Limitless, John Gold [best novels of all time .TXT] 📗

nosebleed again, I’m lethargic, and I’ve lost a good amount of coordination. Both the nurse and the doctor recommend a change of diet and prescribe vitamins. In their minds, what’s going on has something to do with the experiment I’m supposedly taking part in. Really, the problem is Project Chrysalis and the Gray Lands. Even what little I know about neurophysiology is enough to tell me that I’m exhausted and overworked. Better food and vitamins will mitigate the symptoms, but they won’t fix the problem.

I sleep for more than twenty-four hours this time. The rage and the last five days of chimerology have me drained, wondering whether it’s even possible to feel such strong emotions. Is it okay to kill the same person for six hours straight? Regardless of everything she did to me, I don’t hate her to that degree.

The thought gives me an idea as to what the final trial is going to be. Yep, it’s going to be his bare skull, all right.

Claude notices that I swam four kilometers straight, so he makes me do it twice. Eight kilometers of breaststroke in two sessions, with a four-hour interval. He’s a monster! He swims next to me the whole time, and then he tells me how to keep an eye on my salt balances and stress level. In the year and a half I’ve been here, he’s taught me enough for me to start drawing my own conclusions.

∞ ∞ ∞

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I’m back on the lifeless fields of the Gray Lands. Dozens of questions roll around in my head: why didn’t anyone tell me that there are bots higher than Level 10000? If players are capped by a ceiling, how can there be Level 20000 opponents? And if this is just the House of Rage, what are the other houses? I certainly have no doubts that there are, in fact, other houses.

When I first found areas without opponents, I had the crazy idea of running along the rest area and popping out near the finish. But no matter how long or far I ran, I was just five minutes away from where I started. Space is distorted here. At least, that’s the only explanation I can think of.

I use a panacea spell to grow a field with trees. Back when I was looking for a way to destroy that hateful crystal giving out the aura in Hell, I noticed the effect they have. Trees and other plants mitigate the effect on your consciousness, even if they don’t do anything to the aura itself. My island of salvation allows me to pause and take a look at the world around me. As I leave the field, stepping out from under the crown of the main tree, I’m gripped once again by uninhibited rage. I step back, and the rage disappears as if it were never there to begin with. It’s almost indescribable how the emotion is so powerful that it makes me lose my mind, erasing the moral and ethical boundaries I’m usually guided by. When I get slightly used to it, LJ takes me off into the rest area. I need practice maintaining a calm center if I want to be able to keep going.

I spend all my time in the trial zone, growing and destroying plants with Dark Magic. This helps me practice my concentration, Dark Magic, and point of calm. When I get tired of that, I start jumping around to work on my body amplification, sending powerful spells smacking into the gray ground as I do. This also helps my concentration and amplification.

The earth here is definitely unusual. A dead sun I send with ten times the usual charge into the ground makes it just a meter deep. If the ground were normal rock, the sun would have burrowed down a good thirty meters. Sadly, my Dark Magic really doesn’t want to progress quickly, so I have to go back to creating and destroying islands of life.

On the third day, my willpower gives out and I nearly lose it. I come to on the border between the rest area and the death zone. A wall of thick, white fog delineates the two, and that’s how I see the death zone and the two ashen eyes peering out of it in my direction. It’s Lord Terror, though his aura doesn’t affect me in the least anymore. Happily, the log tells me that LJ pulled me into the rest area when I was out of it so I wouldn’t do anything stupid.

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∞ ∞ ∞

Twenty-four hours of sleep in my single room, and I’m feeling on top of the world. People really are adaptable. I’m the perfect example, after all, how many people are there in the world who can smile and shake the hand of their mortal enemy? How many of them can keep themselves in check when they have the chance to kill him? Very few. But if they spend their life like that, they develop a line in their brain between reason and emotion. My wall, my emotional shield, is just taking shape, and my brain is about to build that wall.

∞ ∞ ∞

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Today, I figured out a hygiene solution for the Gray Lands. Using a telekinetic shovel, I dug out a pit for a pool, spending less mana than I was restoring, happily. Then, I cast a tsunami to fill the pool and warmed it with Gehenna fire. Voila! I have myself a jacuzzi.

The water relaxes me, enabling me to focus entirely on my thoughts. I build that wall in my mind as I lie there. The central stream of consciousness is responsible for concentration; three more are for suppressing the rage; and, in the meantime, I do my best to be as abstract as I can about the controlled way I train my subconsciousness to cope on its own. Four magic barriers, an enormous granite sphere, and my personal chimeric shield protect me. LJ has taken charge of my chimeric shield as our last line of defense, and he’s also keeping