The newly crowned mountain king didn't waste time and started to dig around for useful rocks amongst the corpses of its kind right after our handshake. What I was surprised about was that the younger ones seemed to do the same thing, but they kept quite a large distance from the newly crowned king.

This trip however quenched my exploration ich. At least for some time. I looked around a bit but decided not to loot. Instead, I started to head back home with Goose scouting in front. We moved at a reasonable pace and the only break during our journey was the hot spring.

The water there was truly magnificent and before I noticed it a day had gone past while I was just sitting in the water. That was a weird occurrence. Thinking more about this I concluded that I might not be human anymore.

My needs and wants are now a lot different from a regular human. I don’t need sleep for multiple days. My perception of reality is a lot different than regular humans, but I guess food is still what connects me amongst other small things. So perhaps still human but moving quite fast away from being one.

The real question is how long I will live. This is something that I have not really thought about because even without any system enhancements I have quite a lot of life left to live. I might need to start asking more pointed questions, but that would be a problem.

I don’t think my camouflage could hide the fact that I now have a higher tier of energy permeating me. I would need to spend some time away from the village just working on my energy control so I could hide myself better. But doing so might start to be a burden and take away from my progress in other areas that makes me stronger.

This hot spring could become a place for me to practice my energy control but I would like to do it on my own land so I could have access to more energy regen. The dungeon might also be a good place especially now since it would be quite pointless to try to delve the dungeon as it would not give me any XP or very little towards my levels. I’m quite positive that levelling up just became a lot harder. But then again working on making myself physically weaker could teach me quite a lot. Why can’t things be easy and straightforward?

I finally decided to get out and head back to the farm. I was running low on rations and my apprentices might start to worry if I didn’t come back soon. I also had a lot of experiments that needed to be done.

This expedition or more specifically the fight really catapulted my development. I would also like to know how I compared to other adventurers. But I suspect when spring comes, I will have plenty of opportunities to find out.

My trip back to the farm was interrupted by me finding out another feature of the interactive map. I could leave comments on locations that I’ve visited. This way I was able to mark all the interesting things I found that I couldn’t bring back.

I really need to thank the goblins for explaining how much intent worked on the system. I might need to start thinking about what else might give me huge advantages that I could borrow from earth's vast amount of fantasy literature and games.

The homecoming was pleasant, and it was great to talk to people again. The sauna was different from the hot springs but if I had to choose one for the rest of my life I would still have to go with the sauna.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

The most interesting thing my apprentice told me was that George seemed to have gotten himself a girlfriend. I honestly wasn’t surprised as they were spending most of the time in the village together. But I have to say that George works fast with how little time he has in the village.

Emma and Arthur seemed to be teasing him endlessly about it, but I decided not to join in. I had done this enough in my last life and I just quietly wish them the best of luck. But what I did remind George was to talk to the girl about his aspirations more specifically the number of family members that he wanted to have. He promised me that he will have to talk with her and I was quite refreshed by how quickly things moved and how normal it seemed to everyone.

I had to remind myself that this was sort of a medieval society and not like back on earth where people might be together for a long time before anything truly serious starts to happen. This however made me a bit sad. I remembered my wife and my kids and grandkids. I hoped my kids were alright but mostly I worried that my grandkids weren't being spoiled enough with extra candy.

We were a bit smarter than the last generation so we tried to not get our kids hooked on sugar but it was a hard thing to accomplish. I think I liked it even more how my grandkid's faces lighted up whenever I pulled out pieces of candy when we all knew they were not supposed to have any. I don’t know why but for some reason you just want to spoil your grandkids as much as possible. It’s kind of weird actually.

But now for the hardest question. Do I want a family in this world? I kind of don’t. While my family wasn't perfect, I still love them and would do anything for them, and this love hasn’t gone away. I had to take a break from the resting room and go outside alone as I didn’t know if I could keep being happy in front of them. While my wife was gone for a few years now I still visited my kids quite often and I missed them terribly.

As I went outside, I was basically naked with only a towel covering my privates. I was standing on the frozen river while cold wind blew around me. But none of that hurt as much as not seeing my family again. If I truly look back at all that I have done here I’ve basically just tried to keep myself as busy as possible so I wouldn’t have to think about the hard things.

For some reason, I don’t think any of them were alive anymore. I feel that wherever my memories came from was a dark place that I spent a lot of time in. But I’m a stubborn and tenacious bastard who was somehow able to keep my conscious together to steal this unfortunate child’s body.

I think I would have become sort of like a guiding figure for him if he didn’t die. But even that would not have been intended. I think I was supposed to be nothing more than an infodump to help Rich achieve his dreams.

I didn’t stand here for too long and started to damp down on my feelings again. Going back into the mindset that can survive. I always hated myself for not being able to let go. In the war, there were so many times when I should have died but no matter what even if I didn’t want to, I still kept trying to live. Even here I can only get close. I just have to hope that I will run into someone that I can't defeat or run away from. But knowing myself that will most likely not happen.

I wiped my eyes as best as I could as I headed back in and went straight into the heating room. My apprentices suspect that something had happened, but no one questioned me about anything important.

I was happy with that as it took quite a while for me to get my emotions under control. I wonder if there is a psychologist somewhere in this world because I have quite a lot of problems that need to be worked out and not suppressed. But I guess currently suppressing will have to do.

After a while, things got back to how they were, and we enjoyed the rest of the sauna. Sleep came quite quickly and as usual, it was a mix of happy memories and nightmares, but I was quite used to those.

Morning came quickly and I did my usual stretches to wake up. It was time for a training montage, and I was quite excited about it. It was quite euphoric to see the numbers go up on my achievement page.