Limitless by John Gold (best e reader for android txt) 📕

Current location: House of Disgust. Storm Fields of Suffering.

Blood rains down. The ground is covered in a carpet made of thousands of dead bodies, and the bloody streams bathe their hair, soak their clothes, and gurgle revoltingly past their legs. The bare limbs are slippery. I feel the disgust setting in as I squelch along, killing half-dead assailants in a rain that makes my nose itch.

“Panacea! Maximum!”

I already have experience with this kind of trial, so I decide to just take it head on. My death chimera ends up being a snake rather than a dog, as practice has shown that bone hounds slip a lot on bloody fields. Snakes, on the other hand, can slide along smoothly, eating everyone they come across.

I also sew myself a cloak with the bobcat skins I got in Crazyman’s Forest. Now I’m warm, and I can move leisurely across the hills of bodies sitting on the back of my enormous snake. In just the first day I get all the way to the Fields of Loathing. The blood is up to my knees, slurping around my feet, so I get back onto the snake and keep moving toward the source of the disgust.

The farther I go, the more hideous I find everything. In the end, I just have to stop and grow a tree so I can make a small sensory deprivation chamber under the roots. I need to work on the control I have over my emotions. Everything I’m feeling here in the Fields of Blood can be wrapped up in just one word: disgust.

There isn’t a map, but my experience tells me I’m already halfway through. Every enemy I kill fosters even greater abhorrence inside me, and I have to keep fighting it back. It gets much easier after my second hour in my stone room. Ten hours later, I’m ready to keep going.

It’s an endless field of blood and lone figures who die after just one or two attacks. Their serious wounds, the revolting way they look at me, the smell of fecal matter, and the nasty murmuring make them the most repugnant bots I’ve ever come across. Even killing from a distance with magic feels like the dirtiest thing I’ve ever done.

It’s all starting to really get to me when I see a mysterious silhouette spreading across the horizon. Once again, it’s Talamei, only in a different guise. He has black, deer-like antlers jutting out of his bare skull, and there’s a long scarf as red as the surrounding scenery draped around his neck. The worst part is the way his aura gleams orange like a saint’s.

Thankfully, I notice him before he notices me. And even though my thinking is clouded, I’m still not about to go sticking my head into the lion’s mouth. I spend a day getting used to the stress, after which I spend another day figuring out how I’m going to beat an opponent like that.

Talamei looks completely different, which means he’s going to have different strengths. Those antlers popping out of his skull are similar to the ones I saw on Azami, the great natural deity.

While I’m working on my resistance in my sensory deprivation chamber, I think back to how I beat Talamei last time. He probably just got flung out into space, where he threw up a divine shield fed by his astral source. My leap spells are the only kind of teleportation that works here. Because of that, I can’t teleport to the astral or anywhere else, and the leap spell has a limited distance and requires a set destination.

Suddenly, as I’m puzzling over Talamei, I remember a system message I got when I arrived in the Gray Lands.

New world structure: 5th level

Fifth Sequence Limiter activated

I can only guess what kind of effect the world structure has. Most likely, it has something to do with how seriously the world affects the consciousness, and the physical body through it. The last few resonances I activated revealed a direct relationship with my streams of consciousness: they activate when I have several streams working on a single task with a strong emotional component. From what I can tell, the world outside Project Chrysalis is fourth order. Hell and the Gray Lands are fifth-order worlds. Resonances have gradations, too. The fourth-order resonance I activated near Airis Castle nearly killed me, and just one spell was enough to destroy a fortress the size of a small city and kill all kinds of people. An analogous resonance activated when I sent Talamei into orbit. They boost the effect of the spells by at least a factor of ten, though they also nearly kill me. And the logs tell me that nearly two minutes went by between when the resonance was deactivated and when I received the damage from falling. I even picked up a new achievement.

Achievement received: Crazy paratrooper. Second rank.

Survive a fall from a height of at least two kilometers.

Reward: +20 to all attributes

As far as lower-level resonances are concerned, the effect is something like cellular instability, though how it actually works is beyond me. Fem told me my lich was able to divide its consciousness up between eleven bodies it could then control. It’s hard for me just to think with so many streams, and it was able to organize them to the point that it slaughtered a whole company of enemies.

The limiter, it turns out, just affects the natural growth of my attributes. Thanks to it, I was able to get my skills and main attributes up to 200 in Hell, though I can’t get them to budge here no matter how much time I spend jumping around with an amplified body.

Going back to Talamei, it’s worth noting that killing him turned out to be much simpler than I was expecting. I had an unlimited amount of necrotic energy, a flexible mind, and the experience of many similar fights.

Even back when I was working at the