Before we can deduce anything further about Miller, we must first recognise him as only the latest, blurriest manifestation of an archetype repeated throughout Henry’s larger myth.

Before we can recognise that repeating archetype, we have to recognise that Henry’s story actually is a myth – or at least adheres to the form, structures, and logic of a myth.

And before that, we have to recognise what a myth is, as opposed to more conventional modes of storytelling, such as radical anti-(x)-litrpgs.

The first half of this non-chapter of my ‘author’s’ note essay is devoted to that last point, the most abstracted from our man without explanation. The second half begins, but does not complete, the lengthier process of identifying these mythological currents in action in the saga. I pair them in one non-chapter because they form two sides of the same mythological coin.

III. Myth and Its Logic

Myth as Conceived by a Robot

What distinguishes a myth from conventional story?

Here, to set a general outline and establish that I’m only guided by the same dry facts and unbiased logic available to everyone else, I’ll let our pre-super-AI essay-assistance-bot companion chime in first to set the criteria:

Its answer:

'Myths have several distinctive features that set them apart from more conventional stories, such as folktales, fables, modern fiction, and radical anti-(x) litrpgs. These features include:

1. Sacred and Cultural Significance: Myths often hold religious or spiritual importance and are integral to the cultural identity of a community. They are frequently used to explain the origins of the world, natural phenomena, or the customs and beliefs of a society.

2. Timeless and Universal Themes: Myths address fundamental human concerns and universal themes such as creation, the nature of the universe, life and death, good and evil, and the human condition. These themes are often timeless, meaning they are not confined to a specific historical period.

3. Supernatural Elements: Myths commonly feature gods, goddesses, demigods, and supernatural beings. These characters often possess extraordinary powers and exist in realms that are beyond the ordinary human world.

4. Explanatory Function: Myths serve to explain the origins and workings of the natural world and human society. They offer explanations for natural events (like the changing seasons or natural disasters) and social practices (like rituals and taboos).

5. Symbolism and Allegory: Myths are rich in symbols and allegorical content. The characters, events, and settings in myths often represent deeper truths or abstract ideas. This symbolic nature allows myths to convey complex concepts in an accessible and memorable way.

6. Traditional and Oral Transmission: Myths are typically rooted in ancient traditions and have been passed down through generations via oral storytelling before being written down. This oral tradition helps to preserve the myth's core elements while allowing for variations and adaptations over time.

7. Non-Human Protagonists: Unlike conventional stories that often focus on human characters, myths frequently feature deities, animals, or other non-human entities as the main characters. These protagonists often embody human traits or natural forces.

8. Moral and Ethical Lessons: Myths often impart moral or ethical lessons, though these lessons may not always be explicit. The actions and outcomes within myths serve to teach values and principles important to the culture from which they originate.

9. Cosmogonic and Eschatological Narratives: Myths frequently deal with the creation of the world (cosmogony) and the end of the world or human existence (eschatology). These narratives provide a framework for understanding the beginning and ultimate fate of the universe and humanity.

10. Fixed, Archetypal Structure: Myths often follow archetypal narrative structures, such as the hero's journey or the struggle between good and evil. These archetypal patterns provide a familiar framework that resonates with human psychology and cultural archetypes.

In contrast, more conventional stories, such as novels, short stories, contemporary fiction, and radical anti-(x) litrpgs, typically prioritize individual character development, realistic settings, and specific plots that address particular events or conflicts. These stories are usually created for entertainment, exploration of human experience, and artistic expression rather than for conveying sacred truths or explaining the cosmos.'

Thank you, Chat-Friend-PT.

Of Diachrony and Synchrony

In addition to those more obvious features, which we’ll contrast with Henry’s saga next, I’ll add another that might be unknown to readers, as it was to myself before this research, a feature of myth that deserves a much more expansive explanation for its revelatory powers regarding Miller. This is the usage of what the structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss calls ‘synchronic’ storytelling. Synchronic storytelling is a second, rarer mode of storytelling that exists in contrast to the more common ‘diachronic’ mode that dominates modern storytelling, a mode that is worth itself describing first as the two are intertwined.

Diachrony

The diachronic structure will already be familiar to the reader even if the name is not.

