There it ran into an even larger predator, and never returned.
The husk of the former emperor’s body frozen in its stasis field lay in the center of the Wastelands for a month.
Once the effect ended, the body left stasis.
* * *
His mind played the same picture over and over: his sister screaming, the baron standing there, his face soaked in blood, stretching out his hand, something flashing. Some sort of crystal.
The next instant, Luca was suddenly in a scorched place, under a blinding sun, trying to open his eyes, but unable. They’d dried out.
An instant later, signals traveled along his nerve endings, reached his awakening brain, and he screamed. An intolerable pain shot through his entire body. His time with metamorphosis had made him unused to pain. In spite of that, not a sound came out of his parched throat but a hoarse wheeze. He tried to stand up, and then the real pain hit him, overtook his threshold. His survival instinct kicked in and he lost consciousness.
It was impossible to say when he came round again. Maybe an hour had passed, maybe days, but he finally managed to unglue his eyes and raise his bone-dry, uncooperative eyelids. He saw that the heat had softened a little, and the sky, so recently yellow, was now a deep blue. The circle of the sun was reddening and dropping lower, but a suppressing, pulsating heat still bathed the desert.
Unable to withstand the unceasing nagging pain all across his body, especially in his limbs, he groaned noiselessly again. He had sand in his eyes and couldn’t even raise his arm to wipe them. He lowered his eyelids. Faded letters appeared through the bloody darkness. His clouded mind told him that it was the logs of what had happened.
Detected memory access failure.
Detected looped time segment: 0.1 seconds.
Analyzing...
Detected memory access failure.
Detected looped time segment: 0.1 seconds.
Analyzing...
Detected memory access failure.
Detected looped time segment: 0.1 seconds.
Analyzing...
The same lines repeated each other again and again, for pages and pages, and the letters blended together like raindrops on glass. Green raindrops on glass in the night.
The wild pain stayed with him. Worse, it gained strength. Luca opened his eyes a second before losing consciousness again and realized that he had no limbs. Just two stumps at his knees. Blood poured from his wounds in thick streams, and his ability was silent.
He woke up next from a piercing cold. A boundless sky stretched out above him, scattered with myriad stars. His teeth chattering, Luca began to shift his body, trying to dig deeper into the warm and sharp sand.
Some scaled creature around the size of a dog, with an unblinking gaze, growled loudly as it tried to chew on a bone sticking out of his ribcage. He panicked in horror and immediately gave an order.
Red threads leaped out of the stumps of his legs to the beast, stuck to the carrion-eater’s face. It shrieked and tried to jump back, but instead the threads went to its legs. The reptile struggled with its legs, trying to pull away, but only got itself stuck worse, and its limbs began to absorb into its former victim’s body. The hunter became the hunted.
Refusing to watch the sickening absorption of the reptile, Ma Ju Ro delved into the logs.
Much had happened since he lost consciousness. The traveler interface finished reloading just as the time loop cycle suddenly broke. Detecting its body’s numerous wounds, it stopped the blood loss — moreover, it even managed to collect what had leaked out and return it to the body. Of course, that meant it had to fully reprocess the clotted blood.
The biggest problem was dehydration. The ability managed to partially fix this thanks to the absorbed reptile, but the human body was too fragile and inefficient to maintain life in the conditions of this environment.
The new environment was extremely aggressive; harsh radiation, a burning sun, predatory carnivores, no water. There were also his amputated limbs and Wheel penalties. His cells were dying, and the ability couldn’t keep up; radiation sickness, the curse of Two-horns, was picking up its pace. Organ after organ failed, and if it weren’t for the body’s huge fat stores, burned at a rapid pace to restore his tissues, even metamorphosis would have failed.
Keeping the traveler alive was difficult and resource-intensive. Did he want to stay here for long weeks while metamorphosis used all the available reserves to restore his body? Would it not be easier to merely depart this life and start a new one?
Luca refused to be reborn. While there was still a hope that Kora was alive, he had to fight. He worried for Herdinia, regretting that she had killed Daven. The baron wouldn’t forgive her for killing his son.
