Gathering Strength Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  LitRPG Group

  LitRPG Society

  GATHERING STRENGTH

  Aaron Jay

  Gathering Strength by Aaron Jay Weingrad Published by Pip Productions LLC

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  © 2018 Aaron Weingrad

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact:

  [email protected]

  Cover by Valentina Migliore

  To My Brother - if this book is designed to please anyone more than myself it is certainly you.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Behind me was the hidden entrance to my old home, a brutal instance I had been trapped in for weeks. In front of me was an unexplored savage wilderness.

  Whatever you tell yourself, home is where you spend most of your time. If it is at the office, that is home. If you spend your life with your nose in a book, then books are your home. It turns out that my home had, until just a few minutes ago, been the Mines of Madness! Or, as I often thought of it, that stinking prison where I had murdered my best friend.

  I hated that pit, but a lot of people hate it at home so that doesn’t change anything. Lots of people also can’t escape their home situation so that didn’t disqualify my dungeon for home status either.

  Before the world ended, video games were home for lots of people: they spent as much of their lives in them as they could. People used to fantasize about actually living in a video game.

  Fantasies are never as good in reality as you thought they would be. That is why they are called fantasies.

  If you haven’t much experience with humanity let me clue you in. It turns out people are idiots. Not that I am any better. I’m people too. Look at where I was. I was living the dream that millions held before we broke the world. I don’t know who was stupider, them for thinking life in a video game would be great, or me for actually living in a video game.

  The Mines of Madness! was in Professor Brady’s territory. Given how he ran his turf I was probably the only person ever to come to this slice of the Crib. Thank God for that.

  Wiser heads have said that an adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. My head is ok, but not one of the wiser types. I was having trouble considering my inconveniences to be adventures. I had to admit it felt great to be out of the mines.

  Remus, my wolf-brother, was lolling around waiting for me to decide what to do next. Wolves don’t worry about much. He’d use the time I spent philosophizing licking himself and know that he spent his time more wisely.

  Me, I had about thirty weeks left of my year and a day bet with Maya Eastman. First prize if I win the bet is a bunch of nano. Second place wins a lifetime of slavery. All I had to do was finish off four more of the five beginner’s quests. Everyone left alive is issued one -- one of them -- when they grow up and get to start playing the Game. I had to finish all five.

  Well, now you are all caught up on my situation.

  In the months I’d been playing, I had finished the Trade Quest and that’s it. At this pace things weren’t looking good. Especially since it had been a fluke that I’d finished that one. I could do enough worrying for both me and Remus.

  On the positive side, for the moment I was safe, at least from my human enemies. Slavering monsters hopefully abounded down there in the valley. I needed the experience. You can see that I embrace the optimist’s view of life since I noted being alone, surrounded by monsters that wanted to kill me, and cut off from any civilization as a check-mark in the plus column.

  I pulled up my quest log and focused on the Beginner’s Quests:

  Settlement Building

  Crafting/Gathering

  Trade (completed)

  Problem Solving

  Combat

  Settlement Building and perhaps Crafting/Gathering seemed like the ones to tackle. I opened Settlement Building and a Blue window popped up:

  Settlement Building

  “Cheops' Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.” – R. A. H.

  “A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain.” - Player Marx

  Humanity needs you to create safe spaces for the people! Develop settlements that meet the needs of the people and keep them safe from the monsters of the wild. Recommended minimum number of players 18. You must increase the settlement quality or capacity by a minimum of 10 times the size of the party used to develop the settlement.

  The Party had this quest locked up just like all the others. They had claimed all the land and controlled all the settlements. A new player would have to come to them, cap in hand, and at best get permission to work on further developing towns and hamlets the clans owned. Pretty good deal if you can get your laborers and contractors to pay you for the privilege of remodeling your castle or enhancing your walls.

  I decided to make a quick check and stacked together some of the loose timber around the mine entrance. Even this crude effort should be enough to trigger the building menus. After the third beam I received a message:

  **Temporary Encampments Only**

  This territory is claimed by the Goldman Sachs Group*

  Building, agricultural cultivation or permanent enhancement is prohibited without permission.

  Development inquiries contact: Professor Brady, Room 3, Town Inn, Quartzite.

  *a subsidiary of Wizards of the Coast

  Brady was the gray market crime boss who sold me off to the Eastmans and threw me down a mine shaft. He had no love for me. That wasn’t personal to me. He universally had no love for people. He had no hate for people. Just uses for people.