These stories follow four basic phases: Goal, Conflict, Action, and Resolution. A story’s hero or protagonist begins with a goal - e.g. to liberate a princess from a castle or to boil an egg for dinner. Something or someone creates a conflict by blocking the fulfilment of that goal - the castle is guarded by a dragon-tortoise horror or they don’t possess an egg. The main body of the story consists of the hero taking one or more decisive, life-endangering actions to overcome that conflict - scouring multiple planes of existence for kung-fu skills synthesised in an ultimate showdown with the dragon-tortoise horror or driving to the nearest supermarket where eggs are sold. Finally, and of arguably less significance than the former phase, the hero’s actions against the conflict do or do not resolve the original goal – the hero discovers the princess is in another castle or the hero purchases the egg. Such is the core plot structure of most modern stories, whether the phases are crammed neatly in a five-minute cartoon or extended across a 1000-page epic with multiple intertwining sub-plots.

The ‘diachronic’, through-time, label alludes to the fact this mode’s progression is strictly linear. The four phases of a plot succeed and develop upon their previous phases, and they cannot be swapped around in narrative time, although the sequence of presentation can be rearranged. Exemplifying the last fact, some tales open in medias res, in the action phase before retrospectively establishing the goal and conflict through dialogue or flashbacks. Or, in the confounding structure of this duel with Henry and Miller, conceived diachronically, a story might never present the goal or the conflict or the resolution until one non-author takes up the challenging task.

Synchrony

Myth, while employing this diachronic method as a frame structure, often pairs it with a non-linear, ‘synchronic’, storytelling method. This, producing some of the weirder and more cryptic aspects of the genre, revolves around the reader/listener identifying a theme or motif that repeats and mutates itself obscurely throughout the diachronic phases of a myth or—in a complexity I won’t be touching—across multiple myths when a culture’s full corpus is re-evaluated as a unified entity.

The repeated synchronic theme, in its clearest form, contains some or other hidden cultural wisdom. One theme in the children's tale of Little Red Riding Hood, for example, might be articulated as ‘judge by more than outer appearances; anyone, even your grandma, could be a wolf’. Or Goldilocks and the three bears: ‘Don’t steal a bear’s porridge because bears are our friends and they, too, deserve a legal right to unharassed property’. Or this saga's conventional literary interpretation: ‘We must ban videogames for the sake of society’.

The theme can, however, manifest more crudely. Without any coherent moral dictum, it might arise instead from—and confess to—anything the myth-teller bestows with psychological significance, like repeating notions of herbs as a pathway to higher states of power/conscious, primordial fears of snakes, or archetypes of prominent human personalities.

What makes this storytelling mode synchronic is that its elements can repeat anywhere and everywhere in narrative time and its resolution does not correspond with any one fixed point, as the diachronic story does at the ending. The synchronic 'conflict'—the observance of a number of weird, inexplicable repetitions in a myth—achieves its 'resolution' whensoever the reader/listener compiles the repetitions mentally and deciphers their underlying message, the light of this epiphany then casting back retrospectively upon the former mystery.

In the above regard, synchronic stories are a type of mental puzzle-game between the teller and the listener. If we are to be successful in deciphering a myth, we can’t simply receive its statements of events as is. We must gather extra information from the context of its statements, from the coded, mytho-symbolic meanings of its statements, from the motives and beliefs and personality of the statement-teller, from the emphasis of statements, of which repetition is only one method of emphasis alongside length, specificity, loudness, and viscerality, from the de-emphasis of statements, a man’s whispers and omissions often speaking volumes.

An Eggsample of Mythological Synchrony

I'll illustrate the synchronic difference with a puzzling story of another man without explanation. Let’s say, hypothetically, you’re investigating the mythological meanings of a radical anti-videogame litrpg when you hit a wall after exhausting all conventional methods of research. You've talked to strangers, you've talked to books, you've talked to robots, and none of these even comprehend the questions, let alone the answers. So, you seek out higher powers yet, signing up for a psychedelic retreat to consume unnamed substances in an unnamed desert of America. During your trip, while begging the shamanic spirits to explain what the hell this story's about, a shady, meth-fiend-looking dude—possibly real, more likely an imagined apparition—sidles up beside you in the drum circle. In this stranger's pocket appears to be stuffed—by shape and bulk and rustle—a printed manifesto. Without prompting, without answering your inquiry about the manifesto stuffed in his pocket, he initiates a diabolical rant about his struggle to cook last month’s dinner.

