by John Gold
Duration: Permanent
The altars are buried, the dummies set out randomly, and the debuff removed from me. Then, I take a week to grow a tree that overshadows with its crown the entire area where the seal will be. The cherry on top is setting a spot for my leap spell to make sure I can quickly exit the seventy-meter area where the seal will be active. It’s time.
All I have to do is get within fifty meters of Talamei to trigger some kind of defensive perimeter and get a dozen angry banshees popping out of nowhere. The fallen god also comes over to look for me. One of the spirits notices me, and they all come rushing in my direction, forcing me to hop away with a leap spell. The recharge time is ten minutes, so I’m going to have to make a semicircle around the seal.
I run, sending deadly spells at my enemies to let them know where I’m going. Talamei’s footfalls are easier to hear than see. He’s laughing revoltingly and following the banshees, though he steps into the accursed area just as the last spirit dies. One wave of a hand, another, and the curse is permanent. Ah-ha! Your intellect is down to just two thousand, and you’re right in the middle of the seal.
Talamei looks around at the dummies and starts taking out the actual altars. Damn it! He can see the streams of magic energy!
“Gravitational well! Maximum!”
Oh, god, that hurts so bad.
I let a charge with a hundred times the usual amount of energy go through me, expanding the strength and area of the spell by a factor of ten. The spell is costing me a million mana a minute. I’m practically handing over my soul for this one!
The thirty-meter column shoots skyward, leaving the fallen god to flounder awkwardly as he feels around for something to push against. Four real altars from the edge of the seal fly up along with him. The whole lot is traveling at fifty meters a second, and I have enough health to keep my gravitational column going for twenty minutes. Ah, the pain!
After twenty minutes of hellish agony, I still have all kinds of health. Damn it! I realize that’s because of my survivability, which restores 56000 mana a minute, and the tree, which helps tremendously. Damn it! I could do another seven hours of this. I forgot about the gods’ magic vision, their ability to see the world as a spectrum of energy being released, and that screwed up my whole plan. I can barely take it!
Talamei disappears, and I’m lying on the ground in misery. Theoretically, he should be launching out into open space at this point. The lack of oxygen will kill him, at least, if undead need oxygen. Space is absolute cold, too—50 million damage. I also wonder what kind of effect cosmic radiation might have on him.
My whole being is desperately fighting the pain, doing its best to maintain concentration and avoid losing control of the spell. It’s this experience that helps me realize that there’s a central flow of consciousness that coordinates the others. I hear it whispering to me: fight, fight, fight. But is that just the pain making me hallucinate? Or is it LJ taking himself to a new level of self-consciousness? I don’t sense him though, and that’s presumably because I’m not in danger.
At some point during the eight hours, it hits me that there’s nothing left around the tree. The gravitational well has even sucked the soil up into the sky. The ash is gone, leaving an enormous crater behind. The stone thirty meters down settles, the tree lurches as it hangs over the edge, and its roots are all that’s holding it up. The power given off by the spell hurts my teeth. It feels like all the little blood vessels in my body are popping, my joints are vibrating, and my limbs are about to be torn out. The pain wrenches tears from my eyes. Such pain!
Fourth-order resonance activated
The thirty-meter gravitational well expands to three hundred meters, instantly pulling everything in the area up into the sky. I’m crushed into the ground as the tree’s branches start cracking. The entire world is disappearing into a bloody stream.
Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop! Stop it!
Note! Health warning! Central nervous system overload!
I deactivate my emotions and turn off the spell.
Fourth-order resonance deactivated
My head is spinning, my arms and legs are twitching, and LJ is panicking, but I feel great.
Achievement received: Titanbane. Three hundred and forty-second rank.
Kill an opponent 17100 levels higher than you
Reward: +1710 to all attributes
Achievement received: Boundless
Win a duel with a god, forcing them to expend all their divine strength
Reward: +500 to all attributes
The words are so beautiful… My thinking is strange and sluggish. Why am I clinging to the tree? It hits me that LJ has decided to play his feline games, though I’m not sure why I’ve been falling for so long. Wait… Why am I falling at all?
With a crunch, I hit the ground and break all my bones, the saving darkness allowing me to fall asleep.
I wake up in the same tree I was falling in. About three minutes have gone by, and the undead god is still nowhere to be found. New roots start to reach out along the entire trunk of the tree. LJ used panacea, and now he’s working with my life aura to give me a better shot at surviving if my enemy shows up. But he still hasn’t.
My eyes open and close separately; the left half of my body convulses. Activating the resonance almost killed me in reality and came just shy of depriving me of my character in Project Chrysalis.
The rage no longer presses down on me even when I step away from the tree. Did I pass the test?
As I slowly gather myself, I start moving along the rest area in the direction from which the rage used to emanate. A bouquet of rural aromas hits my nose, and I realize I’m standing at the edge of an enormous city.
Current location: City of Nirim. Region from the first Project Chrysalis era.
