Kairen took a minute to catch his breath, letting the memory of the pain fade a little. Nothing had physically changed, and the boy figured he had at least a few minutes before needing to deal with any effects his experiment might have caused. Once he felt like he could think straight again, Kairen went ahead and re-opened the window.

It took him a second of looking around, but Kairen quickly saw that the random upgrade he had purchased had been a second level of storm deflection. While not Kairen’s first choice of options, there were far worse upgrades he could have ended up with. The one upside of the experiment was the knowledge that Kairen had gained. Going forwards the boy would need to be careful to carefully manage his upgrade points. While the system gave him some degree of warning before forcing a choice on him, it was driven by a surplus of upgrade points, with the pressure to choose growing more intense as additional points accumulated. While normally Kairen would have enough time to react to the warning and pick an option, he couldn’t guarantee that would always be the case.

Most of the upgrades he was interested in purchasing had costs close to his maximum capacity, and saving up points would put Kairen in a precarious position where a sudden influx from a festival or other significant event might trigger the automated system, robbing Kairen of his patiently earned points by spending them on some other choice entirely. The problem was somewhat self-correcting, as every upgrade purchased would make it less likely to happen again due to his increasing reserve for points, but it was still something to factor in when planning for the future.

What really interested Kairen about his experiment was the mechanism behind the randomized choice. Until now he had thought of the system as something entirely separate to himself, a completely different entity that he was somehow able to interact with. Now he wasn’t so sure. For all that the system had forced a choice to be made, a part of Kairen was still under the impression that he had made the choice. Not because he knew what choice had been made, and not because he had accidentally given in and picked an option to make the pain stop, but because he had a gut instinct that he was in total control of the development of the Oasis. He quite clearly could still be forced to take actions he didn’t like, but his existence and that of the Oasis were intertwined in a way that the ghost hadn’t really examined before now.

It made a certain amount of sense. Kairen had never heard of anyone sticking around as a ghost after their death. He had also never heard of any new Oases being formed. While it was possible that the two unlikely events just happened to both occur at the same place and time, it was far more believable that there was only one improbable occurrence responsible for everything. It also added some new insights into his inability to leave the Oasis. It wasn’t that there was some invisible barrier keeping him here, or that he was still tethered to his corpse in some psychic manner, but instead his existence was linked to that of the Oasis, something that had deeper implications than Kairen first realized.

It was rare that anyone would want to destroy an Oasis, but doing so wasn’t impossible. Humans had done crueler deeds in the name of war, and while most would be self-serving enough to try and claim the magical haven for themselves, there were plenty of hard men who would rather burn the place down than let their enemies benefit. Beyond that the dangers of the Shifting Sands were an ever present if less likely threat. Kairen had listened in to the nomads’ tales of history, of an empire that had been built across the desert as a monument to the pride of man only to be eradicated by the Sands, with titanic monsters and extreme environments ensuring that no two stones were left standing. Said dangers usually only lurked in the deepest parts of the desert, but there wasn’t any way to guarantee that Kairen would never have to face them. Storm Deflection and the Monster Repelling upgrades would help, but there was a limit to their power, and Kairen knew that his defenses would be just as useful as bedclothes in a sandstorm.

Of course, that assumed that Kairen even made the effort to upgrade those powers at all. Doing so would aid the slavers, and Kairen sat down and closed his eyes to try and sort through the jumbled mess of feelings and motivations he had stumbled upon.

The slavers were directly responsible for his death and the death of just about everyone he had grown up with. The few that still lived had been forced into a life of slavery and Kairen was unlikely to ever see them again, or recognize them if he did. From these events an ember of vengeance had been born, and had been carefully cultivated. Kairen hadn’t known how he would strike back at the slavers while in his current situation, only to have the targets of his dark wrath come to him. If only he could, Kairen would gladly kill everyone present in the Oasis ten times over, and would still feel as if he still had wrongs left to right.

The spirit took a minute to simply feel those emotions. He knew that some saints would advocate for mercy and forgiveness. The nomads had enough stories of blood feuds that he knew that violence only caused more violence. In many ways he was now safe from the slavers, and could choose to move on with this second chance of life. Fuck that. Kairen snorted. At no point during his emotional examination did he feel like his reasoning was flawed, like his fury wasn’t righteous. The slavers fully deserved whatever punishment he could send their way, and Kairen was not falling into darkness for desiring their end. He was not losing himself, not sacrificing his innocence or purity or hope for a better future. How could he, when Zar had already taken them from him? All Kairen was doing now was playing the role the adventurer had given to him when he had cut off his hands and left him to die in the desert.