'Last month's dinner?'

Indeed, last month's dinner.

The diachronic structure of this strange stranger’s tale is straightforward and, in fact, already spoiled above. Goal: he wants to boil an egg. Conflict: he has no egg. Action: he goes to the supermarket where he buys an egg. Resolution: he and the egg live happily egger after.

In the telling of this simple eggspedition, however, the stranger meanders like ancient Odysseus into ordeal after fantastical ordeal, most of which seem self-inflicted and serve no purpose except to prolong a trip that should have only taken, at most—according to conventional shopping times, according to my geographical knowledge of Greece and ancient sea-faring transit speeds—a week or two. Never a month.

I’d encourage the reader to scrutinise the following episodes with regard to its synchronic puzzle, asking what’s the hidden theme uniting its absurdity, the common moral, the common enemy.

The Stranger and His Myth

Act 1. Before the stranger can even get his car out of the driveway, he finds himself blocked by dozens of unmonitored toddlers on tricycles. Lectures about the dangers risked by this gang of rugrats fail to persuade them to leave, as does shouting. He removes them with a blast from his garden hose, and not—the stranger winks—the blast he should’ve given them.

Act 2. In his car, partway through the drive, he spots a group of teenage punks spraypainting a fence. A model citizen, he stops to seize the can from the punks at gunpoint. They take flight. As he’s about to celebrate his good-deed done, the stranger is spotted—can and gun in hand— by a security guard who mistakes him for the offenders. A chase sequence and a bullet-whizzing shootout follow, terminating with him hiding in a kindergarten. Already judged a criminal by society, he spraypaints the kindergarten’s façade with a nuclear danger sign.

Act 3. At the supermarket. The tale, just when it was getting exciting, slumps into a thirty-minute-long account detailing and recreating in real-time the ordeal of finding a parking spot. Why? Impossible to tell.

Act 4. At last inside, scanning the aisles, the absurdity escalates even further. After the stranger selects his roundest, smoothest, least-blemished egg, it’s stolen right as he’s about to grab it by a visibly pregnant woman. In the battle that ensues with this pregnant woman—during which our hero notes he did NOT employ the Chekhovian gun of Act 2’s shoot-out—the physical and mental exertion pushes him to a hallucinatory psychosis that climaxes in a mystic vision. He witnesses a titanic mother hen, whose comb scrapes the clouds, waltzing over our planet, dumping from her cloaca a million-egg rain. These eggs congest the streets, the parks, the parking lots. Meanwhile, the stranger, equipped with a golf club, chases after the hen, swinging and annihilating her unhatched brood. The mission receives no end as the vision fades to black.

Act 5. At this point, the stranger mumbles that, after losing the battle with the preggo, even though he’d had the means to win, he’d spent the next three weeks at a hospital in a coma. Destiny in all her cruelty would delay his reggstitution until his release, when he’d revisited the supermarket and found another, almost-perfect egg.

Epilogue and Synchronic Resolution.

Finally—if you, struggling with your high-as-heaven brain to decipher the synchronic theme are still lost, not yet recognising the mythological yoke within this shell of a myth about an egg—the stranger hands you the manifesto from his pocket. This, you discover to be a radical anti-natalist proposal.

Aha, you think, perceiving the mythological villain revealed behind the toddler gangs and lack of parking, as well as the single moral solution to this villain. ‘We must exterminate all of parent-kind’. Convinced, tear-choked, and mythologically moved, you then shake that stranger’s hand and join his conspiracy to save society from its multiplying menace.

His divine mission complete, the stranger stands up from the drum circle and retreats back into the desert night from whence he came.

Synchronic Addendum, Its Ambiguity and Its Potential

Now, in contrast to that silly example, the synchronic messages of most myths are rarely so blatantly presented - unless you're reading a compilation of myths that, in a storytelling faux pas, stops and explains the theme right at the end. Hard to isolate, the repetitions of one synchronic motif can be scattered and jumbled along with the repetitions of other motifs. Likewise, the messaging inferred from how the pattern of various themes fit together is usually ambiguous, leaving room for different, multi-layered, and contradictory interpretations.

