Finding a Body (The Dark Herbalist Book #4) LitRPG series

by Michael Atamanov

  The unique Baron was also out. I wouldn’t part with him for anything! The proud and self-confident Alpha Swamp Wolf was now demonstrating such advanced combat characteristics and survival abilities that he could take on ten enemies over level 300 without even losing any hitpoints.

  The Gray Pack also had my adopted daughter Chai-nee Shu in it. But that was what made her respawn after death, so I could not let my daughter go until the war was over, no way. The Gray Pack also had the Chieftain of the Clan of the Laughing Otter See-Uhn-Rhu and the Regent of the Clan of the White Lily Uvari-Dor-Shu. With time I planned to move them both out of the Gray Pack, but for now I wanted a guarantee that the sweet rougarou girl Chai-nee Shu wouldn’t die in the upcoming war.

  The rare Guard Dog which I had stolen from the giantess Modgud’s yard? Our relationship just wasn’t working out. He still wouldn’t accept any name, and wouldn’t carry anyone on his back. Sure he was aggressive, fast and bloodthirsty, but no more than that. I figured I could let him go, even though it would be a shame to lose such a strong creature.

  But in the end I settled on the rougarou archer Ama-Rohd, who had been in the Gray Pack since the night battle at Frigid Lake, simply to bring my pet number to the max and get higher bonuses from the Pack Hunter perk. I added her at random, and I had just left the quiet girl there. During the battle in Lars she worked wonders, putting one arrow through two and sometimes even three enemies. After recent events and the experience that rained down on everyone, Ama-Rohd had leveled up to four hundred and was now one of the strongest Rougarou in Boundless Realm . To my eye, she’d had enough! Especially given that she wouldn’t just run away and would remain in my army. With such a high level, she could easily become chieftess of a rougarou clan!

  Right after I deleted Ama-Rohd from the Gray Pack, a new creature popped up in the list: a Level-210 Ravenous Cur. I immediately confirmed. The yellow neutral marker on the mini-map instantly turned to blue, meaning ally. At the same time I saw a message saying I’d failed a quest:

  The Horror of Beloria mission not completed!

  But the lost experience, and especially the two points for leveling two of Amra’s skills didn’t bother me one bit. I was looking at something else. Now, when the respawned creature became my pet, I could see its perks and abilities. I already knew the Ravenous Cur had the Invisibility ability. And I could easily have guessed it had Quick Run by its lean body and long paws. But as for the Loyalty perk, what good was that?

  Loyalty: no circumstances, mind-control spells or enemy abilities can make this creature abandon its allies and change sides in a conflict

  Strange perk. What was it even for? A pet already was already extremely hard to take from its master, and even harder to lure to another side in battle. So why waste a perk on such nonsense? I looked at the description of the fourth and final perk and my eyes rolled into my forehead. Talent for division. What the heck was this???

  Talent for division: unique Modified Chimeroid ability. Each time this creature kills twenty enemies, it will divide into two creatures half its level

  Instead of one strong level-210 predator, I’d get two fairly average level-105 fighters? Come on, what the crap? Why would I even want this? I could understand putting a perk like that on, let’s say, VIXEN. If the flying snake flew one time over an enemy army and spat poison, I could get rich selling little Royal Forest Wyverns at auction. But in the Ravenous Cur’s case, what was the point?

  Actually, how crap was this? Having the Ravenous Cur kill twenty enemies would be easy. Let’s say I fed Faithful a pack of a thousand field mice. Then I wouldn’t have just one canid crocodile that could turn invisible, I’d have fifty-one! Sure, at first they would have quite a low level. But levels, as I said, were easy to get. The first few levels were just a cake walk. Seemingly, I understood why this creature wasn’t added to the game. Under certain circumstances, even without a master it could turn into a real menace, emptying entire provinces and even governments. But with an experienced player controlling it... That reminded me!

  “Valerianna! Come over here, I’ve got something you should see.”

  I didn’t manage to finish the private message, because my sister was already standing next to me, transported by the Steward.

