Chapter One

So, I’d made a bit of a mistake.

Kids, your parents gave you good advice when they told you to always look both ways before crossing a road.

Otherwise, you might end up dead, and then wake up in a fantasy world with cool magical powers, lots of new things to learn about, and a couple of unpleasant problems. If there is one lesson, I want you all to take away from my story it is this: Look both ways.

It’s a good idea metaphorically and literally.

Anyways I woke up again after dying.

I sat upon a high and cragged mountain top. Very high. Like, planes in the sky high. 

And I was naked.

Now, at this point, to the extent I was thinking anything, ‘hospital fever dream’ was my number one guess. I was not cold, not shivering, not really feeling anything about the weather except an awareness that it was low thermometer type weather. Given that I was naked and sitting on the top of a frozen, snow-covered mountain, with gusts of wind blowing around me at tens of miles an hour, and I wasn’t cold — uh… that’s not how getting cold is supposed to work.

I saw incredibly clearly: Details of brown craggy rocks on other mountain peaks dozens of miles away, snow leopards wandering around, goats, all the birds circling in the sky for a hundred miles.

I mean wow.

Once I’d read that Tiger Woods saw better than twenty-twenty after he got laser eye surgery. I suppose that is sort of like what this was like, except at least a thousand times more intense. 

Really high up.

I’d had vertigo in my original life, and it sort of freaked me out a bit that I wasn’t scared of falling off the mountain side. From how far down below me the green valley beneath the mountain was, I shouldn’t be able to even breathe without help. 

Deep breath.

Something in my brain was aware that there was a low oxygen content to the air, and there was some other process that was automatic as breathing, that I was using to… maybe multiply, or intensify, or something the sustaining substance in the air so that I was safe at this height. 

What?

‘The sustaining substance in the air’.

That was the awkward phrase that went through my mind. Not ‘oxygen’. ‘The sustaining substance in the air’.

I think that was when I realized that something much weirder than a hospital fever dream might be going on. I was pretty sure that I’d never invent a made-up scientific phrase that was that awkward for ‘oxygen’, even in my weirdest dreams. 

Anyway, around me, in a magical mumbo jumbo array was a particularly complicated folded ninth shape runic spell circle. 

And despite the fact that I had no idea what the hell that description meant, or what I was looking at, I felt like I understood the weirdly entangled and braided giant circle drawn in what I instinctively knew was my own blood around me on a flattened and cleared section of ground. 

The drawing was sort of like a circle with a nonagram — nine sides — inscribed in it. The lines were made up of braided circles like Celtic necklaces, or the endless geometric forms of Islamic mosques. And then embedded in this were tiny letterings, symbols, pictograms, and endlessly intricate and fascinating structures that overlapped, and yet each was somehow perfect in its own way.

My own fucking blood?

Or anyways the blood of the dude who'd been running this body then — I was starting to realize that I had memories from this person before I was the one in control.

The whole ‘painting the snow with my own blood for a powerful magical ritual’ weirdness made it hard for me to properly appreciate the intricate artistry. 

I mean, objectively impressive. His memories were starting to be available to me.

The last two weeks had been full of closed-off preparations in the lab of his mage tower, because like the cliché of a great wizard, he had a tall mage tower, built out of a pale marble with pink veins. Then all of the intricate runes and spell work were magically folded into a tiny space, and then splotched out, and infused with his blood — that he regenerated arbitrarily fast as a powerful cultivator, that was what they called magic users in this world — and then he made his own little mistake that had killed him.

Funny how we all did that sort of thing.

I stayed seated cross-legged on the mountain top, ignoring the cold and the thin air for a long time, as bits of memory and knowledge popped unbidden into my head. I ought to understand at latest the basics of the situation before I even stood up from here.

It only took an hour for me to decide upon my plans, but it felt much longer because something about the previous owner’s powers made this body automatically think far faster than an ordinary human.

The previous owner of this body had made a forced error in a bad situation. This island was going to be invaded by the ‘Celestial Emperor’, and he planned to kill the dragons that were the symbol of the island, and that everyone really loved. Also, the emperor would strip them of their fiercely defended independence. 

It was clear to the fellow that he had no choice but to do anything that might give him the power to face the emperor, such as a dangerous ritual to open his fourth dantian, and gain the power of a celestial, even though the ritual could kill him.

He’d guessed that there was at best a one in three chance that he would survive this attempt to open his fourth dantian, and to become a celestial like the emperor. But that was the only way to defeat this enemy.

Even if he’d succeeded, the emperor still had vastly more experience and resources behind him.

So, the man had come here, used materials that I’d guess were worth the equivalent of between a ten million and a hundred million dollars to power the vast ritual, used magic to paint with his own blood the ritual circles, and then blew his mind apart.