That ambiguity of interpretation, which I’ll emphasise because my own myth-based reasoning for Miller will be subject to the same constraint, could be applied to the egg-purchasing tale.

Alternative Interpretation 1. Listener A, a humanist, could validly argue that the anecdote—despite the stranger’s own interpretation, conceiving the egg as a mere frame story to push his radical anti-parent agenda at mystical drug gatherings—still holds at its mythological core the egg. Is this stranger’s anti-natalism not just one example of the absurd extremes people are driven to when they’re so destitute they’re purchasing egg in the singular? Is this ideology not a misguided retaliation for being subject to the unstated torture in the myth’s aftermath of standing around an apartment waiting for his one, lonesome egg to boil? Why, it’s not surprising at all that such a famished soul would direct their hatred onto parent-kind, resentful as they are of those fiends enjoying their eggs, plural, with their spawn. In fact, if we review his tale, its climactic hallucination of golf-clubbing multiple eggs, reveals the true target of the stranger’s animosity, this overly-expensive produce, which one could only dream of wasting in abundance, a message further symbolised by the random golf club and the frivolous sport it represents. Yes, everything points back to a poverty motive, even the stranger’s ‘methfiend-looking’ form, a consequence not of drugs but nutrient deprivation.

Interpretation 2. Listener B, meanwhile, a student of Jungian psychoanalysis, could notice the egg’s dual value as a religious nativity symbol. They might declare that the story sublimates further into encapsulating both issues simultaneously, the hated egg and the hated mother’s pregnancy sharing a collective dream unity. What’s more, the tale, like all great tales, alludes to the resurrection of Christ, as embodied by the stranger awakening from his three-week coma unscathed and unpersuaded against his heaven-serving mission.

Interpretation 3. And Listener C, one of those vile meta-fictionalist dweebs who’re always breaking immersion and never just trusting the narrative as presented, might accuse me of being the 'you' of this 'anecdote' beating the drum while blitzed on psychs. Furthermore, this listener having a patronising streak, they might declare that the hallucinated meth-fiend is also myself, a self-forecast of my bleak, increasingly-rambling, increasingly-egg-esque-nested-digressing future if I continue relying on avant-garde crutches in my tireless quest for explanation.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Now, much of that drivel is patently nonsense. With Listener B, I can confirm I did not plan the Jesus garbage in the anecdote’s bizarre construction, although it might’ve slipped in unconsciously after absorbing too much of this myth-saga's mystical drone. Meta-fictionally, the set-up was a joke, and a drug test of my lucid, facts-grounded theorising will show no presence of any harder substances than the ibuprofen sometimes taken for the headache produced by this saga’s brain-splintering mysteries.

Yet these false interpretations do exhibit one of the unique, wonderful features of a myth’s synchronic puzzle-game. At the cost of ambiguity, at the cost of misinterpretation or non-interpretation, the genre of myth has a capacity—precisely due to its ambiguity—to expand in meaning beyond the teller’s conceptions as the listener toys with its absurdities. A myth, its ancient form predating rigid Yes or No logic and not limited by logic, can contain both Yes and No and More within its multiple, egg-like layers.

Holding that last point in mind, I will now attempt, perhaps both correctly and incorrectly, to demonstrate using the above criteria, both Chat GPT's and Levi-Strauss's, that Henry's saga is fundamentally mythological.

IV. The Saga as Myth

Is Henry’s story a myth? Does anything we’ve slogged through in its thousands and thousands of meandering pages resonate with the logic of a myth described last half of this non-chapter? I’m going to argue, if the reader is not already sensing that resonance, that there’s copious logical evidence it does.

But Hasn’t Henry Already Spoiled That His Saga Is a Myth?

