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

All on my own, I succeeded where Treya and all of her instructors had failed. More than that, I could repeat it at will, having grasped the underlying process.

Which was easy as pie.

* * *

This world was called Rock. Technically, the sole vowel should be drawled, and indeed it was written as “Roock,” but I shortened it to “Rock” as a hat tip to my first life.

I couldn’t be sure if the name applied to the entire planet, however. Treya had been my main teacher, and I hadn’t always understood her. Nor could I have risked asking clever questions, lest I shattered the image of a mentally deficient and utterly empty creature.

Hiding behind a mask of a hopeless imbecile was all too easy for someone who had both a full memory and a burning thirst for vengeance. The challenge was having the discipline not to give myself away with even the tiniest detail. And that especially pertained to speech.

Which meant trying to beat Camai in the silent game.

The local populace had interesting sets of beliefs. Perhaps my own ancestors had believed in much of the same in times of antiquity, back when atheism was unheard of, and the gods, despite their invisibility, were as real a concept as gravity was for my contemporaries.

To be clear, the world of Rock didn’t have gods. Not anymore, at least. According to legend, in the process of creating the world, the deities had overextended themselves a bit. Desperate to push the realm away from the territory of unspeakable nightmare—or chaotic grayness—at the edge of which my own homeland was situated, they had dissolved into their creation.

And so, though the gods themselves didn’t really exist, their power persisted everywhere on Rock, in the littlest speck of dust. Some places or objects were more or less successful at accumulating it, but there could not be a place in which it could be completely absent. At least that was my understanding of the explanations that had been leveled at me.

And it was that invisible, intangible substance that I referred to as “chi.”

Various creatures, including the sentient kind, possessed an apparatus with which to harness and command this power. And I had just managed to gain access to it.

The first thing I noticed was that I was hopelessly confused, unable to make heads or tails of anything. What was I supposed to do here? What should I be calling the things I was seeing? It was like throwing a user of a simple calculator into a piece of badly designed computer modeling software, and providing the instruction manual in an obscure language. Optimized, it was not—nor user friendly.

Perhaps things were different with normal children. I, on the other hand, was a native of Earth, a grown man confined to the body of a child that was deficient in every conceivable way. So, perhaps the degenerate’s apparatus of interacting with chi was likewise deficient. Perhaps that was the reason Treya’s son had been born empty. So deformed was the body I had inherited, which included the instrument intended for working with the parameters of Order, that I hadn’t even been able to access it until after the colossal release of energy from the clan’s repository.

But now, it appeared that I had. So what’s next? I felt like a caveman staring at a Windows logo on a computer screen.

For the first few minutes, I didn’t understand anything at all. Then, after a bit of trial and error, I learned that the tangle, which comprised a substantial part of my field of vision, could be controlled. Specifically, I could modify its position and configuration, remove pieces and put them back together, and, if I willed it, I could even make manifest lines of text that appeared to serve as descriptions or explanations. At first, these were but hazy images, but I quickly learned to translate them to letters and words.

None of that helped to make any sense—until a thought came to me that I should try looking at this thing not as something entirely alien, but as the interface of some familiar computer program. The closest association that came to mind when looking at this visual mess was that of a talent tree from a role-playing game. One of the main features of such games was the ability to modify different parameters that impacted the effectiveness of your character’s skills or certain items.

That changed everything for the better. To be sure, it took me a while, but in the end I managed to reshape the mess into a coherent structure, the kind all the normal natives probably started with by default.

I was a unique degenerate, indeed. And would require unique solutions.

Every child born on Rock came with their own kind of reservoir of chi. The process of traversing the birth canal became their first trial, and by completing it successfully, the gods that permeated the world rewarded the newborn by filling this starting receptacle.

This was how natives earned their first degree of enlightenment. A great achievement in the bag before they would even cry about being removed from their warm and cozy home.

An achievement that had taken me twelve long years.

Because I hadn’t had a chi reservoir to begin with. Such was my fate as a degenerate cripple. Despite mother’s and her instructors’ best efforts to locate it, their failures would have them admit that nature must have been asleep on the job when my turn had come. Yet, the paradox defied belief: in a world so thoroughly permeated with divine emanations, it was hard to imagine the existence of a child so thoroughly lacking in even the smallest particles of the primordial force. A fully empty vessel was simply nonviable. Such cases were common with C-sections. The higher powers considered this type of birth too easy for the child, oftentimes