Sleeping Player (Project Chrysalis Book 3) by John Gold (novel24 TXT) 📕

attempt to teleport around behind us, they stop trying. The absolute silence doesn’t keep us from using the voice chat, and my perception always lets me know where the enemies with physical bodies are.

By the fourth day, we’re able to work our way out of the first district, moving along the very edge and avoiding the livelier streets. There are traps the demon ghosts set all over the place. Plus, we have to worry about the rats, who jump out of manholes to attack us every once in a while. The corpses embedded in the walls and floors leap out at us when we’re least expecting it. I remember the courtyard where the skeleton couple was drinking their tea, and I decide to drop in on them. But it turns out that Slender already killed them. When I get there, I see him using their bodies like dolls to have a pretend tea party. Judging by the three sets of bones, he’s been here for a while. My breath catches in my chest as I see him lift a cup up to the spot where his mouth should be, and a cavity opens up to display a row of sharp teeth. He could bite through a tree with those things! After polishing off the rest of the tea, the guy in black disappears into the shadow of the gazebo. What a gentleman, leaving without even saying goodbye.

We keep going, skipping the poorer district, and make our way to the business center. The fact that there are fewer ghosts is mitigated by all the raid bosses and traps scattered around the area. The rats only attack in groups, the strongest of them coming right at us while the rest try to get around to our backs. The traps are all designed to keep us in place, rather than do damage. And I can’t always tell where they are even with my perception.

Finally, we get to the ruins of the demonologist guild. There’s the wall I remember, with the passage on the other side, and there we see the raid boss who throttled the rat.

We haven’t exactly been sneaking along. Femida doesn’t want to dull her sword by hitting the walls, so we’ve been using bare hands and magic. She heads up to the third floor; I use another dead sun, this time to cut a hole through the stone wall and widen the passageway into the sewers. When I was here the last time, back when I was snoozing in the sewer well, I noticed a channel leading downward. It certainly hinted at another level below the dead city.

Note! You found the crypt of the dead city, a hidden location.

The building lurches, the floorboards creak under our weight, and we decide not to see how long they can hold us…

After stepping into the dark tunnel, we close it off on both ends with Earth Magic. We’ve been playing for eighteen hours, and we need a break.

Logout

It’s been twelve days since we arrived in the city of the dead, two weeks since I started physical therapy. I sleep eight and a half hours a day and swim as much as I can. After that, I relax with some medicine and a self-massage.

Claude has a certification in physical therapy, so he tells me how to massage myself and keep track of how my body is doing. I stay away from salt and anything else that could harm me, I stretch and stimulate my nervous system, and I notice how my blood pressure affects me in general. He tells me about the relationship between the body’s overall mass and its durability, what muscle mass does, and why oxygen deficiency is a bad thing. When I ask him too many questions, he forgets that I’m just a kid without a medical education and switches over to technical terminology. I have a hard time understanding a quarter of what he says. Still, his lectures help me understand my body on a deeper level.

I’m kept well away from the other patients at the resort. Once, when I was walking back after my physical therapy, I found an exit leading to the roof. The view was wonderful, the sun was shining, and I could look up at the clouds. The warm wind blew in from the ocean, bringing with it the smell of trees and the sound of waves.

I’d like to learn more about the resort I’m staying at, so I start looking for information in the infonet. Eventually, I find the story behind the whole complex as well as a map.

There isn’t another island closer than 140 kilometers. On the other hand, I’ve been noticing something just on the edge of the horizon. It disappears and reappears, always in different places. I wonder if it’s a patrol ship or a rescue boat there in case something happens to the resort, but Claude informs me that nothing out there can be that close.

“This is a closed area. Any ship that enters our water or airspace without permission will be destroyed from orbit. You’re not completely healthy yet. Go see the doctor—maybe, there’s something wrong with your retinas.”

“But I’ve seen it six times.”

“And it moves around the island? You believe that? We don’t have patrol ships here. Actually, there isn’t a single drone, ship, or other craft on the entire planet. The cleaners got rid of all machines and other equipment a hundred years ago, right after the Great Migration. I look out at the sea sometimes myself, but I haven’t seen a single ship in my three years working here.”

The hallucinations stop, so I decide against going to see the doctors. And when I get tired of killing ghosts, I swim, read, or look out at the sky and ocean.

In the cafeteria, I feel like they’re fattening us up for slaughter. I gain three whole kilograms in two weeks, but