It took Kairen a bit to realize the last statement wasn’t completely accurate. His personality, his shape as a person had been crafted before his death, and Kairen couldn’t care less about reclaiming the love or innocence that was lost to him. But he was more than human now. The Oasis was part of him, or he was part of it in some strange way, and it took the boy a bit to truly internalize that connection. The upgrades that the system provided weren’t just tools he could reappropriate for his private war, they were pieces of himself in some strange sense, ways that he could shape his growth going into the future. To avoid those upgrades, to direct the development of the Oasis in such a way as to hurt the slavers was a strange form of mutilation, one that made Kairen uneasy. His actions were the spiritual equivalent of cutting off a nose to spite the face, or perhaps cutting off a hand to shame the body was the slightly more apt metaphor.

Kairen couldn’t help but look downwards, at the empty space his body occupied. He could feel his fists clenching and unclenching, but not seeing anything was unsettling. With his thoughts going around in circles Kairen found himself staggering over to the rat warren, unable to focus enough to keep his steps steady. It was afternoon, but by providence or unspoken command Gamma poked her head out. The intelligent rat quickly spotted Kairen and made her way over to him, where it didn’t take long for the boy to begin petting her, embracing the grounding that the sensation provided him.

A part of him wanted destruction so badly, both that of his tormentors, but also his own ending. His blood boiled and called for an ending of all things, for the slavers to drown and their buildings to collapse as the Oasis pool grew, vast and monstrously deep, a maw that sucked everything down into black depths, into an eternal slumber, with no more dreams or memories of dying parents and screams of slaves.

The nomads had done more for Kairen than they would ever know, their easy sense of community sucking the boy in and giving him the space he needed to live, to put his painful memories aside for a time as he tried to experience life again, even if only as a bystander. Without that source of mental strength Kairen was sure he would have gone mad, would have simply broken apart under the strain, but he didn’t. He was anchored, and that same anchoring spoke against his initial plans.

“Would it be worth it?” The boy asked himself the question as if it was coming from the Elders, whose experience dwarfed his own. The mysterious fourth tier sparked Kairen’s imagination and he thought on the future for a bit. If he was offered the ability to turn the pool into poison, changing the cleansing water into a drink of death, would he do so? It was almost guaranteed that doing so would kill all of the slavers, Zar included. The strength and constitution that adventurers worked for only went so far in the face of more subtle dangers, and even if the evil man did survive the Oasis would soon be abandoned. Kairen would have won, with his only reward a watery memorial of what he had lost. Kairen couldn’t remove his upgrades, couldn’t turn any of them off. Poisoning the water would kill not just the slavers, but anyone who found their way to his location. For as long as the ghost and the Oasis remained, it would be a trap, one that would only cause the death of otherwise innocent explorers and travelers, and forever barring Kairen from moving forwards.

The question Kairen voiced hung on the air. He badly wanted to give into his rash explosive anger, the feelings that demanded action and rushed through his body so loudly that they almost drowned out all other thoughts. It would be easy to ignore the whispers of wisdom that he could still hear, the warning murmurs that would remain once his rage was spent, his vengeance achieved, his wrath guttered. But the rat in his hands told him a different truth.

He was more than his hate.

There was so much that Kairen had yet to learn about his circumstances, but what he had found out whispered at his potential. Potential to change the world in some way. Potential that outweighed the cost of revenge, no matter how he tried to balance the scales. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t give up on his quest for vengeance. But it couldn’t be his primary goal, not when there were people depending on him. He was still a sanctuary for the nomads, a source of water where they wouldn’t be the alienated outsiders most cities viewed them as. He was still the progenitor of Alpha and his kin, the rats intelligent enough to have awareness of the world around them, and who placed a level of trust and faith in Kairen that astounded the boy when he thought about it.

Kairen looked at the screen, quietly hovering in front of him, before silently willing it to close. No words were needed, just an acknowledgment of the connection that already existed between him and it. There were more secrets to tease out about the system waiting to be understood and used. The pressure of being forced to choose had been resistible, was a challenge Kairen could use to grow stronger, even if doing so would only ever have abstract applications. It was another method of moving forwards that Kairen could add to his quiver, ready for the right moment.

Kairen would never willingly aid his enemy, but neither did he have to blind himself in pursuit of his revenge. Striking too soon or sabotaging the camp with the wrong ability would simply put the slavers on guard. He might not like it, but he could wait. Wait for the right moment, for the right ability. Wait for allies to come into power, for other forces to become aware of his Oasis and enact their own agendas. Wait for enough rats to simply drown his murderers in a sea of fang and fur. The future was a mystery to Kairen. He didn’t know what twists or turns it would hold. But as he watched Zar laugh and have dinner with subordinates he affirmed his intent. When the moment came to make everything come crashing down, to make the villain pay in blood for every crime committed with interest. When the right moment came along to undo it all, he would be ready.