LIGHTNOVELONLINE Chapter 16: Creeping Death
Aalam
Aalam finished looking over the brief memory of a Rollie-Pollie Mila’d sent through their rings’ connection and then looked down at his feet again, annoyed. The insects hadn’t been able to bite through his robes, but the two that had gone after his feet had bitten him easily.
He could see why shoes weren’t really a thing. With a high Perception stat, sensing minute vibrations in the ground would become possible, and shoes would make that harder. With a decent Toughness, stepping on rocks or glass would no longer cause injuries, removing the main reason for footwear in the first place. And, with higher and higher Agility, the flexibility brought by bare feet would quickly become important for balance and rapid changes of direction in combat.
Still, he’d like something like the fingerless glove covering his left hand for his feet. Just a little armor would have stopped him from being stuck.
Taking his first qi recovery potion, Aalam continued running his qi throughout his body, gathering the slight amount of superfluous energy from his cells for the slight amount of extra efficiency it would give. Then he guided his qi and the superfluous energy to his feet to help boost the regenerative effects from his Vitality, continuing to help speed up the process of his body’s natural recovery, the only healing he had access to.
Health recovery potions weren’t really a thing like in most litrpgs, and it made sense why. Health wasn’t a universal resource like qi, mana, or psyforce. What recovery meant for every type of animal was different and, even with magic, that fact wouldn’t change.
Health recovery potions were, however, possible, just as healing skills and healing artifacts were possible. They just had to be designed to work with a species and they required a high level of qi control to guide the energy to the right place, qi control tutorial trial takers were not expected to have.
Thus, like in classic Dungeons and Dragons, the only healing which could usually be found in tutorials was from those who gave themselves up to gods to eventually become clerics or paladins, using the power of their god’s Laws to make up for their own terrible energy control.
Given the Yin Yang Sage had blocked access to their trial’s temple, however, no gods could interfere, so there was no one able to provide healing, leaving Aalam to heal himself.
As he took his second qi recovery potion, another insect monster entered the room, the third one attracted to the smell of its dead brethren so far. And, like the two which had come near the beginning, it died as soon as it got within the light of the lantern artifact Aalam had left on the floor, Aalam’s Epic skill Mental Spike, empowered by his middle grade Law Egg of Entropy, killing it instantly.
Then Aalam had to wait another half hour before his wounds were completely healed and his resources were back to full, three extra dead insects added to the room during that time, and he was finally able to get moving.
Instead of trying to walk quietly like Mila, however, Aalam took a different approach, moving to the wall away from the room’s only entrance and then yelling at the top of his lungs.
As expected, a whole swarm of the insectoid F ranks, came toward him, but Aalam was ready this time. He tossed a grenade filled with his poison Heat Death at the entrance of the room and took an antidote for it himself. Then he watched as every insect which came tried to get through the invisible gas and started to boil to death for their trouble.
They didn’t die instantly, their cries bringing even more of their brethren, but their senses were disrupted, so they couldn’t find Aalam on the other side of the small room, instead attacking others of their kind suffering the same fate.
Five minutes later, the poison in the air lost its effect, but the area Aalam had arrived in was clear of the insects, and it was very easy for him to move around.
It took him only three minutes to find one of the more major hallways and there were signs on the wall just as Mila had seen. Then he sent the image to her and she got back to him with the translation in almost an instant, allowing him to know he was already on the fifteenth floor.
This showed just how useful having Mila around was and, because of her, he also knew not to go out into the hallway.
As he watched, Rollie-Pollies flew by once every ten to fifteen seconds, showing just how dangerous the larger hallways were. But he didn’t have to enter the larger hallway at all, instead moving along a path he could see thanks to the map to a different larger hallway. There he waited for a Rollie-Pollie to pass and then he ran across to another section of the underground lab, where he found another blocked off room to summon all the insects in the section to die.
He repeated this process three more times, ignoring the artifacts present in each section of the lab, and, after only thirty minutes, he was right where he wanted to be, the main control room for the lab’s air filtration system, which wasn’t locked at all.
It took him about ten minutes with Mila’s telepathic help to figure out how to open a vent to the air filtration system’s output chamber using the command terminal in the room, which used really cool holograms, and then he started setting up the more complicated device for releasing Creeping Death.
Mila joined him a few minutes later, having found a set of stairs down from the sixteenth floor and then following the path he’d cleared. Then, over the next hour, as he poured mana and qi into the small 13 cm orb which would release Creeping Death, she figured out something cool to do with the terminal.