Before we bother to break down the saga’s structure, some readers may recall that Henry practically says outright that his story, at least in the highest interpretation, is mythological. This, he confesses when he chooses for the 8th and most impenetrable layer of his ‘ultimate pleb-bait’, to quote from Chapter 171, ‘a Post-Post-Maximalist non-linear inverted modernisation of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh’. Gilgamesh—as the reader might recall from my previous research to decipher Henry’s jargon and nightmares—is history’s first chiselled fable, a middle-eastern myth about a king’s quest for immortality, and Henry’s ‘ultimate pleb-bait’ is—as all of us have hopefully noticed—a pseudo-metafictional device describing this story.

(‘Author’s’ note within an ‘author’s’ note: Pseudo-metafictional. I don’t want to insinuate that Henry is aware of being the main hero and moral champion of a radical anti-everything-litrpg. Rather, it is my belief that, after ascending into cyborgdom, our hero has merely unlocked a state of superconsciousness attuning him to the subtler, myth-like rhythms of his saga; in this regard, his literary productions are a form of self-reflection, meditation, play, and spoiler. Secondly, more critically, the events of this story aren’t fiction but a 100% accurate representation of humanity’s far-distant, videogame-enslaved future.)

Comparisons—which I skip due to exceeding the scope of this myth-centric ‘author’s’ note essay—between his pleb-bait’s lesser layers, its melodrama, its satire, its tragicomedy, its pastiche, will show their own correspondences in the vacillating modalities of these future messages. Although the saga, unlike Henry’s cyborg pleb-bait, does not manage the claimed all-demographic-appeasing juggle, it is evident that the mysterious being or thing sending the story appears to be attempting a reproduction of Henry’s ideal, which it, or perhaps myself in my flawed intermediary function, subsequently butcher, creating a monstrosity that appeals not to every human in history but roughly five individuals and shrinking. Of course, we can’t eliminate other explanations for the flaws, such as the mysterious originator only aspiring to a loose, non-exact analogy, the originator pulling our leg as they amuse themselves with waft, or the originator utilising these layers for a yet more obscure, meta-pseudo-meta-fictional purpose. But, tangential or joking or meta-meta-joking, I’ll hazard that, if this demonic being has feigned at reproductions of Henry’s lesser plot-layers, then it may have also attempted the same with the highest layer, the layer of the myth. My subsequent analysis, naturally, confirms this.

Answering Chat GPT

Let’s first table the professor Chatburt G.P Thomerson’s criteria for a quick checklist.

Myth Feature

Applicability to Henry’s Saga

Sacred and Cultural Significance

Previews the far-distant future of 2050. Warns us of the spiritual danger of videogames and roleplaying. Check.

Timeless and Universal Themes

The essential need to prioritise time. Humanism. Man’s search for the meaning of participating in a tournament. Take drugs and gamble. Check.

Supernatural Elements

Gods, gods, gods, gods, gods, gods. Check.

Explanatory Function

Tons of explanations but they fail to explain anything. A half Fail.

Symbolism and Allegory

Blood, sky, sand, mountains ad nauseam. Check.

Traditional and Oral Transmission

Although I eventually type it out, the story is first transmitted to me through the most traditional method of all, dreams and hallucinations penned on whatever writing surface is available at the time. Check.

Non-Human Protagonists

Henry is an immortal cyborg. Check.

Moral and Ethical Lessons

Is this even a question? Check. Check. Check.

Cosmogonic and Eschatological Narratives

Cosmic planes, world-merging apocalypses. Check.

Fixed, Archetypal Structure

A structure so non-fixed and unconventional it requires an ‘author’s’ note essay to describe. Fail.

10.5 out of 10. Not every item is met, but enough are, I think, to satisfy the pre-robots of the 20s. On the other hand, as Chat-GPT pointed out, conventional, non-myth stories like anti-(x) litrpgs ‘prioritize individual character development, realistic settings, and specific plots’, and these are glaringly absent in Henry’s declining-social-IQ, virtual setting, plotless saga. I certainly haven’t discerned a plot. Have you? This story’s like 50% digressive pseudo-essays.

Answering The Structuralists

A similar confirmation is yielded when evaluating the saga according to Levi-Strauss’s structuralist framework. We can ask does Henry’s tale focus on a conventional, diachronic storytelling mode, i.e. the plot phases of goal-conflict-action-resolution? Or is the focus on a mythological synchronic mode, i.e. the theme puzzle-game?