  He had offered me a job in order to ingratiate himself with my father. But it was clear that once he made use of you, you stayed his. I already had someone I was in a desperate struggle to avoid being enslaved to. One should be monogamous with that kind of thing. I was old fashioned that way.

  Part of me had hoped that my time in the Mines would qualify as completing the Combat or Problem Solving quests but no notices had come when I finished soloing the end boss. Well, by process of elimination, Gathering was the quest to focus on.

  The mine exit was at the top of a bluff overlooking the valley floor. Looking over the edge, there didn’t seem to be a decent path down. Descending looked like a scramble at best.
The cliff-side was mostly packed earth and rock that looked like it could just as easily come loose as support my weight.

  Remus cocked one brow as he waited for me to decide what to do. My large-scale Lincoln Log game hadn’t interested him enough to do more than the aforementioned brow cock.

  With a gesture, a length of rope I had brought into the dungeon and never gotten the chance to use came out of my inventory. I tied it around one of the well planted beams framing the entrance back into the instance and threw the rest of the coil over the side of the bluff. This caused Remus to lazily get up from his flop and sniff along the edge of the cliff-side.

  As soon as I grabbed the rope and started backing down towards the valley floor, he started working his way down on his own. Four legs and a lower center of gravity made it a piece of cake for him. He didn’t seem to care that he was causing lots of dirt and loose rocks to fall on me as he made his way down. Thankfully after a few switchbacks above me he got bored of kicking dust into my face and sped down below.

  Slowly but surely, I scaled down the cliff. I couldn’t tell if or how my Beginner Spelunking skill was helping. I was only 177 skill points away from Journeyman status.

  Most of the time the Game was attempting to create a rule-set that simulated real life. But reality is endlessly more fluid and subtle than any artificial set of rules can ever be. The more explicit the rules, the more the Game could be bizarre compared to reality.

  I wasn’t in a cave, so technically I was rock climbing not spelunking. Did the game care one way or the other? Clambering down a cliff was the same inside or outside a cave. Why should it matter if I was in a cave or not? Even more oddly, some skills in the Game might trigger depending on proximity to things. So, since I was climbing down a hillside filled with mine tunnels my skill boost may have been in effect. I was cave-adjacent and that might be good enough for the Game.

  My father had made a better simulation of reality than I was giving him credit for. Inside or out of the Game we are always impacted by rules, forces and influences we have no idea about.

  The sun beat down on me, creating shadows so black that I couldn’t make out details of where to find footholds, so I ended up mostly using feel to work my way down. I found that if I leaned out from the wall it was easier to use the cliff face to brace myself but it also gave me a huge sense of vertigo. I wanted to hug the cliff but that was bad technique. Maybe my skill was working.

  Beyond spelunking, I had other skills. Just before she dropped the dime on me to Brady and the Eastmans, my master in the arcane arts, Maddie the Witch, had given me some scrolls, one of which increased my Wildlife Knowledge (local).

  I was counting on this skill to give me a shot at beating the Gathering Quest. It was also Wildlife Knowledge (local) that allowed me to properly identify the hissing giant spider as an example of Menemerus bivittatus (Gray Wall Jumper) when it came out of its burrow to see who was clambering around in its territory.

  Gray Wall Jumper

  Menemerus bivittatus

  Found almost exclusively on the exterior walls of cliff faces, dungeons, abandoned buildings or other structures, this is a common example of a monstrous spider.

  All monstrous spiders are aggressive predators that use their poisonous bite to subdue or kill prey.

  Monstrous spiders come in two general types: hunters and web-spinners. Hunters rove about, while web-spinners usually attempt to trap prey. Hunting spiders can spin webs to use as lairs but cannot use their webs as weapons the way web-spinners can.

  It would have been nice if the blue box had told me whether I was facing a hunter or a web-spinner. I must not have had a high enough knowledge skill. In the end it didn’t really matter as I only had one plan either way. I started what someone might charitably describe as a controlled fall down the cliff side. As I tumbled down I’d tighten down on the rope now and again, creating rope burns but getting my speed down to something I thought I’d survive when I ran out of rope.

  The spider aggro’ed in on me and gracefully made its way towards me. Its hairy legs had no problem finding purchase, and despite me tumbling downward at near freefall it was closing fast. It was a hunter. If not, it would have already spat webs at me.

  At just over ten feet from the bottom I ran out of rope. I was going too fast to stop and free climb the rest of the way down. Instead I dropped into a roll. It hurt like a son of a bitch but I received no damage notices. Another sign that those spelunking skills might be in effect.

