by John Gold
As soon as I put it on, it buries itself in my finger, all the way down to the bone. The message that pops up tells me that I can only remove it by lopping off my finger. A symbiotic ring! Just the one ring gives me so much. I’d sacrifice all of Hell to make more of them. It’s just a shame I don’t have a craftsman skill, otherwise there would be more bonuses.
Over the next five days, I kill more than I have in the last six months. But I’m the happy new owner of eight identical rings and chains.
Blood mage vampire chain
Killing people by the hundreds in his avid experiments, a blood mage created this chain. His thirst for power and strength was so strong that it was absorbed into it.
Effect:
Intellect +35
Wisdom +35
Morale +35
Requirement: Scalable item
Durability: Indestructible, with damage to it taken out of the owner’s health
∞ ∞ ∞
As soon as I slip the chain on, it curls around my neck twice and buries itself in the flesh. I don’t even want to think about the message telling me that I have to chop my head off if I want to remove it.
It turns out that the way you create items, the way you kill your victims during the ritual, and the kind of victims they are has an effect on the items’ attributes and bonuses. I’m not an artifactor, so I won’t be able to enchant them. That’s a shame, too. It would be interesting to see what damage resistance bonuses I could get.
I’m a Level 0 monster! I thirst for strength, even if power doesn’t interest me. Formally speaking, I’ve found a way to quickly boost my attributes and therefore my chances of survival. It’s time to make some gloves.
Just to see what happens, I only use one kind of bot. It turns out that they have to be the same, so I go with warriors. I have to go pretty far from the plateau where I work, but I do end up finding an entire location packed with warriors hauling logs and rocks.
This time, I use a different ritual seal. The victims are supposed to die slowly, but I ignore the options for a cruel, painful death. I’m not bad enough to take lives that way.
Leather cannibal gloves
A crazy mage figured out something very surprising: if you eat the body part of a still-living victim, you get to take their life force. He was killed by his own servants, who used one of his victims to poison him.
Effect:
Agility +45
Wisdom +12
Morale +51
Requirement: Scalable item
Durability: Indestructible, with damage to it taken out of the owner’s health
∞ ∞ ∞
After the ritual, the gloves change, going from black to a dirty whitish color. The leather is much softer, reminding me of girlish hands. They fit tightly, making my hands more feminine and elegant. In my demon appearance, they fuse with my body.
I spend a whole week running around looking for archers like a madman, but then I do find them. There’s some kind of forest full of archers lugging logs around. They fight, and it’s a sight not for the faint of heart. The old men yank each other’s hair, tear at each other’s ears, and kick each other in the crotch. Oh god, what is this place?
Thinking back to my father, I remember what he said and the branch of the walk-tree the blacksmith sent me to get. I’ve been working on my carpentry skills so I can make a bow, after all. Father’s going to be so proud of me!
Ahead lies my biggest experiment yet. It’s the largest and most complex seal in ritual magic and blood magic, a seal more suited to a grand master’s 550 skill than my 200. I need almost five hundred victims and a seven-layer pentagram, and I have no idea how I’m going to kill that many people in the astral. But I want to try. I’m prepared to risk everything just to see what happens.
Just the thought of facing down a crowd two thousand strong, with a level two magnitudes beyond my own, and the prize at the end, sends a shiver of sweet anticipation running down my spine. A crazy smile spreads unwittingly across my face. I want to know just how strong I am.
I spend two weeks getting ready for the ritual. It takes almost two days to perfect the seal, making sure it matches everything in the book. Instead of a bowstring, I use a dragon whisker yanked from the succubus’ whip. It looks great: there’s a branch sprouting with leaves, and then a glistening whisker tied up with bows on the ends.
I drag over four victims at a time and feel exhausted, mostly emotionally. There’s a feeling starting to creep up on me: is all this really okay?
The ritual itself goes by quickly, and the victims die even faster. The seal collects the energy from their souls, creating a local rift that leads to the astral from within the item. It’s crazy there. I look around to see ten islands of calm in the same place, making one big island. That’s where the battle plays out.
I shouldn’t have doubted my skills. At one point, a dozen elven arrows smack into me, and my health dips, but I’m back to normal in ten seconds. With this kind of damage resistance, I’m practically a reaper of death. I fight for three hours until there aren’t any elves left to kill. That, however, is when all kinds of different creatures, human and otherwise, start coming after me from the astral itself. They’re all pretty strong, too. They fly, crawl, and hover, some of them even inhabiting other souls. I have to use my full body fusion, my maximum running speed, my destruction spikes, enhanced strikes, and all my vampire spikes. It goes on like that for almost six hours until they retreat and let me go.
As soon as I get back from the astral, I grab the bow and stick it in my inventory. I have less than a minute to hide. I just got a message about my capsule being turned off.
