My consciousness rose from a black slumber. I could hear birds chirping, the hum of insects, and the flow of water—no, it was more of the crash of a waterfall. Bright light bled through my eyelids, and my eyes stiffly cracked open to take in blue skies and clouds above. I yawned and stretched, then lazily sat up as the fog from my mind slowly cleared.

I was in a campsite, next to a stream. The firepit had gone out, but I could feel a few warm embers. I was lying on a mat, with a blanket on top. A sack was nearby, along with a crude walking stick. Upriver, the waterfall previously heard could be seen coming off a short plateau.

Through my addled brain, the questions came. Where am I? The last I recalled was the Deadlands and battle, dying, so much pain. So pointless. How did I end up here? Was this the afterlife?

With that my mouth suddenly felt cottony. I went to get to my feet, but found myself sluggish and slow, immediately falling back down to one knee. What the? I didn’t “lose” my balance, I didn’t seem to have it in the first place … and I felt so damn heavy.

I moved my arms minutely to try to ascertain these strange feelings when I noticed what I was wearing. My boots were cheap. My pants rough and seemingly didn’t fit. Then with more effort than it should have required, I felt up my shirt, my arms, and face in bewilderment.

Why is my face so smooth?

I was completely perplexed. And exhausted though I had just woken. And still damn heavy. I flexed my ki to ease myself up.

Huh. My ki wasn’t flexing through my body to support its weight. I’d been doing that unconsciously for decades—even asleep—and I couldn’t understand what could have broken such an ingrained habit. I reached it for my ki and consciously sent it through my body, but it resisted me in a way I couldn’t recall every feeling: It was goopy and tacky, like syrup in winter. I tried again, and again, and again, before I finally got enough going to let me lift myself up. I breathed a sigh of relief as the weight lessened, but I still felt gangly and unbalanced on my legs.

Still weird. Maybe just need coffee.

I walked, only slightly hobbled over to a bend in the stream where the flowing water pooled briefly. Falling to both knees, I rubbed my hands clean, drank deeply, then splashed water on my face. A tail of hair fell into and stuck to my wet face.

Long hair? I haven’t had hair this long since… My internal monologue trailed off as I noticed the reflection on the water’s surface.

I barely recognized the face. I was stunned, and my mind went blank except for the few stray and strange observations I had gathered since I woke. They circled each other, slowly piecing themselves together, as my gaze was lost in my own eyes. Until, finally, I reached one impossible conclusion.

I looked up and around myself again. This stream, that campsite… Ghosts of memories whispered across my deep recesses of my subconscious.

Could it be? I wondered. But then, I should be able to see…

For all the stiffness that had assailed by body, my head whipped around entirely one, twice, three times, frantically searching. Seeing the plateau the waterfall came off of, I scrambled to my feet, and took off running towards it. I ran awkwardly, my limbs moving as if I didn’t even know them. I reached the bottom in a few minutes, huffing, and saw one path—still steep, but less sheer than the others—and began a desperate scramble up the plateau. My fingers ached, my hands were roughed up, my lungs burning, but I couldn’t stop. I had to see…

At last, my hand reached flat ground, and I grunted as I heaved myself up. I spun around, nearly falling backwards as I did so.

I was in an alpine mountain valley, maybe ten kilometers wide. I could smell the crispness of the high mountain air. Great swaths of it were forested in spruces, firs, and aspens. Up high, snow still lay in shaded areas, but the caps had otherwise all melted. And in the middle of the valley, I saw Dorflich.

Not just any city. Dorflich. For lack of a better description, my first home.

My lungs still burned for lack of oxygen, but for a lingering moment, my breathe stilled.

That was a mistake. I almost immediately began gasping, which then turned into a hacking cough as I bent over double. As the cough subsided, I fell back on my haunches as I looked back over the valley again, rubbing one now-dirty hand under my baby-smooth chin, completely flabbergasted.

It was a city I hadn’t seen in a lifetime.

***

As time passed, I remained stunned, my mind blank. This made no sense whatsoever. I was in the past, in my young body, in the place I should have been at this very time.

This was completely beyond me. But with my mind wrapped up in itself in a functional stasis, I found myself heading back down the cliff and wandering back to my campsite.

I realized I was in shock. That itself wasn’t too terribly new to me. I’d been through, and seen far too many horrors to be lay down and cry. The first time, sure. But whatever the youth of this body, I had years of experience. And I drew on that now.

All I had to do was do something.

In shock, coming to a complete halt could lead to a downward mental spiral. And the longer that spiral spun, the harder it ever was to recuperate. Instead, the best way forward was to keep moving forward. Even if the next step was unclear, even if no forward thinking was available, the best thing to do was the next thing available. And so it was that I found myself back at my campsite, packing my meager belongings together, and setting off towards Dorflich.

