The following day Simon felt like shit. This wasn’t just because the life energy he’d stolen from the would-be thief had faded to some degree. It was also because he’d done it at all. He was definitely looking and feeling better than before he’d dropped a nuke on the graveyard, but he was still pretty far from one hundred percent.

Draining the life of a man had felt worlds better than draining the life of a swarm of insects. It was dangerously good, and though, in this instance, he could certainly say what he’d done was self-defense, it was a small fig leaf for such a terrible thing.

Would it have been any better if I’d beheaded him with a word of force or stopped his heart with a bolt of lightning instead, he wondered. At least this way, the asshole lived.

Whether he lived or died wasn’t the problem, though. The worst part, though, was that Simon craved to do it again. That craving was enough to make him decide that Zyvon was the most dangerous word he knew, and yet it haunted him.

As he lay there with a headache, trying to ignore the clatter of crockery from the first floor and the sound of wagons from the street beyond, some small part of him whispered that he could easily steal a little strength from any one of them, just to silence the throbbing in his head. No one would know.

Well, no one but his experience score, for whatever that was worth. He still hadn’t gotten a straight answer out of the mirror. Baring a better question, that was probably what he was going to ask Helades about someday on level 40. That was a long way off, though.

For now, he forced himself to get out of bed and move. He might lose weight if he lay there and wasted away, but he was never going to get stronger like that. Instead, he explored the backstreets, looking for someone to fight. When that didn’t happen, he went beyond the walls of the city, looking for monsters to slay instead.

Sadly, this wasn’t a video game, and there were no areas to grind. So, at sunset, he returned to the inn.

There, at least, he made a conscious effort not to get drunk again. Though it was understandable when he’d been hurting, he was past that now. He’d been heading down a dark road with that sort of behavior. He had no wish to add alcoholism to his list of achievements. Instead, he listened as people talked, and he tried to learn more about the city he found himself in.

He could leave at any time, of course, but even if he was ready for the fight on the next level, he was close enough to solving this one that he was loath to leave it. He’d beaten the mist once; he just needed to figure out what he was missing so he could strike the final blow.

It took a lot of random conversations and buying a lot of drinks for talkative old men before he finally found someone who claimed to know the story of why the mist had started in the first place.

“Folks talk about the mist like it’s been there in that graveyard forever, but it ain’t,” a retired merchant told him. “It wasn’t here the first time I passed through Darndelle, nor even the second or third time, but one day after a trip up north, it had just sort of settled in.”

“Well, that should have made the cause easy enough to figure out then,” Simon said. “Do you have any idea what caused it?”

“Of course! They buried the wrong body in it! It was some warlock, that was said to be cursed and all that. Turns out the rumors had been right,” the greybeard laughed. “Poisoned the whole place, and only the light of day is enough to keep his angry shade at bay.”

“Well, why didn’t they just dig him back up and dispose of the body some other way?” Simon asked. “Toss him in the sea or burn him to ash?”

“They did just that, so the story says,” the trader nodded. “They dug him up a week after they buried him, burned his corpse to dust, and then scattered those remains in the river so he could never again be reconstituted.”

“So then, why is the graveyard still cursed?” Simon asked.

“I wish I knew,” the man laughed. “The church has offered a tidy sum for anyone who can purge the problem once and for all, but no matter who shows up to do the deed, the mist fades for a week or a month, and then it returns with a vengeance. I tell you; the land is poisoned.”

Simon’s knowledge of magic didn’t cover curses and whether or not they were real, but then, that didn’t mean anything. He knew how to cast a few spells, but he only had a basic knowledge of the way that magical items worked. Both the diagrams he’d made about the runes that powered the golem or held back hell were still beyond him.

So, realistically, he had no idea if or how something would be cursed. Since he was definitely dealing with an evil spirit of some kind, and he’d killed plenty of skeletons in the past, he was inclined to agree that something like that was possible. Though he doubted it was as simple as a word or two he didn’t have.

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Simon asked more questions of the man, but he had no answers. It was unreasonable for Simon to expect that he would, of course. Who could say where a body was buried twenty years ago? He’d be hard-pressed to draw a map to a place he visited frequently but hadn’t been for twenty years.

That applied to pretty much everywhere he’d ever been, since he’d been gone from Earth for like a century now. His whole life was slowly fading beneath the tidal forces of the Pit’s continual grind.

There was nothing that said he had to keep going, of course. Darendelle was a nice enough city. He could stop living off his gold, get a real job killing things, and enjoy a nice, quiet life here. The King didn’t seem so bad, and because of the city's nature as an inland trade hub, they were friendly enough to outsiders.

