Alpha Zero (Alpha LitRPG Book 1) Arthur Stone (hardest books to read .txt) 📖

Shadow of Chi (0.69): level 0

Measure of Order (3.28): level 3

The dark shape of another wisp appeared in the fog. Like the others, it approached me at a relatively slow speed, moving in a straight line.

I gave the wheel ten more turns, and the ridiculous creature continued as if hypnotized, a dozen paces away from me.

I stopped turning the wheel and pushed the rod out to the left as my right hand drew a knife. I threw, ready to grab the spear I had stuck into the ground in case I missed.

You are using cunning to attract the wisp’s attention. You have tricked the wisp. You have dealt significant damage to the wisp. You have dealt fatal damage to the wisp. The wisp is dead. You have defeated the wisp. This creature is part Chaos (Chaos Power 5).

You receive:

Lesser Chaos Mark x12

Lesser Attribute Power x1

Lesser Concentrated Warrior Energy x1

Lesser Universal Chaos Talent Mark x2

Lesser Enhanced Shadow of Chi State x1

Lesser Enhanced Measure of Order State x1

Lesser Primal Essence x1

Lesser Standard Universal State x1

The wisp is a part Chaos creature.

You receive Emblem of Valor x1

What was that, the 70th wisp I had killed? The 80th? Something like that. What mattered was that my method was nearly perfect.

I was an intelligent opponent, after all. The first thing I had considered was how it was that wisps noticed their prey. Vision was not much use in a fog so thick, but still, they could notice you from a distance. Did the balls of poison have some kind of talent that let them see through the mist? Or was their sense of hearing just that good?

I suspected the latter immediately. After all, the first five wisps had not dropped me a talent mark related to finding prey in fog. Of course, since Chaos skills were so rare, this was not incontrovertible evidence. The creatures’ behavior and body structure was suspicious. A flying, buzzing, hollow ball with strange, perforated appendages on its sides and front. They literally deflated when punctured.

Also, their flying was awkward, at best. Their lift was fine, but their acceleration, stopping, and yawing from side to side looked like a blind man groping for a stair rail.

I decided to test their hearing.

How? Not by approaching them and shouting, of course.

That would have been great if I was looking to encounter a swarm of wisps, personal paralysis, and then an audience with the rukh himself.

That would make for a great story. A great, untold story.

Taking stock of what we had available, I soon devised a simple and reasonably safe way to lure the creatures. Fishing was my primary specialty. I put a bunch of lures at the end of my line, with no hooks attached. It came down to a weighty enough load, which tinkled when it moved. I could cast it far enough and make a lot of noise, which was exactly what I wanted.

Then, I wandered the edge of the red lands for a long time, listening for the buzzing of the wisps. I noticed no patterns in these sounds—the concentration of the creatures varied greatly from place to place and from time to time.

I began to select the places and times where the wisps showed minimal activity. I would make a rapid push forward of about fifty yards, swing the spinning, sending the clanking bundle flying—and then retreat to my start position, unwinding the line behind me.

Then, I would start jerking the line a little bit, creating some noise at the other end. Sometimes, the wisps would ignore this, and I would have to start all over. Other times, numbers of them would fly over, and I would hear two or more creatures buzzing. When this happened, I stopped jiggling the rod and waited for the creatures to calm down.

I wanted to lure only one at a time so that I could deal with it easily. When I did draw them in, they moved as if hypnotized. Even as close as ten feet from me, the wisp would continue to putter along, staring at the source of the jingling noise. I probably didn’t even need the throwing knives—the spear would have been enough.

But I used the knives. There was no sense taking unnecessary chances.

And so, for two days straight now, I had been massacring wisps. Never did I come under attack from more than one. There was too little space inside the creatures for a decent brain, especially with all the air they had to hold in there. If the local hunters had rods and wits like mine, they could have generated a business from these beasts.

Beko had claimed that the drops were miserly, though. The only thing that could be extracted from them was their poison glands—and that was a risky and unprofitable business. The glands were not a spice, just an ingredient for low-value potions and weak ointments for joint pain. And there was always a risk of encountering the wisps’ master. What if people’s conclusions were wrong, and he sometimes attacked not just the paralyzed but also the whole? Perhaps no one had ever tried to develop a method like mine.

I did not kill wisps everywhere—only near the place we had encountered them the day before yesterday. I wanted to inspect the battlefield and recover my lost knives.

The buzzing had been reduced significantly, but still I decided not to venture further inward. I took a few hours the next morning to fish. There were plenty of kotes here, under the shelf, but most were medium size or larger. I had to pay attention in order to avoid hooking a torpedo-sized fish that could tear my tackle clean off or even pull me off the raft. All the while, of course, I kept an eye out for garpikes.

The fishing trip