And in just a tenth of a bell, my sluggish thoughts began to warm and flow again.

I had, through impossible means, become young again. But not just a youthful body: I appeared to be just outside Dorflich, not too far from where I had grown up. And the city looked just as I remember seeing it the first time. While this would bear later inspection, I suspected that I was now truly in the past itself. And yes, I had a lifetime’s worth of memories already stored: the loves, the laughs, the experience.

I came to a halt as I clenched and unclenched my hands, looking them over for something I couldn’t see. While I hadn’t been overly strong as a child, I had that agrarian fitness that came from being raised on a wheat farm in a high mountain valley. But as I moved my hands and the kinesthetic memories since waking up rolled over my arms, there was a clear resistance to all of my movements that could not be explained by weakness.

Was this my spirit? My thoughts wondered that there really should not have been that much at my age as I tentatively and absentmindedly reached out a tendril …

FWOOOM!!

My ki bloomed around me in a raging, uncontrolled storm. A shallow crater was forming underneath me as I stood; nearby shrubs were torn loose from the soil and tossed, while branches from trees cracked and blew away. I reached to constrain my spirit again, but found it wild and unruly. For agonizing seconds I wrestled with it until I wrenched control over it again and finally contained it. Before a minute had passed, the local disaster I had unleashed had ended.

While I hadn’t quite decided what I would work towards, two things became obvious. First, whatever happened to… send me into the past, I had far more ki now than I did when I was 16. While others claimed they had been able to do so, I was never quite able to grasp the quantity of ki on any absolute scale. I was elegantly—even inordinately—comfortable with analyzing the strength of an opponent or an attack relative to my own. But that was all in the moment, and I never gained a keen sense of how strong I had grown over my … previous lifetime, I suppose. There really isn’t a vocabulary for this. While I was still loss as to what happened, if I didn’t start putting some words to it, I’d never be able to move forward.

In any event, I could feel that my ki was far stronger than it should have been. Admittedly, it was far, far less than before our ill-advised assault—maybe only one part in ten or twenty—but this still remained the power of someone with years, if not decades, of spiritualism, not a young hick.

And yes, I was 16. While Dorflich’s spiritualism expertise may have lagged behind the other major cities I knew, even amongst those, few if any would have had this much power at hand at this young an age. It was… an opportunity. Completely out of control at the moment, but if I could control it relatively quickly, I would have an obscenely powerful foundation to returning to my old strength as quickly as possible.

This was momentous. While practicing spiritualists tended to peak in power in their early 50s, it was a common misconception that spiritualism slowed the aging process. Indeed, if you stripped out the somewhat-higher likelihood of violent deaths, spiritualists died of old age at nearly the same rate as everyone else. While a practitioner’s spirit and experience would grow throughout their life, it ultimately could not overcome the frailty of the body which led them to retirement. Indeed, though most spiritualists’ physical aspects peaked in their late 30s, the declines for the next decade or so were more than offset by continued growth in ki and experience, leading to some ferociously powerful elders on the cusp of graying hair.

Here though, I could very well see myself full recovering my spiritual strength in an otherwise impossibly short period of time. And while my old body had decades’ of physical training, much had been lost or offset by ignorance, impatience, and lack of motivation—in short, the frailties of youth and human understanding. Indeed, it was only in later life that I had begun to learn the way which worked best for my training.

And those ways were now at the disposal of an old, keen mind within a young and plastic body. There was so much I could do.

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I was interrupted by something at the edge of my awareness. Though I clearly had no firm grip on controlling my ki, my spiritual perception seemed mostly unhindered and I could sense a party of spiritualists moving through the woods a kilometer west. While my little accident could have easily been sensed by any nearby patrols, I was hopeful that none in the city did. I instinctively felt that it would be better to lie low for the moment. I had never gotten a sense for politics within Dorflich, the ebb and flow of power within, yet plenty of experiences in later life warned me against showing too much power—or even potential—within a city before understanding same.

With that in mind, I reached to mask my spiritual presence. Whatever cap had been keeping my ki buried was doing a good job keeping it internalized, so little intentional masking was needed. With that taken care of, I began a brisk run downstream before anyone caught up.

***

Having run about a few kilometers downriver, I emerged from the forest and slowed to an ambling walk to catch my breath. I could no longer sense the scouting party that had been heading towards my “accident,” which presumably meant they were at least a kilometer distant. And while I could see other groups patrolling through the valley on the near side of the city, none seemed focused on me or heading my direction. With my immediate concerns taken care of, I tried to pick up that thread of my planning I had dropped earlier.

The battle with the Guardian en route to the dark lord had gone…well, poorly might have been a generous descriptor. After decades of practice, our party had eventually reached a level of quiet confidence against all but the toughest beasts. That the larger raid had fared so poorly was uninspiring.

