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

restoration speed. The fact that my morale is maxed out thanks to my achievements means that I recover 14000 mana a minute. In other words, I have 4000 mana I can use to work on my manipulation skill. Soon, I have it up to 400.

My dear supervisor Anri Diuval told me that Life Magic is only as effective as the power of the spell you create. The problem is that it dissipates quickly, only part of it reaching your target.

There’s also a maximum amount of Life Magic that target can absorb, and it’s different for different creatures. Life auras with higher density and strength can mitigate the dissipation effect and intensify the effect the aura has on trees and plants.

As soon as we get everything set the way we want it, we head for the Sea of Madness. I picked up a few tons of medicinal herbs at the auction in a backwater town, though Femida has to carry most of them in her enormous bag.

At an alchemist’s stand, we bought five sets of test tubes, a master alchemist’s set, a giant alembic, and a retort, too. The owner was happy to give them to us at half price, so we walked away having spent just shy of two hundred thousand credits.

I’m getting ready for the time I’m going to have to spend in the astral while my body is recuperating. The nurse from the health resort told me that I won’t be able to do anything that puts pressure on my nervous system during the procedure. That’s kind of funny, what with the search, the shapeshifter, the archmage, and the two psychos following me around. The only way I’ll be able to get through a month in the game without overloading my nervous system is if I spend it in the astral. At least, that’s what I’m thinking.

The timer is counting away my last hour in the game when we finally find an eddy in the magic space. Twenty minutes in the astral later, an enormous amount of time there, the path we’re on takes us to a tiny island. It’s a rock thirty meters in diameter. This is where I’m going to have to spend a month in real time?

Given the fact that it’s the ninth layer in the astral, that will be nine months of in-game time. I’m going to have to find a new island as soon as I get back into Project Chrysalis. The timer counts down my last minutes, and I wake up in my room at the Azure August resort.

My body is much healthier now that I’ve spent the intervening time in the med capsule. I can walk normally, and my skin isn’t translucent anymore. Judging by my motor skills, my salt balance is back to normal, too. I stand for a little while, though my muscles, which haven’t had exercise in a while, quickly tire. My head buzzes. That’s really bad. I have to wonder if I had a ministroke or if the blood vessels in my brain are wearing out faster than the capsule can restore them. The resonance didn’t kill me, though my brain is in a highly vulnerable state.

I barely have time to change into dry clothes when Claude walks in with an aerochair. He takes me to the main building before handing me over to another doctor, and the two of us continue on together.

It turns out that the resort has an enormous basement where the clinic is located. I’m led down a corridor lined with doors, behind one of which something is giving off powerful electromagnetic waves. Could they have a transformer hidden down here?

We walk past the room, and I make a mental note to peek inside some time and see what’s hiding there.

My chair is pushed into an office at the end of the corridor. There isn’t a single surgeon there, neither human nor robot. The same doctor places me in a capsule with a thick, silvery solution.

Oh, nasty! It moved!

Before I can ask a single question, I sink into sleep. There are no dreams, just darkness and a light shining somewhere off in the distance. Time goes by, though I’m not sure how much, and I wake up to find myself in Project Chrysalis on the same island I logged out from.

By the time Femida gets back, I’m already inventorying all the items I have for brewing potions.

The last thing I take out of my bag is MoroKrai’s heart. The enormous piece of blood malachite with diamond veins pulses a light red color, and the crimson waves wash over the crystal in time with the heartbeat. Femida whistles in surprise.

“Where did you find something like that? You’ve been trying to save money, saying you don’t have any, and then you pull a stationary mana storage out of your pocket. Please don’t tell me you’re going to experiment on it…”

“No, I’ll probably sell it at the auction as soon as the recovery procedure is done. I want to go with a twelfth-generation neuronet for multi-stream work with the infonet, and twelve pairs of modifications are going to run me around six hundred thousand credits. With how much I’ve spent over the last month, I’m down to about ten thousand credits from four and a half million.”

“Oh, you poor guy! No, you need an even hundred thousand. What, don’t have enough for all the black caviar you want? That’s enough money for six months living however you want! But if you decide to sell it, let me know, and I’ll find you a good price and a buyer.”

“I don’t want to sell it, but I may need the money. Look how beautiful it is! I love the pulsing and shimmering.”

Femida looks closer at the rock, turning it over in her hands.

“There’s nothing shimmering. What are you talking about?” Femida looks me in the eye.