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

and tries to take a bite out of us. The teeth generally go into Femida’s bag as trophies. Of course, I’m only too happy to let her take care of the loot, because that’s just less for me to carry around.

Just as I remembered, the damage from the aura at the center of the desert skyrockets.

One thing that’s different is that there are other players working on their mental resistance this time. Their attempts look ridiculous, however. Almost all of them are here in warrior-healer pairs, with battle mages trying to heal their companions. Without the life magic bonus, however, that doesn’t really work. They can’t restore more than a million or two. Of course, it would be practically impossible even for life mages to hit the number you need here.

None of the players even think about attacking us. There are probably some daring souls in the world who would do battle in these inhospitable climes, but the people who are here to work on their mental resistance have far too much patience for that. Dying here would mean running all the way over from the nearest respawn point at the edge of the desert. Nobody’s stupid enough to try it.

The stone body of the god with the red stake in its chest turns out to be shattered into pieces. Apparently, Bernard decided to have that done to protect his identity.

As soon as I get to the limit of the damage I can safely ignore, I start growing a tree. Femida runs around the area killing the local population. Almost none of them are left for the other players, and she collects all the loot, down to the cheap stuff nobody takes. She’s hauling around tons of weight, perhaps even tens of tons. She’s apparently trying to load herself down with everything she can find.

It takes me twenty-four hours to grow the tree, though Femida can come over to where I am without dying once its crown is sufficiently wide. Her resistance to mental damage is just 6 million compared to my 12.5 million. Sagie, remember how you carried her under the tree to the red stake. The aura of regret does a number on Fem, leaving her barely moving, but we watch the sunset together. It’s the red stake thrust through the chest of the shattered sculpture with the sun going down behind it. Femida’s head is on my knees, I heal her peacefully, and her resistance to mental damage grows by leaps and bounds. While Isaac cracks obscene jokes, Femida quietly calls Ekron, calling me an idiot and crazy. But I just sit there enjoying the view. That red stake could be what takes me to the Gray Lands.

When night falls and I started to nod off, LJ shows up. On the one hand, I’m glad I can sleep in the game. On the other, I’m going to have to swim four kilometers again for physical therapy. I try to get what I have to do and what I want to do out of the way together while I have the chance.

Climbing up into the tree, I lie down such that I can see Femida and heal the tree at the same time. Bumping her resistance to mental damage all the way up to 12.5 million in one go turned out to be too tall an order even for her. The damage here is fifty percent mental and fifty percent fire, so I can push my resistance to both up to the maximum.

It’s only the next afternoon that Femida starts to recover. She picks a spot farther out on a branch where the aura isn’t as strong, though the damage is higher.

Another nice thing about the trees is that they mitigate auras. They’re kind of natural filters.

While we’re relaxing in the tree, I think back to the time I spent as LJ. I hung out in my tree and watched everything going on below then too.

Femida and I lounge in the branches like a pair of sloths well into the third day. She refuses to step out into the aura of regret until she has her resistance where she needs to be, and she even does her exercises up in the tree.

“Sagie…how do you do that? Why doesn’t the aura work on you?”

“You don’t think it does? I’m the same as you, it’s just that in Hell the auras were much stronger. In that shroud, I saw people being burned alive, dead babies, crowds of corpses tramping along. I was still at Level 0 when I worked on my resistance to mental damage next to the crystal generator for the aura of suffering. That was hard; this is nothing.”

The tree has grown quickly, even picking up status as a lesser place of strength. But the crown spreads much more slowly. As soon as Femida gets to fifty percent resistance to mental damage and stops whining, she logs out of the game for a day-long break. I have similar plans.

Claude apparently decided to punish me by making me swim with planks that force me to use just one arm or just my legs. The fact that I can swim breaststroke and front crawl without a problem anymore means nothing to him. Butterfly is too much for me—I’m not coordinated enough for that yet. My muscles are too flabby.

A day later, when Femida logs back into the game, she’s greeted by a new tree. I headed over to the edge of where I can go, found a good spot, and grew it.

We do that six times, boosting our resistance to mental and fire damage to 23 million in the process. I can’t restore any more than that in one go.

Our mental resistance and physical resistance grow at the same rate. If there were only one type of damage or a different ratio, we’d be able to max out our resistance.

Every