"Captain’s Log: Don’t get bitten."

Once again, my level had been reset to one, but I’d kept my skill ranks and journal entries and achievements. My enhanced physiology was still in effect as well. So what was the point of leveling up, anyway?

Something had happened after I died, but the memory had dissolved beneath the morning light. For some reason, it made me think about Hubble images of space. Where did my soul go between the time of my death and the respawn? It clearly wasn’t instantaneous. Maybe souls had to sleep too. I wished I could talk to my brother about it. It was hard for me to remember his face. It hadn’t been that long since I had seen my family, but they seemed so far away. We were literally on different worlds, but the distance shouldn’t have mattered. Distance didn’t make you forget.

The events of the last few days were crystal clear. It was my old life that felt fuzzy. A story I knew well, but that had happened to someone else. Was dying influencing my mind? Even if I could continue to respawn without limit, I couldn’t treat this like a game. I had a feeling that repeated deaths and rebirths would do more than cost me experience.

Back at the base, I recovered my equipment and buried yesterday’s body a little downstream from my shelter. It looked okay except for the arm, which was run through with black lines like poisoned veins. Burying myself a second time was surreal, but didn’t bother me all that much. At least this time, no one had stolen my skin.

The upside of dying was that it reset my appetite. Well rested, and not yet starving, I had an entire day ahead of me to work and plan. As I finished filling in my burial plot, my eyes settled on the area I’d designated as a zombie graveyard. The mushrooms had multiplied, and while most were shriveled and white, a few had spread closer to the shadow of the shelter, and those were purple and fat.

Zombie mushrooms. That couldn’t be good for the environment.

I harvested the tainted mushrooms and the resulting material entry consisted of a three word note.

Do not eat.

What an unnecessary warning. Between building fires and sleeping in a coffin, it seemed like I could reliably survive the night. Now I wanted to know more about how monster spawns actually worked. The System clearly had rules, even if they were a little strange. In order to take full advantage of the gift of a second life, I had to learn those rules and exploit them.

What did I know? The shamblers only spawned at night. The shamblers only spawned if the light level fell below an unknown threshold. What other limitations were there? Using my shovel, I dug out three different cells in the walls of my underground shelter. Two of the cells were five-foot cubes, and one was a three-foot cube. I filled one of the big cells with junk, sticks and logs, grass and loose dirt, to where I couldn’t have fit in there myself unless I curled into a ball on top of all the stuff. Then I blocked off all three cells with log walls. Planks would have taken less material, but I wasn’t sure if planks or fences were strong enough to withstand a zombie banging against them for hours.

The log walls were all missing a single piece near the center, not enough of a hole to crawl through, but enough for me to see inside. I was so preoccupied that I didn’t hear the horses approaching.

“Hail, stranger.”

It was the chad. I raced up the stairs out of my shelter to discover I had four visitors on horseback. The soldier, Esmelda, and two unfamiliar faces. They were both little folk. One was an older man with curly white hair and pale gray eyes. His clothes were too nice for travel, a bright green vest over a pristine white shirt, and his boots looked like they had recently been shined. The other was middle-aged, with a ruddy complexion and a massive belly. He was wearing a blue stole over a brown robe, and I immediately marked him as a priest.

“Hi,” I said, waving. “Good to see you again.”

The chad soldier looked dour, but Esmelda smiled.

“Hello again,” she said. “I’m glad to see you are well. This is my father, Mayor Boffin, of Erihseht,” she gestured to the older man, “and this is Pastor Tipple.” She glanced back at me and did a double take.

“Your arm! It’s healed.”

“What’s this now?” The mayor said.

“He was wounded,” Esmelda explained, “I told you he’d been bitten. It was there,” she pointed at my arm.

“I got over it,” I said.

The pastor's pony was as fat as he was, and he came down from it with care. “Let me see,” he said. “Where was it?”

I lifted my arm. There wasn’t anything there to show him. Damage to my body didn’t carry over from one life to the next.

He frowned. “Not even a scar. What bit you?”

I considered making something up, but as I’d already told them I was from another world, I figured I might as well stick with the truth.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“I’m not sure what it was,” I said. “A monster. It walked like a human, but it had a lot of extra skin and tentacles. It was the tentacles that bit me.”

The blonde man gave a sharp intake of breath, then breathed out a word. “Koroshai.”

That was the same word my System had used for monsters, but it was hard not to just think of them as zombies. An alarmed look passed between the mayor and Esmelda, and the Pastor’s face hardened.

“Where did you see this creature? Did you kill it?”

“I buried it over there,” I said, gesturing to the shallow graves beside my shelter.

“Show me.”

I fetched a couple of shovels, and the soldier helped me dig up the zombie while the others gathered around. I could have harvested the dirt much faster than we could dig, but I wasn’t sure how they would react to seeing my abilities in action, so we uncovered it the old-fashioned way.

The shambler was barely recognizable. Its body had mostly dissolved into mycelium and plant-like structures, but the bones had kept their shape. The smell wasn’t as bad as before, though it still reminded me of a swamp.

The pastor touched his forehead and uttered a brief prayer in their language.

The soldier grabbed my arm. “How many?”

