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

resulting in the receptacle not being filled to the top. An amount of chi insufficient to attain the first degree meant a quick and certain death for the newborn.

One of the instructors had theorized that my vessel hadn’t been partially filled. It simply didn’t exist at all, and that somehow allowed me to keep up my miserable existence. Mother hadn’t agreed with him, maintaining that the vessel was there, but that it was perfectly empty, without a drop of the primordial essence, and that also somehow prevented me from dying. That was why she had flushed all her wealth down the drain in an effort to fill me up manually, hoping that this unconventional method would ultimately bring me to the first degree.

And down the drain it had gone. The chi just wouldn’t stay in me, like water running through a sieve. No one knew where it went, only that nothing had remained.

Until today.

Today, for the first time, I saw my reservoir. To be sure, it was either immaterial or comprised of matter so rarefied that it didn’t really matter. I could use my will to manipulate it into any shape. After a bit of experimenting, I decided on a ring, and placed it right at the center.

This was the essential core. The foundation of my other self. A superstructure so critical, no denizen of Rock could survive without it.

And, in my case, only partially filled. My inner eye saw it as a ring made of cheap and dirty silver, having been carefully sawed open, and the resulting hollow filled with the purest gold. If I could paint the remaining parts the same bright-yellow color, I would move on to the first degree. That is to say, I would achieve what the local infants received at the very start.

A tsunami of chi had passed through my body, devastating everyone around who hadn’t the blood of the Crow. And all that power had been barely enough to fill a tiny hollow in the emptiness of my ring.

Where would I get the rest? I’d had only the abunai, and that had been blown to the smithereens. I couldn’t begin to fathom where to look for any additional chi.

And yet, this wasn’t my only handicap.

At birth, the locals typically received three attributes out of a possible five. Ignoring the highfalutin language used to describe these, I would call them simply: Strength, Agility, and Stamina. The words were expected to be capitalized when written—and affected with a reverential tone when spoken.

Each attribute came with its own degree and milestones—or levels. From zero, when it made no impact at all, to a certain max. Take, for instance, two young people of a similar age. The first gets poor nutrition and doesn’t do any manual labor, so he grows up soft, yet manages to develop within himself the Strength attribute. The second is the opposite: eats like a horse, works like an ox, and pumps iron in his spare time, but pays no mind to his attributes.

Suppose the two decided to hold a weight-lifting competition. In such an event, the athlete may well lose to the weakling due to the difference in their attributes. No doubt, the latter would have a tall hill to climb to compensate for his physical inferiority; and yet, in this world, the prospect of such a pipsqueak beating out a bodybuilder was not out of the realm of possibilities.

For the overwhelming majority of the populace, these three attributes were quite enough. There just weren’t that many professions in this world that required more.

Those who managed to manifest and level all three attributes were called omegas. So, any local reference to omega-threes had nothing to do with fish oil food supplements. Rather, it meant a person who had achieved the third degree of enlightenment, having developed nothing but the three attributes acquired at birth.

So, the matter of the chi reservoir was more or less settled. First, I actually had one. And second, it was at degree zero, and barely filled with anything. Practically empty.

The matter of the attributes was worse. I had none.

They weren’t empty or partially developed.

There weren’t any at all.

I was a zero on both fronts: degrees of enlightenment, as well as attributes.

I was a creature that had no business existing in this world.

Not an omega-zero, but a zero-zero.

Not even at square one. Square zero. The very bottom.

Chapter 7 Good People

 

 

Degrees of Enlightenment: Unknown

Attributes: none

Skills: none

States: none

I was trying everything possible to find that with which the nature of this strange world should have presumably endowed Gedar’s body. And getting nowhere. Not Agility, not Strength, not Stamina. Nothing. I wouldn’t even make it here as an indigent serf, as the physical body alone meant very little. Even if I somehow managed to train my body into amazing shape, like that of a pro athlete, the best I could hope for was matching the level of a pitiful omega-one. On a good day.

And I wouldn’t have too many good days. Here, the parameters of Order were paramount—the foundation upon which stood absolutely everything. Without them, there wouldn’t be anything to develop.

But I did discover something interesting as a result of my “introspection.” It turned out that my body had not one superstructure, but two. The first was the primary one—the ring scarcely filled with chi. The second contained an odd-looking vessel filled to the second degree of enlightenment, and containing all three attributes at decently raised levels: Stamina at nine, Agility at six, and Strength at three.

Decent, because one degree of enlightenment only added six points to the attributes of a standard omega. Whether by blind luck or careful selection, one attribute would be raised to three, another to two, and the third to one. And that was it. If you wanted