My dead body wasn’t technically the only thing floating around in the Sleem system. There were a handful of minor planetoids we had missed. Small asteroids, mostly. None bigger than a Volkswagen Beetle, with the majority of them in the basketball-sized range.

The occasional comet passed through the system as well, from the distant OORT cloud it hosted. Most of those weren’t worth the effort it would have taken to run a ship out, land on them, and sell them to BuyMort after a MortBlock claim had been made.

But primarily it was just me and empty space, floating around the star as it traveled its way through the universe, almost free of encumbrances. All it hauled along with it was that handful of space trash I described above, an inert BuyMort gate that nobody used, my dead, armored body, and the wreck of the Thread of Fate.

The cosmic string the ship had used as a weapon vanished, drifting free in the universe I used to dump it in. It wasn’t held in sway to the star like I was, eternally falling into its gravity well and then being pushed back out by its solar winds.

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If I could remember the time I spent in Sleem, I would probably describe it as the most peaceful days of my entire existence. For just under a century, I drifted through space. Alone, betrayed to my death, and simply gone to all who had known or loved me. A peaceful, dead exile in deep space.

I was in a void, gripped by frozen oblivion for decades while I drifted. Unaware from the moment Admiral Omen blew my head off, right up until the moment my still-clenched fist blasted through a fragment of the Church’s last relic ship. My suit’s charge spun up, its central printer began working, and thin tendrils dragged chunks of skull and brain matter back into place.

Then, after I was put back together, my suit began thawing out my body, replacing parts too damaged or exposed to be used. The crystalline colonies in my body, long dormant, began to stir again.

And my eyes opened, onto a completely foreign multiverse. It was time to get to work.

The End (of Book 6)