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

screenshots pulled from the net had been systematically deleted over the previous few years. The player profile was blank. It had no avatar even. In its place, there was a black male profile with a question mark.

However, the first post in all that time suddenly appeared in the news feed.

Good afternoon, dear reader. I’ll tell you right up front that this post was written a day prior to being posted automatically. I have most likely deleted my account to enjoy some peace and the comforts of home.

I planned this post a few years back when I recognized certain truths. Still, I was never able to draw the general conclusions I wanted, and so I waited for the idea to mature and clarify itself. Here we go.

I’ve been able to meet some incredible people. I’ve seen love between two girls. I’ve seen someone devote their life to someone else’s happiness—he’s only happy when she is. I met someone who had never felt a single emotion. Have you ever taken the time to appreciate having two eyes, the ability to walk, your parents? Or the way your mother feeds you and the attention you get from your father? I’m an orphan, and Project Chrysalis gave me both a family and the love of two parents. Today, I’m going to bring them back to life. Just imagine that you lost everything and found yourself completely alone in the world. It hurts, you’re afraid, and nobody reaches out a hand to help you. Value what you have. Be happy you have it.

I didn’t have a childhood, loving parents, or friends, though I got them all in Project Chrysalis. It was experience, a sequence of events filled with emotions that changed my life forever. And I hope you will be daring enough to follow your happiness to the end of the world.

The players who checked Sagie’s blog couldn’t figure out if they’d mixed up the page they were on or if they’d been completely wrong about the kind of person he was. How could someone who had slaughtered half of Tanatos talk about happiness, family, and love? Wasn’t he rich enough to make his own? Lunar officially confirmed that the account hadn’t been hacked and that the post had been written by Sagie. Some readers had met him personally during their travels across Tanatos, and they said he was just a normal guy who didn’t trust anyone and was far from the monster the media made him out to be. The message gave rise to a wave of questions about who Sagie really was. A community was formed, and one of the commenters gave it a name: Limitless Sagie. Nobody noticed that Sagie himself never responded to a single comment or question.

∞ ∞ ∞

Twenty-four hours after the battle for the portal on Tanatos, a global message went out saying that the portal would be moved to Ferengar, to the valley where the old dwarf capital used to be. The continent itself had warmed significantly. Grass, trees, and cliffs appeared as the ice melted, while the mammoths and their demon drivers were replaced by black battle elephants and tribes of dark-skinned pigmies. The players still didn’t get to see most of the continent, however, due to the fact that the stationary portal started working. The official opening date was moved back a week, and it was finally time.

A crowd of players stretched out a kilometer in every direction. Mages levitated, while artifactors hovered on flying boards that had become the world’s most popular form of transportation over the previous two months. Nobody could breathe, nobody could get any closer, and the air above the portal itself was restricted space nobody could fly in. The air tingled with anticipation as the meeting with twenty-four groups of representatives from the alliance of civilizations grew closer.

Three people materialized atop of the portal cube: Akashi, Krash, and Miguel. The trio was responsible for representing humankind on that momentous occasion.

Akashi asked a rhetorical question the Lunarites had been asked a million times.

“What is Project Chrysalis? Where did a game like this get such a terrible name? Well, it’s because the game doesn’t have a name we can understand. The elder races call the entire network of worlds the Talzeur galaxy in honor of the only first-order world. But why Project Chrysalis instead of Talzeur? The name came from entomology. All caterpillars have a stage where they enter a cocoon, only to emerge from it as a winged insect. That cocoon is called a chrysalis. For us, Project Chrysalis is a cocoon in which all of humanity goes from crawling as a caterpillar to flying off as a butterfly to our meeting with the other intelligent races in the universe. That’s why this world is called humankind’s chrysalis. On the other side of this portal, there is another world called Papilio, or the world of the butterfly.

“But let’s look back a little ways to the moment all this began. Two hundred and ten years ago, at the end of the second millennium, a theory was put forward about the existence of wormholes in our solar system that lead to other solar systems in the galaxy. It was postulated that one of them was not far from Earth and moving along with the planet. One Japanese investor who believed in the potential shown by the space industry, decided to put a team of astronauts together and fly to where that wormhole was hypothesized to be, all financed by him. Neither radar nor any other detection system could see it. But as soon as their space ship neared where they thought it would be, it appeared, a stable passageway to another star system. One of the astronauts decided to leave the ship, fly through, find out what was on the other side, and report back. The ship itself couldn’t fit through the wormhole, which was only big enough for a person, and so it was all up to him. Halfway through, the passageway turned into a