The next thing I did was make some Depths Teleportation scrolls. If Beta found me again, maybe I could use a scroll to escape. Thinking a moment, I made some Lethargy scrolls too. Could come in handy. Although I doubted it, with such a big gap in levels…
I pressed my way through the jungle and reached the shore. There were many islands near Kharinza, and some of them had life. I had no idea how long my freedom would last, but I knew that no matter what happened, the more I leveled up, the better my chances.
The gentle waters of the Bottomless Ocean lapped my bare feet as they sank into the snow-white sand. Standing up to my waist in the water, I tried to make out the direction of the nearest island, but the fog of war made it impossible.
Fish in all colors of the rainbow tickled my toes in the surf. I looked at one of them and my breath caught.
Spotted Blowfish, level 64729 fish
The fish were neutral, even this monster, which could have easily crushed Orthokon the kraken. Bomber would be so upset…
The peace broke as a horrible pain lanced through my foot.
Spotted Blowfish dealt you critical damage: 1,020,298,113,995!
Burning Poison: -5% health every 10 seconds (1 minute).
Damage fully absorbed by Equanimity.
The Path of Equanimity saved me! Resilience jumped up fourteen levels at once and extended my invulnerability at the start of the battle to sixteen seconds. That was enough for the venomous bloated fish to kill itself against my Reflection, deflating like a balloon.
I stood for a long time in flashes of light, flooded by experience. It continued so long that I even got bored, but I had to wait—a character couldn’t move while leveling up, as if paralyzed with happiness. No wonder. I would have jumped for joy if I could.
Good thing I didn’t catch aggro from anything else.
Spotted Blowfish is dead.
You leveled up…!
You leveled up…!
You leveled up…!
• • •
You leveled up! Current level: 2988.
11930 free attribute points available!
The creepy fish turned over and floated belly-up. Rainbow blood floated across the water’s smooth surface. I stretched out a hand and looted it myself. Magnetism was ignoring the loot because of my filter settings.
You got a Smoldering Nether Shard.
Smoldering Nether Shard
Common.
Combine 1,000,000 shards to make a Smoldering Nether Essence.
Used to activate a Lesser Rift leading to another dimension.
Sale price: 1 copper coin.
Beta said that a Lesser Rift was unsuitable for the Piercers; it could only let through one creature. But that was enough for me.
Now all I had to do to escape the Nether was collect nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine shards.
Interlude 1: Horvac
IN THE BEGINNING, Horvac Onegut wanted to become an astronaut. It was with those thoughts that he joined the military space academy, completed a mechatank piloting course and signed a contract that assured him a cushy position at SpaceX when it ran out.
There was a year left until his sendee in the peacekeepers came to an end. Hoi*vac was sent to North China, where he tried not to die alongside other peacekeepers.
There he saw a fast-burning but horrible war with his own eyes, and Hoi-vac changed his mind about conquering interstellar space. He felt death’s breath in his mechatank cabin, which just barely managed to jump onto the transport platform an instant before the nuke went off.
When Horvac ended his tour, no thoughts of space remained. He just wanted to live, with no more of the trials and tribulations of army service.
Three years after the war, in 2056, Disgardium was released. The full-immersion game had been announced a few years before the war and was a source of anticipation not only for gamers, but for the whole world. World War III distracted attention from it, but as it turned out, the game’s development hadn’t stopped for a single day.
The developer company Snowstorm announced that it was planning to pay online players—under certain conditions, of course. The announcement caused a range of questions. Some just rolled their eyes, certain that the company wouldn’t last long: its business model didn’t stand up to criticism and this was all just hype to attract new users. Some voiced careful hopes that Snowstorm would keep its promise, but all the same, nobody should count on decent payment. Others just saved money for a VR capsule, because Snowstorm announced that Disgardium would only be compatible with their corporation’s capsules. The game simply wouldn’t launch on any other.
In the meantime, Horvac was sick of having nothing to do. Fighting on the right side of a war had won him not only a high citizenship status and all the privileges therein, but also a sizable pension. Carefully invested money allowed him to live on dividends alone, with his pension payout merely adding extra to an already impressive account. Actually, he barely paid attention to Dis’s upcoming release, but you couldn’t get away from the adverts all over the internet.
He’d bought a premium Snowstorm capsule already, attracted by the promise of a soon-to-be-released space simulator where you could play as a space pirate, an interstellar merchant or a peaceful asteroid miner. But when Dis was released and Horvac registered out of curiosity, all thoughts of the space simulator disappeared.
This wasn’t just a game; it was practically a new reality’ in a magical world where the experiences were even more vivid than in life. Dis swallowed up Horvac. Everything he’d been missing in the real world, he found in Disgardium. A surplus of free time and a sizable bank balance allowed him to become one of the first hardcore players.
The skills he’d gained in war found their uses in