I looked down at the hands. These hands were — to be honest — pretty similar to my own hands, except with a weave of extra scars and a faint glow from within a network of tattoos so thin that I would not have been able to see them with ordinary human eyes.

Poor guy.

Doubly sad because I didn’t have the slightest intention of trying to fight in his war.

Risky bets often fail.

The former owner of this body had made such a failing bet.

Even if this body had successfully ‘opened the fourth dantian’, I was pretty sure that a sorcerer who'd spent a thousand years warring and conquering would be better at it than me, and I didn’t have any particular reason to care about the fate of the island, or the survival of the dragons. They weren’t my personal project.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

I mean I do care. I’m unhappy when I hear about anyone suffering, failing to achieve what they want to, and simply not flourishing. But I have no particular reason to care more about helping people in Kenya than people in Singapore — it just was that I could do more good with the limited amount of stuff I have for people in Kenya, and they also needed more help.

I figured it was sort of like that here. 

Best if I didn’t die. Not dying again… in a part of my mind that was completely untouched by philosophical concerns, matters of optimizing the world, or even how I looked in front of others, I was desperate not to die again. 

And, fortunately, my rational mind also didn’t think I was ethically obligated to stick around.

This island was going to lose its war — with or without me. So there was no reason for me not to grab everything that he had owned that was valuable and easily portable, and then scram, flee, make a cautious withdrawal — get the hell out of dodge.

It was not my war.

I mean I was not a pacifist or anything, but it just wasn’t my war.

At this point I will freely confess that I had a sense in some part of my mind that I was supposed to, despite all those considerations, care about this war and fight in it.

But I didn’t want to.

It was scary and I might die, and besides there were lots of things I wanted to do to explore how magic worked.

Perhaps there was some reason that simply did not occur to me for why this war was really important, and really mattered in a way that it would be super valuable to everyone, even people who weren’t born here if Yatamo won. If there was something worth my death to be won, I’d risk it.

But since I didn’t know about any reason like that, I was going to bounce like Han Solo.

Anyway, the guy whose body I’d gotten had been ridiculously rich, and he had a set of epic capabilities that were extremely valuable — I’d make a fortune somewhere suitably far away. 

Maybe dying and waking up here wasn’t the worst possible thing that could have happened to me: I’d spent the last years trying to earn as much money as I could, and now I was going to do what I’d always planned to do if I ever got properly rich: Give it all away.

Well, most of it. I’d keep some of his hoard around to have fun that had nothing to do with anyone else.

Without making the effort to recall the details from that fellow’s — Sesako had been his name — memories, I got a distinct sense that this world was at least as fucked up as Earth was. 

Maybe even a bit more.

I wanted to make the lives of impoverished, unhealthy, and underused human individuals better with the huge pile of gold coins and the giant store of expensive refined pills, power stones, finely enchanted artifacts, magically infused clothing, and just generally expensive stuff that he had — much of which had no actual purpose at all except to show that the owner possessed ‘the best’.

Now my heart was beating.

This was more exciting to me than having magical powers and being immune to the cold, and able to keep my place easily despite the winds that were gusting over the mountain top at a hundred miles an hour.

And what about those other, more uncertain issues — what were the things that might destroy this world entirely? Could it be slowly and in the very long term, be turned into a true utopia?

I had a chance to really, and personally make a vast difference for a vast number of other people. 

That was better than the eyesight that let me see anything I focused on in detail, a small city far in the distance at the foot of the mountains, the orchards, the fields of wheat around the feet of the mountain, a snow leopard climbing on an icy ridge after the track of a mountain goat ten miles away, the curvature of the earth underneath the vast oceans.

Oceans that were bringing a mighty invasion force — spotted, tracked, detailed by spies.

Eh, no time to waste, no rest for the wicked, idle hands are the devil’s playthings. Also haste makes waste.

My mind held a clear map of the whole island, and while I couldn't see the capital city and my, or his… the tower, I knew exactly what direction to go. The capital city was almost five hundred miles away from here — which was the tallest mountain on the island, and also near the valley where the great dragons made their home.

It was an hour and a half trip for this guy when he flew and pushed himself, and about two and a half at a comfortable pace.

Warfare often involved cultivators accelerating big enchanted stones fast enough to create a sharp sonic boom. The speed of sound then had to be a thing in the physics of this world. But cultivators were not able to move nearly as fast as sound. 

I wasn’t sure how much of Sesako’s valuable stuff I could actually carry from the storerooms, but I caught from his memories that there were extra dimensional storage systems where anything that wasn’t magically delicate could be stuffed in great quantities. 

