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

We continue our trip down into the darkness along the drop-off. It’s getting harder to breathe, and Femida’s movements are more limited, but she loves it. In fact, she tells me as much in the chat.

So, basically, I perfected my mastery of swordplay. But then this happened! It turns out that the way you move and work with your sword underwater is completely different. That doesn’t sound like much to you since this isn’t your thing, so it’s probably hard for you to realize how important that is to me.

My life aura helps so much more than I was expecting. The incline is practically vertical, and fighting in this kind of environment is suicide, so I have to turn off my lantern. But we aren’t completely in the dark. My life aura grows whole harvests of glowing mushrooms, so they show us where we’re going. The aura of death intensifies. Also, the water pressure is so strong that rocks sometimes crumble in my hands.

Damage received: 26715160 (ignored: 18218422)

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We’re three kilometers down. Sometimes, very rarely, I sense enormous monsters the size of trains swimming by. Twice, we see whales with whole cities on their backs. I can’t remember ever coming across more terrifying sea creatures. When the whales swim by, their wake is so strong that it nearly throws us off the rocks we’re clinging to. Both times, it’s Isaac, the lightest and weakest in the group, who gets the worst of it. Femida isn’t wearing him, doing what she can to boost her resistance, and it’s hard to swim in armor anyway.

We have to drag him back to the cliff both times. The archmage showed me a good way of using telekinesis with living objects, and I use boulders to pull Isaac back to shelter both times he gets pulled away.

When we get five kilometers deep, we find that there aren’t any underwater creatures. Enormous turtles off in the distance are all we encounter. They have abandoned cities on their backs, and I thoroughly enjoy watching them. I could be wrong, but I suspect there’s an entire continent deep underwater that flooded thousands of years ago.

Ever since my first day at the Academy of Magic, I knew for sure that I wanted to be a life mage. Players at Level 10000 can do approximately 25 million damage, so I know I have until then to get my hands on an absolute shield that will protect me from every possible attack. That will be my resistance to all kinds of damage. My sword will be an unstoppable line of attack. Every time I unlock a new level, I dump the points into my intellect, as the key to my fight with the gods will be the perfect sword and the perfect shield.

Damage received: 29548150 (ignored: 20850402)

280772210/280772210

I’m not exactly sure how deep we are—probably around seven kilometers. It’s looking like we stopped working in the city of the dead too early. My weaker healing, which doesn’t have a recharge time, heals 4.2 million damage at a go, while eleven streams max out at 46 million, short of 50. What saves us is that the damage is three-quarters physical down here. That means that when I get down to the bottom, the damage will be 37.5 million, 12.5 million of which will be mental.

I don’t know if there are people who can get their resistance to any damage up to 100%. In fact, I don’t think there are. You’d need a team of healers, a particular environment, and the voluntary consent of the warrior. Femida is bent over double. Ten percent of the pain may not sound like much, but when your bones are breaking and regrowing every second, it gets to you. The aura of death casts the sense of inevitable death, and there’s also the constant fear of falling down below. You have to have absolutely iron-clad nerves for something like this. Rather, you need incredible willpower, the preparedness to fight through the pain and anguish to reach your goal. Femida is that kind of person.

We’ve been going down for a week now, and the cliff has yet to end. Femida leaves the game every sixteen hours to rest. I leave it every thirty hours. The deeper we go, the more frequently I have to grow new mushroom caps so I can use Samarus the Bloody’s mark. Far from making things worse, they let us relax and sleep in the game. Every time, the mushroom is different, though my creations always do their job. I rest underneath them; LJ thanks them for both of us.

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In real life, Claude gets on me every time I skip physical therapy. He makes me swim two kilometers twice now, once after I log out of the game, and again before I log back in. Even though I’m stronger than I used to be, he gets a kick out of carrying me to my capsule for some reason.

“Claude, why don’t you get mad at me for spending so much time in the game?”

“I don’t know why you’re here at our resort. I don’t know what experiment you’re running or why you spend so much time in the med capsule—maybe, that’s like medicine for you. Maybe, it’s part of your experiment. Regardless, my job isn’t to keep track of your schedule. All I’m supposed to do is make sure you do your physical training.”

“But what do you think?”

“Almark, I’m not your father, brother, or boss. I don’t have any right to get on your case or yell at you for not following your schedule.”

Claude, even without knowing it, just showed me something very interesting. Subconsciously, I’m creating a situation that attracts attention. Is that something I need? Or am I looking for parental love? It’s probably one of those, maybe both. I’m behaving like a child.

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Two more days of pain go