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

of magic, auras, and places of strength went to another level. Sagie, I can’t explain this, but I started sensing absolutely everything. When I step on the stone, I feel its weaknesses and cracks. I know how far I can push my own bones. I sense the sap in the tree. I hear the roots venturing deeper into the earth. Something like a fathometer, I can detect where magic and life force are flowing through anything. My head has an X-ray machine that can see through all matter, and right now, I can feel that some kind of magic energy I don’t recognize is pouring out of the cube. It doesn’t show up in my magic vision, though I can still sense it. Actually, it was the same where I met Azami, Rogue, and Diran, the eagle. But that sensation was gone the next day. Just to test out a theory, I pull a piece of wood out of my inventory and cast Life Magic on it. Instead of a tropical maple, a dwarf tree grows before dying ten minutes later. The energy being released from the cube inhibited its life force and distorted the initial essence. But the most surprising thing is that it has a positive effect on me. I’m thinking more clearly, my streams of consciousness work mistake-free, and my in-game body feels real. It’s almost like my in-game and real bodies have fused slightly, giving me a higher-than-usual sensitivity to pain.

I spend quite a while just lying on the cube and working on Ledge via the neuronet. My productivity is way better there than in the astral with its distorted concept of time, and my mind has taken thinking to the next level.

My real body starts to change, my appetite increases, and I can swim farther than Claude for the first time, twelve kilometers in four hours.

A month goes by, and I’m still working in the infonet from my perch on top of the cube. I’ve learned how to manipulate my own aura, matching its density to what the cube is giving off. It starts inhibiting the life force within other living creatures, too. But even as I learn how to increase the radius and density of my aura, I start feeling mentally tired. The life is leaking out of me even though my mana and health bars haven’t budged. In real life, however, my skin is tougher, my hair is growing faster, and I’m enjoying more stamina. Even Claude notices a difference.

We’re sitting in the cafeteria. My diet is modified yet again, and the nurse sits down next to me for the first time.

“I’m not sure what experiment you’re part of or how you got permission to stay here so long, but I’d like to participate if I can get the same results.”

“What are you talking about? Isn’t this all thanks to you? Who’s made me swim two kilometers a day for the past three years? Who’s kept an eye on my diet, explained how my body works, given me massages, and picked out the right vitamins?”

Claude looks at me carefully before shaking his head. He’s disappointed.

“Apparently, I’m not talking to the right person. You’re smart, too smart, but you aren’t experienced enough to realize how different you are from other people. I’m an Olympic triathlon champion, while you’re just some guy training once a day and lying around in your capsule the rest of the time, and you were still able to outpace me both in speed and distance. And that’s not to mention the data the med capsule has been feeding me. Are you even human?”

“What else would I be? A dolphin? What data is the med capsule giving you?”

The nurse shakes his head once again.

“I’m not talking to the right person.”

Claude gets up and leaves, and there’s a new nurse the next day. He’s more like a taciturn prison guard than an attendant at a health resort though. Every movement he makes speaks of his military training, and he spends all his time working out.

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There isn’t anyone in the portal ring. The locals, not to mention the monsters, give it a wide berth, and even the dragons with their mental immunity are afraid of it. That thing in the astral may have other ways of influencing things besides infusing them with emotion.

Five months go by before the first players get to the portal. Oddly enough, they’re all Hunters and quite unique individuals. Cedric is a dwarf and space mage, not to mention being a Hunters Association scout. He doesn’t tell me how a dwarf was able to become a mage at all, not to mention such a good one that he was the first to get to the center of Tanatos, with their racial predispositions. Needless to say, he saw the message about how you need 500 people and victory over the keeper, and then he saw me getting up from the cube. The portals flash open, and he runs off in bewilderment. I’m only able to chase him down and bring him back when he realizes that I’m Sagie rather than the keeper of the portal. A quick conversation later, I send Cedric back to the Hunters with all the information I have about Tanatos in exchange for complete and lifetime access to the association’s data bank.

A month later, Kurold arrives on his leveteur, as he calls it, a triangular board with three stationary mana storages he steers using a soul crystal. He’s an artifactor and an inventor, as well as a mage who has maxed out Mind Magic, Space Magic, and artifactory. At around twenty-seven, he has an active, fascinating mind, one step away from becoming just as fanatical about his profession as Isaac is about his. He can go without sleeping for days when he’s sketching out a new design on his portal board. Its indestructibility is a divine gift to him, and he’s constantly working on it. The third day, I find out that he has the annoying