Blood of Fate
a novel
by Dan Sugralinov
World 99
Book#1
Magic Dome Books
World 99
Book #1: Blood of Fate
Copyright © Dan Sugralinov 2019
Cover Art © Vladimir Manyukhin 2019
English translation copyright © Alix Merlin Williamson 2019
Published by Magic Dome Books, 2019
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 978-80-7619-060-3
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to the shop and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is entirely a work of fiction.
Any correlation with real people or events is coincidental.
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Table of Contents:
Chapter 1. Last Day in the Life of Luca Dezisimu
Chapter 2. Interdimensional Universal Traveler
Chapter 3. Magical Healing
Chapter 4. One-Time Wheel Spin
Chapter 5. The Birth of a New Traveler
Chapter 6. Nemania Kovachar’s Offer
Chapter 7. Polluted Gene Pool
Chapter 8. Prizes of the Wheel
Chapter 9. The Justice of Judge Cannon
Chapter 10. Senior Apprentice Penant
Chapter 11. Bad News
Chapter 12. Let’s Get Started!
Chapter 13. An Extremely Curious Specimen
Chapter 14. Master Yadugara’s Edicts
Chapter 15. Chinils
Chapter 16. At the Behest of Lentz
Chapter 17. In the Emperor’s Palace
Chapter 18. Ma Ju Ro the Sour
Chapter 19. Activating Countermeasure
Chapter 20. Metamorphosis Level Two
Chapter 21. The Clearest Evidence
Chapter 22. Special Assignment
Chapter 23. Surprise for the Sovereign
Chapter 24. Special Attention to Courtesans
Chapter 25. The Greatest Secret
Chapter 26. All Hail the Emperor!
Chapter 27. Constant Value
Chapter 28. Stick and Carrot
Chapter 29. Red Sector
Chapter 30. Great Ancestor Spirit
Chapter 31. General Hustig’s Confession
Chapter 32. Who is Herdinia Cross?
Chapter 33. Who are you, you son of a bitch?
Chapter 34. The Fourth Advisor
Chapter 35. Kora and Prisca Dezisimu
Chapter 36. Lost Years
Chapter 37. Yadugara’s Award
Chapter 38. Threat From Within
Chapter 39. Ignatius the Furious and His People
Chapter 40. Circle of Captains
Chapter 41. New Boss
Chapter 42. Ambassador of the North
Chapter 43. The Nine
Chapter 44. The Offer of Anthony Cross
Chapter 45. Northern Hospitality
Chapter 1. Last Day in the Life of Luca Dezisimu
LUCA’S DAY was turning out average. They’d caught his sister at the market again, trying to steal a couple of soused apples from a merchant. The fruit cost a copper a basket, but to pay the girl’s bail, her mother would have to wash other people’s clothes non-stop for a week. At least an old friend of hers, another washerwoman, had gotten sick and passed her clients on.
That was why it had been two days since Luca last ate when his mother, herself barely staying upright, fed him some hastily cooked broth of potato skins. Nemania Kovachar, the owner of the only inn in the entire district, sold potato skins and similar leavings on the side.
To help his mother collect the bail money, Luca climbed into his wheelchair with her help and slowly rolled out of the hovel they lived in, heading toward the temple. The porch there was always full of professional beggars, but if he made as if he was just rolling by, he might get a few coins.
His mother didn’t even want to discuss allowing him to join the beggars’ guild. She had been and always remained the proud wife of a gladiator. They might live in a hovel on the edge of town now, since his father’s death, but there had been a time when they had a good house almost in the center of the capital, and apart from babysitters, Luca had had a nanny that taught him his letters and various sciences.
His father had been called Severus. He fell in the Arena three years prior. Only his earnings as a professional gladiator had allowed them to buy a wheelchair for Luca in those better times.
Ignatius the Furious had killed Severus, becoming a six-time Arena champion. It was whispered that not all had been clean in that battle, but Luca did not have the power to bring back his father, no matter what people said. Severus’s bones now decayed in a tomb, and Ignatius, rumor had it, headed up the capital’s criminal underworld.
Slowly, slower than a swamp turtle, Luca wheeled himself across the small plot in front of his home and onto the street. It took him almost ten minutes to go just fifteen feet. Luca had been paralyzed from birth, or maybe even while still in his mother’s womb. Those muscles he had allowed him to move his hands; not good enough to hold anything heavy, but enough to roll the wheelchair. His legs had never moved as far as Luca could remember.
