Death After Death-Chapter 363 - A Clean Slate

It was hard to say how long Simon lingered at death’s door. With the dreams he had, it was hard to say how much time passed at all. Aranna was by his side constantly, but sometimes she wasn’t. Sometimes she was Elthena or even Zoa or Freya. Once it was Helades.

Intellectually, he knew that wasn’t possible, but that didn’t stop him from talking to them. He couldn’t remember those conversations, but he hoped he didn’t tell Aranna anything too embarrassing. Still, when that haze ended, he didn’t need to open his eyes to know that she wouldn’t be standing there.

His mind felt too clear, and the lumps in his mattress were too pronounced. He’d died and gone back to his cabin to start over again. He clinched his fists at that, but quickly released them. He was frustrated, sure, but it had been a good life, and ended more or less on his terms.

“You can become a sea captain in another life,” he told himself as he took a deep breath and opened his eyes to make sure he could still see the subtle currents of the world. “You were going to leave the Inn to Aranna and Leon anyway; now you have. It’s just a little sooner than you wanted to.”

The words rang hollow to his ears, but Simon made a conscious effort to suppress whatever regret he had as the colors around him started to blur and fade. He’d sacrifice a lot to keep that particular gift, and he wasn’t about to dull it with negativity; the right time to save himself with a word would have been a week ago. It was too late for that now.

Instead of that, he got up and began to pace. He noted the way his body wobbled as he moved, but for once it didn’t rate as a concern. He’d fix that on his hike down the mountain. For now, he wanted to see his stats, and after a quick command to the mirror, they appeared in their normal cyan font.

‘Name: Simon Jackoby

Level: 33

Deaths: 70

Experience Points: 229,569

Skills: Academics [Above Average], Agriculture [Poor], Archery [Poor], Armor (light) [Below Average], Armor (heavy) [Poor], Armor (medium) [Poor], Art [Above Average], Athletics [Poor], Baking [Poor], Cooking [Average], Carpentry [Above Average], Craft [Average], Deception [Above Average], Escape [Poor], Fishing [Below Average], Healing [Average], History [Above Average], Investigate [Excellent], Maces [Average], Mining [Above Average], Navigation/Mapping [Average], Research [Excellent], Ride [Below Average], Search [Average], Sneak [Average], Spears [Poor], Spell Casting [Excellent], Steal [Below Average], Swimming [Below Average], Swords [Above Average], Trading [Above Average], Transformation [Below Average] Warfare [Below Average].

Words of Power: Aufvarum (air, disperse, minor, slow), Barom (illusion, light, vision), Celdura (plan, shape), Delzam (cure, order, repair), Dnarth (command, connection, distant, hidden), Eszloum (soul), Farzehl (alter, manipulate, twist), Gelthic (ice, death, weakness), Gervuul (greater, power), Hyakk (flesh, healing), Karesh (location, protection, understanding), Meiren (creation, fire, life), Oonbetit (focused, force, motion), Uuvellum (anti-, null, boundary), Vosden (earth, growth, metal, strength), Vrazig (lightning, ruin, quickening, wind), Weylera (because, on condition of), Zyvon (sacrifice, transfer, plants, water)

His experience had gone up quite a bit since he’d stood here last time, but that wasn’t a surprise given how regularly checked it or how much he’d done. A life well spent filled up fast, and if he actually lived for seventy or eighty years, he was sure he would have had enough points to choose any fate that Helades had in her library.

Helades, just thinking about her made Simon want to talk to her, as he had so recently in his fever dreams, but he decided against it. I don’t want her to see me like this.

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Instead of reaching out to a goddess when he didn’t even have a good reason, he checked what levels were available to him next. There, nothing had changed unexpectedly. He’d take out the two levels he’d planned to take out, and only four familiar levels stood between him and something new. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

‘Level 19 - Lizard men in a swamp.

Level 20 - A Basilisk amongst the ruins.

Level 21 - A haunted cemetery.

Level 27 - Centaur raiders near Crowvar.

Level 34 - ?????’

He didn’t plan to pursue any of those right now, though, so that didn’t matter. Instead, there was something he desperately wanted to see, but looking around his body, he didn’t see any of the strange swirls he’d expected after glimpsing them in Ordenvale. Thinking that the cabin might block the threads of fate, he skipped his usual post-death meal and went outside first thing.

The sunlight blinded him momentarily, but if anything, that blindness made the lines of the hidden world glow brighter. Even then, though, the whorls that the Oracle had told him were caused by too many Simons in the world were absent. “This is the place with the most Simons anywhere, though, isn’t it?” he asked himself.