∞ ∞ ∞
Eliza had to go back to the orphanage that day. Anji was a danger to himself and the people around him. Over the past six months, he’d broken more rules than the rest of her wards combined. She’d watched his recordings for three weeks running, ever since the first incident, and he’d spent most of it sitting by the fire or just spending time around his victims where nobody could see him. There was one moment where Anji was torturing his victims, and, the worst part, he just smiled and nodded to everything they said. She’d just seen the recordings from today and was shocked by the changes: Anji had started consciously going out and looking for victims for his rituals. Then, there was a moment of calm before the boy started dragging the bodies over the night before. It was sickening. Hundreds of victims, an enormous, eleven-sided seal drawn in blood, and the poor people pinned to the ground with spikes in their hands and feet. She was too late for the beginning of the ritual and couldn’t stop it once it had started, so her only option was to turn his capsule off. That required Vaalsie’s sign-off, however, and so that’s who she went to see.
The supervisor, once he’d joined the virtual space, started watching the feed from Anji’s capsule. The boy was looking at a large pentagram covered in bodies, and Vaalsie cut loose with a long, varied construction that described Anji’s origin and mental capacity. Leaving him in the virtual space, Eliza had left for the orphanage. She was able to watch what was happening in the game from her aerocar. Just at that moment, Anji headed into the astral, something that was supposed to be impossible for children. The battle was joined. Afterward, a bunch of monsters attacked him, something that hadn’t happened once since the game was launched.
When she got there, the boy was still in Project Chrysalis, still in the astral space. As soon as the battle ended, she forced a shutdown.
Anji crawled out of the capsule and looked at them with tired eyes. He’d spent 57 hours in the game; too much even for an adult. There were kids all around, ready for him to get chewed out. Vaalsie started it off.
“Anji Ganet, in view of your many violations of behavioral etiquette here in the orphanage, you have lost your access to the game reality for two months. Now go, wash up, and talk with Miss Elizabeth.”
The boy did exactly what he was told. Except, he didn’t really listen to any of it, just accepting the fact th
at he was being punished. He reacted to Elizabeth’s enraged speech the same way. It happened in the cafeteria without being planned out ahead of time, so they had plenty of company. Anji listened in complete indifference as he ate. Then, he went off to get some sleep, not even waiting to hear the end.
∞ ∞ ∞
Bernard was worried. As was his usual custom, he polished his dragon-bone staff, even though it was already polished to a shine. The problem was an open quest, the one he’d given Sagie in Imir. After the ritual, the boy should have been sent to Hell, and his death would have automatically closed the failed quest. But eight months had gone by, and the quest was still open. That meant he was still alive. The worst enemies are the kind who will stop at nothing to kill you, even if everything you’ve done is necessary, immoral and terrible, but necessary. It had worked for everybody else. There were ten new gods in the pantheon, and all of his brethren had been able to get away after completing the ritual. Wanderers don’t leave witnesses.
A millennium and a half had passed since people had found out about other worlds, and the gods who’d wanted to leave that world had found out how to do so from a wanderer. Dying as a god meant being reborn as a human and passing through the world of the gods to the island of freedom. That’s where the portal was.
“The answers to all your questions are on the other side.” Bernard still remembered what Idzumi had said.
First, everybody laughed at the wanderers. They cracked jokes, giving them different quests, though they gradually gathered strength. Idzumi was so strong that even the gods didn’t know what his level was. He proved that it was possible to kill a god, too. It had been Bernard himself who challenged him to a battle. Gods love their facts. None of his kind had been willing to risk death in order to see if the wanderer was telling the truth.
Witnesses of the battle thought that Idzumi commanded more than four thousand streams of consciousness. Even with replenishment from the main altar and Bernard’s enormous strength reserve, the battle lasted almost all day, and even that was just because the wanderer had decided to show the difference in strength. Bernard tried to break through Idzumi’s shields, used astral attacks on his mental body, lit the air on fire, and tried to turn the wanderer to ash. Idzumi ignored everything; he just breathed magic, literally. He didn’t care, spending a whole hour under water and just taking everything Bernard threw at him without reacting in the least.
The other gods decided to punish the rude wanderer. Their combined strike created a desert, left craters several kilometers deep, and reached such a level of strength with their fire and magic background that the fire elementals disintegrated almost as soon as they were born.
Then, Idzumi killed Bernard’s avatar with one strike. It was crazy. He put paid to the strength restrictions, killing all things living in a ten-kilometer circle around him. The magic background boiled under his power. Then, he pulled an enormous, 130-meter spike out of the astral and hurled it at Bernard. The latter died instantly, both mentally and physically. Even now, thousands of years later, that spike creates an aura that does enough mental damage that even the gods are afraid to touch it.
When Bernard regenerated, he couldn’t remember everything. He’d been a god; he became human. When he showed up at one of his old temples, he found out that many years had passed. His adepts had all gone over to other gods.
Idzumi, just as he’d promised, was waiting for him to regenerate.
“When the time is right, I will come to the world and take my chosen ones. For now, they are your wanderers. I came as humans were beginning to show promise, though Akashi refused to leave alone. As soon as his group is ready, we will leave your world. You, the old gods, can leave it, too. From now on, you, Bernard, will be a wanderer like one of them. Your first rebirth will take one year. Afterward, you will have the same skills the wanderers have, and you will also be able to give quests and share experience.