My brain is having a hard time comprehending what’s going on. A constant stream of locals pours out of the white shroud behind me. A father is leading two young children by the hand, while his wife carries a crying baby. They were lucky to get here together, spared the bitter loneliness of searching for each other.
I’m having an even harder time thinking, my streams of consciousness get mixed up, and I collapse onto my knees. The left side of my body stops responding completely.
Critical health condition
Emergency withdrawal from Project Chrysalis in 3… 2… 1…
Logout
∞ ∞ ∞
Again, I’m dreaming about the field of flowers and the girl in the white dress. I feel the warmth of her hands, the care she takes of me and of my health. God, if you’re real, thank you for this dream. I don’t have the words to describe the wonderful feeling. She protects me and hurts when I hurt, almost like the mother I never had. I want to stay here in this field of flowers with you. It may be a dream, but for me, it’s finer than the real world with its pain and suffering. Please, stay with me. No, don’t leave, mama! Don’t leave me!
I’m jostled awake by somebody’s strong hands. My doctor is peevishly reproaching me for being so careless about my health.
God, why do you hate me? Why so much suffering? Am I really such a bad person? Enough. I decide I’m going to depend on nothing but my own strength. No more charity.
The nurse is shaking me, trying to wake me up.
“Are you awake yet?” I realize it’s Claude without opening my eyes.
“You know… I’ve only ever wanted one thing in this life. I want to go home, smell my mother’s cooking, and hear the clatter of dishes in the kitchen. That will tell me that she’s home and okay. And that will be enough for me.”
“What? Ribonz, wake up! You’re in bad shape, so we have you here in the clinic.”
My eyes fill with tears, so I cover them with a hand.
“Everything’s fine, Claude. Everything’s going to be fine.”
You don’t need to know what’s in my heart. Everyone spends their time in this tiny world dealing with their own problems, leaving little room to care for ot
hers.
I’m taken back to my room three days later. This time, I managed to avoid getting overworked and exhausting my nervous system. There’s going to be a new course of physical therapy and vitamins coming up.
Claude says swimming will help me more than the med capsule, so he forces me into the pool. I feel sick, my thoughts are jumbled, and my hands shake, but I paddle away toward that two-kilometer mark. I’m back to square one.
∞ ∞ ∞
Login
There are hundreds of buildings in the city. People live here, in no hurry to go anywhere or do anything. Parents watch their children play, elderly people chit-chat, and the old ladies gossip about their neighbors. The endless circle of life shut off as soon as worldly ambitions and desires ceased.
While the one-story and two-story houses look identical, the people are all different.
Dwarf, Targun, Level 1377, Templar
The bearded character is walking the streets, looking for someone the same as me, and not talking to anyone.
“Excuse me, Targun. Have you seen a couple with a one-year-old girl?”
The dwarf snorts.
“We have a thousand couples here like that.”
“Their names are Camelia, Arman, and Rosie. A seamstress, a fisherman, and a child between Levels 150 and 300.”
“No, can’t say that I remember them.” The dwarf looks over my original bone outfit. “Wait, are you new? How did you get clothes like that?”
Everyone around me is wearing identical outfits looking angry. The pants and shirts are gray and tailored to fit.
“I made them myself. What does that have to do with anything?”
Targun looks me over carefully until suddenly his eyes grow as big as two saucers.
“You’re…you’re alive,” he says, continuing in a whisper. “How? Why? Only the dead come here.”
“I came to this world to find my family. What does that picture mean, and why is everyone wearing identical clothes?”
The dwarf leads me off to a small green garden in between some houses. There’s a well with spring water from which I drink deeply, subsequently earning myself a dead water debuff. Original!
After making sure nobody’s eavesdropping, the dwarf starts talking.
“The clothes are given to the deceased, and you can’t take them off, damage them, or give them to someone else.” He points at the square and two crossed lines on his chest. “These symbols show which trial you came through. You have the angry smile on your armor —congratulations on beating the rage trial! Only one in every ten thousand can pull that off.”
“How many trials are there?”
The dwarf pauses, listening to a voice only he can hear. He nods and continues.
“Sixteen.” It hits me how much trouble I’m in. “But there’s a legend that anyone who can beat all the trials will receive an audience with death itself.”
“What does that give you? Can souls leave the Gray Lands?”
“Nobody knows the answer to that question. There’s never been anyone who came back after the sixteenth trial, so we’ve always assumed they’re just sent straight on to the seventeenth.”
I’m able to find out how it is that the people who get here have no real needs: parents take care of their children based on instinct alone. The same is true of conversation, recognition, self-affirmation, and personal development. From the point of view of a modern person, that kind of desire suppression seems horrible. It’s ideal for the trial, however.
The dwarf tells me that there are seven enormous districts in the city. With each new era in Project Chrysalis, a new district opens, boosting the city’s overall population. Whole streets are populated with nothing but dragons, goblins, ogres, and orcs. The only quest people are given when they show up is to find a home in their district.
That’s an important point I have to clarify.
