Clonemancy: Ascension Through a Thousand Clones [LitRPG Multiple Bodies Progression Fantasy]

18. Next Steps

by inkadmin

Alistair finally left the miserable gap where his main body had spent most of the day.

A few people had noticed him there. The looks they gave him were almost impressively insulting. They were worse than the ones he had received when he first walked through Verevain in ragged scraps with the smell of slavery still clinging to him. Apparently, a half-starved boy in ruined clothes was easier for people to accept than a decently dressed one slumped half-conscious in some narrow gap between buildings like a broken puppet.

If he was going to spend whole days in that state, doing it on a bed would be far better. Unfortunately, the inn could not support that. Even if he tried to be careful, the innkeeper or one of the guests would eventually notice that Alistair kept leaving the room without returning.

The inn was comfortable enough, but it looked less like a solution with each passing day and more like a temporary compromise. What had happened the previous day proved it. The place failed to support his real needs. It had forced him into an awkward and humiliating position in town just to keep his appearances intact. He did not intend to kill people often, but he also refused to pretend this sort of problem would never happen again. If he ever saw another child being dragged toward slavery, he would not ignore it.

By the time he reached the inn, he was starving. Heavy clone use had hollowed him out, and the day’s eating had been miserable by his new standards. He had only managed two real meals. One came from the tavern, when Cook briefly switched out and slipped him a bowl of stew. The other came later, when he grew desperate enough to send a clone to buy three loaves from the bakery. A month ago that would have sounded like plenty. Now it barely felt sufficient.

So he did not bother pretending to be frugal. He paid for an extra meal at the inn and ate every bit of it without shame. His body needed it. Afterward he went upstairs, looked once at the weights he normally used for training, and decided to ignore them for the night. What he needed more than a strength workout was real sleep. Deep sleep, the kind where he did not have to worry about someone stumbling over him, noticing him, or treating his limp body like an inconvenience.

Even that did not become true sleep.

In the middle of the night, his original body was pulled fully awake by the clone accompanying him. Technically, his mind had never gone completely into rest. He had shifted most of it into sleep and left only enough awareness behind to manage the clone rotation and the watch on the girl.

Managing that much, at least, had become easier. With his clones lasting so much longer now, they required far less constant attention from him. Even the farthest task, the watch on the shelter, was only about twenty minutes from town if walked at a calm pace. The arrangement was flawed, but manageable. With WIS now effectively at twelve, he could maintain five clones at once and, in an emergency, juggle six bodies counting the original. Keeping one or two clones on the girl no longer strained him the way it would have before.

Still, he did not want that arrangement to become permanent.

A few days, he told himself, just long enough to get things back into a stable shape. After that, he would need a different answer.

Before getting up, he looked again at the two points still waiting in his Guide.

Personal Guide
Class	Clonemancer	Level	4
VIT	3	DEX	4
STR	2	PER	4
STA	3	WIS	12
END	2	INT	6
Free points available: 2

Putting them into DEX and PER again was the obvious path. He had already accepted that VIT, STR, STA, and END would have to be trained for now, no matter how much he disliked it. The fight with the slavers had made that painfully clear. Avoiding direct combat by choice was one thing. Knowing his original body would be close to worthless if forced into open conflict was another.

Still, this was not the moment to correct that through points.

He had learned something important from the fight. He had survived through the right classes in the right places, not by turning himself into a proper fighter. Survivor had helped more than brute force. Positioning, improvisation, timing, awareness, and the ability to move through several bodies had counted more than raw strength. His low physical stats still mattered, just not as the next problem he needed to solve.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The next problem was scale. He needed greater reach, greater flexibility, and more ways to move pieces into place before anyone understood what he was doing.

He made the choice. He put one point into INT and the other into PER.

VIT

DEX

STR

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