I may not have immediately climbed back up the side of the barrow, but only because the very small part of me that’s actually rational convinced the rest that doing the same thing twice was a bad idea. I didn’t intend to leave it for long, but there was something that would make it far easier and not as likely to end in my death (again). It wasn’t that hard and honestly, it needed to be done.

I just had to fill my second Soulroot.

There were a few different types that would help me break in there, as there were for just about anything a person could hope to do. If I wanted to tie myself to this village permanently, I could even go as specific as filling a third of my ternion with the animus of the barrow itself. The specificity of that didn’t seem appropriate, though. I still needed things that would retain use as I continued on, and a more common version would be better than something so narrow as copper anima.

Taking in the lingering essence of whatever had died to be buried in there didn't appeal either. Things may have changed while I was in hell, but I’d be very surprised if necromancy had gone from reviled to acceptable in any of the major sections of the world. Grave anima was almost always a death sentence. No pun intended.

I couldn’t imagine rotting away part of the barrow to make an entrance would go over very well either, so there went Decay. I already had Wind, but was far from advanced enough to breezewalk in or I’d have done that already. Fire was a no from a stealth perspective alone, even if the idea of being able to make firestorms at some point was very tempting.

It felt like I was overlooking something that would work perfectly for this situation so I cracked open my mental inner eyelid and took in the anima around me. Stone? No, that was a wider but less useful version of the copper idea. Purity? I think I’d just end up scrubbing off the art. Pressure? Potentially, but without a better idea of the resilience of the guards, it wasn’t a sure bet.

I kept looking, letting my feet take me around town as I searched for the perfect addition. There were no demands on my time here. I could take as long as I needed.

Though hopefully not enough to end up like Anmot the Idealist, a cultivator who supposedly only found the third portion of his ideal ternion structure on his deathbed, far too late to do anything about it. I hoped that story survived. If it didn’t, I was going to revive it. The effect it had on my initial early collection of anima as a cautionary tale cast a shadow over the rest of my entire time in the first life.

Wait. Shadow. Was I stupid? Shadow animus would be the absolute best option. This was literally its main function: concealment.

Phantoms. I was an idiot. How did I forget about Shadow? As my thoughts turned to it, the faint traces of it around me grew more prominent. Not enough to fill my second Soulroot, but that was just a matter of location.

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I kept wandering, looking for the place where the Shadow anima were most populous. Unlike Wind, Stone, or Fire, there were only specific areas it would develop in. It couldn’t be dark constantly or there wouldn’t be anything there. That had always bothered me, but I hadn’t had time to look into it in my last life. Maybe I would this time. Or maybe someone else had found the answer in the however-many years it had been, because I couldn’t keep deluding myself that it had only been thirteen.

The area also couldn’t be lit up more than half the time either, for more obvious reasons. Regular patches of alternating light and shadow worked best, so I was working my way toward an edge of the village that I thought was west. Hopefully there’d be some form of shaded overhang there, in darkness for all but the last hours of the daylight.

A lot of the old cultivation strongholds would have an area designed specifically to sponsor the development of Shadow animus. I had no idea if this place had been built or added onto with cultivation in mind, but there had to be some alley that only saw sunlight occasionally. Maybe a sunset pavilion; those used to be popular.

*

The edge of town was startlingly sharp for a place that didn’t have a wall. There was no fade-out of houses spacing themselves out and farms emerging in the newly unoccupied space, just copper-sided houses and then emptiness. I’d have expected a town this small to have been using every bit of spare land for fields or pastures unless they had someone tucked away who had a way to boost crop growth speed.

Maybe Drakebarrow did have someone for that. How would I know? I’d only been awake for a matter of hours. Nonconsecutive hours, even, if my unconsciousness at the hands of the barrow’s guardians had been any decent length of time.

Should I be worried at how unworried I was about that uncertainty? Probably. Was I? Absolutely not.

Especially since I’d found what I was looking for. Three buildings, all clustered together, their roofs overlapping enough for a pocket – sized just right for a person to sit in – to be more dark than light. The motes of anima agreed, layers of interlocked black power piling up in the nook.

As I sat down, dispersing the sheets back into free-floating flecks, I opened myself to them, offering my second soulroot for their new home. None came; the root remained devoid of anything. Unfortunate. Not entirely unexpected, but I was hoping my goal to not be detected by any of the major powers of the world would have brought me into alignment with what the Shadow animus wanted.

Why only some forms of anima seemed to need a mental adjustment, I had never gotten a satisfactory answer to. Everyone had ideas but none of those held up to every example. It wasn’t entirely about immersing yourself in darkness for the same reason that the animus itself wouldn’t develop in those spaces. It wasn’t about being willing to cross boundaries, but that was one of the most common threads of successful approaches to absorbing Shadow anima.

But it wasn’t completely random, either. There were entire sects built around the various uses of Shadow anima and lineages of cultivators that all used the same Shadow combination, each new generation building on the knowledge that came before. There was something repeatable about it. Something replicable enough to make that possible, but also situational enough that it didn’t just happen for everyone.

I didn’t know Shadow animus well enough to figure it out on my own. Surely I had some memory tucked away that could give me the key. Who did I know in my previous life that cultivated Shadow and may have said something about it to someone that didn’t?