Sleeping Player (Project Chrysalis Book 3), John Gold [free e books to read online .TXT] 📗

a source of income for me, and it’s now a spot where a lot of players do something similar, so long as their resistance allows it. Femida collects one final harvest from our tree before we leave.

Instead of going to look for a magic-space eddy, we just use the one by my last tree’s place of strength. By that evening, we’re in Sural, the city where all travelers begin their wanderings around Kongul. Femida heads over to the auction to sell everything we’ve collected over the past four months. While she’s there, she’s going to see what information there is about us in the League of Hunters, as that’s probably where the requests for our heads are.

But that’s not the main reason we’re in Sural. There’s a person here who can tell me what my trophies from the desert are. The guild of monster hunters is still there, though there’s a girl seven or eight years of age sitting in Hela’s spot. She’s explaining to two kids how important the roll of monster hunters is in the game, and what an honor it is to be counted among them. As soon as they leave, the girl notices me. My white outfit from the clinic apparently looks like a laborer’s.

“We don’t need porters! All we accept are monster hunters.”

Mm, what a smart little kid.

“Miss…where is Hela? I came here to see her, and not you, young…lady.”

It takes a couple seconds, but it finally occurs to her what I want.

“Mama! You have visitors!”

Hela walks down from the second floor, having barely changed at all since we first met six years ago.

“What can I do for you?” Hela looks at me openly and confidently. She doesn’t recognize me!

The whole neighborhood can probably hear my gleeful laughter.

“You must be sick! Why would you behave like that in front of other people?” Hela glances over at her daughter, and she’s right to do so. I’m a bad example.

“You haven’t changed a bit in the last six years, though I don’t remember you having a daughter.” Hela still doesn’t recognize me. “Let me give you a hint: I gave you those epic life mage boots. I killed more monsters in Hashan than any other player, all at Level 0. I helped you work on your identification skill, too.”

“Sagie…? Everyone’s looking for you! What, did you go through the rebirth ritual? You even have a different name.”

After a five-minute conversation in the store room where nobody can hear us, I find out quite a bit. Hela doesn’t have kids after all. The wanderer girl just latched onto her, started calling her mother—apparently, another orphan.

She’s gotten questions about me twice over the past five years. The first time was right after the battle for Airis Castle; the second, three months ago, after we broke out of jail.

But the trophies I brought with me from the desert are a mystery. She isn’t able to identify them, even with a maxed-out identification skill.

“I’ve come across items like this a couple of times before. They stay hidden until you complete the requirements for activating them. Judging by the durability and the information we can read, you need to do something to it or activate it some other way. Both, maybe.”

I can’t figure out how to use the key. In the meantime, Femida takes until the evening to sell everything we’ve collected over the past four months. She’s able to find a clan of crafters and alchemists who bargain with her to deliver and sell directly all the “special ingredients” she was able to find “in her travels.” The flowers from the last tree I grew offer a strong boost to health regeneration, while everything else from the tree offers a lighter version of the same boost. I suspect the alchemists struck gold with the deal. Still, I care more about how much they paid for the flowers we’ve already collected.

“I sent you your 1.7 million credits. And don’t look at me like that! I bargained with them for a long time, even signed an agreement via the auction just in case. That’s the whole amount. There are some unsold lots left, though we’ll pick up the money after we collect a new load. Hey, we are going back for another load, aren’t we?”

There are some things we still need to do in the desert, so I’m fine heading back once a week to collect flowers.

The fact that I wasn’t able to figure out what the keys are wasn’t much of a surprise. If it were that easy, crowds of players would already be making their way to and from the world of the dead. The gods certainly would have combined their forces to pick up the key to the gate.

We head off into the desert again, though we take a different route, from north to south, rather than from the eastern shore. This part is almost uninhabited, as it butts up against the villages belonging to the steppe orcs. The snow troll mountains loom behind them. All are wild tribes with almost no contact with the outside world, and so the players generally just leave them alone.

The next day, we find a good spot a hundred kilometers from the center of the desert. It’s an enormous tract of sand far away from the trade points that have been set up over the last five years.

While Femida chops up the local population, I start preparing the area. First and foremost, I need a pit, the bigger, the better. A full-strength meteor is the simplest solution for that. One thing I didn’t think about, however, is the shock wave that sweeps along the sand and nearly buries us alive. The explosion is so powerful that it kills everything within a hundred meters.

Down in the crater, I even out an area covering about a hectare. Then, I stand in