A large hologram popped up in the middle of the room showing a 3D version of the map they’d been following, and, all over the map, were orange dots of different intensities. There were twelve large dots rapidly flying around the larger halls of all seventeen floors, so fast it was hard to track one dot at a time. There was an even larger dot on the lowest floor, not moving at all. And, throughout the entire lab, there were several tens of thousands of smaller dots, much more concentrated on the lower floors but present everywhere.
When Aalam was ready, Mila opened the vent to the air filtration system’s output chamber and Aalam dropped the sphere inside. Then Mila closed the vent and triggered a safety protocol to seal off the room they were in from the rest of the base.
Aalam didn’t want to take any extra chances, however, even though they both had an antidote which should work, so he activated the Twelve Element Shield, forming a sphere of protection around them as well.
Then they watched in silence as a light orange mist started exiting from vents all around the lab, quickly filling it up almost entirely, some even entering into their supposedly closed off room, but there were a few rooms on the first and second floor which no mist entered at all, which was interesting.
Over the next hour, the mist in the hologram began to fade, and, by hour two, when the Twelve Element Shield’s barrier stopped working, it was almost gone everywhere, only a little bit emanating out from all the dots whenever they exhaled. As a precaution, however, both Aalam and Mila took an antidote. Then they continued to watch.
The first few deaths started happening at hour three, 103 tiny orange dots disappearing over the next hour, replaced by small areas of orange fog, the remaining trial takers stupid enough to enter the Nightmare challenge all winning their Darwin Awards.
Then the smaller of the remaining dots began to be replaced by fog as well, from their locations in concentrated clusters on the lower floors, likely the young of the insectoid monsters.
More and more monsters throughout the lab began to fall and soon the hologram was filled with mist again, after eight hours the upper floors only occasionally having one of the Rollie-Pollies rolling through, all the insectoid monsters already having died.
They waited five more hours, three hours past the mist on the upper floors completely disappearing, and then Mila suggested going through the upper floors to steal whatever they could.
Aalam instantly agreed and Mila opened the room again. Then Aalam headed down to floor eight and Mila up to floor seventeen, and they started searching the floors and stealing whatever they could, including the artifacts of the other trial takers. On floor ten, Aalam found a skill orb repository, the contents of which filled three of the bags of holding in his backpack. On floor fourteen, Mila found a room with five Epic grade bags of holding. And, on floor thirteen, they together found a room filled with a golden metal called Solar Iron where the description said extra trial points would be given for every kilogram a trial taker managed to take with them, which they split.
The greatest reward from the challenge, however, was something Aalam couldn’t access. Every section of the lab had a terminal, and, on that terminal, was the recipe for the alchemical or smithing product that section was built to create, and there were between four and sixteen sections on each floor.
Realizing this, Mila went back over the sections Aalam had been through and Aalam, who was strong enough with his limited telekinesis to carry the larger crafting artifacts they couldn’t fit into their bags of holding, went over her old sections to take everything that could be taken as well, using multiple trips to bring everything back to the control room on the fifteenth floor.
Then, noticing floors three through seven were clear as well on the hologram, they went through those sections as well, finding a whole lot more resources like the Solar Iron which were worth extra trial points and fit into their bags of holding.
By that point, a standard day and a half had passed since the beginning of the challenge and there were only six and a half days left, but there were only thirteen orange dots besides themselves and no mist left on the holograms.
Creeping Death wasn’t done yet, though. Aalam had broken some record when he’d designed and successfully created three deadly poisons, Wintery Grave, Heat Death, and the yet to be used Last Breath. All three had been based around his Law Egg of Bacteria and created by alchemically modifying some magical bacteria he found in the auction house with several of his other Laws, and this had allowed the Yin Yang Sage to give him another boon.
She seemed to like him as she’d given him a set of information from her own research into bacterial diseases, the part about how to make bacteria which would eat a host’s qi and mana especially useful, and Creeping Death had been the result.
If just one bacterial cell got inside a creature, it would start to feed on the creature and multiply, each bacterial cell feeding more and splitting when enough energy had been gathered, again and again and again. This meant it didn’t have to be very concentrated when it was released and also, as Creeping Death was light enough to travel through the air, a little bit leaving an infected host with every breath out and a lot leaving upon host death, it was incredibly infectious.
Granted, Creeping Death could be quite easily fought off with pretty basic usage of qi and mana control, but all the monsters in the challenge were quite stupid, so the result was all the weaker monsters dead and the stronger monsters slowly dying from the infection.
Aalam just had to wait and the E rank monsters at least would fall in just a few days.