The stuff that couldn’t be stuffed in such super dimensional pouches was the most valuable, I’d have to figure out some way to take all of it with me. 

Maybe a big crate that I’d hold while I flew away.

This guy was big on magical flying, and I could tell that pretty soon I would be too. A large fraction of his memories focused on flight.

In the air, chasing down birds, outpacing hawks as they swooped down at hundreds of miles an hour to snatch their prey, hurtling through clouds, flying calmly along next to the flapping wings of a fucking gigantic dragon.

It turned out that leaping off a cliff wasn’t quite as easy as simply knowing that it was safe. When I tried to leap off the craggy side of the mountain into the air to fly away from the mountainside, my own instincts stopped me.

I was so high up.

I imagined the fall all the way down the ridges and cliffs to the valley far, far below — broken body tumbling.

Crack. Crack. Bounce. Crack. Ba-ba-bounce. Crack.

And then as though it reflected some sort of contempt for ordinary mortals, an instinct from Sesako overrode that anxiety, as though his mind was still there, and still active somewhere in my new brain — how the fuck did that even work? — and I leapt off the mountain side.

Wheeeeeeeee!

With a series of loud whoops, I soared higher, and higher, hurtling upwards towards the sun. 

The instincts honed by more than a century of life controlled the motion.

My stomach leapt. The mountain receded beneath me. Everything became smaller. I saw further and further. The world curved beneath me as the point of the horizon went further and further away. The water around the island, many cities. 

The island itself was shaped rather like Britain, except that the side that reminded me of Scotland was nearly as wide around as the other. There were two giant circular clumps of mountains, and in between was a low fertile isthmus, which was big enough for large cities on either side, separated by incredibly thin roads and thick farmlands.

And then glancing down at the mountains behind me, I saw the dragon.

Sleeping, huge, the tail curled around the giant body, and the wings pulled in, but it looked to be at least a thousand feet in length.

That dragon figured prominently in Sesako’s memories, with a mix of fond affection, religious awe, and actual friendship.

The dragons were the symbol of his island, they were the gods they worshiped, and whose blessings they begged. They were fed off a fraction of the proceeds of a million farms and a thousand prosperous trading expeditions.

An odd sensation of guilt rose in me while looking at the dragon sleeping far below.

It had been the knowledge that the emperor meant to hunt and kill the dragons in the mountains of Yatamo after he had reconquered the island which drove Sesako’s reckless attempt to force open his fourth dantian.

This was his body. It was his wealth I intended to appropriate for my own purposes. His people, and all that he cared for were going to be abandoned by me and left to be destroyed.

It did not feel like the right thing to do.

Selfish.

There was that difference from the memories in my body that said the fourth dantian was open. 

I might be able to fight this invasion to a stop. 

A proper storybook hero always stayed and fought no matter what the odds were.

If I was in a novel or a web serial, I’d stay and fight.

I ought to fight, and… 

And if I fought and won, I’d kill a lot of people. Most likely I would kill a moderate number of people, and then fail and lose because having the memories and instincts of Sesako was not the same as me being a great battle cultivator with a hundred years of honed skill.

Yeah, I could try to kill a lot of people so that food that could feed tens of thousands of humans would continue to be fed to a group of ancient, overgrown lizards — even if they were sentient lizards that didn’t make it necessarily a good use of resources.

The thing was, I had always wanted to use an important part of the resources I had in a way that benefit people who weren’t in any way connected to me.

The point was that another person was alive and could suffer or be happy. They were someone who had a life story, who fell in love like, had hobbies, and perhaps enjoyed reading stories like I did, and who was deeply fascinated by things that I perhaps had never even heard about. 

It didn’t matter who they were or if I would ever see or meet them, or if they were part of my country, or lived in some place I’d never actually heard of.

For me a good person is someone who tries to help everyone alive. They didn’t have to necessarily do everything in their power, but they had to give up something non-trivial, something that was a little painful and uncomfortable. 

By normal standards Sesako was a very good person. He was selflessly focused on what was good for his nation, for his friends, and for those who he personally cared for.

He was ridiculously brave, hardworking, disciplined, and he was generally generous and kind to those beneath him. He took his duties seriously.

All of these things are extremely important. And I admired him for them.

But Sesako had nothing of that thing in him which I had in me, that made me care about someone wholly unconnected to him just because they were alive and able to think and feel.

I could do more for people in general if I left.

That was why I wasn’t doing an evil act by turning my back on Yatamo, and on Sesako’s goals, friends and desires.

This did not wholly satisfy me. I was thinking in ugly circles. I again and again made excuses for myself and for my plan to abandon the place.

But whether I felt guilty or not, I was going to leave.