While that was technically true, as he thought about it, he realized that such a statement didn’t make a lot of sense either. After all, if the magic that brought him here ended at the cabin door, then he’d be able to see every Simon that ever came out of that door from where he was standing. He’d be in a river of Simons. He wasn’t, though. He was by himself, as he always was.

“Maybe the magic goes further than I thought,” he said to himself as he started walking.

The small voice in the back of his head said he shouldn’t leave the cabin without a sword at a minimum. His armor and a water skin would have been a good idea, but he pushed those aside for now. He wasn’t planning to go far.

Still, even as he trudged through the meadow to the forest on the far side, he didn’t see what he was looking for. The colors that clung to the trees were a bit more iridescent than usual, and the threads that led to the goblin den were a little more tangled than he would have expected, but it was hard to say what that meant.

Simon went for the best part of an hour before he turned around. By that point, he could safely say that Helades’ magic affected the whole valley, not just himself or the cabin. What did that mean? Probably nothing, besides the fact that he wouldn’t be able to get the answers that he sought until he left, and he absolutely wasn’t leaving like this.

In the cabin, he nibbled at his bread while he tried to decide what he was going to take and where he was going to go. He had a plan for this life, of course. He was going to infiltrate the White Cloaks for real this time, and then, after he learned what he could, he would either destroy them or try to reform them into being better than they were. He hadn’t decided that. Even with such a definite goal, though, there were still a lot of possibilities for how he should go about it.

He didn’t even know if he should do it at this moment in time or not. After all, whatever he did on level zero couldn’t be undone on subsequent levels, but it could undo them, creating its own complications.

“Do I really want to trek all the way to a swamp, figure out where it is, and then make my way back to civilization though?” He asked himself.

Simon checked the mirror just to make sure, but it only confirmed his suspicions. He’d never pinpointed that level’s location; he hadn’t even put much effort into it, and though he knew of a few swamps throughout Brin, none of them seemed quite right. It was possible it wasn’t even on the same continent. He was certain that the jungle temple that had dominated his earlier runs was somewhere else in the world at this point.

That was one of the reasons he’d wanted to try a seaborn life or two, but that would have to wait. He wanted to be able to cast spells again, and he couldn’t do that until his business with the Unspoken was concluded.

On whim, Simon went back outside and tried to locate both the swamp and the temple after he’d finished eating. He walked out to the shade of the nearest tree, then sat there in a deepening meditation, looking for the thread that connected either his destiny or his past to either of the places. He’d tried divination magic before, but he’d never tried to use the sight, and that was an oversight.

Still, it was a thankless task. His own threads weren’t any easier to read than Aranna’s had been, and he was much older and, at this point, very well traveled. He had connections everywhere, so the more tranquil his soul became, the more impenetrable the knot he was looking at. It wasn’t a thicket, it was a jungle. It was the farthest thing from a tapestry that he’d ever seen, and he wondered idly how all of those deeds and connections would be recorded in Helades’ book.

Looking for places he had been before, especially so long ago, was a bust. While he could find the lines that connected him to Abresse, his former inn, and even older lives like Ordenvale and Hepollyon, a place he hadn’t seen in fifty lives, was just too far away.

Still, he didn’t let himself get frustrated. Instead, he looked out to the future, trying to find the right path that would allow him to meet his current goal. That was easier to find.

It wasn’t quite the thunderbolt of enlightenment he’d faced in the north, but as the colors of the world swirled around him, and he sat there in a cocoon of all of his past deeds, he finally saw a way forward. Well, ways, was putting it more precisely. He saw all the different ways that he might be able to proceed.

He saw how low his odds would be if he just walked up to the Broken Tower and demanded entry, which had been his main plan, somewhere in the back of Simon’s mind, but there were a thousand fuzzy encounters that might or might not happen anywhere else in the region. The real question was Simon.

Was he there at some critical moment or not? Did he show himself as brave or arouse their suspicions? Most important, though, seemed to be him; did he look like a warrior? Did the tangled whorls of fate dance around him? In that moment of perfect stillness, he saw no chance of being recruited when he looked like this, or at this time.

He was going to have to bide his time for a few of the Simons that already existed to move on to other things, and he was going to have to get in shape. It was only when those things were done that he was going to be able to prove himself and find his way into their good graces.

“Will that take months?” he asked himself. “Years?”

Simon wasn’t sure, but as he shook himself free of his fugue state, he wasn’t disheartened by the news. It was a straightforward task, and as much as he would have preferred to simply speak a word of greater flesh and become the man he knew he could be, to some degree, he relished doing this the old-fashioned way.