Death After Death-Chapter 357 - Greater Insights

The leap from seeing nothing to seeing the auras around him was not a subtle thing. For a few months, Simon could only see them if he pushed himself to the limits of his endurance. After that, if he meditated for hours, he might benefit from expanded vision for a few minutes, but slowly but surely, it became a normal thing.

One day, he just woke up, and he could see Aranna’s dark aura when he went downstairs one morning. He thought the room was just dark until he noticed that several of the still sleeping customers snoring near the still warm hearth were much brighter.

“I did it,” he said to himself, “Finally.”

“Did what?” Aranna asked, looking up from the tankard she was cleaning.

Simon responded with a shake of his head. It didn’t matter. Even if he explained it to her, it would only confirm her suspicions that he really was a warlock.

Of course, that jolt of surprise was enough to disrupt the effect completely, but Simon had expected that and didn’t get annoyed. Instead, he got to work making breakfast for his guests. His vision would come again in its own sweet time, but they would come all in a rush as soon as the smell of sausages reached them.

One meal at a time, one conversation at a time, and one day at a time, his instincts sharpened. Even when he couldn’t see the glow of a stranger’s aura now, he got a feeling for whether they were trustworthy or not almost immediately. That gut instinct was enough to make him worry that his time at the Wayfarer was coming to an end. In fact, he spent a couple of days fretting about it before he remembered he didn’t have to end this life until he wanted to.

It was a much simpler decision than most of his recent lives, really. He was on level sixteen and couldn’t go much forward without running into the basilisk, and he was certain that his progress on this level was locked thanks to how he’d handled the orcs, so there were good reasons not to join the Unspoken this life.

If I do that, there will be no redos if I fuck it up, he told himself. So the right answer was to do whatever he wanted until he died, leave the world better than he found it, and then go straight to the Broken Tower, or wherever he thought he might catch that strange cult's eye in his next life.

Still, he couldn't decide what to do next, beyond whiling his life away studying, so he asked his friends. “If you could do anything you wanted with the rest of your life, what would you do?” He could find any quest to occupy a lifetime after all, but before he got sidetracked, he wanted to help those who had helped him so much.

They all had different answers, but Bessa’s was easiest. “About the same as I do every other day, really. Maybe with a softer bed, and a few more tarts instead of making naught but bread and roasts day in and day out, but it’s not such a bad life, you know?”

It wasn’t. He was certainly forced to agree with her there. Leon’s was only a little harder. “I want to apprentice to a carpenter,” he started, “I really do, but then I can’t abandon you after all you’ve done for me, now can I?”

That answer was endearing, though not entirely honest. Simon would have been sad to see the young man go, but he knew that eventually everyone had to leave to nest. It was the boy who was afraid to do so, but he understood that, too. Simon had never quite managed to leave his own nest in his first life.

Aranna’s answer was the hardest. More than anything, she wanted to find out what had happened to her parents. That was something he could have probably accomplished pretty easily if he could’ve used a greater word of Distant Location. He’d tried using his dousing rod before for such things, but the distances were too great, and the trail was too cold. So, for now, he placed all his hopes on his sight.

“One day we shall go and look for them,” he promised her. He meant it, too, but understood that it might not happen.

For now, he threw all of his efforts into granting the wishes of the other two. The first step to that was to hire a full-time carpenter and a small crew for the foreseeable future. That would effectively consume all of his profits until they were done with the jobs he had in mind, but that didn’t bother him. Simon had more saved than he really needed, and he would just squirrel it away for future lives.

He couldn’t do all the repairs himself, though. Some jobs were too big for one man, and others were too complicated for a layman like him. “Plus, this way you can start your apprenticeship without leaving the inn,” he explained to Leon one night. That got Simon fervent thanks and a hug, which was as awkward as it was delightful.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

How many strays are you going to adopt just because you erased your son’s timeline? Simon asked himself. He hadn’t, of course, according to the Dragon Icefang, Simon's son Seyom, lived a long, happy life, and his world was still spinning along out there, but who could say?

