After the battle, I was numb.

My memories of the day that followed were fragmented. Eventually, the Velgein rebels gave up the chase of the remaining Horuthian soldiers who fled back through the pass, letting them deliver the message of their defeat to the Kingdom. Most of the army had fallen to the fists of the northerners, as well as whatever additional arms they could acquire after my attack. Golchev congratulated me and there was a celebration, but I was in no mood to celebrate.

Vorel’s end had been horrible. Part of me acknowledged that a battle with Vorel was always going to end in someone burning alive, and that all else being equal it would probably have been me, but the fact that I had survived could not quite wipe away the memory of the screams of a man showered to death with molten metal.

Yet all around me were the festivities of a people freed, a people I helped free. I should have wanted to be happy for them, to help them work out how to hold the mountain pass, and work with them to build a brighter future.

In the moment, all I wanted to do was forget, to silence the screaming in my head.

“Fuck this,” I whispered to myself in the middle of the celebration, and I disappeared.

Moments later, Treepo and Buda also disappeared, and invisible, we ran.

We traveled east, following the mountains in the only direction left to travel that would lead away from this conflict. I wanted to put as much distance between all of this and myself as quickly as possible.

It took days of fleeing, mechanically eating through my stored cooked meat supplies, and watching the barren landscape pass before I could properly start processing.

I knew that I was running, again, although at least this time I was not running from my problems so much as I was attempting to run from myself. I was not upset about the fact that I had to kill to help free the north, nor was I even that upset that I had to kill Vorel, but it was something about the method itself that was making me so uneasy.

The memories I had of my previous life were of a peaceful world with science and understanding well in advance of this one. Much of that peace and understanding were built off of violent conflict and mass graves. If not for nuclear weapons and the threat of mutually assured destruction, would the peace I had known growing up and living my first life have even existed?

I wanted to create peace in this world, but I did not know if peace was even possible without the threat of overwhelming force. I had not created a nuke to defeat Vorel, but what I had done had been an order of magnitude more horrifying, to me, than cutting a man down with a sword. This was probably only the beginning of what I could do. I had killed a man almost three times my level, who had a qualitatively higher level of magic. I had no idea what I would be able to do once I had developed that much power myself.

Glancing at my menus, I winced at the changes. I had gained six levels from killing Vorel. I was not exactly sure what the math was on beating a human so much stronger than me, and I was not planning to find out through further testing.

Pilus Horgson (Lv 35)

HP: 277/277

MP: 166/393

Status: Absorption (major), Protection (major)

EXP: 584/3500

Skills: 3-Point Magic(+), 4-Point Magic(++), 5-Point Magic(+), 6-Point Magic(++), Acrobatics(+), Brewing, Butchery, Cooking(+), Detect(+), Enchanting(+), Foraging, Inkmaking, Inventory(+), Knotting, Literacy(+), Needlework, Negotiation, One-Armed(+), Ranged, Smithing, Stealth(+), Strength(+), Taming(+), Tanning, Two-Armed, Unarmed

Familiars: High Treehopper (Lv 10), Wooly Ramhog (Lv 10)

I had 195 skill points to distribute, skill points that were again drenched in human blood. I had clearly learned nothing from my experiences since leaving Mirut, repeatedly slamming my head into the same walls, making the same decisions and mistakes over and over again, and suffering the same consequences.

When did my second life stop being plain, simple fun? The obvious answer was when I was put into situations when I had to kill people. I was not opposed to killing beasts for experience, since it was also for meat, and whether I did it myself or not my consumption of meat on Earth meant the slaughter of animals there, too. In fact, killing beasts for meat had actually been rewarding, especially when I provided that meat from my community.

Even if killing people saved other people, it just did not feel good, and was never fun.