He kept trying to figure out what had happened in the castle, breaking off only to catch and absorb any mutant vultures that came along.
Metamorphosis had studied this form of life and adopted its most successful mutations as weapons. With the traveler’s consent — and Luca was willing to consent to anything to get a chance of seeing his loved ones again — it activated the transformation process, accepting the carrier’s wish to maintain, at least on the outside, a human shape.
There wasn’t enough organic material, but there was plenty of iridium. The emperor was lying on veins of the stuff. The ability suggested taking it as a base and using it in the skeleton, and Luca accepted it.
The new form allowed him not to limit himself to organic matter, and to use silicon-based nerve fibers. An alarm bell rang in his head, his vision darkened. Luca couldn’t even read what his ability suggested as material for muscle mass and a skin imitation, so he blindly gave his confirmation.
A fountain of sand exploding beneath him pulled him out of another dull revery. Thrown up to the height of a man, Luca felt himself turning. After a short fall, he saw that he was flying in a monstrous jaw, surrounded by uncountable rows of fangs. He couldn’t see anything except this wide-open maw brimming with steaming, stinking drool — the monster’s body was hidden beneath the sand.
Crumpling, he activated his battle form in panic and prepared to tear the beast apart from within, even at the cost of his own barely burning excuse for a life. And he did it.
Metamorphosis neutralized the acid drool and thrust a hundred symbiotic threads into the creature, taking control of the nervous system of this conveniently appearing beast. The sandy half-worm, half-bug creature chittered and died.
Little was left of it by the next morning. It had all been used up for transformation. On top of that, the monster had given up plenty of information. The ability had analyzed it and created weapons not only from the bug’s telescopic chitinous tungsten limbs that could extend thirty feet, but even from its corrosive saliva. The contents were optimized and the formula added to the combat arsenal. The ability’s highest priority was its traveler’s survival, and the changing environment required total transformation.
His metamorphosis was running at full steam, and gave Luca no choice. It began to regrow new limbs. Powerful, functional, invulnerable limbs. It kept using iridium and its compounds as a base material.
The process could take more than a week. The ability put Luca into active defense mode in case anything damaged the body, and sent him into a deep sleep.
* * *
A few weeks later, a dozen deep raiders approached the spot, something catching their eye. The band of mutants consisted of a chief, a tracker, a digger and warriors. The key selection criteria for its members was that each could easily withstand the Core’s heat and Two-horns’ curse.
A small barrel-shaped creature walked at the front — the tracker.
“Heh!” he emitted a gargling guttural noise in joy. “I told yas! I got an arrow inside, and it always points to fresh manflesh! I smelt it in the Core from the edge of the Wastelands!”
A human head jutted out from a sandy elevation. The chief, a tall and powerful mutant, approached the discovery. Crouching, it passed a hand over the sand, re
vealing the buried neck.
“’Sfresh, Gecko!” the barrel-shaped one yowled.
“Shut it, Zee,” Gecko muttered lazily. He pressed his hand to the neck, felt the jugular vein and listened. “He still breathin’! Hey, you!” he shouted to the digger frozen nearby. “Dig him out! How the hell did he get here?”
“He ain’t ours,” Zee said with authority. “I’m seein’ this mug for the first time. So thin, all skin ‘n’ bones!”
The tracker parted the layers in its stomach and stuck out a long snake’s tongue from it, touching the tip to the body.
“Enough lickin’, snoop!” the chief snapped. “This meat ain’t for you! He’s alive!”
The tongue withdrew with a sniffle.
“Quit it, Gecko, stop, why you talkin’ like that? Nobody’ll know! Huh?”
“I know,” Gecko said, jabbing his finger at his chest. Then he pointed to the others. “They know. Forget it. The orders are clear. We take all newcomers alive to Shelter. The shamans’ll figure out what to do with him, got it? What if he’s a super? Or a chosen one? Huh? You thought of that, dumbass?”
Zee sighed and sat down on the sand. He took some dried cockroach meat from a sack, threw it into his gut and did what he was ready to do it any condition: chew. A second piece followed the first, and in the meantime the others got to work; they dug out their find, tied it up with a thick rope at the arms and legs and loaded it onto a stretcher.
