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

water pressure. It’s an illusion built on erroneous sensations, and LJ calms down. He’s just sounding a warning, though he continues healing.

My body is enveloped in an enormous, glowing plant that feels almost like a sheet.

The plants think I’m a life source, so they start wrapping themselves around me in an attempt to soak up as much of the magic as they can. Darkness turns into an entire glowing forest as I get my bearings about me.

Femida is just sitting there waiting for me to come back; Isaac is running around somewhere nearby. I can sense Slender a lot better though—he didn’t want to come close to the glowing forest of seaweed. Why? Afraid of the light? No, it has to be that there wasn’t anywhere for him to hide. Now I know his weakness.

A message pops up from Femida.

How’d you sleep?

Fine. I got an ability for maxing out my perception. It’s awful, though I’ll get used to it. As it turns out, our friend with the tentacles and weird outfit is only semimaterial. The fact that you can see and touch him is just the ability of his mental body to create temporary connections similar to a physical body. He’s sort of a semispirit who can live in the real world, but it’s the fact that he’s semimaterial that lets him move faster than us. The laws of physics and magic work differently on him.

And you figured all that out in the twenty minutes you were relaxing here?

Not exactly. That parasite—and he is a parasite—has been getting on my nerves for a long time now. You can’t feel it, but I can’t stand the way he looks at me. Even though he hates us, he still follows us around. That shapeshifter probably gave him the job, and I’ve been figuring him out the whole time he’s been with us. Okay, so there’s silt in the currents, right? I know exactly where Slender is, and when he appears, the silt stops going through his body. That means he’s only mental.

Why don’t you think the ability to fuse with shadows is an ability his physical body has?

That’s nonsense. It would be like a player who can resurrect himself an unlimited number of times, and as a spirit, not a player. I can imagine that and even have an idea about how it could theoretically be done, but it’s almost impossible in practice.

Our conversation about Slender over, we keep going, trying to avoid confrontations. The gentle decline leads to a steep drop-off, however. The darkness is so thick that the lantern doesn’t reach the bottom or the opposite slope.

Evening comes, and Femida logs out of the game while I get ready for our next move. I put out my lantern, sit on the edge of the drop-off in the absolute darkness, and sense the tons of water being carried past my legs by the powerful current. The impenetrable gloom is compensated for by the synesthesia that creates a picture in my head. I’m deep in the emptiness, the silt, the swaying seaweed, and my even breathing moves with the thousands of tons of water moved by the current. Strength! It’s the unlimited strength of natural phenomena.

I turned off my lantern so I could switch that stream of consciousness over to a life aura. The water pressure is enormous, to the point that only mushrooms and simple seaweed can grow. Five minutes later, I’m pulled away from the quiet and my meditation by the fact that I’m no longer sitting on the drop-off. Instead, I’m on an enormous, glowing mushroom. My life aura has everything growing around me, and the little guy under me was smart enough to push me away from the rest. That works for me—I have what I’m looking for, and the clever mushroom fits in perfectly with that.

Switching over from my life aura to lesser healing, I start feeding the mushroom only.

Its cap will work for a large “crown.” I do have to go back to the drop-off, though, as I’m just about at the edge of the area the floating island covers. Sitting on the edge of my new friend’s cap, I look over the path we’ve taken. It’s crazy—the aura of life has made a trail of glowing plants from the edge of the gentle ridge to where I am now. There’s a whole coral forest where I was wrapped up by the seaweed.

Femida comes back an hour later, though one glance at the blue creature growing under me is enough to make her change her mind. The semitransparent mushroom glimmers with a cold blue light. You can see the microorganisms appearing and multiplying in its biome. Considering the fact that we’re so far down, it’s a miracle of life and nature.

Achievement received: Herald of the creator. Second rank.

You were able to create a location out of nothing.

Minimum requirement: The creation of a complete ecosystem

Created: 4 complete ecosystems

Reward: +10 to all attributes

That’s a nice bonus for all the work I’ve been doing. Judging by the other achievements I’ve gotten, this one works exponentially, too. The one complete ecosystem was first, this was for four, and the next will be for nine.

Twelve hours go by before Femida returns. Underwater battles really take it out of close-combat fighters, while I try to sleep in the game when I can. I end up having to swim over to the mushroom and take cover right under the cap. Regardless of the cold, the fact that I’m underwater, and my need to drink underwater-breathing potions regularly, I sleep wonderfully. Claude is probably going to be ticked—I’ve already missed two pool sessions.

I wake up when Femida gets back. The mushroom has become a small place of strength, expanding significantly over the last eighteen hours. I still have plenty of mana left in my source, too, since weaker healing doesn’t