Path of Spirit (Disgardium Book #6): LitRPG Series by Dan Sugralinov (best free e reader .txt) 📗

more importantly how, do I find a crazy person who’s sold his soul to demons?”

“We can smell ‘em a mile off,” Flaygray answered. “It’s always clear when there’s a demonic mark on someone’s soul.”

“A mile off isn’t figurative, boss. That’s about how close we have to be.” Nega circled me, stroking my cheek with the tip of her tail. “But this old fart and I will have to go looking. Not in our own forms, of course. Don’t worry, we can easily disguise ourselves as a couple of young humans…”

Flaygray immediately overflowed with ideas for his disguise. Nega started arguing with him.

I sat on the ground, face in my hands. Each day, each hour, I seemed to sink deeper into a tangled web of problems. Solve one and two new ones spring up in its place, like the legendary hydra when you cut off its heads. I was annoyed with myself for not laying a route on Holdest when the frost wasn’t an issue. But now… Wait! A revelation came to me. I shot to my feet, leaving my guardians in confusion and jumping straight to Holdest.

The icy coast met me with a biting wind. My eyes froze, my nose stung, my breath caught. The hell with it!

Paying no attention to any of it, I ran as fast as I could toward the South Pole. The frost debuff refreshed, adding a penalty to movement speed to the deadly ticks of damage. My Resilience did nothing at all. But that didn’t bother me. I had a theory to test.

Sinking in snowdrifts, I staggered to my goal and remembered how I’d reached Behemoth in the Mire. I had drowned and died, but revived in the same spot thanks to Patrick’s curse. Now I had something similar — Second Life, with a one-hundred-percent chance. Did that mean that I would, after dying time and time again, eventually reach the place of power?

You are dead.

 

Remaining time to respawn 9… 8… 7…

 

Second Life! You managed to dodge death!

 

Choosing my place of death as my respawn point, I came back to life, but had no time to even celebrate before I died again.

You are dead.

 

Remaining time to respawn 9… 8… 7…

 

That damned frost buff hadn’t gone anywhere, and it kept all its stacks through death! Second Life had canceled my death, and the penalties to experience with it, but the debuff hadn’t reset.

There was no way we could reach the Nucleus, even if I won the essence at the Demonic Games. My theory had failed.

Flaygray and Nega would have to take a trip round Dis.

 

 

Chapter 19. Trials at Mecharri Mountain

I COULDN’T TAKE the whole group through the depths to the Auction of Special Sales all at once — the boys and Irita didn’t have the right to be there. So I contacted Grokuszuid and introduced the girl to him.

The auctioneer stuck his head through the portal opening, shot us an exaggerated frown and scratched his throat with his claws.

“I don’t know, Scyth, I just don’t know. This goes against the founding principles of the entire League!” He looked at Irita in displeasure and spoke to her directly: “You might have at least bought some goblin souvenir, young lady, for decorum. Or made a sacrifice to greedy and heartless Maglubiyet, to demonstrate your, shall we say, respect for the League.”

“Mr. Grokuszuid, can we drop the formalities?” I asked. “Believe me, I have a lot to do, and Irita is responsible for all our trading operations now. If you refuse to work with her, then we can’t trade at the ASS, which means you don’t get your fee.”

Grokuszuid laughed, waved a hand, expanded the portal to let a human pass:

“Come through, Madame Irita. Mr. Scyth always wants everything yesterday, but with you, I suspect, we will be able to take a wiser approach to trading.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Grokuszuid,” Irita curtsied. “I’ve put together a full list of the legendary weaponry and armor the clan would like to sell. For a good price, of course.”

“Capital, capital!” The goblin rubbed his hands. “Then let us not waste time!”

Crawler clenched his teeth as he watched the scene. It was clear by his face that he’d rather be in Irita’s shoes — he’d had his eye on the Goblin League auction house for a long time. But the roles in the team were already set; he had to go with me.

When the portal clapped shut behind the girl, I summoned Kusalarix. The goblin woman was already waiting and told us to come straight through the portal.

We found ourselves not in her office, but at the foot of Mount Mecharri near Kinema, by a cliff overgrown with ivy. The mountain itself looked like the top of a balding old man’s head towering over the cliffs: the slopes were covered in trees, but the higher you went, the sparser the trees became. The very top, which must have been the mouth of an ancient volcano, was bare and gray-black. The imagination wanted to put a bobble hat on it.

A goblin woman sat in a red boiler suit next to a chubby goblin man in a trampled glade, rooting through some half-empty bags in search of something. Further along the cliff was a gnome doing something complicated with an instrument. A forest surrounded us, and the trees were twice as tall as those on Kharinza, like sequoias, only leafier.

The male goblin turned at the clap of the portal and scampered over to us, shaking all our hands in turn and introducing himself as Chief Magineer Fitzbos. He nodded toward the gnome that was so busy with his work that he hadn’t noticed us.

“He’s tracking seismic fluctuations and we’re calculating them into the portal cannon settings. Well, who is going first?”

Bomber stepped forward, shrugging. He