That felt too much like giving up to him, though. Simon would be happy to spend a lifetime in a level so long as he got to clear it, but to just decide it was home meant that he’d stop looking and striving. That was intolerable to him. If he did that, then all he would do was prove Helades right and make all the suffering he’d endured to get to the point so far pointless.

“Mirror, how many floors have I completed so far?” Simon asked when he was back in the room, studying his washbasin.

‘18 floors are currently completed,’ it responded in wavering, glowing blue text.

“18,” he told himself. “Well, then let’s make it 19, shall we?”

The next morning, he visited the temple next to the graveyard, making sure not to go through the door that led to the next level. It was a lovely old building with fancy mosaics and even a large stained-glass window.

Simon had yet to see any evidence that the Gods of this world were real at this point, but he took a better safe than sorry approach with them. Just because magic was real here didn’t mean that the religions had to worship real gods and goddesses. After all, that hadn’t stopped any number of religions on Earth, so he didn’t see why that should matter one way or the other.

Still with his twin worries about the shadows that some people saw in his soul and the gnawing hunger to find another excuse to use Zyvon, he went inside and offered a tithe for a benediction. Would the priests or the acolytes be able to see him? Simon wondered. Would they brand him a warlock and try to burn him at the stake or something?

It wasn’t impossible, but part of him certainly hoped that they would try. Instead, they took his silver, gave him a blessing, and then answered his questions about the history of the cemetery.

It turned out that they did indeed have records going back that far, but the name of the man interred had been lost to time, making it impossible to cross-reference them. “How can you expect someone to purge this blight if you don't even know the guy’s name?” Simon asked in frustration.

“Ah, you see, our records contain only names of those who are buried here,” the priest corrected, “and since this man was dug up shortly after he was buried, he’s not in our records anymore.”

“But he was buried, soo…” Simon said, a little exasperated. If he tried to scourge every last inch of the graveyard with fire or something again, they’d probably arrest him. He needed a target more specific than ‘the graveyard.’

“Well, if you discover his name and preferably the date, then we could probably go back through the records and tell you where he was buried,” the priest said, trying to be helpful.

“And where am I supposed to get that information?” Simon sighed.

“The county seat where he was tried and executed might know,” the priest said helpfully.

That turned out to be a lie, though a subtle one. It turned out that the county seat would, but that there were dozens of counties in the Kingdom. Even if he just visited the nearby ones, that meant he had to travel to eight different towns, which was going to be at least a hundred miles of walking or riding.

Simon sighed and got started, thinking of it as a weight loss pilgrimage as much as anything else. He bought a few supplies, like a new bow, a better backpack, a warm bedroll, and some comfortable boots, but eschewed a horse. He wasn’t in a hurry.

Maybe I can find some goblins to suck dry, he thought hopefully as he left the city gates behind him.

Over the next few weeks, he visited five different towns before he found at least some answers in the form of a particularly knowledgeable records keeper in Lyndon Hills. The Keeper didn’t know precisely what the name of the warlock was, but he did recall the Blackheart incident, as he referred to it. He was happy to tell Simon all the lurid details, though the only thing that was really useful to him was the town where all of this had started, a little town a few days ride to the north called Kawsburl.

It was standard fare as most of these warlock stories went. A stranger arrived in Kawsburl a decade before things had come to a head.

He’d kept to himself, he’d been nice enough, but then people had started dying and there were strange lights sometimes at night. The trouble had really only started when an angry mob showed up on the stranger’s doorstep to demand answers.

Almost everyone in that mob died that night, the clerk told him, and in the end it took trained witch hunters to find the monster and bring him to justice. It turned out that the whole thing got its name from dead heart inside the man when they finally cut him open after killing him the fourth time. The warlock simply wouldn’t stay dead.

The thing that bothered Simon, though, was how he said it like it was just a horror story, like the man was retelling the events of Sleepy Hollow or something. Simon couldn’t help but imagine himself in the role of the villain as the man described the fire and lightning that the evil mage was supposed to have summoned.

He suddenly had a much better idea of why people disliked magic in this world. He’d heard stories like this at the bar, of course, but he’d never really felt like they were about him. After he drained the life out of that mugger, though, and been disappointed that no bandits gave him an opportunity to do it again, he couldn’t help but feel like maybe he was the bad guy.

Well, not the bad guy. He was a hero, but lately, he’d been a little less than heroic. He’d have to work on that.