But now, Bernard was nervous that Sagie would come back from where there was no return. Wanderers had raided Hell, but even they were forced to change their body when they died. Being sent to Hell was considered the ultimate punishment. But what if someone figured out a way to come back?
Bernard worried that the boy might be able to send him to Hell, a scary thought, indeed. None of the gods had seen the boy, so he was still there.
The god wasn’t able to leave the world he was tied to, and that was why he’d be reborn as a wanderer. One of Idzumi’s conditions had been that the death of the gods would be the result of a new wave of wanderers coming from other worlds. They would die in battle, and not as the result of giving themselves up.
“There is no place for the weak.”
He wasn’t joking.
And there was the new wave of wanderers. They came from the same time and world as the first wave, and everything was going according to plan—the new gods had appeared. They represented the hope of old gods to be reborn and leave.
∞ ∞ ∞
Merlen Ruzh was the treasurer for a clan called the Golden Clan. That day, the clan had the opportunity to level-up and add a new floor to their castle. Preparations for the upcoming war were a problem - they cost too much money. Even their divine patron wasn’t nearly as happy as he used to be. Everything was getting harder. In eight months, the clan had pulled in 20 million of the 38 million players in Project Chrysalis. Two military alliances had been formed; warriors were being trained relentlessly. There were trade unions, too, for training craftsmen and developing regional economies, and Imir had even acquired its own stationary portal.
“What’s on your mind this time? Relax, take a trip around the country with your daughter. She has to work, but you can relax!” Leon was in his human avatar body.
“You know very well, and she can work on her saintliness by herself. Hey, have you got the group together?”
“Yep. Soon, they’ll all be taking the word of truth out together. We’re still far from our goal, though this will help. Reaching Level 1000 isn’t easy! It’s a long journey that takes many months.”
After a glass of good wine, they got back to work. It was a new and wondrous world of hard work and discovery. Leon wanted to become more than a god, and he’d set that as the goal for the entire clan. Happily, only the consecrated knew about it.
∞ ∞ ∞
This forced vacation is an odd beast. I’m not itching to get back into the game, seeing as how I have time to work on my actual future now. My experience using eleven streams of consciousness is paying off in real life: I’m making decisions faster, thinking faster. If I used to be like a normal fish, now I’m more an octopus. My brain has lots of arms, and my perception of the world is a conglomeration of lots of little fragments.
What can I do for two months? For one thing, I can read the law on child rights that was drawn up and approved by the UN. The maximum duration for a punishment is thirty days, though I decide not to bring that up with Vaalsie. That’s a good ace to have in my sleeve in case I need to jump into the game. Otherwise, there’s no point getting on his bad side. I need to change the rules of the game. Both Vaalsie and the psychologist are getting in my way, and the fact that I’m a child means that they both have power over me. I need to find adoptive parents or move to an orphanage where I make the rules.
I find an original solution. On one of Jupiter’s moons, there’s а hospital colony, the city-state Arpa. According to local laws, I can receive citizen status when I turn 14 if I’ve lived there for more than three years and have enough money to tide me over until I turn 18. It’s a pretty big sum—90,000 credits—but I can pull it off. If I take money out of the game for a couple years, that should do it, especially if I can sell some items from Hell at the auction.
The citizenship issue won’t be a problem if I can get myself transferred to a local orphanage. The problem is that I’m not sure how I’d do that. I could pretend I have psychiatric disorder and get myself transferred there… That would take some doing, and it would be pricey.<
br />
I didn’t even think about going the route of adoptive parents, my experience with Galboa enough to put paid to that idea. If Eliza had told the kids I wasn’t mute, Galboa was definitely fired. I don’t want to screw over the people I care about. I’m a kid, but it’s still really unpleasant…thirsting for strength, becoming strong, and always protecting yourself, staying away from affection and pushing people away.
I renounced weakness and emotion a long time ago. That’s how I learned to be quiet and think. Being human isn’t about what you say; it’s about what you do. Younger children are different from older children in that way.
My nose starts to bleed. I need to relax.
∞ ∞ ∞
Here I am, back in the game. Project Chrysalis greets me with the usual hellish landscape, though I also get to check out my newest acquisition.
Astral bow
A crazy ritual created a local rift in the astral, linking it forever to this bow. The bow itself creates astral arrows full of mana.
Effect: Depends on the type of spell and how much mana you put in each arrow. The maximum charge is equal to the amount of mana you have, and you can be hit with 10% of the damage if the spell recoils.
Requirement: Non-level item
Durability: Indestructible, with damage to it taken out of the owner’s health
∞ ∞ ∞
You want to know what’s crazy? When you pull the bow back and pour all your mana into a single arrow. The cliff shatters, and I’m thrown back 25 meters by the shock wave. And that was just a trial run!
Father’s going to be so proud.
When I pick the bow up, it starts to glow. Superior mages use the same principle when they’re getting ready for a powerful blow, though they make sure they aren’t standing in the same place as their opponent.
“Attribute window!”
Name: Sagie
Level: 0
Experience: 0/100 (100 left until the next level)
Race: Human