Gestation by John Gold (love books to read .txt) 📗

as I can, trying to stay under water the whole time. The salvo from our ship strikes a hundred meters to my right, and I pick up a hearing debuff. The second frigate is about fifty meters ahead of me, with the third a hundred meters behind it. That’s my target.

Attempting to grab hold of the ship at full speed practically kills me. I bang my head on the hull, only barely grabbing the stern and clambering up it. When I jump down off the bulwark right behind the wheel, I see that the whole crew, complete with the captain, is up by the bow ready to board. A quick dab of poison, and the helmsman drops quietly to the deck. I head over to the wheel. None of the pirates are expecting their ship to turn parallel to ours, but that’s what happens.

It takes a quick battle, though it’s only the captain who’s hard to take out. He’s the only one who uses a sword and a dagger at the same time, and he’s practically immune to stunning, too. I win when I smear the poison all over his face. As long as he doesn’t die.

The frigate is a bit small for what I’m looking for, and drawing the ritual blood seal takes some doing. I make just two levels—three points of strength with ten victims each. Geroit was right about there being exactly thirty of them. The only problem is what I’m going to enchant, since I don’t have mithril and don’t plan on picking any up any time soon. The price is prohibitive. Instead, I have to use a silver ring without a gem that I made in Heron after I found a small deposit of the metal. Once the sacrifice on the deck is over and the fight in the astral taken care of, I get what I’m looking for.

Captain Archie’s ring

The pirate captain gained fame as a terrible human with a love of torture. Over the long years, the ring he wore soaked in all the pain and suffering, not to mention the mastery of its former owner.

Effect:

Agility: +20

Requirement:

personal item

Durability:

125/125

There it is: to create a nice, scalable item, you need at least eighty-five victims. The kind of victims you use, the way you kill them, and the material you use all plays a part. If I had mithril, I’d be able to create a ring with three attributes rather than the one I got. Still, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. I take it and walk away happy.

Hey, at least Eliza didn’t pull me out of the game for something little like this.

By the time I get rid of the bodies and clear away all traces of the ritual, the battle on our ship is over, too. They weren’t able to capture the third frigate, though they were able to drive it away.

Geriont tells me that the pirates started to have second thoughts when they saw the ship I was on turn and sail away. They realized they no longer had a numerical advantage and turned to run.

“What are you going to do with your trophy?”

“Sell it and everything on board. I don’t need a ship.”

“How much are you looking to get for it?”

“I’ll figure that out in the city. Why, do you have an offer?”

Geriont thought for a little while.

“I might be able to help with the sale. That will also grab the attention of people who work with the pirates.”

“What would you like in return?”

“A quarter of the return.”

“That’s a lot, and you know it. However, I’m willing to pay it if you’ll give me some information.”

The captain smiles. And why not? He just won the jackpot. Yes, my friend, you don’t even know why I agreed. It was because he was right. I don’t want any kind of attention.

“I need to find out where a city called Zird is located. I need information about the continent’s strongest monsters, too. Then, I’ll need the best healer in Sural who can do body modifications, and a tattoo master. Most importantly, I’m going to need books on magic. You’ll have your money, and I don’t care how legal they are, I just need to know about them.” The captain’s expression turned all the more serious as I went along, mentioning the port we were on our way to.

“That sounds terrifying coming from a kid at Level 0, but I’ll do it.”

He doesn’t bother me the rest of the trip, something I’m very thankful for.

The weather becalms us for two days, and I dive into the water to look for the most poisonous fish I can find. But I find out something odd. At a depth of a hundred meters, I start taking physical damage, apparently from the water pressure. That’s something to think about! I’ve been looking for somewhere that does constant physical damage, and it looks like that does the trick. It’s just a shame that I don’t have any potions for underwater breathing, as only alchemists can brew those. It’s three hundred meters to the bottom, and I assume that depth would kill me. It’s a perfect spot to train, though.

Today, I decide to relax in the real world and read. I need to figure out what’s going on with my body. It’s my mental stress that’s overloading me, and I can control my stream of thoughts, but doing that gives me a nosebleed. I need to dig into the problem to see how my brain and neurophysiology work. I lose consciousness after spending almost twenty-four hours like that, waking up once again in a personal virtual space at the hospital.

∞ ∞ ∞

Less than a month after the previous instance, Eliza was back in the virtual space with Anji. He’d overloaded himself and started bleeding yet again.

“Hi, Anji. We’re having a hard time here—every time we see each other, I have to give you a punishment or tell you off for doing something stupid. How could you study for