Gestation by John Gold (tohfa e dulha read online .TXT) 📕

As I step out onto the bank, I pull out my map. I got across the Styx, but now I’m in the Stygian swamps. This circle is much smaller than the last one, so I should be able to get to the next hole in less than a day if I run as fast as I can.

Unfortunately, I overestimated myself. Running across the swamp, which has bodies instead of a bottom, is really hard, especially as there are people fighting everywhere. As soon as one battle finishes, the next one starts. New fighters pop up right out of the swamp, going on and on forever. I can’t feel a particular aura of rage, just a wild fire of anger and fury. If the shroud were right next to me, I would say that Lord Rage was right on the other side of it. I’m wrong again though: he’s everywhere, he’s the darkness swimming right in the water. I look closer, and the darkness looks back at me with blood-red eyes.

I run without thinking of anything. Brigands slaughter the fighting sinners, and I surge by them with large leaps. I do have to change my running style. I wish I could run across water. That probably has something to do with telekinesis and requires energy every second.

The closer I get to the center of the circle, the stronger I feel the swamp pulling me in. The drowned people lying on the bottom grab at my legs, making it harder for me to run. I fall, get up, and keep running. Rain starts falling, cries ring out from the fights going on all around me, and a fog spreads across the swamp. Visibility drops to two meters. I have to change something.

I need to find a way through the swamp that doesn’t have bodies getting in my way, and I have to be able to see where I’m going. An arrow fired with weak healing creates an impassable forest. I need something else…and this is going to be fun! Awful, very awful, but fun.

I grow out the forest even more. It takes me three days until I get the size I’m looking for. I need a large, dry space. So, I create it under the roots of one of the gigantic trees. There, I get to work using necro-chimerology. It’s a shame I’m not allowed to make sacrifices, though nobody said anything about chimerology or necromancy. The emanations of death are a great source of energy, even if they are tricky to work with.

For four weeks, I work, and I start to look crazed. Even back in the orphanage cafeteria, my smile kind of terrifies the other kids. It looks like what I’m doing in Project Chrysalis is starting to affect who I really am. But it’s so much fun creating dead creatures, flesh terrors, bone hounds, ghouls, zombies, and other spawn of necromancy. What do I feel when I give dead flesh a semblance of life? Happiness, and the power of the creator. They don’t talk, but I feel each of them. They bow to me thanks to my blood magic.

I only get the chimerology skill after my fiftieth chimera. I destroy them all, every last one. My altar of chimerology reeks of dark magic, and even the aura of death appears. Mental damage can’t touch me, though it can absolutely get into my head.

The three-volume series on chimerology was written in blood with detailed examples and ways to interact with blood magic. That’s enough to get anyone going! I create something terrifying that straddles the border between chimerology and necromancy, none of the books on the dark arts covering anything like it. I just happen to guess, based on how incomplete the seals are, that a ritual like this is possible. But what does a concentrated burst of necroenergy get you? Creating scalable personal items using your own blood takes a three-level seal. The five-sided contour on the outside offers the primary energy, while each subsequent contour enables you to control it and imprint that on the enchanted item. But I only realized that you can expand the seal to the fourth contour when I finished studying the books on chimerology from cover to cover. Thinking in several streams at once makes it easy to add what’s missing. The seal wasn’t complete, and it required a grand master in chimerology, necromancy, and blood magic. I’m taking a huge risk, but I want to do this… My intelligence calls for a seeker! I follow it.

I need a lot of space for a seal this big, so I go back to feeding energy into the tree I’m under. It gets so big, it reaches the clouds. There are plenty of bodies and lots of water in the soil, meaning that it can grow quickly.

There are five large seals, one each at the tips of a star, and another at its center, six in total. It takes a week for me to draw the whole thing in blood because it keeps disappearing after twelve hours. To see the whole thing, I have to stand in the middle and jump. But I did it! Luckily, one thing that’s different about the fifth circle of Hell is that the bodies don’t disappear. They decompose, but that takes a full month. I already checked.

In a word, it took me a long time to prepare: two months preparation, a week handling the details. But finally, I’m done, I got some sleep, and I had something to eat. Let’s do this!

∞ ∞ ∞

Eliza was giving a seminar on social education for girls. Since they often get caught up with the wrong crowd, you have to teach them how to protect themselves.

It was a routine seminar with a group of girls she’d already been working with. They’d been coming for weeks and could expect their level of citizenship to be bumped up when they finished their studies and got their qualification.

“Miss