And if I was in the past, I had a second chance to make things right. So how does that future battle affect me now?

Well, it was so distant that it probably didn’t make a difference. I was a spiritualist through and through. It’s not like I could become a baker or… whatever. As peaceful as that sounded, being anything other than a spiritualist rang false in my soul. Whether I crossed paths with the dark lord was a later determination.

In any event, it was apparent that I would need years of effort to reclaim my former strength, let alone fame. I was, at the moment, just a 16 year old kid with hardly anything to his name. Admittedly, with a large of amount of uncontrolled ki, but still just a kid. There were a lot of small steps that would need to be taken care of—and with my knowledge of what happened in my past life, perhaps some things that could be fixed. For those, I would need to both greatly increase my own power—spiritual and physical; I could feel the years of combat experience still haunt me—and the soft political power I could wield against others—respect, influence, reputation. Fortunately, in Dorflich, the expression of the first would lead to the second. Compared to the great cities to the north, it was not unfair to describe Dorflich as little better than a tribe of savages in a few huts lead by a warlord. An oversimplification true, but in this city, personal power led to political power.

Of course, if I was already bound to a dojo, that would be more problematic. When I woke up and gotten my bearings, I had assumed that I was on my way to Dorflich for the first time. What belongings I had did not strike me as a hunting trip and in any event, I would not have gone solo on one at that age. Admittedly, it was an obscure memory decades old. Some aspects of that glade seemed familiar, as did the walking stick in hand. I was fairly sure my original stopover there had been some mistake—another excess of youth—and I was lucky I hadn’t been attacked at all that night. On the other hand, it was convenient that I woke up when and where I did. It gave me a chance to grab my bearings while leaving me a blank slate for the future. An unlikely coincidence for now, but as I had no idea why what happened happened, it seemed impossible to immediately attribute conscious effort by whoever—if anyone—was involved.

Still, I ought to get into and stay the night in the City. Still, the sun was just peaking over the Scarred Mountain to the west. Maybe some light hunting would be in order. And the beast cores I found would augment my meager funds.

With that in mind, I stopped my ambling walk and reached out with my spiritual perception again. In the field along the creek I was walking through, there was nothing I could sense, but back in the forest I could detect a fair number of G-level beasts and potentially a single F-level beast at the edge of my perception. Sighing at backtracking a path already walked, I went over to the creek’s edge to collect a few small river stones, then began to head back into the forest.

***

Thwipp! “Keeek!” and my third Squirrel of the day was dead. It had taken me nearly a bell just to hunt the three, but I was still all kinds of uncoordinated. When I found my first target, I had put just a touch of unattuned ki into throwing the stone, but both my physical and spiritual coordination were off and I did little more than scare it away. After the third missed creature, I headed back to the stream and threw rocks for a fifth of a bell just to get my aim to an acceptable level. Back in the forest—again—it had taken me nearly seven encounters before I had grabbed my third kill. Oh well, I thought morosely.

Regretfully, the only sharp blade I had with me was a little 8 centimeter blade. I couldn’t for the life of me recall why 16 year old me thought this was an adequate blade for anything other than whittling wood… until I remembered that whittling may very well have been why I had it. Nonetheless, it would do, and I knelt down next to the Squirrel to field dress it and remove its beast core. When that was done, I buried the guts, tied the Squirrel together with the other two, and slung it over my back to continue onwards.

As I resumed moving through the forest, I thought about how childishly simple prey these beasts were. Though they served as practice for regaining control over my fighting body, their beast cores were a pittance and the little practical value of their hide and meat would easily be overshadowed by literally any beast of a higher rank.

At just that moment, I sensed a much stronger bestial presence a few hundred meters away. It was moving slowly. Spinning my senses around carefully, I didn’t sense any people nearby. This is my chance. Moving as quietly as I could, I started closing in on where the beast was.

Popping my head from around a nearby tree, I saw the beast rooting through the dirt. It was a Boar, an F-rank beast. Such a beast could easily weigh as much as I did. Actually, I wondered, how much did I weigh now? Sighing at the strange problems I was facing after only miraculously waking up in a youthful body for a bell, I set down my belongings, took my wooden staff in two hands, and began stealthily creeping towards the Boar.

Step.

Step.

Step, crack!

As the dry twig underfoot snapped, the Boar spun around and eyed me up and down. So much for stealth, I thought as I readied my stance. No sooner had I done so, then the Boar huffed, pawed the ground, and charged at me with a violent squeal. As the Boar neared, I stepped and pivoted out of the way, my staff striking along its flank as I did so. The Boar cried, pivoted, and charged at me again. I again dodged, but this time missed my strike. The Boar charged twice more, and each time I managed to land a weak strike on its flank. Then, on the next charge, as I dodged, I swung at its head, aiming for a more direct strike.