Diachronic Interpretation

A diachronic analysis will show the plot to be about as straightforward and dumb as the previous egg-purchasing anecdote.

For this fourth volume, the structure of Henry’s heroic quest looks like this:

Goal: Win all of the tournaments.

Conflict: What conflict? Henry was already the best at everything. Now, as a cyborg, he’s only more better.

Action: Pummel a series of weaker, non-cyborg opponents.

Resolution: Presumably, Henry wins all the tournaments, but the first chapter of this rookie category spoils he’s going to lose it, inverting this into an apparent tragedy with a negative ending. (313: ‘This tournament, alone, he’d not be winning. One of the other eight would be taking him out.’) We have to ponder, however, if this even qualifies as a tragedy. Henry’s already won a heap of more critical, non-amateur tournaments. Plus, as we learned through Grandma Ru, he’s rigging bets to walk away with fat loads of $$$.

Diachronically, that’s hardly a plot. And, if we were to compare the sub-‘plots’ of the volume’s seven other contestants, the structure is equally bleak. All of them are destined to lose except, presumably, one although in a saga with such a desolate design, we can’t eliminate the chance that every contestant somehow loses, along with us hallucinating/reading also meta-non-fictionally losing for squandering our energy on this hopeless anti-story (‘author’s’ note within an ‘author’s’ note: I hallucinated ahead to check. No, someone does win, thankfully.)

An aficionado of tournament arcs might rebut here that the above-described framing is misleading if not hysterical, that it glosses over the completely conventional mass-tragedy intrinsic to all tournament arcs since the historic dawn of this nihilistic genre. A tournament, logically, cannot award victory to the bulk of its contestants, and the genre’s appeal has always been the schadenfreude of watching randoms fail their dreams, a sort of aspiration holocaust. To this rebuttal, I rebut back that, while such may admittedly be the nihilistic case with the tournament arcs of other litrpgs and this litrpg's tournament arc, further diachronic analyses of the rest of the saga will reveal the same plot blackhole. What was the plot of the first volume? Henry completes a beginner’s tutorial, ‘progressing’ from level nothing to 5. What about volumes two and three? Anti-Friendship? Anti-Romance? Overtraining so much that this tournament of volume four loses its plot?

Diachronically, the saga is a non-saga, and the vast majority of its material is redundant, serving no identifiable function towards the development of any plot. Abominably, this anti-(x)-litrpg appears to also be anti-literature.

Synchronic Interpretation

But synchronically, on the level of myth and myth’s puzzle-game, some proportion of this redundant material could be the product of intensive thematic repetition. That is the conclusion, possibly erroneous, possibly mad, that I have drawn after much reflection. Throughout the saga’s looping digressions and absurdities, its demonic originator might be shanking us again and again and again and again and again and again and again with a second, non-diachronic story. That it is to suggest, although not definitively prove, that this plotless non-saga may have had a plot, a plot lurking in its repeating theme or, perhaps, more obscurely yet, in the constellation of repeating themes, a plot begging for recognition, decipherment, and synchronic enlightenment.

Maybe. I’ve never been able to locate such a plot, and here, in this ‘author’s note essay, about Miller’s identity, I will be making no great attempts to disentangle this plot if it does exist. The absurd scope of such a task will be made evidently impossible for one of my own limited, non-cyborg intellect as I continue to flounder through the much-humbler challenge of mythologically interpreting just one, minor archetypical figure and his duel.

But, for the hyper-geniuses and semi-cyborgs between now and 2050 who might one day be up to this challenge, the research framework diagrammed by my inept ramblings should offer one potential starting point.

Immortality and Its Reincarnating Forms

In illustrating the saga’s synchronic excess, the most obvious recurring theme, which won’t be analysed here, is that of a ‘mountain’, whose omnipresent shape permeates every layer of the saga, from Henry’s nightmares, to his and others’ constant metaphors of climbing and ascension, to Henry’s adversary in the murky past before this saga ‘Heaven’s Mountain’, to the title of the game (Saana, as a reader once informed me, is a holy Finnish summit), to the saga’s title.

To avoid adding to that repetition—and for the previously described difficulties, and also because doing so has more topical relevancy in this ‘author’-essay-note—I’ll be focusing on a smaller, secondary theme, that of ‘Immortality’, i.e. the transcendence of death.

