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

It takes me just a week to get through the trial, though I go the next month without playing in an attempt to recover from the trauma. I spend days at a time reading, collecting material, making designs, organizing the manufacturing processes, buying production and mining drones, and setting up an underground warehouse and plant. I need so many raw materials to launch the production of my frontier ship. But I have the money, the time, the desire, and a powerful intellect.

Femida flies in during the third week to yell at me and throw up every argument and logical conclusion she can. I understand much more than she can say or know, but I need a break. I’ve been at the resort for two years, and I still haven’t been able to relax.

“I’m going to continue the trials tomorrow, so get into the game and go to work on Leon. Tell him Sagie could be back at any moment.”

“Are you really coming back soon?”

“I have four or five trials left. After that, I have to find the exit, though I have a couple ideas.”

∞ ∞ ∞

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The House of Happiness is a forest where friends try and persuade me to try different, new adventures. Isaac is even there in his human form. I get invitations to battles, requests to help with quests, and exhortations to give some old people a hand. Even Nela, the administrator at the Sural monster-hunter guild, asks me to help her cut an endless pile of wood. Father needs help fishing; mama needs help washing dishes. The empty sink spits out plate after plate, so I spend three weeks living the life of a normal, happy person before getting down to business and repressing the emotion.

The hardest part is turning Rosie down when she asks me to go for a walk, all grown up, and just leads me around in circles through the forest. The sound of her calling as I leave stays with me.

The House of Optimism turns out to be unexpectedly tedious. About forty thousand kilometers long, I work my way through a steppe, a plateau, a body of salt water, and a whole continent made of nothing but volcanos. Sometimes, I simply collapse on the ground and tense up in order to sense which way it is to the source of the optimism, before getting up and running onward. After two weeks of running eighteen hours a day, I max out my body amplification.

Body amplification +1

Your body amplification skill has reached the maximum value

It’s the third important skill that gives me nothing when I reach the ceiling. Manipulation and scaling hit theirs in the House of Love, I was just preoccupied with other things. But logic tells me there’s a reason why I don’t get a spell or ability. Project Chrysalis is balanced such that people looking for strength will find it. Those with nothing but complaints about their life rot away in the poverty you find at the bottom of the rankings.

I run across fields littered with volcanic ash for the first week, coming across stone people and non-people. One group of statues is made up of a father with a child on his shoulders holding his wife by the hand. They’re frozen there in the ashen desert, just a few among hundreds of others. At night, I see the messengers from the spirit world coming down to look for souls. Since I’m by myself, they all come to attack me, so I try to avoid the spots they like to show up. The point of the trial is to listen to your inner voice and get to the end.

At some point during the second week, I start to feel like I’m getting close to the finish line. The terrain shifts to a desert covered in statues and even whole cities. I see sculptures looking like thousand-armed Buddhas that the sand storms nearly overturn, and then, it’s on to a field of stone giants. They’re alive, though they don’t move. There are whole alleys lined with stone monuments reminiscent of death. Happily, they don’t have scythes.

On the thirteenth day, I see a tower sending a stream of light into the sky. It’s so far away that I’m only able to get to it that night.

The next city doesn’t give me any clues as to the whereabouts of my parents. Tsevidar is an exact copy of all the other cities. One thing that worries me is that I haven’t seen a single person who’s been through other trials. The dwarf I met at the very beginning could have been a quest character, or maybe, just a unique case.

Current location: House of Hope

It’s a desert from one side to the other, with a lone, giant tree somewhere at the other end. The evenly placed marble pillars on either side hint at the fact that I’m going to have to run a marathon over an improvised track.

But no matter how far I run, the tree doesn’t get any closer. The problem is that space is distorted to the extent that I’m running in hope of reaching the end. Three days later, when I emerge from my sensory deprivation chamber, the tree is a hundred meters away, just on the other side of the nearest pair of pillars.

The monstrous tree is so tall that its tip disappears into the clouds. The branches grow in a spiral and go up all the way to the top, so it reminds me of some kind of seventh heaven or the stairway to paradise.

The tree turns out to be the end of the trial. As soon as I touch it, it sucks me inside and spits me out at the edge of the next city. The longer I run the streets looking for my parents or at least news of them, the more my panic grows. What if I make it through the whole Gray Lands without finding them? The