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

to buy some more food from the innkeeper, “for lunch”. The trading post didn’t give a formal lunch to its workers. Miners were given the basics: salted lard, bread, cheese, and so on. Others received various grocery items a week at a time and stretched it to fit their needs. Still others bought food as needed. So my request did not seem odd—except for the sheer volume of lunch I requested, which was at least triple the usual number.

My body was demanding food in order to complete the personal development and energy production I had selected for it.

But an outlet for this energy was also required.

When Beko finally came down to the shore, he found me near the fishing shed doing push-ups, fists clenched, ignoring the pebbles painfully grinding their way into my knuckles.

“What’s the matter with you, Ged?” the ghoul asked hesitantly.

“I’m doing great!” I answered breathlessly. “Couldn’t be better! But where are the fishermen? Where are the boats? And where the hell is the work Romris was supposed to complete for us?”

“The fishermen started fishing on the other side of the Stone yesterday. Downstream. Ash was yelling at them, something about how few fish they were catching. So they struck out for more fruitful waters. That’s what they say, anyway: that there are more fish down there at the start of summer.”

“Summer is starting already?” I blinked.

“That’s right.”

“Wow. Time sure flies when you’re young. What about Romris?”

“For that, we need to head that way,” Beko said, pointing towards the very end of the spit.

“Well? Let’s go, then!”

I didn’t like Romris much, and neither did Beko. The ghoul’s feelings were easily justified: how could he have any love for a relative of the man who had done him the greatest ill of anyone here? Besides, Romris couldn’t resist jabbing at the trading post’s preeminent “freak” whenever he passed.

He didn’t mock me like that, and I had nothing personal against his cousin. Satat, ever since he took a sourpiss bath and then got to clean the cesspits, had been giving me mean looks, but never made any aggressive moves. Perhaps he had malicious thoughts. But he had not turned them into actions. He was a typical commoner, illiterate as a partridge, but he understood the difference between when he could pick on someone with impunity and when it would come back to hurt him.

That was a lesson that most here quickly learned.

No, I didn’t like Romris for other reasons. He was always trying to sniff out the secret behind our fishing success. Not ask directly. Not connive or cajole. Just sniff out. The way he looked at Beko—I imagined that was how rich Confederates had looked at their slaves, after the latter had escaped and been recaptured. He probably wouldn’t be past boxing the ghoul’s ears on occasion if I had not given him a stern look of warning. For some reason, I scared him, even though I was stuck in the skinny body of a weak teenager.

He had a shifty, indecent look about him, too. I was sure that there were many secret sins in his past.

But I had to admit that he had handled the assignment I gave him perfectly. I may have overpaid, of course. But it was worth it.

Romris had personally traveled to the right bank of the river and cut down eight cotton poplars. They were short trees which usually had trunks of ideal straightness. Lumberjacks disliked them—they rotted quickly, within a few years. I, to the contrary, was entirely unbothered by this characteristic. There was a whole forest of poplars across from the Stone, so selecting suitable ones was a straightforward task. Their wood was very light, too—about as dense as cork.

Romris used a winch up on a small cliff to lower the ready logs into the river. A platform lay below the winch, ready to help transport heavy loads up to the trading post.

Romris had tied a raft to this platform, and he now directed it towards me, to the tip of the sand spit.

It was a feast for the eyes. The logs fit together like the fingers of tightly clasped hands. Romris had planed them when necessary—you could drop a pile of coins right on the deck, and none would find a crack to slip through. They were stacked three layers tall, with a square platform at the top and in the center. Standing on this raised platform, one would be significantly above the water level—which was often important for spinning fishers. Mounted to the stern were latticework boxes suitable for storing baskets of fish. They would keep the baskets from sliding off into the water in case the raft made any sudden moves. As a bonus, on sun-scorched days the whole craft could be covered with a canopy of mats, which were both stowed in the boxes.

Romris even put a lunch cooking station in. He covered a small area near the bow with small pebbles and built a hearth of stones carefully selected to fit. Then came mounts for a spit, or for a pole holding a pot over the flame.

Sadly no pot had been included with the raft. I was just preparing for the future where I would be so rich I could afford buying cookware.

That was, hopefully, the very near future.

I examined the solitary oar and thought about making another, as well as a pair of oarlocks. I wasn’t sure that was necessary yet. After all, this raft would not be traveling far.

“How do you like our ship?” I asked with a smug smile.

“Raft,” Beko asked, skeptical. “I’ve heard talk of ships. They’re like boats, just very large. They can only travel Redriver, and only down towards its mouth. Some say that Redriver flows into an even larger waterway down that way. Gumis says it’s a sea. Like a lake, but so