By selecting this theme, I may be accused of foul intellectual play. The sceptical reader might recognise that it’s not a theme I myself have organically identified but, rather, have plagiarised from Henry’s 8th Gilgamesh layer, from that tale’s own theme about a man’s quest for immortality. Through this plagiarism, I commit a larger, circular error of logic as I use the very thing that prompted my hypothesis, i.e. the current mythological interpretation, to justify and validate itself, this analysis being—in mythological terms—an Ouroboros swallowing its own tail. I would, however, dispute both claims. From an analysis I won’t document here about a higher meta-theme of Meta-Non-Fictional Cyclicality, I’ve concluded that the saga’s emphasis of Henry’s meta-‘fictional’ pleb-bait has a larger meta-mythological purpose hinting to begin any synchronic interpretation with this theme. This story IS circular, and so, in turn, should be any befitting literary interpretation of it.

Off the bat, a content analysis of the saga’s full text thus far counts morphemes of ‘immortality’ and its nearest synonyms—‘invincible’ and ‘eternal’—as occurring over 400 times. That is an absurd rate of more than once per chapter. This density multiplies if we expand the search into related concepts, like ‘reincarnation’, ‘revival’, ‘cyclicality’, and the antonyms of ‘mortality’ and ‘death’. This repetition of the theme, in language, as I survey the text for instances, corresponds with a yet more omnipresent repetition in ideas, actions, and lore documented below.

The Cripple and His Immortality

The densest clustering of the immortal theme revolves around Henry’s old duelling persona, ‘The Cripple’ or, as Henry himself appends like a dweeb, ‘The Invincible Cripple’. (126: ‘[Silver Wolf] decided to put it all on the table. “You're The Cripple." "The Invincible Cripple," [Henry] corrected. "Don't omit the invincible part; it's an important component of my legacy.”’)

Third Gate. His title is backed by a deathless streak in duelling, one that’s ultimately ended by The Third Gate, another contestant in the tournament. This mystic, a bastard lore-child pulled into the saga by Henry’s remote past, expresses her own obsession with immortality, through both the extremes taken to achieve the goal of denying Henry’s immortality and her dirt-eating rhetoric with promises of an eternal, roleplayer-ruled paradise beyond these days of apocalypse. Henry’s deeper lore as ‘The Second Gate’ probably contains similar messages, but, to be frank, I refuse to re-read any of that material because it makes me feel like I’m experiencing an episode of schizophrenia.

Mrtyu. Another side-personality to The Cripple with the immortality theme is the principal antagonist of his old career. This is an Indian duellist Mrtyu, first mentioned in chapter 168 (to quote, ‘in his 8th and decisive match against Mrtyu, an Indian Qi Master and Saana's then-reigning duellist champion.’) and later met with Whitefrog in 228 when the pair arrive in Suchi to challenge Henry. That username, ‘Mrtyu’, as is made explicit in 288 (aptly titled ‘The Return of Death’), happens to be Sanskrit for ‘Death’, originating from the same Indo-European language root that evolves in English into ‘Murder’ and ‘Morbid’. We thus learn that the crowning act of Henry’s first run as a duellist was to triumph over death, to obtain—symbolically— immortality.

The Cripple’s End. Very curiously, Henry’s Cripple saga terminates with a negative relationship to immortality. His final act, after ascending to the stars and duelling cosmic gods, is to obliterate his character.

----187: ‘Freeing himself from The Cycle, he grabbed a Legendary Class to terminate his character’s invincibility, travelled to a remote galaxy on a distant Plane, and leapt into a black-hole...’

----218, from a journalist at his press conference: ‘“Mr Lee, what’s the significance of [the self-fanfic written about his adventure’s] ending? Why pick a Legendary Class before committing suicide by diving into a blackhole?”’

The emotional tone in these quotes—‘freeing’, ‘suicide’—and the excessiveness of the action betray what I interpret as Henry’s mutating view of invincibility. The trait, a gift worth bragging over earlier in the career, becomes as he’s drawn ever deeper into ‘The Cycle’ of Saana a burden and a malediction, one that requires a dramatic gesture of self-destruction to purge. This tainted regard of invincibility continues, I believe, to the present day. It’s most palpable in a peculiar emphasis Henry and his narrative bestow the reincarnation of player characters. This, an ordinary game feature, which should never need to be repeated, receives constant attention from Henry as he juxtaposes it against an unstated fact, that of the non-reincarnation of the NPCs, a distinction that provokes his sense of grief, irony, helplessness, rage, and injustice.