Since the moment I woke up in this world, I had rather single-mindedly pursued strength. The reason for this was fairly straightforward: my metasystem showed me that there were levels and experience, and I could plainly see how advancing my levels by gaining experience would advance my fitness and capabilities. Truth was, my pursuit of strength was, in part, the reason I was still alive. Eight years later, the situations I had lived through would not have been possible if I were only Level 7, give or take a couple of levels, like most kids my age probably were. That said, it was in the pursuit of strength and from my own choices that I put myself in danger. Had I simply lived a quiet, peaceful life in Mirut, I probably would not have needed the strength I had gained.

I knew a lot more about this world than I had when I first decided to pursue strength. At the time, I did not know just how different life could be if I were Level 1 compared to if I were Level 100. The power curve on Earth was not that severe, on the whole. A human could only get so strong, and life was not that different in my first life for the strongest compared to the weakest. That said, on Earth, the weakest child could kill the strongest human alive with the pull of a trigger, thanks to tools and technology.

When I first started training, my assumption about levels was that this would not be the case. Had I been able to reach some absurd height like Level 100 quickly, I thought I would be safe, effectively unkillable. However, before even reaching Level 30, I had just killed the strongest mage I had ever met. As with Earth, this was possible mostly due to having access to knowledge and the pursuit of science, not because my magic power was higher than his. This was the same path that led to the arms races of Earth. Clearly, no matter how high of a level I was able to reach, there were no absolutes in this world, just like on Earth. Eventually, I would be killed by something stronger than me, be it a super powered beast, an overwhelming opponent, or the march of time itself.

Frowning, I allowed myself to really question my plans, my goals, and myself. It was the first time I had really started to consider other options in years. No matter how impartial I wanted to be, I was only human, and I recognized I had dug in repeatedly and committed to paths that, perhaps, were not for my best after all. What did I want from this life beyond the short-term pursuit of power? What had I lacked in my first life that I wanted to gain from this one?

I did enjoy training and getting stronger. I doubted I would ever fully abandon that. It was growing clear to me that getting stronger in terms of levels and experience was not necessarily the best path for that. I did need to grow in order to gain skill points, as advancing my skills let me do things I would never have been able to do before, and having skill points let me gain and possibly create new skills entirely, but at this point each level earned was worth my first eight levels put together. I had done a lot over those early levels. That said, I did not actually need to gain 1000 SP to master most of my skills, as I had already accomplished incredible things at double-advancement, which only required 111 SP in total to unlock. Finding and clearing a couple more dungeons to farm skill fruit would have as much value as grinding out a few more levels.

Those skill points would help me study this world and try new things, but it did not answer the question of what I wanted from that. I was starting to recognize that this fault in my thinking was something which grew from my original life. I had died relatively young, without much in the way of family, and virtually nothing in the way of hopes or dreams. I worked to live and passed the time and died alone.

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It had always felt like my impact on Earth was tiny, that I was a mere cog in the massive machine that was modern civilization. My talents on Earth did not lend themselves to really advancing any cause or pushing forward any scientific frontier. I was not the guy that would cure cancer or create world peace. Even at the more local level of trying to help my community, there was not much I could do. The systems of my civilization were too slick to stop moving, and all of us that lived within it were headed full tilt in the only direction we could, simply trying to keep our heads above water.

All that was true of any civilization, but in this world, it was at a much smaller scale. I knew, qualitatively, that I could improve myself through training, but I was also confident that, if I put my mind to it and committed myself, I could improve my community of choice, as well; I had clearly had an effect on the Velgein communities I had passed through, and that was in a single year.

If I put my mind to it, could I improve the entirety of the Horuthian kingdom? Could I improve the entirety of this world?

That was a much larger goal than I had expected from myself, but it was something to work towards. I did not need to tackle the whole thing at once, either. It was a path that had many smaller goals along the way, with multiple milestones, each one of value separate from the final goal. If I could improve the world even a small amount, it would give my second life meaning. It would not need to be a fully selfless act, either, like sacrificing my life to save the north would have been.