  I got unsteadily to my feet just as the spider also decided to forgo climbing the rest of the cliff and launched itself at me from about twenty feet up.

  There was just enough time to pull out my Spatha, Wyrmmdigger’s Bane, and get it between us. The rime of icy magic that gave my blade an impossibly sharp edge shattered. The blade itself felt like it was covered in cold oil and even before the spider hit me I could barely hold onto the thing. Right. Wyrmmdigger’s Bane was specc’ed to be one specific tribe of kobold’s worst nightmare. Without it I’d never have made it out of the Mines of Madness! Fighting anything else I might as well as be wielding a wet noodle.

  Ever have that dream where you are attacked by a giant spider and you can’t keep hold of your weapon? I hadn’t until then either. Now it was part of my nightmare pantheon for the rest of my life. The hilt wrenched itself free from my grip as I was smashed to the ground with the Spider on top of me. One of its forelegs pierced all the way through my shoulder and its mandibles were inches from my face.

  I ignored the damage notice and the pain to focus on the mandibles twitching and lunging for my face. Poison was expressed out of glands that lined the mandibles, coating them like snot. As the thing got more excited at the idea of eating my face it pumped the poison out in small spurts. The venom’s smell competed with the sight of the poison-covered mandibles straining towards my face for pride of place in my future nightmares. Arthropods are horrifying.

  You may be judging me harshly for lack of proper preparation leading to my poor performance. Guilty as charged. No excuses. Not swapping out my weapon once I exited the mines was stupid. I hope it redeems me a bit in your eyes that I remembered the spell cached in my recently acquired Ring of Spell Storage and unleashed it into the Gray Wall Jumper’s thorax.

  “Maijika Misā'īla!”

  Three tiny comets of arcane force flew from my ring, made a short u-turn, and hit the spider one after the other in the exact same spot. The gray hairy body deformed at the first strike and cracked on the second. The third entered the wound and the creature stopped trying to close in for the kill and just twitched randomly as its life drained away. The loot from the Mines of Madness end boss really was the perfect item for me. Yay, Ring of Spell Storage.

  As I scrabbled out from underneath the dead spider, adrenaline from the sudden attack allowed me to pull the leg out of my shoulder with a short sharp yank. Pain is odd when you know your wounds aren’t real. I was learning to handle it under the rush of combat. I had no idea if I could do as well getting pierced through the shoulder in real life, and had no plans to find out.

  I spun around and searched the cliff face to see if this was part of a swarm. Nothing else seemed poised to attack me. My breathing started to calm and I quickly found one of the least crappy swords looted from the Wyrmmdiggers in my bag of holding and equipped it.

  Looking around I found Wyrmmdigger’s Bane lying where it had been flung, covered in dirt and dust. I put it in my inventory on the off chance I ever ran into more of the tribe.

  Remus wandered over, gave the spider a sniff, moved away till he was far enough that the leaking body wouldn’t bother him and flopped down again.

  “Some help you are,” I said.

  All I got in return was a yawn.

  It took me a few tries to reload the spell ring with another Magic Missile. Then I pulled out some tools and went to work harvesting what I could from the spider. Dissecting a giant spider is not the easiest of tasks. I had damaged one of the claws
pulling it out of my shoulder. So, from this battle I had gained a chunk of experience, a shoulder wound and these items:

  Poison Sac x 2

  Spider Claw x 7

  I had thought I’d start working on the Crafting/Gathering beginner’s quest when I got down to the valley, but the spider had given me some points even before I hit the valley floor.

  The Crafting/Gathering beginner’s quest was the simplest and the most commonly given.

  “Labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother. A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” - Player Marx

  Humanity needs materials and items crafted from them to survive! Collect or craft items and donate them.

  Seems simple right? You could donate just about anything. Anything you made or looted: potions, weapons, armor, devices, scrolls, anything. Any base materials could be donated: herbs, ores, monster parts, eggs, tamed creatures, captured creatures, gold--anything.

  This was the quest that almost everyone received. This was the quest that most everyone worked towards. The Party didn’t control access to working on this quest. It had the fewest seeming barriers to entry. In fact, it had only one. But boy was it a doozy. The proof of this is that most people never left The Crib.

  With some manipulation of my game interface, I was able to “donate” the Gray Wall Jumper’s loot towards completing the quest. I was rewarded with a completion bar. As far as I could discern my donation had no effect whatsoever. That was how little the loot I had just donated counted towards finishing. With some further manipulation of my interface I was able to figure out that the items I had donated counted .00357% towards finishing the goal.