A Thousand Tools. In Saana III, as The Invincible Cripple Returns, so too does his immortal theme.

Three of A Thousand Tool’s constituent styles mention the idea by name - Eternal Brother Blade, Invincible Steel of The Excavated Mind, Eternal Rain Zoology. Many others repeat the theme without the title. Most notable of these would be the episodes of The War-Priest’s Duty with its systematic ‘Death Training’ and the background Old Rangbitan lore that conceives Saana’s amorphous ‘Cycle’ in terms of NPCs reincarnating through a progression of life ‘Duties’ or castes.

Ultimately, what these arts synthesise into, ‘A Thousand Tools’, is a martial reincarnation of ‘Twenty Tools’. (286: ‘[Henry] would bring with him both the abrupt cessation of Twenty Tools and—after a period of quiescence—its phoenix-like rebirth into a much greater beast.’)

And behind the whole project is the immortality-esque melodrama of Henry seeking to revive the legacy of ‘Heavy-Fingers’. In a spiritual regard, he also revives Heavy-Fingers himself, first mentioned during Henry’s tutorial (Chapter 12 – Expert Lessons from a Foul-Mouthed Monk), and revealed much later, during Henry’s date with Rose (Chapter 196), to have been slain by her brother after a torture session in which the monk’s eyesockets were, to quote a nightmare cameo of the duellist in 147, ‘dagger-raped’.

Beyond The Cripple

The dream mountain. That nightmare of the mountain could in turn be re-examined in thematic terms. Does it not portray a ghoulish type of immortality, tens of millions locked in a purgatory of dying undeath? Henry himself, ‘the climber’, by falling from the slope only to rise and climb again, gesticulates an obvious metaphor for reincarnation through never-ending, psychopathic persistence.

Monologues. On a lighter note, immortality invades several monologues, a form that repeats so often in the story it may itself signify a different synchronic theme. Karnon’s cryptic speech in Chapter 183, when he interrupts Henry’s executions at a trading post, appears to be delivered on the subject based on the jargon of ‘Hero-Eternals’ and ‘Enemy-Bear-Eternals’ - this, we'll soon learn, is not mere appearance. Meanwhile, in 253, when Henry is comforting London Tremor after their plans were spoiled due to The Tyrant revelation, Henry’s monologue equates the intern’s future redemption through journalism and his own through avant-garde fannypacks to the resurrection of Jesus.

Saana's lore. Beyond Henry, and perhaps what instils him with the obsession, much of Saana’s background lore fixates on the theme. Comparing the various conceptions of the afterlife held by its NPCs, they’re all wildly inconsistent except for one central notion of a Hindu-esque cyclicality - cyclical duties, cyclical deserts, cyclical dialectics, cyclical blood, cyclical crusades. Historically, Henry is also by no means the first conqueror to claim invincibility in title. He’s preceded by a ‘Tyrant of Sokgyemant’, a.k.a. ‘The Deathless One’, a researcher of zombification.

----102: ‘The Deathless One, having an obsession with immortality, conducted human experiments on the freed slaves, transforming them into mindless undead automatons...’

In the even deeper past is a yet murkier immortal, ‘The Eternal One’, described by the infected Kolonian builder of 305-307 as reincarnating into all of Saana’s supervillains.

---306: ‘The erasure of this Goddess’s religion had been the Kolonian’s[sic] founding story, the holy wars triggering when the Cosmos-Scryers identified her as this Cycle’s 7th and latest reincarnation of The Eternal One, the hermaphrodite form succeeding King Jazeer’s Nameless Bane, The Deathless One, and The Redeemer...’

In the next non-chapter, taking a rest from yet still continuing this immortal theme, I'll be dipping for a very short moment into this 'Eternal One'. This turned out be another of the saga's men without explanation, but, in his case, my reconstruction of him proved a wild success.