“So, anyone who died recently, let’s say ten years ago, would be in the region for Project Chrysalis’ seventh era?”
“Yep. If the people you’re looking for died recently and went through the same trial you did, that’s where they are. You just have to find the human streets and then the house they moved into.”
There’s just one more question bothering me.
“Why is the sign on your chest different from mine and everyone else’s?”
“When I died, my soul was sent to the loyalty trial. I beat it and found myself in Ran. Most dwarves go through the loyalty trial, so there are plenty of our kind there. But I’m from a family of warriors—the berserker class, all with natural abilities activated by rage. They had to have gotten here to Nirim after going through the rage trial. Most of all, they thirsted for glory in battle, and their willpower wasn’t strong enough to continue through the trials. So, I spend my days here looking for my brothers and father.”
From what the dwarf is saying, I can tell that there are at least two cities as well as a way to get between them.
“You came here to find your family? How do you get between cities?”
“I prayed to death itself, promising to go through the next test twice in exchange.”
“How much time did it take you to beat the loyalty trial?”
The dwarf smiles sadly.
“Hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Time here flies by without you being aware of it —neither the log nor the maps work. All you can do is not give up.”
I say goodbye to the dwarf and set out in search of Nirim’s seventh district. My family could be there.
∞ ∞ ∞
Tiamat teleported to his office. The shape of the old dwarf wiggled and wobbled until finally, it was a tall, strong man standing in front of Idzumi.
“What were you thinking? You interfered with the trial!”
“I may be wrong, and I’m prepared to take the consequences, but what does it matter? Doubling the difficulty level? There aren’t any creatures higher than Level 10000 in the world, and he has three gods jabbing at him! Could you have taken out opponents like that?”
The young man, who looked as if he was barely twenty-five, gave a sly smile. With just a little willpower, he cut loose all his hidden strength. Everything in the room quivered, a dish fell off the table, and the kiir slipped into his battle form as he sensed his master’s rage.
“Tiamat, don’t forget who we are and how we got to where we are. I’m one of the strongest representatives of my world—don’t compare me to some green peeper from a fifth-order world.”
Tiamat nodded unwillingly.
“Still, the keeper interfered with the trial. I’m going to submit a complaint to the council.”
Idzumi just smiled, remembering that about death. He was endlessly pedantic when it came to following the rules.
∞ ∞ ∞
I spend all day running up and down the streets in search of my parents. Nobody has seen or heard of them. It’s been thirty hours since I logged into the game, and I’ve been through a good hundred streets populated solely by humans, but I still can’t find the people I care about.
Finally, I get to Angry Milkmaid Street. Just like all the others, it features benches with old ladies sitting on them.
“Excuse me, have you seen a couple here called Arman and Camelia? They’ll have had a one-year-old girl named Rosie with them.”
The old ladies look at each other and whisper before finally telling me something I’ve heard lots of times before.
“We don’t know anybody here by those names. Go head over to the end of the street—they may know something there.”
And so, I do just that. But as I’m going along, glad to find even that little piece of information, somebody yells from behind me. I feel my sleeve being tugged, and I turn around to see a ten-year-old boy pulling at my left arm.
“Grandma asked me to tell you that Arman and Camelia aren’t here anymore. They left a long time ago! I remember them, too. Arman was always walking around asking something, and Camelia would watch Rosie play with the other kids
.”
“Where did they go? Did they move to another street?”
“No, Mr. Arman took them to the next trial. I remember better than grandma—she’s old and she always forgets things.”
“Wait a minute, let me make something for you.”
Kid, you have no idea how much what you just said means to me. They’re alive and well, and my little sister was lucky enough to get through with them. My father hasn’t lost his will to live, either, and he’s taking them through the trials. Is there anything more one can ask for? Just hearing that makes the year I lost to work and struggle in the House of Rage worth it.
“Here, my friend. That’s baked ham in a sweet-and-sour sauce with an ambu-root side. Eat it, you’ll get another 50 strength to help you get through the trials.”
I lost 20 levels, but I don’t regret it in the least. If my parents kept going, my job is to follow them.
Where the city ends, the next trial begins. There are hundreds of people standing by the shroud. Still yearning to live, they’re diving into the shroud one after another, while there’s an empty spot that looks almost like a line that people are too afraid to cross. A minute later, I realize why they’re leaving it alone—it’s the point where people come back to after dying in the trial. That rule doesn’t apply to me, and all my efforts to set a respawn point are fruitless.
I do, however, come across an old friend and his teacher. The archmage is helping an unprepossessing old man get up. It’s impossible to forget the powerful, terrible, and revolting aura, and it’s coming from where they just appeared on the respawn strip fifty meters from me.
“Hi there, Tiberius.” I’m already safe behind a magic shield capable of withstanding any attack. Ten streams of consciousness replenish it every second. “Or should I call you the archmage?”
My opponent hasn’t lost his strength, though the old man seems awfully weak for a god. He doesn’t give me that tingling feeling in my body, either.