“Where to?” Zee asked. “We finishin’ our round?”
“Not with this cargo,” Gecko shook both his heads. “Don’t know what’s up with him, but he’s as heavy as three supers.”
“So?” the tracker asked with hope in his voice. “Maybe we can just eat him?”
“Eat your socks, greedy!” Gecko snapped in annoyance. “We’re taking him to Shelter!”
The tracker sighed deeply. The road ahead was long.
* * *
Carrier body transformation completed.
Do you wish to familiarize yourself with the full list of changes made?
Metamorphosis: +1.
Ability level five reached!
Ability to control own body at master level...
Luca’Onegut, an interdimensional universal traveler in his first life, woke up.
End of First Book
From the Author
In our day and age, authors have the great advantage of being able to speak to their readers directly and even receive feedback. I try to use this opportunity for all it’s worth, both in social media and the way I’m doing now, using the pages of my own books. Normally, I do it to tell you what you can expect from me next and what kind of books my publisher has in store for you.
You might have read my other series: Level Up and Disgardium. Or maybe this is the first book you’ve ever read by me. In either case, I’d like to tell you a little about the two series above, as well as offer you a glimpse into how the story of Luka Dezisimu, the boy who became the Emperor Ma Ju Ro, will unfold.
World 99 was initially conceived as the story of a young cripple who receives some superpowers and becomes an interdimensional traveler. In most classic stories of this genre, becoming an emperor often heralds the end of the hero’s adventures. But I wanted it to be the moment when the hero’s real story only just started. Especially, as you now know, his Empire is just a posh moniker for an island inhabited by some genetic rejects long forgotten by the cruel and infinitely more advanced civilization which created it.
Luca loses everything, including even some body parts, but thanks to Metamorphosis and the Wheel, his true adventures have only just begun. In the next book, he will face the radioactive Wastelands abounding with mutants, monsters and all sorts of other dangers. Then Luca will come back in order to wreak his revenge, reclaim his country and try to confront the world’s real masters, the racants.
The English translation of the second part of World 99 will be available on Amazon some time in spring 2020.
A bit earlier - hopefully in November or December 2019 - I plan to release the third book of the Disgardium series. If you’re already familiar with a certain Alex Sheppard better known by his handle “Scyth”, then you already know that he’s finally left the sandbox and entered the big world of Disgardium proper. Which means he has to face all sorts of dangers: not only the preventer clans but also the vindictive Destroying Plague. To top it all, Snowstorm Incorporated finally realize the dangers presented by “Class-A Threat” and set up several very unpleasant surprises for our hero. But despite it all, the Awoken keep growing, building a clan fort for themselves and colonizing the island of Kharinza.
Some of the more observant readers might have already realized that all my books are set in the same universe. The first trilogy, Level Up, is set in our day and age. The action in Disgardium is unfolding in our world too, but the time frame is already in the 2070s. The second trilogy of Level Up will take place in an even more distant future when we’ve already colonized the entire Solar System and made contact with other civilizations in our Galaxy. And as for World 99, it’s also set in our time, but on a parallel Earth - and as you remember, Luca has learned to travel between worlds.
By the time all the series are completed, the seemingly random associations between them will finally fall into a single pattern, giving meaning to this jigsaw puzzle. Everything will make sense. I promise.
In the meantime... if you’re still with me, you might find it interesting to subscribe to my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/dansugralinovslevelup
And if you’ve already done it, I can only mentally shake your hand. Thank you!
See you in my next books!
Dan Sugralinov,
the author who firmly believes that good always defeats evil
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The Final Trial (Level Up Book #3) LitRPG Series
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LEVEL UP LitRPG Series:
Re-Start (Level Up Book #1)
Hero (Level Up Book #2)
; The Final Trial (Level Up Book #3)
Level Up: The Knockout (Book #1)
DISGARDIUM LitRPG Series:
Class-A Threat (Disgardium Book #1)
Apostle of the Sleeping Gods (Disgardium Book #2)
World 99 LitRPG Wuxia Series:
Blood of Fate (World 99 Book #1)
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