“Uh, lots,” I said. “They show up every night.”

He let me go and said something harsh-sounding to the mayor.

Boffin shook his head. “We need to know that you are what you claim to be.” He said to me. “No hero has come to us in living memory. The koroshai are minions of the Dark Lord. Gastard believes you are his servant, and have come to us in deceit.”

So the chad was named Gastard? That checked out.

“What can I do to prove it to you?” I said.

“Show us a miracle,” Tipple said. “Every soul chosen by Mizu was blessed by her in some way. You asked Esmelda for herbs for a wound, but now we see you are healed. Is that your gift?”

That would be a little complicated to explain. Did all transmigrators come with a respawn mechanic, or was that particular to the Survivor System? Regardless, I wasn’t interested in dying again to prove to them I was special.

“Hold on,” I said, “I’ve got something.” I climbed back down into my shelter to retrieve my new backpack and brought it back up. They watched me dig through it for coins, and I picked a bare patch of earth to throw one down on.

Grass appeared at my feet with an audible pop, rising almost to my waist.

They drew back, and Gastard’s sword leapt into his hand. He was a moment from swinging on me when Tipple stepped in front of him. They had a brief argument, none of which I could understand, except it was pretty obvious that Gastard wanted to kill me.

“Those coins,” Esmelda said, “did you create them?”

“Sort of,” I said. It was easier to show than to tell. I patted the grass with my hand, and a moment later, the material converted back into travel size.

Tipple uttered another prayer, while Esmelda watched me with wide eyes.

“It is the power of the Dark Lord,” she said. I thought harvesting grass was a weird thing for a Dark Lord to be known for, but I wasn’t in a position to argue.

“Why are you here?” Boffin asked. “Why have you come to us now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I died, and the goddess sent me here. She gave me a quest, but it didn’t come with instructions. I’m supposed to do something involving a guy named Kevin.”

There was a lengthy pause following my statement. The group seemed to wait for me to say more, but that was all I had. The mayor cleared his throat.

“We rarely use that name. But Kevin is the true name of the Dark Lord. Dargoth has not stirred in centuries, but he rules there, upon his Throne of Shadows, as he always has.”

I guess that meant he would not be my mentor.

“You don’t know anything else?” Tipple said. “Did Mizu send you to defeat him? To protect us?”

I held up my hands. “Maybe? I’m not really clear on any of this. I’ve only been here a few days.” Esmelda was watching me with narrowed eyes. “When I saw you riding up the first time, I thought you had come to find me. How did you know I was here?”

“A dream,” she said, “but not of you. I saw shadows rising over the mountains, and monsters, and flames. I saw it night after night, and I asked Gastard to ride with me. When we saw you, I didn’t know what it meant.”

“Can you talk to the goddess?” I asked Tipple. “Does she send you messages?”

He shook his head. “We offer her our prayers, and we have the Shui, a record of our history and her teachings. But she does not speak to us directly. Esmelda told me of her dreams, and I wondered if they were visions, but we did not know.”

“So do you believe me?”

Tipple looked at the mayor, whose face had wrinkled with concern.

“We will have to discuss this further,” he said. “For now, I will ask you to remain here. If the beasts of Dargoth are hunting you, that is a danger we cannot allow you to bring to Erihseht.”

“I’m not sure if they’re hunting me, exactly,” I said. “The zombies appear at night, and they go away in the morning.”

“All the more reason for you to stay away.”

I nodded. They had to think about their own safety first, and it wasn’t as if I’d been planning on moving into the first village I found. As long as monsters were spawning, I would be a threat to anyone who was close to me.

“I don’t know where Erihseht is,” I said. “Would it be alright if I moved closer to the river?”

The mayor frowned. “Where this stream meets Wiskywend, no further.”

“That’s fine,” I said, assuming Wiskywend was the body of water I’d come across the other day. “I don’t want to cause you any trouble. But do you think your village could spare me some seeds? I’d like to grow a garden, and I don’t have much to work with.”

“We…can,” Esmelda said cautiously.

Gastard said something to Boffin, who nodded.

“Gastard wants to see for himself if what you say of the koroshai is true. Will you allow him to stay with you through the night?”

“I’m okay with that,” I said. If anything, having another person with a sword around would make me feel a lot better, as long as he wasn’t planning on killing me himself. “As long as he understands how dangerous that is. As soon as the sun goes down, there are going to be a lot of zombies in the area.”

Gastard sheathed his sword. “I want that,” he said. It was an odd response, probably because of the language barrier, but as long as he understood the risk, he was welcome to shelter with me.

“May the blessing of the goddess be upon you both,” Tipple said, touching his knuckle lightly against my forehead, and then Gastard’s.

“I will await his report,” Boffin said.

“Good luck,” Esmelda had been staring at me, but under the circumstances, I would have been staring at me too.

The little folk rode off, leaving me with the man. The meeting had been extremely brief, and I felt like they had been in a hurry to get away from me. Maybe it was the monster talk. They weren’t exactly welcoming me with open arms, but they hadn’t been hostile, either.

“I’m going to collect some more wood before nightfall,” I said to Gastard. “You want to come with?”

He grunted. I took it as a yes.