Crraacck! And I found myself holding a one meter stick. The Boar stopped, and shook itself, before slowly turning at my more warily.

Without a weapon, this would be much more difficult to handle cleanly. With few options left, I thrust my hand forward and rapidly released my ki, attuning it to air and electricity. My control was incredibly poor still: the electricity arced all over the battlefield, but my ki was a flood and in no danger of running out now. The first bolt stunned the Boar into place, and it squealed as wave after wave of electricity struck it with its feet locked in place. After several seconds, it toppled over and I capped my ki again.

The ground and several tree around me were charred and smoldering. I didn’t appear to have started any fires, which was at least a small grace. Approaching the Boar, I saw that its hide had been thoroughly blackened and was little more than coarse soot at this point. I sighed deeply at how messy a kill that was, but pulled out my little knife and got to work.

***

Rolling my new acquired beast cores around in my hand, I continued trolling my memories. Throughout all of my travels, beast cores had a level of universality to them that made them ideal stores of value when traveling. In most cities—Dorflich includes—beast cores were almost as good as local currency. While trying to buy anything with the larger cores could be tricky, most merchants would accept small cores as equivalent to cash without a second thought. But, in any event, there were always exchange shops in cities for converting cores into currency—in Dorflich, these would be marks.

Dorflich marks were pretty simple. As a rule of thumb, for each step up a beast core rank went, the value in marks would increase by a factor of 100. Of course, the moneychangers would carefully weigh and measure the core and give you the exact value, but it was a helpful rule nonetheless. And so, a G-core was almost always 1 mark, while F-core averaged 100 marks. E-cores though would average nearly 10,000 marks. That was the highest valuation I had ever seen in Dorflich in my first life—and even then, only second hand—though I was pretty sure the trend continued through D-cores and C-cores. Such beasts though had only ever been handled by the City Guard elite, the noble families, and the Royal Guard. Perhaps there were a very few independent spiritualists in Dorflich who could do so as well, but I never moved about in such circles. I couldn’t quite recall if a B-ranked beast had ever attacked Dorflich in my lifetime, though I imagined such an attack would be considered an emergency of the highest magnitude and that even the Queen would lead the force to counter such a threat.

In any event, I had just gained over a hundred marks. I also had about five hundred marks equivalent in coin and G-cores I had saved up before moving to the City. The details were escaping me at the moment, but I was pretty sure that represented a few years’ worth of savings from home for me, slowly accumulated killing G-beasts and the occasional village militia coming together to handle a F-beast. So making another fifth of that in just one morning was pretty good relatively. A pittance compared to the wealth I threw around near the end of my last life, but a good start. And considering I broke my walking stick that I had called a “staff,” I would need to acquire a weapon soon. If I had better control of my ki, I might have foregone the weapon for spiritual techniques in the short term, but for now it was better safe than sorry.

As I neared the South Gate, I got in line behind a wagon as the guards let us in. My thoughts continued to mull until I heard the guard shout “next” at me.

“Hey kid haven’t seen you before. You new?”

I paused for just a moment, a little off-kilter from being called a kid and not quite sure how to respond. However, a few decades of bullshit came straight to mind.

“Huh, oh yeah, I left my hamlet a few days ago and I’m moving to the city. Make it rich, ya know?”

The guard seemed a little puzzled at my response, which was far more awkward than I expected. But he accepted it after a moment with a broad smile, “hey, that’s great kid. Welcome to Dorflich!”

“Thanks. I’ve actually visited the City before but I was actually going to need to find a place to live…” I trailed off as I thought back to how the City was laid out. “I heard that there’s good forest out of the west gate. Do you know a place near there?”

“Hmm. Can’t say I do, but I know a gal who would. You’ve been here before huh? Do you know Old Time Square? Yeah, if you head there, take the main road west about two blocks until you find a smith on the right side of the road. Talk to Dolores and let her know that Frank sent you.”

“Dolores, Frank. Got it.”

“Say kid, what’s with the Boar around your shoulders?”

“Huh, oh this? I killed it on my way in. The marks are good, but I figured no need to let the body go to waste.”

“Damn kid you killed that by yourself? Did you say that you were a spiritualist?”

No, I thought to myself, but “Yeah, I did, didn’t I? Ha ha.”

“Ergh. Well, while you’re at it, ask Dolores for directions to Old Han’s dojo. He’s always looking for new talent with an independent streak, and I think you’ve got that.”

“Ugh, yeah, sure. Will do.” I said with no intention of actually doing so.

“Alright kid, you’re good to go in. Good luck!”

“Thank you,” moving through the gates, “it’s good to be back.’

Time to get settled.