by John Gold
Femida says nothing, though I’m sure she’s happy to receive the praise.
“What about you, Sagie?”
“I’m not going to let anyone manipulate me. As long as we have the same goals, we’ll keep moving in the same direction, making concessions and reconciling the way we think.”
Femida takes off in the evening, leaving me to go relax in my corner on the roof. I can read here until I’m blue in the face if I want. And my head is buzzing by the time when Claude pulls me back to my senses.
“How did you find me? I didn’t leave any traces.”
The nurse smiles and points at a mark on my collar.
“The same way we find everyone. Other clothes aren’t allowed, and ours are outfitted with GPS chips. They track your health, too, which is why I come get you when there’s an alert.”
Apparently, problems with my health activate a signal. That’s fine, so long as there aren’t any chips under my skin—they’re much harder to get rid of.
I was able to read several books on spaceship building, their technological quirks, and ways to cut costs. It turns out that automating production right where the resources are mined can cut costs by as much as half. For a ship as large as a frontier, you need a ton of metal. The other additives can be brought from elsewhere.
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Current location: House of Fear
It would be no exaggeration to call this location the birthplace of nightmares. The gloom is palpable, seeping into everything around me. Living terrors scare everyone using any means at their disposal. It’s horrible. You’re just standing there, not bothering anyone, when someone lays their hand on your shoulder. When you turn reflexively, you just about lose your head to the gaping jaws of some terrifying beast.
Off in the distance, there’s an odd, weakly glowing silhouette. It gets closer by the minute, and soon, I realize, the soul of a hungry demon is rushing at me.
No matter how much energy I pour into my magic lantern, I can’t pierce the gloom. It’s the same Gray Lands, just with enemies everywhere. Happily, I survive all of my encounters with them. They even manage to break into my sensory deprivation chambers twice, and that’s when I learn what it means to freeze in horror.
I lie in the water, the darkness around so thick that I can’t see my hand in front of my face. As I imagine that I’m in my room, safe and sound, I slowly get the feeling that someone has their long, cold fingers on my throat. The sensation grows with each passing second until I realize that someone is sitting on my chest.
My lantern fires up, illuminating the space for a couple meters around me, and I see the beast trying to strangle me. It’s a zombie with eyes intact but muscles rotting away.
Damage received: 737290 (ignored: 1000000)
38498/38498
The beast is smacking away at a spot that just partially ignores damage. And it’s a good thing he isn’t hitting any lower, otherwise I’d be dead—the Adam’s apple has half the resistance as the rest of the throat.
A wind of death kills the zombie instantaneously. His body dissolves into dust, though his hands stay clutched at my throat.
That’s a lesson I’ll remember until the very last trial. Now, when I climb into a chamber, I always leave the light on and one eye open. LJ keeps watch while I focus on suppressing the fear.
The farther I go, the more terrifying the creatures around me become. The light cast by my lantern barely reaches out two meters, so I can’t move any faster than a walk. It starts to get light at the end of the trial. But even that bit of good news turns out to be false hope for two reasons: I see everything in black and white, and there’s something resembling humanity’s greatest nightmare looming up in front of me.
Monster, Reeves the Lord of Fear, Level 19950
I realize too late that the mountain is actually an enormous beast. The white eyes have no pupils, the teeth are triangular, and it’s a hundred meters tall. It lets out a battle whoop as soon as it notices me.
Damage received: 8600290 (ignored: 25000000)
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The howl rattles its way through every cell in my body. My heart drops, and our eyes meet. It’s sitting in an enormous hole, which means that only a third of its body rises up above the edge of the precipice on which I’m standing.
Fear throws me into a stupor when I see an enormous paw reaching toward me. I’m lifted off my feet and hurled toward its mouth.
“Leap!”
You’re not going to get me that easily! The giant teeth snap together right where my head was a second ago. And as soon as the creature turns to look at me, I hurl a light spear at its eye. It’s impossible to miss from this distance. The hit elicits a screech, stones fly all around me, and debuffs start listing off in the chat. One paw clutches the wounded eye; the other tries to pin me to the ground.
My second light spear hits the monster in the finger, doing no damage whatsoever. In fact, its health is starting to recover quickly. As its health bar fills, the area grows lighter, and I realize that is what’s generating the aura of fear that’s turning everything black and white.
Yet another howl deafens me, just making it worse. Looking down, I notice the exit by its feet, though I also realize that the futility of trying to kill me with just one paw has now dawned on the beast. It pulls its second paw away from the wounded eye. But it also hits me that the creature’s going to be hiding its powerful second strike behind a first, diversionary jab.
After the first attack, I leap onto its arm using my sword, and then spring right into the gaping mouth. If you’re afraid of doing something, that should be the first thing you do. I’m afraid of being killed and eaten, so I make a beeline for the safest place I can find—the creature’s mouth.
