Sleeping Player (Project Chrysalis Book 3) by John Gold (novel24 TXT) 📕

the breeze the ghosts make as they walk by is better than the silence. When you aren’t expecting anything, and life suddenly freezes, your hair just stands up on end. He’s watching… He’s waiting… He wants to play…

Half the day goes by, and I’m starting to feel hungry and tired. Drainage channels line the road on either side. One of the stone plates they’re made of is missing, and the opening is just wide enough for me to wriggle into. Just in time! No sooner am I hiding in the basement than the door scrapes open.

Very quietly, crawling on my stomach, I find a gentle descent into the dead city’s sewage system. I don’t head any further. Who knows what could have spawned there in the last two thousand years? Curling up comfortably, I fall asleep right there in the tunnel.

What kind of dreams do you have when your brain is damaged, your hormones are out of whack, and you’ve just been through that kind of stress? I just doze, finding some relief. In the meantime, my consciousness splits: while I’m resting, LJ the cat is on the clock, and my seven combined streams of consciousness dream. It’s an enormous field of yellow flowers coming up to my waist, the sky and clouds like the ones they have on Earth. I’m not alone; there’s a girl taking me somewhere by the hand. She’s a step ahead of me, and I’m barely moving, not keeping up. Her red hair falls on her shoulder blades, she’s wearing a white dress, and her body is hefty…strong. I can’t see her face, and LJ doesn’t want me to look at her. Why not?

The field of yellow flowers is endless, and I have no idea where we’re going. The girl, however, definitely does. It’s a sunny, summer day, with a warm breeze and warm soil under my bare feet. Everything is almost real it’s so bright and pleasant, but it’s still a dream. The smell of the flowers, the wind playing with the girl’s hair, the blooms brushing against my hand…and I wake up.

It feels like I’m running out of time. I need real healing—my hormones are influencing the way I think too much. In my dream, I cried, wanting to stay there rather than return to this awful world.

When I crawl out of the sewer channel, I notice that my hiding place has been discovered. There are three rat tails lying next to the hole, not to mention deep scrapes that look like they could have been made by a large sledgehammer. Apparently, Piroxis found a new body and is in a hurry to get back to his games.

The city of the dead really took a beating, regardless of how the mages tried to save it after the cataclysm. Some of the buildings are underground, others are collapsed, and the latter look dangerous to venture into. The demonologist guild building suffered the most. It ends up being located right at the fault line, and it sank a good dozen meters into the cleft. With the roof collapsed, you can look down into all the rooms and hallways making up the third floor.

Somewhere nearby, zombies murmur, which tells me that the demon isn’t anywhere close.

I make my way down into the crevice, listening for any sound as I go. It isn’t the possessed demons back on the surface that I’m afraid of; it’s what could be in the building. I’m fine with rats or ghosts.

Everything is quiet.

The building was made completely out of stone, which saved it from being destroyed.

There’s nothing on the third floor besides dirt and trash. The paintings have faded, one of the walls collapsed, the furniture is all destroyed, and it looks like a library’s storage room. I know the information I’m looking for survived, so it can’t be here.

I find the stairs going down.

The second floor isn’t in the best condition, though the furniture here was destroyed by time, rather than the catastrophe. I find bedrooms and a couple of offices, though they’re bare of anything worthwhile.

The first floor is in the best condition. Also, the air is moister, which is odd. There’s the administration desk by the door, three walls covered in quests, and a small café for the mages. The outside door was apparently torn off by a powerful spell, though the opening has been covered up with stonework. When the building fell in, the first floor was next to the old sewage system, and it looks like the moisture seeped in through the stone. I find perfectly preserved stairs in the administrator’s room leading to the basement.

There’s just one stone door fortified with powerful enchantment, and a recess that reads magic rings instead of a key. The door quietly swings open to reveal the way down into the basement.

I find myself in the room from which the building was managed. It’s in great shape, almost as if the earthquake only happened yesterday. The Air Magic lectures I’ve attended have included some information about the deep conservation spell, though hearing about it and seeing the results with your own eyes two thousand years later are very different things.

In front of me, there are four large mana storage crystals, an enormous desk with a map on it, and two doors leading to other rooms. There aren’t any books or information about demons- nothing useful, that is, unless you count the discharged crystals that find their way into my inventory.

The first door leads to the guild’s storeroom, though the empty draws scattered around tell me it was probably emptied before the earthquake hit. The mana from the crystals probably went toward creating a teleport for the last demonologists hiding here to get away through.

I have to push open the other door. It’s stuck on the opposite side.

There hasn’t been a single body in the entire building. Until now, I