Buda, Treepo, and I had settled down for the evening, making a small campfire and roasting some meat from my inventory. In the distance, I saw some mountain quadhorns that had not yet migrated away. The young had grown and were no longer taking milk, and they were grazing on some of the fresh greens that had started to grow.

I frowned slightly as I remembered some of my declarations of youth. Aside from self-study and learning how this world worked, a large portion of the fun I had in this world and plans to improve things for the people involved beasts. I enjoyed discovering them, learning about them, hunting them, but most especially taming them.

I had not been able to pursue taming to the fullness of my limits because I was hiding so much from my parents, and then I could not pursue it while I had been on the road or engaged in a rebellion, but in that moment I could not figure out what was actually stopping me from pursuing that in full.

So that was what I would do. It was a start, at least. I would still pursue advancing and studying magic, but I was eager to settle down somewhere to properly lean into taming.

I dropped the necessary skill points into double-advancing Taming, and with a quick invisibility spell I approached the grazing herd of goat-like creatures. The ground here was hard and rocky, unlike the jungles of my youth, and so was easy to manipulate. I snapped some quick stone shackles around the legs of about a dozen of the quadhorns, who started bleating and bucking against the ground which had captured them while the rest of the herd fled.

Exiting invisibility, I examined the beasts. They were a bit flighty, but despite the four large horns on their heads they were not particularly aggressive. I double checked their sexes, and saw that even though the young had weaned, the females still had some distension in the udders.

Despite their flightiness, as soon as I provided magic-infused meat they became incredibly interested. The beasts were magic-starved like everything in the north, but the beasts must have had a natural instinct to consume magic when given the chance. It was easy to get them to accept the food, and I realized I probably could have skipped the shackling in favor of just providing the tamer treats as bait.

I fed a few mature and young females some infused meat, and then picked out two of the adult males and did the same. They were rank E, which would have made controlling this many tough when I was a novice tamer, but it was fairly trivial with my new advancement.

After guiding them back to where I had set up camp, I let them continue grazing, and settled down to sleep. For the first time in a long while, I slept peacefully. Instead of dreams of burning molten metal, I dreamt of pizza with molten cheese.

* * *

My herd and I continued to travel east. I needed to eventually cut across the mountains, but I was in no hurry to do so while so close to the capital. My map did not extend east of Gurt, and as far as I knew the mountains continued at least that far. I was curious what happened beyond that.

Days blended into weeks, which became months, and soon we had traveled about as far east as I had previously traveled north. We had left behind the Velgein territories, and as far as I was aware were surrounded by unclaimed wilderness. I had no idea where, if ever, another group of people might start to appear.

I figured we had traveled enough by midsummer to have reached Gurt, the largest Horuthian town east of Roko, and the limits of my old map. It was time to start figuring out how to get south of the mountain range.

My options were to tunnel through or go over. My herd of quadhorns should have been able to go over, but it would be a challenge for Buda.

The small herd had attracted some predator attention, which resulted in me taming a pair of rockstalkers. They would also probably make it over the mountains, but more importantly, they would make decent guards for the group if I had to tunnel.

We continued to move east, looking for natural caves and low points in the mountains. I tracked areas of slightly higher concentrations of magic—which was to say, more than none—hoping to find areas that allowed the wind to carry magic to the north. I presumed that would also suggest a good area to try to cross.

Unfortunately, before I found a way across, I noticed the mountains started to veer northward. The whole region seemed largely impassable.

“Can’t push much further east this way without going way off-course,” I said to Treepo, who chittered in response. “We’ll have to just deal with it as it is.”

The slope up the mountain was not too steep at first, and with my team of beasts we navigated up as far as we could before the paths became too difficult for Buda. I found a steep cliff, and carefully began carving out a cave in the stone wall, leading my charges inside once complete.

