Time continued to pass.

After years of hard work, I finally identified the root cause behind Maela’s illness. The problem was the binding essence in her body. The way the digestive system worked in this world was quite unusual. After the intestines absorbed nutrients, binding essence dragged them into a series of tubes. These tubes were filled with liquified binding essence, and transported nutrients to the rest of the body.

Maela’s body didn’t produce enough binding essence. It seemed like the body had some sort of ‘priority’ system for what got nutrients first, and Maela’s body had put her legs last on the list. Thus, her upper body got nutrients fine, but her lower half was starving to death. It didn't matter how much she ate, because her body couldn't transport the nutrients.

Unfortunately, learning about the origin problem only brought me frustration. This was because I had no way to solve this problem. I could fix many things, but I had no idea how to correct a lack of binding essence. How was I even supposed to improve someone's binding essence generation?

I had no clue.

Once again, I realized that my ability had a very limited effect on essence-related injuries and problems. I now understood the issue… but I had no way to fix it. When I told Maela that I had no way to cure her, I felt like crying. I didn’t like feeling helpless in the face of injuries and illnesses. My healing abilities were wonderful… but every time I couldn’t heal someone, I felt awful.

Maela didn’t seem to mind it anywhere near as much as I did. When I told her she would be reliant on my healing forever, she shrugged and thanked me for trying. She seemed… unbothered. Instead, she gave me a hug and told me that it was all right. Even if she was reliant upon me to keep a ‘normal’ lifestyle, I had already given her the ability to walk, run, and move on her own. Even if she needed to receive an infusion of healing magic every few days to keep that going, she was happy that I had done this much for her.

Hearing that made me unsure how to feel. On one hand, I was glad that Maela could take her continued illness in stride. She didn't seem to be putting on a brave face. She seemed genuinely unconcerned. On the other hand, I felt guilty that I couldn't heal the last parts of her illness.

Maela seemed to realize I was feeling glum. She invited me to go into the rainforest. There, we found a nice little clearing and relaxed for a few hours. The only interruption was a pair of venomous fanged toads fighting over a berry bush. It was a nice day, even if it did make me question what was wrong with the animals of this continent.

A year later, my mother passed away. I had been expecting it, and a part of me had known that there wasn’t much that I could have done to change it. Still, I felt bad. I didn’t mourn my mother - after all, I had never gotten a chance to know her very well in this life. Instead, I mourned a relationship that could have been. I had been close with my last two families, so my poor family situation this life stung. But at the end of the day, I had done everything I could. There wasn't anything I could have done to create a different outcome.

Meanwhile, Felix continued to thrive. Anise and I had settled down in the town, becoming unremarkable on a global stage, but Felix was now famous throughout Zanna.

After the king finished re-uniting Zanna, he settled into a period of reconstruction. The people of Zanna were grateful for that. The scars of the civil war had left plenty of people mourning their lost businesses, friends, and family members. The archipelago needed time to heal.

That’s where Felix thrived.

Factories started to spring up left and right. Those factories pumped out materials to make more factories. Those factories, in turn, made more factories…

Originally, Zanna had a hard time expanding its industrial strength past a certain point. Damilius sucked away resources and manpower like a butcher dissecting prey. Without Damilius, Zanna finally had the space it needed to grow. Within a few decades, this continent might catch up and become a new industrial powerhouse.

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Five years after the civil war ended, Zanna even started to make steps to address the rainforest. For centuries, the rainforest had been a development roadblock. They were dense, venomous, and difficult to navigate. However, it wasn’t impossible to expand into them - just very expensive. With no oppressive overlord, and the rest of the world in chaos, Zanna started developing the rainforest.

During that year, I also made my final accomplishment in rune magic.

Power: Form your 8th rune.

Achievement +560

This brought my Achievement from 19,599 to 20,119 Achievement. It was also the limit of runes I could make this time. My rune maximum had increased after my ability upgrade, but this was my limit.

The upgrade for forming an eighth rune were similar to the seventh. I could move even faster than before, and air resistance and my own agility constrained me less. I could sense that I was on the verge of something. If I managed to push to my ninth rune, I suspected something interesting would happen.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the essence to build a ninth rune, even if I had my keywords active. So it was a pointless ‘what if’ scenario, at least in this life.

Apart from that, my teleportation ability got cheaper and more efficient. It still didn’t catch up to my rune ability, but it was closer than before.

Time continued to pass. I started to delve ever more deeply into souls. I wanted to understand them. I wanted to figure out what made them tick.

But progress was frustratingly slow. I kept running into barriers left and right. I got the distinct feeling that my soul-sight just wasn’t good enough for my needs. I couldn’t see what was happening. Worse, the magic of this dimension was completely unsuited for viewing, measuring, and interacting with souls. The natives had no idea what souls looked like, and I had no good way to learn more. I ran into wall after wall as I tried to conduct my research and improve my abilities further. I made frustratingly little progress, no matter what I tried to do. Part of me was tempted to try to ‘farm’ a bunch of low-rarity skills for Achievement… but that felt like a much more narrow path of growth. Worse, it probably wouldn’t actually give me very much Achievement. To get a skill to ‘basic’ grade could take years, and might only reward me with a few dozen points of Achievement, or even less.

In simple terms, I started to feel stuck. I was still working to grow, still working to get more Achievement… but the things I tried just weren’t working out.

Unlike my frustrated attempts at growing, Felix’s time was going incredibly well in this world. Ten years after the civil war ended, most Zannans had forgotten Felix was from Damilius. Instead, they referred to him as the Honorable Minister of Industry. Most people had respect for him. Around that time, people also started to show up and ask Anise and I if we could ‘get in touch’ with Felix. Most of them wanted us to get Felix to promote various sketchy political agendas. Anise and I refused, of course.

It was annoying, but I decided to take it as a sign of how much Felix had grown. Most of these visitors didn’t push too hard. They didn't seem to hold much hope for our ‘inner contact’ with Felix. At least on the surface, we didn’t visit Felix that often. Anise and I usually met up with Felix once a year for a nice lunch and a relaxing day among friends. We didn't even exchange letters, or telegrams.

Of course, that was because we had communication bracelets. They didn’t have any range limitation, so Anise and I talked with Felix at least once a week. Felix was more than a little bemused when he heard about our visitors with sketchy agendas. He also asked me to help him heal a few important people when he wanted to build a few connections. Both of us took great pains to mask my identity during those times, and while it wasn't perfect, it seemed to fool the patients.

Time continued to pass. Outside of Zanna, the freed colonies and Ennalia started to have major conflicts. Ennalia tried to build a new, stronger colonial empire. The old colonies sent swarms of soldiers to tell Ennalia to get bent. Ennalia lost more than they won in those wars, although a few smaller colonies did get reconquered.

Zanna, however, was left out of the mess. There were some safe sea passages between Zanna and the Zelyrian continent. However, the death zone left after the Worldstrider-continent war left many of them unusable. Combined with Zanna's expanding navy, Ennalia seemed more interested in picking on weaker targets. Thus, our corner of the world remained peaceful.

By the time I turned forty, I was starting to realize something unusual.

For two lives, we had died pretty young, relative to our species. But now, there were no real threats to our lives besides disease and old age. The country was stable. There weren’t any major catastrophes happening. We weren’t under any serious threat from venom or disease, thanks to my healing. Most people lived to around sixty or so. Anise, Felix and I were now forty.

For the first time ever, I was growing old.