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

I shook my head again. “Thank you, Beko. But don’t worry about me. I’ve got everything planned out, and I can do it on my own. I could use some help—but you won’t have to take too much of a risk.”

“I’ll fight alongside you.”

I chuckled. “You won’t have to fight. But you may have to take one sting from a wisp.”

“You call that not fighting?”

“The wisp will not be unable to paralyze you for long.”

“Why?”

“Because yesterday I developed my Healing talent a second time. I now have the Antidote branch. So, now I have two Healing talents: Cure Wounds and Antidote. Both are tier 3. Now, I’ll take Antidote to tier 4 and pump that to level 10. At tier 4, I’ll be able to remove paralysis effects applied by opponents with an Enlightenment Degree of 5 or below. The wisps have no Degrees of Enlightenment; they have Power of Chaos. But the numbers work out the same.”

“You pumped a talent to tier 4 in 2 days, just to get a rukh,” Beko murmured thoughtfully. “You really do never change your mind.”

“I haven’t reached tier 4 yet, but I will once we’re done eating.”

“It sounds like I need a good night’s sleep, too,” the ghoul replied as he reclined on the tarp.

I had fudged the numbers a little. I wasn’t able to raise a talent to tier 4 yet. Not without adding one Degree of Enlightenment.

Or, without a workaround.

I had been wrong about my Artificer skill. Ordinary talents required 10 chi to boost tier 1 by a single level. This talent required 100. As I was calculating its development, I had somehow missed the conclusion that future costs would be similarly higher. Ordinary talents took 20 chi per level at tier 2, 30 at tier 3, and so on.

So the Artificer talent took 200 per level at the 2nd tier. The full 10 levels cost 2000. The 3rd tier’s 10 levels would cost 3000. In total, that meant I needed 5000.

It wasn’t a hopelessly large number, but it was a multiple of my original expectation.

Forgive me, kotes.

I have wiped you out with such cruelty that fishing has become much harder here. I imagined that  scavengers downriver were praising their fortunes, unaware that I was their benefactor.

But I had saved up enough chi for both Antidote and Artificer. It would cost nearly everything I had, but I would get the latter to a full tier 2 and the former to a full tier 4.

I would activate these now—and then, I would sleep.

Artificer was such a difficult talent that I felt nauseous and lost the ability to move for fifteen minutes after levelling it up. Apparently, there was a good reason it took so much chi—but it was worth it.

As I was lying there, I explored the newly available talent branches. I yearned so badly to acquire several of them right then and there.

But no, I didn’t have the chi.

For now.

At this point, Antidote was my focus.

Leveling it up took very little time. Now, I did not have to be scared of wisp stings.

Or at least not as scared. I didn’t know how fast Antidote worked. What if it took 10 to 15 minutes to take effect? While paralyzed, my arms would be barely able to move. Crawling around with them would not be possible.

I had to hope that Beko was serious. It was nasty of me to manipulate my companion like that, but without his help, I would be truly risking my life.

* * *

Come morning, Beko was shocked by my method of preparing for battle. It seemed he thought that we would pray to a higher power and then die with our souls pure. Instead, our preparation was purely physical.

We dragged the stakes to the pit and stuck them into the holes I had prepared the day before. We then smeared the bases of these stakes with mud, in two coats—the same way I had sealed the pit.

As we waited for the mud to dry, we listened to the buzzing of the wisps. I whispered to Beko that I had marked them from a distance and was now watching their paths, ensuring they were really moving in the expected circles. I also told him about how difficult it was to use my navigation talent and Monster Connoisseur talent in conjunction. That had taken me many tries.

Only once the mud had dried did we begin the trickiest part of the plan. We converted the tarp into a large water carrier hanging from a large branch, filled it with muddy marsh water, and carried it to the pit on our shoulders—much like hunters carried carcasses of large game.

Each trip gave us about ten gallons of water. That was a decent haul for our relatively weak attributes and scrawny bodies.

We made numerous trips, back and forth. I counted our steps on one of the trips: 670 in all, which took about ten minutes. The sun was well past its zenith for the day when I finally decided we were done.

Wiping sweat from my forehead, I gazed into the pit. The murky filling resembled the sad product of diarrhea more than water, and filled the pit less than halfway up. Would that be enough? I certainly didn’t feel like diving into that. The rukh would, I was sure, agree with me on that point, after he experienced it himself.

Perhaps we needed more water.

The coats of swamp mud were working poorly, and the water was slowly seeping into the soil. The sooner we made our move, the better. We could continue carting water until the evening, until we were exhausted.

But we were already weary. Making that weariness worse was not a good option. The most dangerous piece of