Shirtaloon

Notice: Book 9 chapters coming down.

TL;DR: Book 9 chapters (595-698) coming down April 4th. Pre-edit book 9 PDFs attached, get them while you can.

As a quick note, daylight savings has shifted my local time, so the time this post is released will be the same time chapters will be starting tomorrow.

Book nine is preparing to launch in the usual ebook and audiobook formats on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, Audible and Amazon paperback on the 18th of April. As such, the chapters for book nine (595-698) wi...

Chapter 763: The Greatest Enemy of All

The underground city of Cardinas was ruled from the Citadel of Pillars, if ruled was even the right word. It had been a harmonious place for centuries before the cultists and then the messengers burrowed down from the surface world. They had paid the price for their intrusion, each in their own way, but that was little comfort to those left living with the ramifications. Or dying with them.

The central room of the citadel’s top floor had been the council chamber, but was now the war r...

Chapter 762: Pride

It was no longer possible to see the forest of worms down the shaft. The butterflies filling the space had turned it into a lake of glowing blue and orange. The expedition group were above it all in stone-shaped alcoves or on conjured platforms.

Jason floated over the centre of the shaft with frazzled hair and half his beard scorched off. Being crushed, impaled and smashed into walls had left his hair largely intact, but the explosion of fire in his face had not. Jason was perfectly cap...

Chapter 761: Surplus to Requirements

Jason lay spread across a rock like deeply unpleasant jam. Colin, in an incomplete apocalypse beast form, continued battling the gold-rank spider mole. Leeches had crawled onto the monster’s body, moving between the stiff, venomous bristles and biting into flesh, draining health and delivering afflictions.

The monster flailed with surprise and rage, distracted from Colin’s flesh mass continuing to take shape below it. A slit formed in the mound and opened like an eyelid, but instead...

Chapter 760: Hit Points

The massive vertical shaft was thick with battle. The gold-rank adventurers were doing their best to keep the fight with the spider moles away from the crawlers and the lower-rank adventurers. The silver-rank adventurers had even more to deal with, as at least the spider mole numbers weren’t increasing. Gas and fire elementals kept pouring in through holes in the wall. Even more prolific were the toothy worms, continually burrowing their way out of the rock to extend from the walls like ten...

Schedule for next week.

TL;DR: My uncle just died so I'm going back to my hometown next week. The release schedule will be unaffected but the weekly gold+ Q&A is cancelled.

I really wanted the next chapter to be a crazy long one that concludes this whole battle. Unfortunately, one of those real-life situations has come up so I'll be splitting it.

My Uncle Robert just died and I'll be going back to my hometown for his funeral next week. I need to make sur...

Chapter 759: Gary's Old Team

“You were being optimistic,” Jason told Humphrey. “If you kill a whole parcel of monsters in front of some elite adventurers, the result won’t be an awed crowd. It’ll be a cluster of wildly self-confident people explaining how they would have done it faster and looked better doing it.”

“Actually,” Clive said from the driver’s seat, “they mostly complained about the smell. You left a lot of disgusting goo back there and we had to take the crawlers right through it.”...

Chapter 758: What Kind of Adventurer

The expedition team was standing on a platform that hung over one side of the hole. A strong wind blew through the town and over the aperture, creating a low, ominous roar. No one could resist going to the edge and looking down into the roughly circular chasm that was hundreds of metres across. It was a hungry void, devouring what sunlight made it past the bridges and buildings arching over it.

After peering over the edge, the group gathered to examine the vehicles lined up on the platf...

Chapter 757: What We're Walking Into

The expedition members, along with Allayeth and Marcus, were in a briefing room aboard an airship owned by the Adventure Society. This included Jason’s team, Rick’s team and Korinne Pescos’ team as the silver-rank combat contingent, along with a team from the Magic Society. The team of researchers had been, to everyone’s surprise, swiftly approved by Clive. It turned out the society officials didn’t want to go on the incredibly dangerous mission, so they sent the competent researche...

Weekly Q&A

Sorry for not starting yet, I'll head over to the discord now. I can blame no one but a lovely nap.

Chapter 756: Quick and Clean

Yaresh was no longer lit up at night. The tree buildings were toppled, lanterns no longer draped from the branches. The metal and glass ziggurats no longer shined in the city centre, having been annihilated in the fight between the garuda and the naga genesis egg.

