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

“Shoot, Jigsaw is bloated again,” said one of the coachmen, confirming my veterinary diagnosis.

There were several coachmen, one or two per wagon. That part was suggested by my ears—as my brain revved up to keep up with the unexpectedly bountiful flow of information from all of my senses.

The child whose body I had inhabited had been thoroughly handicapped. Barely able to see or hear, and incapable of recognizing the smell of dung short of getting his face shoved into a freshly made mound of it. His taste buds were sufficient to distinguish between honey and salt, and, with a little luck, his fingers might be able to tell a person’s face from their ass.

My body had definitely undergone some substantial changes. Whereas before I felt like a grown man’s foot wedged into a child’s shoe, now, everything felt different. All of a sudden, it fit me like a glove.

This wasn’t Gedar’s body any longer. It was fully mine.

It was an unusual feeling. I had to relearn all the things that felt normal to a regular person.

The seizures were gone, but the pain was still there, nesting in all my joints. Still, it was perfectly tolerable, even somewhat enjoyable. Not in the sense of enjoying getting your balls stomped on by latex-wearing dames with daddy issues, but more like the pleasure your muscles feel the morning after a hard workout—sore yet satisfied in the knowledge that the body will be better off for it.

I didn’t know what exactly was happening, but whatever it was, I found it hard to complain about this development, considering I had never felt this good before.

It made sense to continue studying my new state. To delve into a phenomenon that clearly had no analogues in my old world.

The problem was that I had only the vaguest of ideas how to do it. From time to time mother would try and get me to understand the fundamentals of working with Order, and had even engaged some outside specialists. And I had tried my very best, hoping that it would help make me whole. Unfortunately, none of those attempts had gone anywhere.

But something had changed within me, possibly unlocking doors that had been previously closed. Certain elements of the nightmare I had escaped hinted at this as well.

Of course, a dream wasn’t the same as reality. Learning the truth of the matter would require putting my theories to the test.

Only that was a problem, since neither mother nor the instructors she had contracted had been successful in explaining to me how it was done. Such a task was akin to trying to teach meditation to someone who not only was uninterested in spiritual practices, but derided and dismissed them as quackery.

Or, perhaps, describing the color spectrum of the rainbow to the blind. Quite a challenge, indeed.

But I was trying. Trying my very best. Straining my memory to the limit to try and fish out every detail I had ever heard on the subject. Supposedly, I would first need to enter into something resembling a trance. The exact words used by the locals would translate the term as “a look within.” So I tried my damnedest to rotate my eyeballs every which way.

Again, this wasn’t my first attempt at this thing. Mother had spent a ton of her own time, as well as the clan’s money on numerous instructors. The outcome had not justified the investment in the slightest, as despite me having sat through many mind-numbing lectures, nobody had succeeded in guiding me into the required state, leaving the impression that it was simply impossible. That either something in my mind blocked the ability, or it was absent altogether.

Probably the latter. Why allow an empty shell to peer into his own emptiness?

But here I was again, back at work to do the impossible. Spinning my bulging eyeballs to somehow make them “look inside.” Snapping them shut, then back open.

All in vain.

What else can you expect from a degenerate...

In this world, it was better to be born deaf and blind than empty. I lacked the single most important instrument with which to interact with reality. My case was beyond treatment, beyond even an explanation as to why treatment was hopeless. I was a unique case. It wasn’t that people deprived of Order didn’t exist at all, but in virtually all cases the poor bastards either died at childbirth or shortly thereafter.

I wasn’t supposed to have survived. And yet, I had. Thanks almost exclusively to Treya’s efforts, despite her meager means ever dwindling. In short, the fact that this empty body had reached twelve years of age was nothing short of a miracle.

And just as much of a mystery.

As I pondered this mystery yet again, my visual apparatus continuing its experimenting on autopilot, I noticed an odd phenomenon. Something that had never happened to me before. It was almost as if I had been pushed three feet back. Or rather, not back, but down, into and through the wagon’s floor. Into a hollow that seemed like a grave—narrow with vertical walls that let in a tiny bit of light. I could make out blurry silhouettes of some objects outside the walls, but not enough to ascertain what they were.

The visuals ahead, though somewhat clearer, still appeared hazy and almost shrouded in fog so thick you could start cutting it with a knife.

My eyes focused on a particular object that seemed somehow pronounced in the general fog. It looked like an uneven ball of yarn that had been ravaged by an overly zealous feline. Ragged pieces of thread and loops stuck out every which way, torn pieces floating overhead, like satellites rotating along circular and elliptical orbits. And moving in all directions, resulting in a ton of stress for the eyes.

As I peered into the center of the tangled ball, it suddenly