I didn’t think I’d ever been more thankful to wake up with cobblestones jutting into my back than I was that morning. The fact that I could feel them meant the integration had gone perfectly, both the merger of my soul to this body and the imprinting of the System on my mind. Speaking of.

Greetings, Resurrector.

Your acclimatization has succeeded in all quantifiable measures.

As you have experienced in your previous life, you may now choose which aspects of the System’s optional functions will apply.

Every toggle went off immediately. Pop-up notifications with arbitrary numbers about how much a certain stab wound hurt? Annoying and intrusive. I’d rather just estimate blood loss and call it good enough. There were similar workarounds for the other optional features and honestly, those were probably better than the number form.

Some things couldn’t be put into numerical form and still be an accurate representation of their source.

Thank you for your selections.

You have gained one new Title and regained your previous Core Title. These will apply simultaneously and cannot be toggled off.

[Resurrector: Hell’s Escapee] – You have died and returned to life. Due to your method of escape, members of demonic races will be more wary around you. Extreme enemies of those races will be more likely to trust you for less reason.

[House Founder: Hellbent’s Dark Lord] – You founded a lasting dynastic faction whose actions affect all of Nisichi. This title can be used as proof of identity.

Due to your method of resurrection, the body you are inhabiting now has conformed itself to your sense of identity. In areas where that identity was too vague to mold to, the host features have been maintained.

Huh. I didn’t know that this kind of thing happened frequently enough for there to be a System acknowledgement for it, much less a separate one for the flesh-molding possession effect. Guess my thought that I could be breaking new ground in a positive way for once was too good to be true.

By the time I’d finished getting everything in order with my interface, the sun was up far enough that I could definitively, authentically, one-hundred-percent confirm that I did not know where I was.

Maybe I should have specified that in the deal. Or maybe there just wasn’t anywhere left in the world that I would have recognized. That might be the likelier option, honestly. As far as I knew, the final portion of my plan had gone off without a hitch, right down to me dying early enough that no one could argue otherwise but also too late to take the wind out from the sails of the rest of the effort.

I could make it work. Surely there had to be something left over that could clue me in to where I was in terms I was familiar with.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

First chance: architecture. The alley I was in wasn’t distinct, just gray walls, grayer cobblestones, and a discarded bloody knife that had presumably been how this body came to be minus one soul in the first place and that I was not fool enough to pick up without at least observing whether other people went about armed. The city itself had to have a style though, unless things had just changed that much in thirteen years.

Not likely.

I picked a direction and started walking.

*

Two hours of walking later, I knew that if this city had existed before, every building would have had to have been rebuilt for this level of unfamiliarity to be possible. There was no sign of Chynot’s plethora of exterior spiral staircases, not even a hint of the retractable ladders that Shuthan had adopted to get around their collective necessity for building stilts, and there certainly weren’t any of the living trees Zryton had grown around itself.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say it almost looked like a gnome city with all the cut stone and sharp angles, but there wasn’t dirt raining on my head from dangling roots, so that put the kibosh on that. It looked like I could fit into the buildings, so that cut out the potential of it being any of the reclusive imp or brownie cities. The stone was cut, not hollows melted into living stone, so it wasn’t dwarves. And it absolutely wasn’t one of the more unique species, either, or there’d be clear signs.

Probably a human city, then. Or at least human-designed; those tended to pick up anyone vaguely humanoid and roughly human sized. No idea why. Awfully bland, human cities were.

Identification based on architecture was clearly not a good idea. What other options did I have? I’d never been particularly good at navigating based on the suns’ positions, so that was out. Obviously I didn’t have a lodestone, magical or mundane, to make up for the deficiency. I couldn’t try to guess where I was based on the people because there weren’t any despite it being late morning at this point.

Oh hell.

I knew where I was. I knew exactly where I was. “You bastard, Solgilan. My own city? You put me in my own city?” I knew they probably couldn’t hear me, but it was the sentiment that mattered.

No surprise it was empty, then. After thirteen years, the only people left here would have to be both true believers and survivors of the final battle. I never did get around to getting rid of the gigantic ruby that would glow when I came back to life. It had been intended to be a morale boost if I somehow died – or came near enough that it counted – before doing what needed to be done. They probably took it as a mission to go find wherever I’d been reborn.

I had to leave. Fast. Vaz Andax was not a good place to be if you weren’t recognized, or if you would be recognized and wanted peace instead of adoration. And I would be recognized. I still looked like myself, mostly, thanks to some of the metaphysical soul/body disjoint protections around all forms of resurrection. I didn’t understand it. No one did, and if someone says they do, they’re delusional.

The quickest way out…could be in any direction. The whole city was a circle. Every road wound around, with only a few of the little alleys around to cut through. Intentionally difficult for any invaders, or for those who just weren’t used to it.

Unfortunately, that latter category now included me.

It was my own fault, really. I was the one that insisted on having it be styled in the same pattern as one of the old necropolises. The cities of the dead were all as self-contained and looping as possible to keep the naturally occurring unquiet dead inside. No one wanted a flood of preta to eat their families or an infestation of doppelgangers to grow into dominating a normal town.

So for the second time in three hours, I picked a direction and started walking.