  “I was already thinking of coming to see you,” said the sorceress, extending me the open bone tube. “What a job! I busted my brains over this thing. Well, here you go!”

  With these words, Valerianna Quickfoot handed me a golden sphere the size of a pool ball. It was perfectly smooth and polished to a shine.

  Insufficient Intelligence to identify object

  Required minimum Intelligence to identify: 1200

  “This is the Egg of New Life,” my sister eagerly informed me, showing plainly that the Wood Nymph did have that much Intelligence. “It’s a very rare item which allows a player to change character in Boundless Realm . It’s the only way to start the game over from level one. Take it, Tim. As for me, no matter how this war with the undying army ends, I have decided to quit computer games for good. We live in such an interesting world, I’m done spending my days cooped up in a virtual reality capsule!”

  I accepted the rare Egg and stuck it in my inventory:

  “Thanks for the gift, Val. But while you’re in the game, look at this big-toothed guy.”

  I didn’t have to explain a thing to the Beastmaster. Valerianna needed five seconds to familiarize herself with Faithful’s description, after which she couldn’t hold back and broke out swearing. Then she looked at me with her eyes wide in surprise:

  “That’s what I’m talking about! What an awesome combination of abilities. Loyalty goes especially well with the rest. With one of these under your control, all the copies that split off will obey unquestioningly and attack your enemy! I’ve never even seen that perk before. But it’s a way to get around the maximum pet number. I wonder if this is even legal?”

  I just shrugged my shoulders unconfidently, because I had no idea how the corporation would react if the Gray Pack had, let’s say, seventy pets instead of the fifteen it was supposed to allow. Or if Valerianna Quickfoot replaced one of her hornets with a pack of fifty Ravenous Curs.

  “On first glance it doesn’t look fit to live with that set of perks,” I said, voicing my own observations. “In battle, it will quickly turn from a few strong beasts into a swarm of harmless little shrimp. But if you give the first one the Pack Hunter perk instead of the speed one, which is pretty worthless for an invisible creature, the picture changes drastically!”

  “Yes, Tim. If you let it all go on autopilot, in a prolonged battle the Ravenous Cur really will quickly lose effectiveness and drop severely in level, multiplying into a large number of weak copies. But if you keep an eye on all these clones and don’t let the highest-level ones land finishing blows... It would be hard but possible... In any case this creature isn’t made for a prolonged battle because it will always eventually turn it into a pack of little cockroaches. But it can be fun at the very beginning of battle! You could cobble together and level a whole army of invisible crocodiles who could instantly attack enemy support and mages, cutting down everything alive before the enemy’s main forces get back, then have them return to invisibility. Due to the extremely high number in the pack, the main high-level fighters would have such great damage multipliers that those Ravenous Curs could eat their way through any army!”

  “You deal with that then, Val. And you only have a day and a half before the enemy army is within view of my castle.”

  * * *

  WHY WAS IT so dark? That was the first thing I thought after going through the portal to the Eastern Continent. Was it still night here? Or was there a solar eclipse today? No, that wasn’t it. Seemingly, I had overdone the thickness of the dark clouds a bit and now they were so thick no light could get through. The sky was drawn-over with such black impenetrable gloom that I even had to turn on Night Vision.

  The world grew more contrasting and I looked around. S
o, where was I? And what direction was Taisha’s camp? All around I saw only tall dark cliffs and the odd flash of distant lightning. I was getting the impression that I was at the bottom of a deep stone well. The mini-map wasn’t helping change my mind, either. It showed a gold marker right on my position. Weird, was that me now? But then... one of the nearby rocks moved and turned toward me! From seventy feet up, two huge red eyes were staring down at me!

  Sphinx

  Wise and Eternal

  Unique indestructible creature

  “Well, well. If it isn’t the Sphinx!” I must have said that out loud because the lion-man answered me with a booming echo:

  “Well, well. If it isn’t the Dark Sovereign!”

