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

Debuff received: Severe exhaustion, critical condition

You haven’t eaten for a long time. Find something soon, otherwise you’ll die of hunger.

Effect: -70% to all attributes, double effect to your strength

It’s a strange feeling when your whole body tingles as if there’s a god standing right next to you. Only there’s nobody there, and I don’t even know where I am. Why is there a forest around me? Where did the sky and those little animals come from? Slender is hiding in the shadow of the tree. That parasite hasn’t gone anywhere in… How long has it been?

My time panel tells me that it’s been thirty-nine days since my body restoration began. It’s been thirty days since the process completed.

Logout

Oh, god, my head! My body isn’t responding well, my muscles are spasming, my eyes aren’t opening at the same time, and my heart is pitter-pattering. The silvery solution housing the medbots pushes me to the surface, straight into the caring arms of the doctor.

“Finally, you woke up. You took it hard, slept for almost a month.”

“What’s wrong with me? Why is my body all out of whack? My head hurts.”

“Your occipital lobe was damaged. The nervous tissue was so worn out that it could’ve belonged to an old man, and repairing it meant messing up your fine motor skills as well as reloading your long-term memory. For some reason, we couldn’t pull you out of the game so you could rest completely. Your head hurts from the lack of sleep and from being overworked, but you’ll be able to rest once Claude takes you back to your room. We’ll talk about physical therapy later.”

Falling asleep is wonderful. Through the encroaching shroud, I see Claude taking me back to my room in the aerochair, and I’m gone the second my head hits the pillow. My whole body relaxes. The bed is comfortable, the blanket is warm…and LJ’s there.

Again, I see the field of flowers and the girl in the white dress. Despite the red hair, I’m positive it’s not Femida. How do I put this? Their motives, their personalities are different. I can sense that what they want from me is different. Femida follows me and sometimes adjusts my plans; this girl knows exactly where I’m going and how this is going to end up. It’s like she’s the one leading me forward. At some point, I leave dreams behind and drift into an even deeper sleep.

I forgot what it was like to really sleep. Strength floods back into my muscles, and my thoughts are viscous and ponderous. Oh, I have an erection! I need to calm down and figure out what to do about that. Judging by the way I feel, my hormones are back to normal, though my weakness still has my arms and legs moving sluggishly.

Ten minutes go by as I study how my newly restored body feels. My thoughts are clearer, and I can control all eleven of my streams of consciousness. Still, it’s not worth pushing them, so I focus on my body. And that’s when Claude walks in.

He’s about thirty years old, and he always wears a blue nurse’s uniform. Over the past couple of months, he hasn’t changed a bit.

The doctor who oversaw my restoration prescribed physical therapy for me, so I’m supposed to swim two kilometers every day. After that, I get a full-body massage and medicine that will normalize my salt balance. My coordination and fine motor skills will be back up to par in three or four months.

“Doctor, can I set up a neuronet?”

“Ribonz, stop calling me doctor. I have a name—Edward Jenner. You can only set up your neuronet after your nervous system is completely recovered.”

He’s never brought up any associations for me, so I’ve never been able to remember his name. But Doctor Jenner, the doctor who wouldn’t let me set up a neuronet, is a perfectly good association.

Claude takes me back to my room, telling me I need to move around more on my own. He stops in an hour later and takes me to the pool for physical therapy. Once I have some free time, I decide to write Femida to let her know I’m back.

When I read my mail, I find eight letters from the irate girl, all laced with invective. In one, she mentions a strange deer that showed up by my tree and then ran off into the astral.

A glowing deer showed up right by your tree and stood there for a long time just staring at the trunk. Slender tried to kill it with one of his tentacles, though he ran into a beastly charge of lightning. I don’t know what that thing was, but baldy didn’t go anywhere near it after that. That happened ten days after you switched off in the astral.

Doing enough damage to teach Slender a lesson without killing him? There’s only one deer who can do that—Azami, the supreme natural divinity. He never shows up just for fun, so something unexpected must have happened.

I reply to Femida, letting her know that I’ll be logging into the game in a few hours after my physical therapy.

Claude walks in as I’m sending the letter. From what he’s told me, the resort is located on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and there aren’t any other islands closer than a hundred and forty kilometers.

There are three pools in the resort. My treatment will be taking place in the third reserve aquatic complex behind the main building.

Hearing that there are three whole pools here and seeing only one of them are two very different things. A fifty-meter pool with a sliding dome, and this is the reserve aquatic complex? What must the other two be like?

I’m able to swim just a tad more than two hundred meters before practically drowning. Afterward, I