The fishy tongue doesn’t help the monster spit me out, though chewing me up is always an option. I wedge my sword into its larynx and do everything I can to pick up the kill. Light spears go flying down into the stomach, and then a dead star sears through the rest of its organs by sucking everything in with a gravitational wave before detonating.
Rivz is killed when the internal organs below me explode.
Level 2951 unlocked
5 attribute points available for distribution
…
Level 2960 unlocked
45 attribute points available for distribution
After climbing out of the creature’s mouth, I clamber down the side of the pit it was sitting in. The fear is gone, though I do have some experience climbing down spots like this, and it isn’t the most pleasant experience.
When my rump hits the ground, I realize that the descent is over—I’m standing on the city border.
Mavrikan has a surprise for me: the blacksmith from my village and his wife. They’re sitting quietly on a bench, whispering to each other, and I’m too ashamed to go over and say hi. I’m pretty sure it’s my fault they’re dead.
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It had been a year and a half since Sagie attacked Leon. Mirida was reading a paper that detailed what happened, and shivers ran down her spine when she saw the weapon Sagie had used. The gods knew about toys like that even if the rest of the world had only heard rumors, though nobody had any idea what Miridia had made in the vaults under her main temple after the explosion in Ferengar.
She didn’t just lose her followers because they turned their back on her for no good reason. They piously believed in the infallibility of their protectress and the patron of sorcerers and artifactors, though dwarves were starting to disappear by the hundreds. At that point, the rulers quickly put their heads together and found the common denominator. They had simply stopped believing in her without lodging any formal complaint, and her once-expansive flock dropped to a couple thousand in a week.
When the former goddess read the article that talked about the weapon Sagie had used, her heart skipped a beat. She’d made two unique swords. Sagie’s weapon sounded awfully familiar, so Miridia quickly headed off to her old templ
e to find hers—Heaven and Earth. They were perfectly safe. In fact, they were still in perfect condition after going unused for two thousand years. She’d forged them at the epicenter of the explosion, right under the spot where the artificial sun had appeared.
The swords were slid into a special container and hidden in her sack. Nobody was going to be getting to them.
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Over the next six months, I go through the House of Resignation and nearly die when one of the spawn of darkness almost pushes me to resign myself to my death. The temptation grows each time. In every instance, however, I focus on what I have to live for, and each step forward helps me better understand my own values. This is the most important lesson the Gray Lands are teaching me.
When it looks like your life is over, the people you care about are dead, and you’re all alone, you start to realize that you can live for yourself and your dreams. But when I completely suppress the feeling of resignation, I gradually move toward the idea of living for other people rather than for myself. Their happiness is more important than my own. With that realization, it hits me that I understand what parents feel for their children.
Next, I get to the House of Loyalty, where the demons try to break my will and force me into their service. The sole point of life, they claim, is to follow the dictates of your master.
I learn something new as I suppress the emotions that surge up within me during each new trial. I find out what makes people human. The meaning behind culture, upbringing, civilization, social norms, and the trends that move community. The farther I go, the better I see straight through to the heart of people, what they do, and what drives the leaders of colonies and entire nations. If you look at things from that point of view, all of humanity’s motivations are laid out before you.
After that, I move on to the House of Love. It’s the most unforgettable, terrible place in all the Gray Lands. Every time I step out onto a field with an enormous tree at the center, there’s someone I love living in it…and they’re trying to kill me.
As soon as I find the exit hidden in one of the rooms, I’m thrown straight through to the next trial. The world is getting brighter, emotions more colorful, and the trees around me sharper.
The first incident was the most memorable. I nearly died of happiness when I saw father, with mama holding Rosie next to him. They behave as if my being there is the most natural thing in the world. Mama puts some food on a plate in front of me. Father reaches into a closet for some wood he’s working on. But as soon as I swallow a spoonful of soup, a message pops up telling me that I’ve been poisoned.
I look up and see mama looking back at me angrily.
Even my sister is filled with rage, and that’s when father breaks a stool over my head. I spend the next ten minutes lying on the floor under the cover of a magic shield. They do everything they can to break through, though they aren’t strong enough. And all I can do is wonder who could possibly have thought up a trial like this. Killing the people you love?
It’s the hardest trial I’ve been through. Ever since my time at the orphanage, I’ve avoided trusting or loving anyone. The stronger you are and the more powerfully you close yourself off from other people, the more you get hurt when you do trust someone. Love in any of its forms is, first and foremost, about trust. I’ve only opened up to three people who have never betrayed me: father, mama, and Femida. They’re the only ones I could trust enough to be myself around them. Everyone else got held at arm’s length, but that changed after the trial. Now, I don’t trust anyone, and I see the worst in everyone. Trust, and therefore love, have to be earned.