“Look, it’s the cripple again!” shouted one of a group of guys whose appearance made Luca turn around at once to run.
Although the words ‘at once’ and ‘run’ had nothing to do with it. Usually they quickly caught him and then bullied him for some time, taking advantage of his helplessness. Karim, the son of the innkeeper Nemania, was particularly cruel in his abuse.
Luca span his wheels as fast as he could, retreating homewards. He even managed to get a few feet from the yard... But he wasn’t fast enough.
Splash! A cobblestone
landed in a fetid puddle nearby, throwing up a fountain of dirty water. It soaked Luca through. The boy clenched his teeth and tried to move faster. The worst of it was his mother’s wasted labor. She always tried to give him clean clothes before he went out.
He pushed the wheelchair onward. Karim and his gang stayed at a distance, kept having fun throwing stones. The same huge deep puddle blocked their path, spreading from sidewalk to sidewalk. Days of showers had flooded the roads, and people walked at the edge of the sidewalks, where it was shallow enough to keep the water below the knees.
The stones flew one after the other, throwing up dirty water and mud, breaking spokes in the wheelchair and generously peppering Luca in cuts and bruises. The boys hollered and cackled, shouted abuse at him and got even more excited, congratulating each other on particularly good hits or insults.
One of the stones hit Luca in the shoulder. The flash of pain stopped his retreat: it was as if his right arm was dead. His eyes began to sting, but not from pain; from resentment. How he hated how helpless he was! How he dreamed of standing! Even crawling! He would have crawled up to each of them and bitten them!
Luca aimed his fury at the gods, if they existed, at the injustice of the world, at his parents... His father had spent so much money trying to make his son stand, but no matter how many wise women he saw, or rare shamans specially brought in from the planes, or professional physicians from the healers’ guild, none could do anything to fix his ailment.
One fortune teller said that the sins of the parents had fallen on the son. She was probably making it up, but for some reason Luca remembered her in particular. Most likely because it was easiest to blame his parents for it all. They were close by...
They had been close by. His father was gone, his mother faded with each passing year, and his sister Kora would end her journey in a brothel. Luca was sure of that. She was light-footed, curvaceous for her fifteen years, carefree and entirely without moral principles. Her knees were always cut-up, too. Kora took everything that wasn’t nailed down, and wasn’t afraid to get into a fight with much older boys, and as for where and how she got certain expensive luxuries like makeup, jewelry, new dresses... Luca didn’t even want to know. He loved his sister and she loved him, and that was enough.
“Hey, cripple!”
Luca turned around unwillingly. In the last second of his life, he saw a huge cobblestone flying toward him, blotting out the sun.
Chapter 2. Interdimensional Universal Traveler
ESK’ONEGUT, AN INTERDIMENSIONAL universal traveler, ended his life on Earth in the twenty-first century in the body of a Russian student whose name sounded far more exotic than his nickname — Craster. Ilya Pashutin, a student in his final year of a journalism course, had little interest in journalism and studied at the university only at his parents’ insistence. More specifically at his father’s, a former soldier who had given his son an ultimatum: army or university. Ilya chose the second one, along with... games.
Esk’Onegut found the world of computer games so gripping that he’d spent almost all his waking hours from the age of ten sitting at a computer. For Esk, this was his ninety eighth reincarnation, and, like every traveler, he got stronger from life to life as he earned Tsoui, which meant, in a long-dead language, ‘balance of deeds’, something that determined one’s influence on the harmony of the universe. Tsoui points could be spent to turn the Wheel.
You could spend Tsoui points to turn the Wheel as many times as you liked, as long as you paid. Millions of sectors were marked on it. Many were empty or unfavorable, but there were also very powerful ones that gave the current body supernatural abilities: incredible strength, ludicrous speed, deadly combat skills, magical or creative abilities...
The talents spread across the Wheel were split into four levels: from common to peerless, the best in all the worlds. Esk vaguely remembered winning the skill of becoming invisible on the Wheel in a previous life. That had been a good one! That world probably still had legends about the thief whose body he’d inhabited for almost six years.
On Earth, the concept that Esk had found closest to Tsoui was karma. Only he was certain that karma was a blasphemous fiction, because it took into account actions measured by the scales of individuals themselves and those around them. In Tsoui, the traveler’s deeds were weighed by their influence on universal harmony. After all, every action, every word, caused ripples in the past and the future of the entire universe.