Simon didn’t worry about it right now. Instead, he focused on getting new beds made, not just for him and Bessa, but for every room in the inn. He also went out and found a new stableboy to replace Leon. Matteo wasn’t half as useful as Leon, but he was eager enough, and his aura glowed brightly enough that Simon didn’t care about the rest; he could be taught to take care of horses and be a bit bolder with customers, but teaching him to be a good person would be impossible.

The months that followed those decisions were busy times. So much construction, coupled with so many changes, should have trashed the fragile peace that Simon had been building, but they barely dented it. He was wrapped in a serenity that he hadn’t felt in a long time, and aside from the fact that he felt less and less like studying magic for fear he would do something to damage what he was building, it had no downsides that he could tell.

He could see whether someone was going to be trouble from the first moment they entered his establishment, and as time passed, he could see more than that. He could spot not just the bad apples who already had rotten souls, but those who might have a soft spot that could lead them down a dark road in the future.

Over the next two years, before the inn’s extended renovations were complete, Simon had to kill two men whose souls were too dark to let them continue breathing. However, surprisingly, each of those encounters only set him back by weeks, in his estimation, not months.

The first one was a rapist; Simon barely needed to look at the man to catch a whiff of his depravity, and caught him alone. He’d told himself he’d do it if he got the chance, but the minute Simon had seen the way he flirted with Aranna, he made it a priority.

The man just went out for a piss and never came back, and though his friends looked for him, they had no way of knowing that Simon had cast his body over the cliffs and into the sea.

The second one was a little messier, but the worst part about it was that Simon had to use one of the kitchen knives. He’d made that body disappear along with the murder weapon, but Bessa complained about that knife going missing forever after that. Still, it wasn’t like Simon would let her use it again after he’d used it to gut a murderer, and he didn’t exactly carry his sword on his belt these days.

The world had been a safe place for years now, and only his returned sight had let him see the monsters among them. Really, murder should have set me back farther than this, Simon thought, noting that they’d only made things hazier and hadn’t even washed away the colors he’d come to rely on so completely.

It’s probably because I’m glad they’re dead, Simon noted as he studied his experience point total in the mirror. Murder seemed to knock that number down a little bit, regardless, but the penalty was a lot lower when he was proud to have done it.

Simon didn’t exactly plan to become the arbiter of good and evil and wait for all the miscreants of the world to try to pass by at some crowded crossroads, but sometimes something had to be done. If a man walked into his common room with so much blood on his hands that Simon could taste the copper in the air, then he wasn’t going to be allowed to keep breathing. That was his line, as things currently stood.

Though a life where I just wander around killing evil doers sounds like fun, Simon told himself now and then. Maybe that was what he would do when he’d learned all he could from the white cloaks: he’d travel around the continent and just kill whoever needed killing.

If it goes well, I can always take out the Lizardmen and lock it in too, he reminded himself; it won’t even be a frivolous waste of time then.

Even with those setbacks, though, Simon’s perception of the world around him continued to grow, and when he reached the point where he could see the threads that connected husbands and wives, as well as those that connected strangers destined to meet, he knew that a long-awaited task was about to start.

Still, he didn’t bring it up until the carpenters were finished with the addition they’d been working so hard on that would double the number of rooms in the old place. When all of that was done, and Leon beamed with pride at Simon’s praise, he finally approached Aranna and said, “What say we go on a little trip to find your parents?”

“I—” she started. “How? Where?”

Simon shrugged. “I don’t know how long the road will be, or if they will be alive when we reach the end of it, but I can tell you we will find them or die trying.”

Aranna looked at him with less distrust than confusion before she finally nodded. She clearly had no idea how such a thing was possible, but she also knew better than to ask at this point. Simon had a way of making things happen that was hard to miss these days.

“When do we leave?” she asked.

“As soon as we get some supplies together and hire someone to replace you,” he smiled. “Bessa will be upset enough when she finds out we’re off on a trip for months without—”

“Months?” his Barmaid asked. “Why so long?”

“I have no idea how long this will take,” Simon admitted, “But even when I focus, the threads are faint. Wherever we’re going, it isn’t close.”

“Threads?” she asked, but Simon ignored her. He could tell Aranna about it on the road. Technically, this was his last loose end before he started his next chapter, whatever that was, but it felt like an adventure, too, so for now, he opted to look at it as a beginning, not an end.