As I'm returning to the city which serves as the nearest staging point to Virtue, a city I've now visited 4 times while still not bothering to learn the name of it, I try to reorganize my thoughts after my tear free parting with Old Man Sol. We're men, so a firm handshake and a heartfelt thank you are a good enough goodbye.

As I take the long jog back to the city with the portal to Virtue, I run my current plan through my mind. There are still a few more skills I feel I need to acquire before I allow myself to start practicing the many skills I've been learning. After that, I… After that I what, exactly?

Honestly all I've actually cared to do after coming here, the very thing that convinced me to come to this world in the first place, was the desire to learn magic. I still want to pick up the tier 3 Diviner and Necromancer skills, and I still want to learn alchemy so that I can upgrade into an Enchanter, though that one is supposed to be rather expensive to get started in, but… Right now I'm still trying to ensure that my magic practice goes towards learning new skills rather than leveling up. 17 years now of not doing the thing that I want to be able to do, all because I want to get the most out of skills while I'm living on this world?

"Status", I think.

Well, my life expectancy is high enough now that 17 years isn't as massive of a burden as it would've been on Earth, but really, what's my long term goal? What, I ask myself, Do I want to be when I grow up? I came here for the magic, and after I finish developing the Diviner, Necromancer, and Enchanter skills to tier 3, and let's say that I get Ranger to tier 4 while I'm at it, I've been saying I'd go ahead and start trying to improve my skill levels.

But why? For the attributes? What good do those do? Increasing toughness would increase my life expectancy, but right this second I'm not really seeing the value in pursuing a long life for the sake of having a long life. Sure, a long life would be nice or whatever, but… Why?

I realize at that point what it is. Leaving old man Sol is bothering me, and I'm feeling lonely. I didn't ask how old he was, and I didn't ask how much time he has left, and I didn't make any promises I'd see him again. Quite the opposite actually, leaving the village entirely was among the conditions we'd agreed upon when he accepted the task of tutoring me. But in him I found someone I could relate to.

Unlike the people my age, unlike the children I was practicing spears and guns with, or even the roommates in Virtue who I'd lived within a few feet of for nearly a decade, I actually felt comfortable around that cantankerous old man. I'm not a 17 year old, I've just been here for 17 years, so older people think I'm little more than a child, while people my own age generally don't mesh well with my personality.

I can get along with people of any age, it's downright easy to get along with the vast majority of people, all most people in either world I've seen care about are getting high or drunk, or having sex. But that's also why dealing with people my own age feels to me more like suffering the attention of belligerent children than having fun and hanging around with peers. Don't get me wrong, I like sex. Everyone likes sex. But talking about it, getting drunk, consuming or talking about drugs… Look, you gotta grow up eventually, and the number of people who simply never evolve beyond the point where their animalistic urges consume their every waking moment is disheartening.

But old man Sol? With the way attributes affect aging and his profession greatly increasing the most important stat for determining life expectancy, he may well have been older than me. As to his opinions on booze and drugs? He spends too much time near the forge, and considers them to be a safety hazard, so beyond urging me to avoid them any time I'll be near the forge and thus more prone to issues like dehydration, it simply wasn't something we'd bother talking about. It was a nice change from the more general population; he's the first person I've met in this world I actually became comfortable with.

I shake my head and clear my thoughts. My motivation isn't ideal, but the questions of "why" and "what will I do after I've finished learning the skills I want" are fair. Aside from learning magic for the sake of being able to use magic, what exactly do I want out of this life?

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Unfortunately, this is a problem I had in my last life, too. I don't want anything out of life. I'm not particularly attached to living, so I let my mind decide my goals, and I push through relentlessly to see them made reality… But the sense of a greater purpose, the view that my life has meaning? I don't have something like that. I live, I do what I believe to be most correct, and I will eventually die. Half the time I want to end things by my own hand, though I never will.

