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

Claude tells me that’s good for my age and condition. I’m more worried about getting kicked out—I don’t have any money left.

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Femida hit Level 1500 today as we cleared the crypt in the dead city. The flood that happened in the last era swept a lot of bodies into the crypt, and the necrotic energy turned them into all different kinds of undead.

Level 2500 flesh terrors scurry around the hallways of the dusty crypt, leaving tracks in the ash that covers the floor. Banshees, the souls of the dead, and other evil spirits are the weakest creatures we come across. In one room, there are three priests all together—raid bosses. We practically destroy the whole place before we kill them. They’re liches, and they take great pleasure in betraying their former lives by casting Dark Magic at us. The narrow passageway we fight them in gives us a good defensive position, though Femida can’t work the way she’d like to. Ultimately, I batter their defenses with my shield and push one lich back, giving Femida room to maneuver. The monsters have incredible amounts of mana they tie into their magic shield. As long as their mana hasn’t run out, the shield stands tall. We have to pull out all the stops to kill them in the enclosed space.

It all ends when I spend 5 million mana to crush the liches with a shield. Femida lops off their heads, the best way to take out any kind of lich.

Another month goes by, spent working our way through the city of the dead. Femida reaches Level 2000; I’m at Level 2138. As we approach the level of the ghosts in the city, the experience we get drops precipitously. We spend the last three weeks slaughtering as many as we possibly can to make up the difference.

Femida splits her attribute points between strength and agility, saving a little for stamina. I dump everything into intellect. My wisdom parameter is gone, and investing in stamina would be a complete waste.

Be my opponent a god, the archmage, or a brutal crowd of headhunters, I need an absolute advantage in battle. The enormous amount of damage I do is built on my advanced intellect and the mana in the astral.

We only head out into the city to buy food, though our absurd appetites mean that has to happen every couple of days. The more interesting the battle, the hungrier we are afterward. Sometimes, we start the day with a big breakfast, and by lunch we already have exhaustion debuffs.

To compare us to a regular player, we’re going more like fifty or sixty hours without food rather than the six it actually is. The whole problem is the Hunter skills, amplification, and manipulation. Femida can hold out longer, though I always look like I haven’t eaten in a month. It’s the face of an intellectual atop the body of a last-stage dystrophic person.

Femida never takes her armor off when she’s hit with the exhaustion buff. She doesn’t say why, but I can tell that the reason is the fact that women lose weight from their chest before anywhere else. Putting on weight is the opposite story. Sure, there are some nuances there, but that’s basically it. Her exhaustion has her looking like a boy, and a hungry Femida is scarier than a Level-2799 raid boss. Even if you could kill her, it’s better to stay away from her famished rage.

The city of the dead is a unique location for leveling-up. To survive in its extremely hostile environment, you need incredible endurance, lots of skill, and good strategies for attacking and defending. You don’t get loot, and the bots respawn really quickly. Oh, hey, my perception is almost up to 1000! The constant stress leaves me tired faster, so I start sleeping around ten hours a day. But the demigod class rank is practically cheating. Sure, even the idea of cheating is gone now that everything is virtual, but I can’t think of a better way to describe the advantage it gives me. With my auras of fire, light, dark, and storm, my magic energy manipulation and scaling advance quickly. In fact, Femida has been forced to hunt in a different part of the dead city lately just so that my auras and other spells don’t kill her. For example, my wind of death sweeps along in a cone ten meters wide. Charging it up six times over and increasing the area seven times simply levels whole regions. It’s a good thing the recharge time is about the same as the bots’ respawn time. My mana recharge speed is light years ahead of most players, but it still isn’t enough when I’m fully exploiting my magic energy manipulation skill.

I’m starting to rethink magic, the rules for using it, and the ways the different types interact with each other. They’re all linked, and there’s some kind of system or doctrine that encompasses them all. The thing is that the hierarchy governing the different types of magic has a huge impact on the end result. For example, my tree in Kurg was the result of combining different types of magic. Sure, I only used Life Magic, but there were the spirits that showed up on the last day, the magic-space eddies, and the creation of a discrete area with a stronger magic field. Everything was connected—the god, the astral, the mind, life, and space. They all have magic skills, but not spells. I’m not sure how to best use them or what the hierarchy even looks like.

Throughout the whole crazy time we spend in the city, we have one goal: as soon as either of us gets to Level 2500, we’re going to move on to the next stage. A month later, I hit that threshold—I’m at Level 2500, while Femida is at Level 2398. Yes, I’m a monster!

“Attribute window.”

Name: Sagie (Almark)

Level: 2500