Only a handful of patches in the city still shone in the dark. The most prominent was the Adventure Society campus, left largely intact despite being the starting point of the garuda fight. Some less important outbuildings whe...

Chapter 755: Welcome Aboard

The messenger device was an ovoid crystal held suspended in a rectangular frame of metal. The frame was some kind of magical brass variant, based on the colour and the magic Jason sensed from it. The crystal was very dark blue and perfectly smooth. The entire device was about the size of a bathtub.

“We have managed to confirm that the central part of the device is some manner of crystal,” a Magic Society official said. Jason hadn’t bothered remembering his name.

“You can c...

Chapter 754: Sometimes, Violence is the Answer

Jason turned to look at Vesta Carmis Zell. She was extremely tall, even for a messenger, filling the doorway that had easily accommodated Jali. The astral king didn't look different from other messengers, height aside. She had the usual exquisite beauty, with olive skin and dark hair cascading over her shoulders. The wings spread out behind her were like that of a hawk with a gorgeous and complex brown and white pattern. Her physique was athletic rather than delicate, muscular but lean and po...

Chapter 753: Not Yet

Jason stood alone on one of several towers of a sprawling castle, reaching up for the sky. Sprawled out to the horizon under a bright blue sky were rolling hills, woodlands and vast plains of grass, all in the colours of early autumn. The air was clean, a breeze taking just the right edge from the heat of the sun.

“Wow,” Jason said to himself, as much about his presence as the vista. All the messengers whose inner realms he had entered previously had resisted to some degree, even th...

Rebooting the discord questions channel

TL;DR: Live Q&A on discord for gold+ patrons 30 minutes after the second chapter release of the week.

Last year hit my life like a wrecking ball, leaving nothing but mental rubble and a naked skinny white girl whose singing I don't particularly care for. Metaphorically speaking.

By the end of the year, everything that wasn't writing went out the window. Cooking meals, most of my sleep. Showering as often as I should. My assistant does my laundry now.

O...

Chapter 752: Worth Saving

Messengers rarely touched the ground. It was the reason Marek Nior Vargas had stood out to Jali; he often stood on the ground, walking instead of floating. It had drawn a lot of negative attention, leaving many wondering, as she had, if he was as loyal a messenger as he proclaimed.

Jali had decided to follow his example, the sensation of having her feet settled grounding her both literally and figuratively. It was unusual feeling the weight of her body holding itself up instead of float...

Chapter 751: A Task You Can't Seem to Manage

It wasn't hard to get the messenger servants in line and Jason was soon frog-marching them into his soul realm. These were people already broken by the messengers, so obedience in the face of power came easy. That Jason had clearly been in the position of power over the messenger had helped.

They had already surrendered to the idea that the messengers were all-powerful, becoming traitors in the face of the seemingly inevitable. If they were wrong about that, then where did it leave them...

Chapter 750: Money or the Box

Jason swept a couple of metres over the highway in a flying device that was little more than a seat in a roll cage with drone rotors. It was something he'd seen on the internet on Earth, with some sleek Shade modifications and, of course, finished entirely in black. Convincing the Adventure Society to let him go alone had been startlingly easy thanks to the Continental Council rep, who was bending over backwards to get on his good side. It was the opposite of what Jason had been dealing with ...

Chapter 749: Unmistakeable

Marcus was in a command tent set up in Marshalling Yard One, the largest on the Adventure Society campus. From there, he was organising the round-up of messenger-servant infiltrators, as well as the impending expedition underground. He was standing behind a large table covered in neatly organised maps and reports. On the other side of the table was Rick Geller, along with his fiancé and team member, Hannah Adeah.

“Your team performed excellently during the sweep,” Marcus said. “I...

Chapter 748: The Nightmares Never Really Go

In the cloud palace, Jason had an almost empty room where the walls were magic whiteboards made of cloud stuff. He and Clive had spent the better part of a week using the space to try and decipher the basics of the messenger astral magic, building a foundation for further study. As a result, the walls were covered in sigils, diagrams and notes. The one piece of furniture was a large table piled high with books, notes and scrolls taken from the messenger’s study. It also held a selection of ...