After I dumped a couple of weeks worth of meat for my tamed herd in the cave, which all tamed beasts could eat even if they were naturally herbivores, I closed in the entrance with a simple facade, leaving a few slits for light and airflow.

“Keep each other safe,” I said, then headed back out with Treepo up the mountainside.

I had only the dregs of my magic pool by the time I crested the top of the frigid mountain with my companion, and looked out at the scenery below. The south of the mountain was largely wild prairies and forest. I spotted a few lakes, and in the distance, saw several plumes of smoke that spoke to a small village. I wondered if I was still in the Kingdom or beyond it.

The magic was significantly richer in the air on the south side of the mountain, although it was not as rich as it had been by the sea. I absently pondered over whether the Kingdom’s capital, and the former capital of the country to the south, were seaside not for trade reasons but for the magical concentrations there.

Even reduced from where I grew up, the magic in the air here was like a waterfall to the desert in the north. With my Absorption buff, I enjoyed the feeling of my body recharging from the atmospheric magic around me.

The magic in the air here was the reason I opted to climb over the mountain rather than tunnel through from the north. I could scry the location of my tamed beasts with 3-point magic, and lock on to where they were from this side of the mountain. Tunneling through from this side would allow me to recharge naturally rather than use up my remaining potions. I could also hunt beasts in the south for fresh meat which, unlike the magic-poor meat in the north, would be charged up with magic and restore some of my magic that way.

At that point it would just take time and effort. I had a time limit, given how much food I left for my herd, but my stone-working magic was very efficient with all my practice and double-advancement with 4-point magic, so I should be able to move huge amounts of stone. I decided to drop another 50 skill points into my inventory skill, and felt the qualitative improvement of double-advancement in that. Suddenly, it felt like I could store the entire mountain.

With that, I only needed to cut the stone into bricks and then store them. Since my unique storage skill had no MP cost, and cutting stone was cheap, I would be able to make very short work of my secret tunnel through the mountain.

While I was assigning SP, I had to decide where to use the rest of it. I could double-advance either 5-Point Magic or One-Armed, both of which would be useful, or I could push towards double-advancement with 3-Point Magic. The fact that I might be able to use telepathy to hit opponents with mental attacks made that option tempting, but it did feel like it was beyond the natural order of this world, and I was not sure how I felt about using that kind of power freely. I still was not sure if I wanted to teach others how to cast 3-point magic for the practical usefulness of it, and arming others with that kind of weapon seemed immoral.

I think it might be best to just lock away mental bombardment for anything but the most dire of circumstances.

As I looked over my skill list, I debated how I wanted the next years of my life to go. I was planning on focusing significantly more on taming, my experiments with beasts, and the world around me, and setting myself up somewhere safe for a while where I could figure out my future. I was not necessarily looking to engage in a ton more combat, at least not with humans. Dungeons and strong beasts were always worth seeking out, but I already had magic and skills to deal with those.

I would also need to make money. Though I still had lots of gold from the chest my whaloid Vlad had discovered in the ocean, I had used much of it as raw materials for my new magic circles. I had lots of skills that could be used to make life easier and raise the quality of materials I would get from beasts and from nature, things which I had ignored in the raw pursuit of power. Perhaps it was time to focus more on that side of my development. Spending time on those skills would bring me experience in a way that did not require as much danger and death, as well.

In the end, I decided to advance Brewing, Butchery, Foraging, Inkmaking, Negotiation, Smithing, and Tanning, which used up my remaining skill points from killing Vorel. I still had the 11 skillfruit in my inventory which I planned to use for advanced horticulture once I settled down somewhere, and not just for food. With my discoveries about how magic came to this world from the gas giant in the sky and advanced brewing, I had some experiments I was hoping to do with the pits of the skillfruit I had eaten up until now.

All that would wait until I reclaimed my beasts and explored the area. I needed to check out the village as well and find out where I was and see what I could learn about the region. For the moment, I started quarrying stone from the mountain as I tunneled north.