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

for what purpose? I kept trying to come up with some plausible explanations, but so far none of them had clicked.

Though these two had referred to themselves as good people, if their treatment of pedestrians was any indication, goodness was not one of their primary attributes. Besides, good people wouldn’t have appropriated my money the way they had.

So, in all likelihood, I’d gotten myself in some kind of trouble.

On the other hand, I wasn’t going to get far on my own two feet, so I might as well hitch a ride to wherever they were taking me.

Then, I supposed, they would do whatever they wanted...

* * *

I had heard of Redriver before, but had never actually seen it. No one in their right mind would have taken me there—and I would’ve had to be out of my mind to go on my own. But even if I had tried, my body would have failed me after ten steps.

Not that there was a reason to go. Redriver served as a natural border between the relatively settled north and other, either untamed or utterly wild parts of it. The further out you went, the gloomier it got. And once you passed the Foothills—assuming you could even make it to a place where even warriors of the twenty-first circle couldn’t always reach—that was when the truly terrible places began. The local version of the gates of hell, where the Order itself was an infrequent guest, for this was Chaos’ domain.

Lying past these lands was not hell, but rifts through which chaosites came into Rock. That was my name for forces that adhered to their own systems of order, congruent with their host worlds in some ways, discordant in others.

Magic hadn’t existed in Rock until the arrival of Chaos. Or rather, it had, but there hadn’t been any instruments for working with it.

It had been the chaosites that brought those.

Along with a multitude of other, far less pleasant novelties. Ever since then, the lands that ended up being in close proximity to the rifts’ locations remained abandoned and extremely inhospitable.

Thankfully, we didn’t have to travel that far—there would be no sense in starting up a trading post in a place where it couldn’t survive even a year. From what I’d gleaned talking with Rycer and Krol, we had about two days of travel left. Assuming that the caravan would continue heading strictly north at a similar leisurely pace, that meant a distance of less than fifty miles. Possibly a lot less, though I couldn’t be too sure given such imprecise data.

When I laid eyes on Redriver for the first time, I felt a great disappointment. The sinister frontier looked like an ordinary lowland river. A couple of hundred yards across, with a sluggish current and muddy waters. The banks were lined with reeds, and the walls were perforated with dead channels overgrown with duckweed. The shallows abounded with seaweed-decorated snags washed downstream, lily-white herons promenading between them as they scoured for food.

On the opposite bank stretched the very Wild Wood with which the locals so loved to scare their kids. As well as other grownups. Only I wasn’t seeing anything scary. The relatively flat and sandy slope was covered in underbrush and short leafy saplings. Beyond those, sparse pine trees soared like skyscrapers. That meant the wood had plenty of natural light. Nor should it be as damp as the forest on this side of the river, the terrain being more elevated than these marshlands.

Yet, the caravanners’ behavior made it clear how seriously they were approaching the crossing. Even the peasants, which had ostensibly been sent to the trading station to work off debt or some such minor infractions, were being armed with gnarled clubs, stored in the last wagon until now for this very purpose. Once armed, the newly minted “militia” were warned to hold on to their weapons from here on.

Women, children and the elderly made for dubious soldiers, especially armed with such crude weapons. But it was better than nothing.

No club was issued to me. No sense arming a teenager who was barely able to stay on his feet even without a weapon. And indeed, I was capable of taking no more than ten or twenty uncertain steps before being overtaken by dizziness and needing something to hold on to until it passed. And if I continued moving, the fits became more frequent.

This was concerning. Were I to find myself in danger, I wouldn’t even be able to get away. The infusion of energy I had felt from the wave of chi was long gone. My body was wracked with pain as it adjusted to the amulet’s changed attributes. No, I wouldn’t be getting far in such a sorry state, and I had no idea how long it would persist.

The speed of my recovery was all over the place. And bloody confusing.

Naturally, there was no bridge, these lands being not nearly so civilized as to support major engineering projects. The dirt road came out to a sandy ford, at which point the wheels of the heavily loaded wagons started to get stuck. I had to leave the comfort of my carriage and proceed on foot to make it easier for the others to push.

A question arose that I couldn’t resist asking.

“Won’t the caravan get stuck? The river bottom seems to be lined with the same sand.”

“You dolt,” Krol replied lazily. “The wheels get stuck in dry sand. Wet sand is a breeze for foot and wheel alike.”

A dolt, indeed. It had been a while since I saw sand, so I had forgotten about this aspect of it.

The twelve years spent in the homestead had left me completely unaccustomed to life’s basic realities. I would have to work on restoring the lost skills and knowledge posthaste. My objective was challenging and my time limited—and a clumsy simpleton