Chapter 747: Destiny

Marcus made his way through the Adventure Society campus after meeting with the carefully selected nobility. It was fun going full bombast and pushing around some aristocratic slackers, but it was also exhausting to ham it up like that. Fortunately, the opposite approach was the correct one for his next meeting. He had been warned, in no uncertain terms, to never get in an outrageousness contest with Jason Asano. And when Danielle Geller gave out political advice, you listened.

It would...

Chapter 746: Tradition and Decency

The gathered elites looked at Marcus like he was a madman who had somehow invaded the Adventure Society campus. Gormanston Bynes masked his contempt for their muttered outrage, carefully moderated not to draw the leonid’s ire.

Gormanston’s niece, Juniper, was next to him. At twenty-two, she had reached silver-rank during the monster surge. Gormanston was not the only one in the room who frequently brought around young members of their families to gain experience, political and other...

Chapter 745: What is The Adventure Society

Rufus emerged from a shadow portal in Jason’s cloud palace, in front of the open metal sphere. A moment later, Jason emerged from the opening and walked down the ramp.

“The Continental Council rep finally turned up?” Jason asked.

“Yes,” Rufus said, then nodded at the orb. “Didn’t that thing used to be a different colour?”

The previously brassy colour had shifted over the last couple of days to a glossy dark grey.

“Yeah,” Jason said. “Clive is obse...

Chapter 744: Everything Adventurers Should Be

Jason ended up taking his cloud vehicle a significant distance from Yaresh, away from the messenger strongholds and towards the eastern coastline. He set up a cloud palace atop a massive plateau cliff that offered spectacular views that stretched out to the ocean. They could see a handful of large towns dotting the coast, the buildings washed white and decorated with bold colours.

“Why are we so far from the city?” Sophie asked Humphrey. They were on a balcony, looking out at the oc...

Chapter 743: Because It's Hard

Jason was using his cloud-flask to produce what was essentially a combat recreational vehicle. The size of a large tour bus, it was comprised of cloud-substance encased in panels of various magical materials. The blue and green metal panels were not square but formed swooping shapes, reminiscent of the wind. The result looked like a hybrid between a bus and a swift pleasure yacht.

“This is the way to travel, bro,” Taika said happily.

Belinda and Clive were floating around the ...

Chapter 742: The Manner of Person One Will Be Dealing With

The team moved towards the messenger servants where the gold-rank Magic Society official was already barking orders, both to his own people and the messenger servants.

“Get out of the way, you traitorous weeds! Get the control key for the freight skimmer off them and get it moving! I want this back at the campus.”

“I’m afraid that’s not where it’s going,” Humphrey told him as the team approached from behind. The gold-ranker was close to Jason’s height, so when he t...

Chapter 741: An Impossible Act of Forgiveness

The messenger envoy group was set up not too far from where the adventurers were camped outside the city. There were no messengers amongst them, being comprised entirely of what they called the servant races. They had travelled along the network of roads winding through the rainforest, stopping at a clearing not far from the city. A heavy freight land skimmer had been used to move the large metal orb containing the study of the diamond-rank messenger, Mah Go Schaat. It was close enough to be ...

Chapter 740: Exactly Where I Want to Be

Although his body was sitting with Emir and Carlos, Jason’s attention was on other places within his soul realm. There was only so much privacy Jason could offer Sophie and her mother, but he forcibly moved his attention away from where she and Arabelle were looking after Melody. Because of how his mind and perception worked in this place, he was able to compartmentalise the memories, the same way his avatars learned. He could access them later if necessary, a quirk of how his mind and perc...

Friendliness

Firstly, I would like to thank you all for making this such (mostly) friendly space to be in. This means that I am able to take a largely hands-off approach to moderation. That being said, I have one big rule: we do not attack one another. If you want to argue against someone's ideas, go for it. But argue against the idea, not against the person having it. Explain why you disagree, don't call the idea (and, by extension, the person holding it) stupid.

The same goes for ...

Chapter 739: I'm Going to Change the Laws of Reality

As soon as she entered Jason’s soul realm, Sophie was blasted with heat. They were in some kind of industrial facility with a massive foundry pit of molten iron, her mother dangling over it from a chain. Sophie’s ire rose as she watched Arabelle and Jason banter, finally exploding as she flashed in front of Jason in a blur, grabbing his shirt and hoisting him into the air.

“Does everything have to be a joke to you?” she growled.

The amusement left his expression as he look...