  An awkward silence followed. I was fitfully trying to remember everything I knew about the Sphinx. Predatory, immortal, tried to confuse people in the desert. I also knew that it acted with a certain nobility, never attacking a victim unannounced. It always offered travelers a chance at salvation by answering its clever riddles correctly.

  Here in Boundless Realm, it belonged to the realm of demigods or maybe even higher, also having the Indestructible quality and a beastly appetite. As far as I knew, the Sphinx was the only indestructible creature in the game that could attack and eat a player. As a rule, indestructible creatures were plentiful in Boundless Realm . For example NPC guards in locations for beginner players were invincible. But those NPC’s either never attacked first or, like my Steward and Storekeeper, were fundamentally incapable of hostility. But the Sphinx’s imbalance was compensated by the fact that this legendary creature always stayed in the same place, which was very hard to reach, making it nearly impossible to encounter by accident. But by some wonder, my wife Taisha had convinced the Sphinx to leave that place and follow her.

  Good girl, Taisha. But what should I do now, where to look for my green-skinned companion? Was I really just going to ask this red-eyed walking mountain?

  “Oh great Sphinx! Could you please tell me where to find Taisha?”

  The mountain leaned in closer and bellowed in reply, pressing me with a column of hot air:

  “For that you’ll need to get past me! If you answer my riddle correctly, I’ll allow you to pass peacefully. If you cannot, you have only yourself to blame! Tell me, Dark Sovereign, which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed? No creature on the planet changes the way it does. When four-footed, it has the least strength and moves the slowest!”

  At first, I was afraid I’d have to respawn, and I didn’t have a second portal scroll. But after the first words of this very famous riddle, I quickly remembered and could hardly wait for the huge being to unhurriedly finish its rather drawn-out retelling.

  “Sphinx! After King Oedipus answered that riddle correctly three thousand years ago, everyone knows the answer! It is: a human! Think of something harder, this is child’s play...”

  “Well it used to work,” the Sphinx replied, somewhat abashed. “And that is not going to count, Amra! You didn’t figure out my riddle, you just knew the answer! So here is my second riddle. It’s a bit harder, as you wanted. What’s red and green and goes round and round and round?”

  “Sphinx, are you actually like a child?! This is the exact riddle Merlin asked you [3] !”

  “You’re no fun!” the huge monster objected, just like a child. “Just like your wife Taisha, you know all the answers already. I wasted a whole day on her and have nothing to show for it. I must have asked her a thousand riddles, but she’d already heard them all! Just go. What’s the point...?”

  The huge creature moved aside, opening a passage in the stone wall. Just then, the Gray Pack appeared next to me, slightly late. And a few of the rougarou and wargs were somewhat shaken up by the sudden transportation. Chai-nee Shu appeared in just her nighty. She must have been pulled right out of bed. And the huge half-man half-lion greeted them with great interest:

  “What an interesting retinue you have! So many unique canines! Does that mean you like big dogs? Well then why don’t you have the strongest hound in all Boundless Realm ? I’m talking of course about the three-headed Cerberus!”

  Good question. And it was right. What was stopping me from taking Cerberus? Or at least trying.

  Sure, I didn’t know for sure where the large fierce beast lived. But that was not really a problem. My Dark Riders could move throughout the cloudy reaches of the Styx, and the entrance to the kingdom of the dead was somewhere around there. Even if my emissaries couldn’t bring me, I could ask Charon. That old geezer definitely knew. Every day he ferried dead souls there. And Cerberus couldn’t attack me, because Amra had an ability that guaranteed no legendary or mythical canine would ever come at him unprovoked. And Cerberus couldn’t use his renowned aura of terror, either because I had complete immunity to fear. Fair enough, I’d have to try!

  I thanked the Sphinx for the valuable advice and entered the narrow rock passage. It looped around for a quarter mile before leading me and my companions out into a brightly lit camp, located in a valley surrounded by mountains on all sides. There were hundreds of large and small tents. Lots of very unusual creatures. The majority of my wife’s army was made up of nagas, which were half-human and half-snake but there were also plenty of goblins, kobolds, and giants. When we walked up close they all stopped their weapons training and led long studious gazes over my group. At any rate, none of them ever tried to stop me, so I walked into the middle of camp over to the largest tent.

