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

My time would be better spent resuming my battles with flint.

This time I needed a special billet. A dozen blocks later, I still didn’t have the desired result.

Having given up, I selected five shards closest to the required shape, and tried to chip away at them with careful, precise strikes. The first three ended up breaking, but the fourth finally resulted in what I wanted.

By then, Beko had both baskets tightly packed with stalks. Returning back to me, he stared at the billet and shook his head with disappointment.

“That knife is dull. No good. Make another one.”

Studying the hefty wedge, I mused.

“This isn’t going to be a knife, but a pickaxe.”

“Why do we need a pickaxe? Nobody is sending us to the mine. And even if they did, we’d get an iron one. This one won’t work. It’ll break right away.”

“It’s not for the mine. This is going to be our weapon.”

“A weapon? What for? We’re not soldiers. Or hunters.”

“Do you plan on picking wild leeks for the rest of your life?” I asked, then gave an immediate answer, mostly for myself. “This is a job for losers who can’t do any better. It is not our path. We’re going to grow up strong and dangerous. And this scary stone pickaxe is going to play a vital role.”

“Then hurry up and finish it,” Beko begged anxiously, as if suddenly realizing that the pickaxe was all that stood between his presently wretched existence and a decent life.

The handle took even more time and effort. I suspected that a slipshod product wouldn’t be accepted by ORDER, which meant I had to approach the work with maximum earnestness.

Then I took a long stroll along the riverbank, littered with garbage washed ashore by the river. After finding a suitable snag, I used the flint shards to file it down before breaking it. All on my own, refusing Beko’s help, because I wanted to conduct a pure experiment.

It took another two hours with the stone knife to fashion a proper notch. Once done with that, I secured the flint beak in the wood, perpendicular to the shaft, then wrapped the joint tightly with interwoven wild leek stalks.

You have crafted a pickaxe with a flint wedge and a handle of mountain ash.

You receive:

Lesser Symbol of Chi x2

Personal Attribute Embodiment, Strength x1

Personal Talent Mark, Novice Stonecutter x1

Personal Talent Mark, Novice Carpenter x1

There it was, the missing piece of the puzzle. And the prizes from the Order were nothing to sneeze at.

Everything I knew about the subject matter suggested that my rewards for treating Rycer, wounding the kote, crafting the knife and the pickaxe were beyond generous. Given the insignificance of these feats, a few symbols of chi would be a commensurable reward. Anything beyond that, such as a personal mark to unlock a corresponding talent, let alone a personal attribute embodiment, would be truly great luck.

The kind of luck that happened once a year. If that.

My experience, however, flew in the face of all that knowledge. I had been raking in rewards well beyond the expected, and that was certainly strange considering the fact that, aside from the past few days, I hadn’t had luck on my side pretty much ever. Yet, here I was, hitting the jackpot again and again. The second knife had been an aberration, and I had an idea as to why. My creations were worthless. Lowest quality materials combined with amateur craftsmanship, without using any unlocked talents. The Order might reward such wretchedness as an incentive to encourage further growth, but only the first time around. Recreating the work in hopes of similar prizes would be a fool’s task.

And today, after working my hands nearly to the bone, I had earned, among other things, four small symbols of chi, bringing my in-progress zero-degree bar to a total of ninety units. If I managed to make something similar to a knife or a pickaxe, yet original enough to merit more rewards, I might compensate for my daily leakage.

The path was too tough and labor-intensive to be worth it long-term. How many unique creations could I fashion from the meager resources of this pebbled beach? A spear, a club, a spiked mace, a boomerang, a sling, a bow... A good plenty of things if I put my mind to it. Even a proper rope woven of old wild leek might fetch something.

But then what? Assuming that our daily task going forward would be picking plants or some other menial work, Beko would need to toil for the both of us while I strained my already wan physical abilities. All to cover the losses of my perpetually vanishing chi. I might prevent or at least delay nullification with such a strategy, but I wouldn’t progress in any meaningful way.

Or would I? Suppose I started unlocking attributes. What if they turned out to be OK, and wouldn’t be decreasing every day? Alas, even then I would need to spend chi to unlock them—one hundred units per attribute if memory served me right. An exorbitant price. Only the attributes bestowed at birth—your base Strength, Stamina and Agility—were exempt from this rule.

How unfortunate. I had to assume I’d need to be paying for everything. And I didn’t have enough chi for a test activation of even one of the three attributes in my possession. Nor was I likely to accumulate the required amount in my circumstances. I might delay my nullification by a good stretch by pouring everything into my hole-ridden bucket of a vessel, but in the end I would still collapse into the old wreck that I was when my amulet finally lost its charge.

And that would truly be the end.

The thought prevented my itching fingers from using the received four units