Esk had ended up in Ilya’s body when the latter reached the age of four. While his mother wasn’t watching him, the young boy fell under a rapidly moving metal seesaw in the small park outside his house. His innocent spirit was moved to the universal archive to await its next revival, if it had one. And Esk’Onegut set up shop in little Ilya’s body. It just so happened that at that very moment, he’d died in the last one.
In his life before Earth, he had reigned as emperor on a peripheral planet in the Galaxy, enjoying total power and his very own cult of personality. The finest women, the best intoxicants and narcotics, delicious meals, the fulfilment of all his whims, from the simple pleasures to the most perverted...
In truth, he had become the worst emperor in the history of that planet, whose name he could not recall due to the effect of the Waning. It was no wonder he’d been poisoned.
The Waning was the curse of every traveler. The effect wiped memories from previous lives, but the knowledge of their existence remained, along with the memories of the last minutes before death. And the shorter the time between lives, the more Esk remembered. Before his imperial reign, he had been a great musician and singer who wrote his own songs. He knew that, but, lightning strike him down, he could not remember a single line of what he had written.
His memory of his years as an emperor, his ninety eighth life, remained with Esk in Ilya’s body. He was so sick of power and authority that on twenty-first century Earth, he wanted nothing to do with it. With the taste of all those accessible and inaccessible joys of life still fresh in his memory, Esk discovered the world of computer games on Earth. Realizing that virtual worlds were basically the same as what he did, only on a smaller scale and with the ability to switch between worlds and virtual bodies at any moment, Esk fell headlong into them.
By the end of his earthly journey in the body of twenty-year-old Ilya Pashutin, Esk had earned minus Tsoui thanks to his idleness and indifference to the world around him. Not only had he spent his entire life on Earth without using the Wheel, Esk’s luck also seemed to have turned negative.
And when Fortune turns her back on you, it’s pointless to make stupid jokes. Esk’Onegut, or Ilya Pashutin to everyone else, died before his time, hit by a car while rushing to a lecture after a sleepless night at his computer.
God, anything but that! Esk thought, with an entirely earthly god in mind; he still considered himself an earthly student. There’s a guild raid tomorrow! I’m going to miss it... Vanka will be pissed.
In the next moment, he moved to another world and another body. Here it was — his ninety ninth rebirth. His ninety ninth world.
Twenty five again! He sighed inwardly. He’d have to learn a new body, study a new world... He was sick of it.
Esk opened his eyes and tried to move his limbs. His legs weren’t listening. That sometimes happened when the new body functioned differently from the previous one, but the genome was clearly identical — human. It seemed there was something wrong with the body.
Deciding to deal with it later, Esk immersed himself in the input data.
Esk’Onegut, life ninety nine.
Influence level: 9.
Tsoui points: -971 (negative value).
Orion Arm, Milky Way, Solar System, Planet Earth.
Universe variation: #ES-252210-0273-4707.
So he was still on Earth, but in a parallel universe. That was good, he wouldn’t have to relearn too much. Not like when he’d revived in the body of an eight-armed reptile. But the fact that his Tsoui points were in the red — t
hat was very, very bad. Why were they so far in the negative? He hadn’t done anything bad, he’d just played computer games!
Reincarnation unavailable. Tsoui point balance must be above zero.
Right to reincarnation with negative balance: exhausted.
One-time Wheel spin privilege: available.
Esk swore internally, mentioning all the gods he’d known from previous lives. As an emperor, he had gone into minus points for the first time in all his incarnations, but he was sure he would earn the Tsoui back in Ilya’s body. He’d decided to simply not do anything that could negatively affect his balance. As it turned out, doing nothing carried a harsher Tsoui penalty than all the deadly sins performed in the emperor’s body...
After landing in the body of the future Russian student Ilya, Esk had used his one-time spin of the Wheel, but an empty sector came up. Good that it wasn’t negative, at least. He could have gotten some curse like an incurable illness or limited mental abilities. He didn’t have enough Tsoui points for more, he’d wasted too much as emperor. Wasted and lost.
Having decided that since he had no right to reincarnate again, then he had to start living as soon as possible, he returned to the real world and realized that he was lying in a deep, stinking puddle. The smell was nightmarish. Esk grimaced and tried to stand, but couldn’t.
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