  The first surprise awaited me there. The entrance to the leader’s tent was guarded by someone I knew very well — Djinn Sultan Al-Hassan Godsbane. Once upon a time, this deadly creature had escaped confinement and killed my Amra in an instant along with half of the strongest players in the Legion of Steel . But now I could see a red-skull marker over the Djinn Sultan. He was over twenty levels higher than me, but less than fifty. A strong enemy, but no longer quite so insurmountable. With the Gray Pack, I could most likely take down this so-called godsbane.

  And the Djinn Sultan understood that. There was a look of confusion and insecurity frozen on his grayish-blue ghostly face. Finally having made up his mind how to treat me, Al-Hassan gave a bow of respect:

  “Sovereign, your wife Taisha is asleep. Many desert clans came to join her army today. She was accepting their chiefs until late and only got to bed around sunrise.”

  I gave a short nod to the uncanny doorman and, leaving the Gray Pack on the step, threw back the tent flaps and walked inside. Taisha’s room was dark and smelled of sandal wood. And my goblin wife was asleep on a black warg pelt, her arms splayed and her fiery hair spread out on the pillows. I was surprised to see the goblin beauty using the black thief’s clothes I’d once gifted her as pajamas. The thin fabric didn’t hide a thing, in fact it emphasized the shapes of her feminine body. I looked over my sleeping bride with polite interest until suddenly one detail drew my attention. Taisha’s stomach looked round. Was my wife pregnant? Could players impregnate NPC’s? As far as I knew, Boundless Realm didn’t have such a feature. The other way around yes, I had once met a player named Belle Sweetypie who was playing a quest to bear Fenrir’s son, but that was different.

  Just then, Taisha opened her eyes and caught my gaze. Her eyes instantly went wide in surprise, and her lips started quavering. She just couldn’t believe she wasn’t dreaming. I smiled and sat down on the pelt of the predator my wife and I had once killed:

  “Why hello Taisha Spark. You asked me to come find you after I’d sorted out all the weird stuff going on around me. Well now I have and, as you can see, I came to find you.”

  The green-skinned beauty finally believed this was real, looked carefully at me and, not hiding her surprise and admiration, said:

  “My husband look how powerful you’ve become! I’m taken aback! The goblin race has never been blessed with such a powerful leader before.”

  Taisha sat up, extended her hands, and I embraced my beautiful companion firmly. The few minute
s that followed we just sat there, hugging in silence. Then I pulled the Egg of New Life from my inventory:

  “A gift for you! I’m no longer immortal and, if anything happens to me, there will be no one to protect you. I don’t want my enemies to find you after, because I will slaughter them all many times. Many, many undying will be trying to find you. Even worse, a group of people in the other world have a strange obsession with you. Using this artifact you can change into whatever creature you desire! No one will ever find the connection between the new you and the beautiful Taisha.”

  My wife held the heavy golden egg in her hands for a long time staring at the extremely rare item in thought. Then she gave me back the artifact and stroked her bulging belly with tenderness:

  “This is your son! So I cannot die no matter what, nor respawn. Because I would respawn, but not him. And don’t you dare think of dying and losing this war. You and I have a long time left to live, and so does our child!”

  * * *

  “CHARON! CHARON!” my voice carried a long way in the night, frightening the creatures that lived along the river.

  My big-eared goblin was up to his knees in dark stagnant water and holding a bottle of wine. All around me was impenetrable fog, and it was pitch dark. Where this place was I had no idea. But Night the Dark Rider responsible for the western border and the River Styx brought me right here when I asked to be brought to Charon. And that meant the immortal geezer must have been somewhere nearby.

  Finally I heard a familiar rhythmic splashing and a dark figure emerged from the fog. The ferryman of souls was piloting his ancient vessel with pole in hand.

  “What are you screaming about? You scared away all my fish!”

  I extended the bottle to the old grumbling man: