Everyone makes mistakes, especially when they’re trying to estimate angles, but Isaac helps with the exact calculations. I wasn’t aware he knew something about engineering.
Femida can’t wait, so she finally asks what we’re going to make.
“A shield!”
“Why? You’re impossible to kill as it is.”
“You’re forgetting that there are deadly strikes, battle machines that stab you to do higher damage, critical hits, and areas that partially ignore your resistance. The eyes, the mouth, the throat, almost all mages protect them. And some attacks are just simpler to block with a shield than with magic.
Femida doesn’t like what she hears.
“So, you want to get a shield ability? Wouldn’t it be simpler to just enchant a normal shield?”
“Nope. People can take normal items from me, but there’s nothing they can do about abilities. I still can’t understand how the devil was able to take my sword.”
“Maybe, he had a good reason for doing that. Think about it! If it were that simple, why would you need maxed skills for blacksmiths, carpenters, jewelers, and artifactors? Just take Isaac—he’s helpless without someone good to wear him.”
“What are you getting at?”
“You can’t just get strength, special items, and abilities for free. If you make something like that, you have to pay for it.”
“I’ve already made two non-level items, and nothing happened. Are you sure you aren’t all worried about nothing?”
Femida can be stubborn when she thinks she’s right. This is definitely one of those cases.
“Sagie… Any power is like the sword of Damocles. You’ll get something unbelievable, something that blows the mind, but how are you going to pay for it? What are you going to have to give to get it?”
“Nothing. That’s how it was before, and that’s how it will be this time. Do you have any facts that might prove the opposite?”
“No, just theories and conjecture, but I’m rarely wrong.”
“Enough. We don’t have time for this.”
The laboratory is ready, and all I have left to do is make exits to the surface. Four pipes point in the four directions. Then, we bury my laboratory inside the crater. All that’s left on the surface are four large openings.
Logout
Everything’s going well in real life. My nervous system is recovering well, and Claude thinks I’ll be able to implant a neuronet in a month. I’ve waited so long! Still, I have my two kilometers a day.
Login
We rest for a day before beginning the ritual. Both of us need to get our sleep, as we have a ton of work ahead of us. Before I log in, Femida has time to run to the heart of the desert, find our trees, and bring back what she needs to make a spear.
“It’s worth a try.”
“You want me to make you a non-level spear?”
“I need a powerful ranged weapon, and a spear would be perfect for that. I don’t need an ability. Hey, Sagie, how do you pick what the end result will be?”
“It’s all about the central portion of the seal, which is where the activation happens. When I was in Hell, I figured out how seals work. The key is the magic symbols. Concentration and dispersion, shield and blade, durability and destruction, almost all of them come in pairs. The part in the middle of the seal tells you what the form will be and what you’ll get. For instance, I cut concentration symbols and the edge sign into my bow. When I used it, an astral pocket was formed that sucked in all the energy freed up during activation.”
“Is the weapon itself tied to you?”
“Yes. Making the astral pocket is…is… Well, it’s like a bubble full of mana forming in your mental body. When the weapon is activated, all that built-up strength is released.”
“So, can the bubble stretch to infinity?”
“Nope. In my case, it was linked to my mana. The durability is based on your stamina.”
And with that, the great soul harvest begins. We’re able to collect our first batch of two and a half thousand in two days, and I use stakes I bought from a blacksmith in Sural. I purchased the metal right there; I always have some blood malachite on me. To be fair, I only had enough for three thousand stakes.
We distribute the bodies around the passageways. Given my supply of mana and blood magic skills, the charge is enough for a week. The blacksmith was a master who was able to find the perfect balance of durability and number of uses. Thanks to that, the paralysis lasts longer, though I can only use each stake three times.
The first set of victims is finally ready. Femida doesn’t like the idea of the ritual, but she won’t turn down her new javelin. The bodies are piled to the ceiling of the laboratory, the five-meter arches at the edges of the dome perfect for the stacks of minotaurs. They live in groups, which is why Femida was able to lug lots of them over each time she went out. Ultimately, she brought two thousand of the two thousand five hundred bodies we needed.
The four-level seal drawn in blood looks like a complex pattern with thousands of letter-like shapes. Just drawing it from memory takes forever, and the last part is traced on top of my tattoos.
We start the ritual.
After activating the seal, my jaw drops at the power surging through my body. Ow! It’s like my soul is being torn to pieces, each of them suffering their own individual pain.
I’m not just taken to the astral island; I’m thrown there, almost like I’m my own meteor. If I didn’t have such resistance to physical damage, the impact would have killed me.
The island grows quickly. New elements join, while the thing sitting in the astral is enjoying the chance to throw me around however it wants. Huh, I can feel it, but not its emotions. Does that mean it isn’t a person? Doesn’t feel emotions? Both?
I’m pulled out of my reverie by the sensation that something is approaching the island. It turns out to be something enormous, angry, and very powerful that I feel from a long way off.
Our two and a half thousand victims pour at me like a meteor made of flesh.
“Diamond shield! Maximum! Magic shield! Maximum!”
The diamond shield shatters after just five seconds, and the powerful stream of bodies knocks me off my feet. The first blow is taken by my shield. After that, I get to work.
My magic shield bursts, and I immediately activate a wind of death. The stream of bodies stops, though my victims whirl around next to the island. Everyone who wasn’t killed by smacking up against my shield starts to get up. They’re possessed by evil spirits, and the remaining victims rain down from the sky.
Possessed! The ritual victims are all possessed by demons and evil spirits. They’re lifted to their feet, and those still alive are empowered by the spirits in them. Huh, that’s strange. The thing is above the island, though I feel something in…all the victims on the island. A collective intelligence? Or a queen ant?
Monster, Goroto the Minion, Level 3501
Got it. There’s an automatic balancing system—if I’m too strong, they make the victims even stronger. But not that strong!
Happily, Light Magic is one and a half times as effective against demons and evil spirits. Possessed victims fall into that category, as well.
“I summon the sun! I summon an infernal spirit of cleansing!”
All of my strength is poured into each of them. I have bigger things to worry about than the recoil.
Superior Elemental, Infernal Spirit of Cleansing, Level 4027
It’s a giant made completely of bright, white flames. Just his aura is enough to kill all my adversaries, though he’s looking at me awfully suspiciously.
Hey, wait a minute, why are my summoned creatures attacking me? How is that fair?!