It takes me just a week to get through the trial, though I go the next month without playing in an attempt to recover from the trauma. I spend days at a time reading, collecting material, making designs, organizing the manufacturing processes, buying production and mining drones, and setting up an underground warehouse and plant. I need so many raw materials to launch the production of my frontier ship. But I have the money, the time, the desire, and a powerful intellect.
Femida flies in during the third week to yell at me and throw up every argument and logical conclusion she can. I understand much more than she can say or know, but I need a break. I’ve been at the resort for two years, and I still haven’t been able to relax.
“I’m going to continue the trials tomorrow, so get into the game and go to work on Leon. Tell him Sagie could be back at any moment.”
“Are you really coming back soon?”
“I have four or five trials left. After that, I have to find the exit, though I have a couple ideas.”
∞ ∞ ∞
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The House of Happiness is a forest where friends try and persuade me to try different, new adventures. Isaac is even there in his human form. I get invitations to battles, requests to help with quests, and exhortations to give some old people a hand. Even Nela, the administrator at the Sural monster-hunter guild, asks me to help her cut an endless pile of wood. Father needs help fishing; mama needs help washing dishes. The empty sink spits out plate after plate, so I spend three weeks living the life of a normal, happy person before getting down to business and repressing the emotion.
The hardest part is turning Rosie down when she asks me to go for a walk, all grown up, and just leads me around in circles through the forest. The sound of her calling as I leave stays with me.
The House of Optimism turns out to be unexpectedly tedious. About forty thousand kilometers long, I work my way through a steppe, a plateau, a body of salt water, and a whole continent made of nothing but volcanos. Sometimes, I simply collapse on the ground and tense up in order to sense which way it is to the source of the optimism, before getting up and running onward. After two weeks of running eighteen hours a day, I max out my body amplification.
Body amplification +1
Your body amplification skill has reached the maximum value
It’s the third important skill that gives me nothing when I reach the ceiling. Manipulation and scaling hit theirs in the House of Love, I was just preoccupied with other things. But logic tells me there’s a reason why I don’t get a spell or ability. Project Chrysalis is balanced such that people looking for strength will find it. Those with nothing but complaints about their life rot away in the poverty you find at the bottom of the rankings.
I run across fields littered with volcanic ash for the first week, coming across stone people and non-people. One group of statues is made up of a father with a child on his shoulders holding his wife by the hand. They’re frozen there in the ashen desert, just a few among hundreds of others. At night, I see the messengers from the spirit world coming down to look for souls. Since I’m by myself, they all come to attack me, so I try to avoid the spots they like to show up. The point of the trial is to listen to your inner voice and get to the end.
At some point during the second week, I start to feel like I’m getting close to the finish line. The terrain shifts to a desert covered in statues and even whole cities. I see sculptures looking like thousand-armed Buddhas that the sand storms nearly overturn, and then, it’s on to a field of stone giants. They’re alive, though they don’t move. There are whole alleys lined with stone monuments reminiscent of death. Happily, they don’t have scythes.
On the thirteenth day, I see a tower sending a stream of light into the sky. It’s so far away that I’m only able to get to it that night.
The next city doesn’t give me any clues as to the whereabouts of my parents. Tsevidar is an exact copy of all the other cities. One thing that worries me is that I haven’t seen a single person who’s been through other trials. The dwarf I met at the very beginning could have been a quest character, or maybe, just a unique case.
Current location: House of Hope
It’s a desert from one side to the other, with a lone, giant tree somewhere at the other end. The evenly placed marble pillars on either side hint at the fact that I’m going to have to run a marathon over an improvis
ed track.
But no matter how far I run, the tree doesn’t get any closer. The problem is that space is distorted to the extent that I’m running in hope of reaching the end. Three days later, when I emerge from my sensory deprivation chamber, the tree is a hundred meters away, just on the other side of the nearest pair of pillars.
The monstrous tree is so tall that its tip disappears into the clouds. The branches grow in a spiral and go up all the way to the top, so it reminds me of some kind of seventh heaven or the stairway to paradise.
The tree turns out to be the end of the trial. As soon as I touch it, it sucks me inside and spits me out at the edge of the next city. The longer I run the streets looking for my parents or at least news of them, the more my panic grows. What if I make it through the whole Gray Lands without finding them? The next trial is the last, so there won’t be a city waiting for me on the other side. Will there be a seventeenth trial? Will death tell me where my family is?
Current location: House of Hatred
This one is a bit like the rage trial. It’s an extensive network of caves, with a demon hanging at each intersection. Yes, hanging. The walls of the caves are made of something like roots, all still alive, revolting, living pipes that pump a nutrient solution to the intersection guards. The latter have grown into the walls while waiting for lost travelers.
Killing the first, second, and third is easy. But with each successive kill, the next one gets disproportionately stronger. After the fifth one, I run calculations between the overall number of guards and the maximum load they place on the nutrient network. It turns out that demons who die distribute their health pool among the rest who are still alive. Because of that, each new opponent I face has more health than the previous one.