Alpha Zero (Alpha LitRPG Book 1) by Arthur Stone (top 5 books to read TXT) 📕

could eat for a whole winter on those! Two winters! But you ate it. That was my... that was ours!”

I raised my hands in a calming gesture. “You eat the other one. If they’re so valuable, it means that they give us useful perks. Maybe your legs will heal up faster.”

“Eat this hup?”

“Right. Enjoy. Well? What are you waiting for? It didn’t poison me, so it won’t poison you. We’re stuck here, Beko. I don’t know how long we’ll be here. The river dragged us along all night, meaning we have a long way to go back to the trading post. We haven’t even started, and already we’re running into... adventures. With only one small backpack to our name, there is no way we could carry a bunch of mushrooms. They’re useless extra weight.”

“Useless?” Beko screamed. “It was only two mushrooms! If we dry them, they’ll weigh next to nothing, and take up next to no space. They become little tiny withered things. Things worth a winter of feasting!”

“How do we dry them, then? In this fog? They’ll just rot!”

“No, these are hups. Look—see how they’re getting wrinkly already? They dry out fast, no matter where they are.”

I watched as Beko practically kissed his last remaining mushroom and shrugged. I had more important things to do than convince Captain Avarice that we didn’t need a little extra weight. I did a mental inventory. Backpack, pot, two spoons, two axes, ari, crossbow, two hunting knives, and three throwing knives—all I had been able to recover. My new navigation talent would easily allow me to find where the other three were located. Was it worth going back? Perhaps, but it definitely wasn’t worth rushing.

My ghoul friend was no help setting up camp, of course. The moss I had laid down on the stone was so damp, I could feel it squishing beneath the tarp. I took the raft back out into the river, keeping away from the waterfall and moving among the deadwood, in slow water, until I found a fresh pine tree. It must have fallen down from up high and got carried here by the current. Still, there were enough dry twigs sticking out above the water and I broke off a bunch of them to use as bedding for the both of us.

Camp was done in short order, and I followed up with a short rest during which I examined what the killing of the wisps had earned me.

I only recognized two of the prizes. First, the lesser standard universal state. I liked these very much, as they could add 0.01 to any state. Picking up 100 of these would level up a state. For example, I could boost my Equilibrium by 1 and then unlock another attribute level.

Enhanced Enlightenment was also clear. It wasn’t as versatile, since it could only boost one specific state: my chi reservoir total. I considered this less important than most other parameters. But it might matter.

All of the other parameters were dependent on total chi in my reservoir, after all. Eventually I would hit the upper limit and become unable to boost or unlock anything until I increased the capacity of my reservoir.

When I would reach that limit, though, was entirely unclear. I knew that developing Enhanced Enlightenment could postpone that moment, whenever it was destined to come.

All of the other prizes I knew nothing about.

There were several forms of life that coexisted here in the world of Rock. Many of them were not purely of one kind or another. There were even hybrids so bizarre that they defied classification even with caveats.

Natives, along with most of the creatures they lived near, were from ORDER. Their nemeses, the creatures of Chaos, resided in places like the Dead Archipelago and the Far North. With millennia of interaction between these two groups, some mixed creatures had emerged.

I understood trophies dropped by ORDER creatures. Enough had passed through my hands and my mouth that, even if I had been an idiot, I would by now have complete mastery over what they did. Besides, the schooling I had received during the first few years of my new life had directly answered such questions, numerous times.

I knew that chaosites and hybrids were very different creatures. But I didn’t know the details. I had never needed to deal with items like this before. Meaning I had never seen them, held them, or received them from mother.

Perhaps she would have wanted to experiment with them—but they must be worth a fortune. Chaos creatures only rarely wandered into our parts of the world, the chances of them dropping prizes were small, and they  were quite expensive.

I had been lucky to survive my battle with them today. My degree 0 condition had functioned to boost their drops just as it did on creatures of the ORDER. Plus, the more outnumbered a fighter was by his opponents, and the more superior such opponents, the higher his chances of a solid reward. Since even the weakest creature was infinitely stronger than I was—dividing by my big fat zero—I always earned maximum loot.

Division by zero was dangerous business, but so far it had only worked in my favor.

I did not necessarily understand the purpose of all these items immediately.

The Chaos marks seemed straightforward enough. They must be analogous, though antagonistic, to chi symbols. In other words, they provided the energy of Chaos, not of ORDER. This could be used to develop Chaos attributes and connected Chaos talents. Perhaps it had other uses, too, which I was unaware of.

“Lesser attribute powers” was harder to comprehend. I vaguely remembered hearing of some way to double the energy of an individual attribute by using special Chaos trophy drops. But this was only a guess.

I would have to become a guinea pig in order to find out. My inventory held 5 units of lesser