I know how I plan to die. Plan A is for me to die fighting; doing my utmost best to kill someone before they can kill me but, despite giving it my best, they succeed at killing me first. I don't want to go easy, I want to make them EARN their kill. Failing that, should I accidentally prove too difficult for someone else to overwhelm me, plan B is that I die of old age, mentally sound but physically decrepit. Failing that, when my mind is compromised and understanding the world around me becomes a struggle, only then will I take my own life during a moment of clarity. Suicide is only plan C, no matter how apathetic or disenchanted I become with life, the one and only exception to my "no suicide" rule is if my mind is compromised.

That's really all that I have to work with, though. I live, and then I die. I learn new things and push myself to improve and even take insane risks for a truly trite reason. I have nothing better to do with my time, because I don't believe anything I or anyone else will ever do will actually matter. No matter how well I fight or how long I live, even if I accomplish things that other people find extraordinary, it doesn't chance that over a sufficiently long period of time, it will have been meaningless. Even if I were to somehow remove the threat of the monsters entirely, even if I could fly into the heavens and destroy the four, "Yay I saved humanity!" Woopity doo dah. Even that wouldn't really matter to me.

Humanity is doomed no matter what I do. If it's not monsters, there'll be some form of nuclear war equivalent, or climate change, or a giant meteor sends us the way of the dinosaurs, or an alien species invades, or something, SOMETHING will absolutely destroy all of humanity, and the only way around that is… Well that's the problem, isn't it?

Even if I'm underestimating the "goodness" of humanity and we have no role in our own destruction. Even if we do everything right, even if we spread to multiple worlds and span the galaxies, entropy will eventually come for us all, and there is nothing whatsoever that I can do about that. Nothing we do matters, and no matter how great our accomplishments, no matter how many people we save, how large a nation or empire we found becomes, no matter how advanced technology becomes, the very laws of the universe have inarguably and inescapably determined that all of humanity will end.

And when we do end? We'll end so hard that not so much as a single scrap of information of any type or format will ever be discovered by anyone else. Our existence will end, as pointlessly as it began, and with not so much as a whimper or an echo for the future.

Bearing in mind that my outlook on life is that dark, the secret to my ongoing survival and effectiveness is mostly just a matter of discipline. I choose the thing I'm going to do, and I do it, and the only thing that I'm willing to let stop me is me. But that's just it, isn't it? I recognize that this little mini creed of mine is a cry for freedom and purpose, but not only do I lack purpose, I see little value in adopting a higher purpose beyond alleviating boredom.

This is a pointless line of thought, so I decide to return to the question of "why" some other day. Today I choose to keep moving. I will learn the skills I plan to learn, and then I will improve those skills. Even without having a better reason, my will alone is reason enough, because it has to be. As for what comes after? I'll come up with something to keep me busy. I always do.

When I reach the city this time, I ask one of the soldiers at the gate for the name of the city.

"Hialeah", he says.

I almost start laughing before asking him to repeat himself, which he does. I ask if there's any history or story behind the name, and he says that it's "Hi" because it's a transport city, taking us to a city in the clouds, where the leaders of humanity, our rulers, continue to try and find solutions to the monsters and the ever growing threat they pose to humanity. As for "Leah" he's less certain, but he thinks it was a founder or explorer or something. He also explains that it's common for these portal cities to adopt names which somehow relate to their role in keeping the cities in the sky from turning into mass graves.

I have to admit, I'm seriously underwhelmed by the reasoning in use here. Maybe the guard is mistaken… I hope he is, because that's the worst explanation of a city names meaning I've ever heard.

I thank him for his time, and then I set about various establishments trying to find either a necromancer or an alchemist. Perhaps once I've finished collecting the skills I have in mind, I will join the Adventurers guild and pursue a more conventional route towards empowerment and excitement. Having put in numerous job requests, I'm struck by a rather glum suspicion that I would find trying to use the Adventurers Guild to fill the void would likely be underwhelming as well.

I'm fortunate enough to locate an alchemical shop with a minimal of fuss. I walk in and introduce myself. Here's to hoping it's as fruitful as my experience with old man Sol.