“Like, actual nests? Like birds?”

“They’ve got these weird, bee-hive things which grow the demons.”

“And how did you learn all of this?”

“Bit of a long story,” Riza said, walking up to a beast demon corpse and crouching down beside it. Meren remained standing. “There’s linguistics skills. They let you talk in a different language. What if demons could use linguistic skills as well?” Riza’s hand was already touching the cool, smooth skin.

“You’re saying a ‘humanoid demon’ learnt linguistic skills? And it was willing to talk to you?”

“Not exactly.” Riza said, pointing her sight at the corpse in front of her. Meren got the message, not saying anything else, and just waited until the body suddenly surged with energy.

“What the-” She said instinctively, taking a step and planting her other hand on her spear.

“It’s okay!” Riza hastily said, jumping to her feet. “It’s safe. Put your spear away.”

“Wh-wh… What did you do? Is it alive?” The creature was standing as still as a statue while Meren was frantically moving about.

“Demon, sit,” Riza commanded, and it sat. “Roll over.” The large, wolf-like creature obediently rolled over like a carefully trained dog. “Good boy.”

“It listens to you?” Meren asked, fear strong in her voice. She pointed her weapon towards Riza, quickly realising the futility of that and pointing towards the demon again.

“It does everything I say. There’s no danger. Look; kill yourself.”

With no hesitation, its toothy jaw mauled its own leg, ripping the limb off before suddenly collapsing.

“What the fuck! It just killed itself!” Meren had a look of disbelief on her face.

“It does everything I say. It’s not immediately hostile.”

“Wha-what else can you do,” Meren asked, her face shifting to reluctant curiosity. She stopped pointing her spear towards anyone but her arms were still tense, her feet still apart and ready to move.

“I reanimated a humanoid demon and made it learn linguistic skills.”

“That’s… can you do that to Skaldians too?”

Deep breath. Riza looked over towards the crater, where some human bodies still remained. Fear of her overruled burying the dead, apparently.

“I’ve never tried.”

Meren followed her gaze.

“But you’re going to?”

A small, curt nod. Riza walked over to where the first body lay.

She didn’t know this man. His mail was ripped apart in the centre of his chest, his helmet caved in–along with his head. Little bleeding and no dismemberment–though, Riza guessed the demons would prefer the bodies in one piece.

His weapon wasn’t nearby, flung off somewhere. His shield remained strapped to his arm, in better nick than the rest of him.

Riza knelt beside him but not doing anything yet. This was different from a humanoid demon; this was a person.

She wasn’t religious or spiritual. As far as Riza was concerned, once you were dead, that was it.

But that wasn’t the case with Dave. He retained memories, knowledge only a humanoid demon could know. His personality was a bit robotic and he lacked agency but was that just who he was, as a demon, or a result of [Raise Dead]?

What made a person, a person?

Question for the ages.

A personality is part innate, part trained. People can change over time. Memories influence a person. There are innate predilections such as liking chocolate. How much of that remains after death?

A thought blossomed in Riza’s head as she went to check the wording on a skill.

[Last Words] (1/10)

Extract thoughts from an entity that died within 2 hours

Casting Time: 1 min

Cost: 5 es

‘Thoughts’. How are they extracted? How are they interpreted? Beamed into my head? [Message] is just my voice in Lefie’s head when I use it; is this the same thing?

But some people think solely in images, not words. Would it just be images then? Would I black out for a few seconds? Would the thoughts be transitory or a permanent addition to my memories that I could think about whenever? Constantly conjuring the same image?

Or is there a different skill for implantation? This merely governs extraction.

I’m off-topic.

Extracting thoughts. Consistent memories. Even fucking resurrection. None of these would be possible without the bodyless person existing after death.

Fuck, sounds stupid, but I guess a ‘soul’ must exist, then? An incorporeal, immutable soul.

[Animate Critter] and [Reanimate] don’t touch the soul at all. They’re just a simple intelligence commandeering a body. Yeah, like an A.I. It understands me and follows orders but doesn’t think for itself. It’s just a programme.

[Raise Dead] is different. The beast demons can’t understand me. They don’t hurt me but that’s about it for what’s changed about them. The same soul except they recognise me as their master.

Shit. Does that mean the soul isn’t immutable and I’ve already changed it? Do I alter loyalty to be absolute? Do I remove their ability to cause harm towards me? Is it a rewiring of the body, brain, or soul?

The body is effectively the brain. You can mould the brain, shift receptors. Instil a fake, absolute loyalty that cannot be undone. Then, you add a soul into the body.

Alternatively, you touch the soul itself. Shift around the loyalty there then you put it into the body. The body is the same but the soul is different.

At that point, is it even the same person?

I suppose if I wanted the same person, I’d simply resurrect them.

[Resurrection] (1/10)

Bring an entity that has died within the past 2 day back to life

Casting Time: 1 hour

Cost: 10000 es

Requirements: [Resuscitate] (10/10)

Same soul, same body, no changes.

[False Life], [Raise Dead], [Resuscitate], [Resurrection]. They don’t instil life into a body–they return the soul to it.

Her hair was thick and dirty. Her fingers snaked through it, tracing over her scalp as Riza’s gaze drifted from head to toe of the body in front of her.

Body neatly laid on the ground like it was ready for an autopsy. This wasn’t like with the beast demon earlier, where you simply created a robot.

Is this ethical? That’s the question I should be asking, right?

Nothing. That’s what Riza felt. No hyperventilating, no awe at realising that souls were real. The corpse in front of her felt like any other corpse, and the prospect of turning it into an undead felt as routine and mundane as anything else.

Hands on her knees, she didn’t move. Her heart wasn’t racing, nor was sweat pouring from her skin.

The most she felt was confusion. Confusion about said confusion.

Fuck it.

Leaning over, her hands found holes to the cold skin underneath, the essence beginning to flow from her core, through her arms, and out through her fingertips.

The last thing he remembered was the ground giving up under him. The tumbling, the rolling, the bouncing off rocks and the sudden, great big thud at the end.

Then darkness.

Next thing he knew, the cold, wet grass tickled his bare arms, the crisp, cool morning air filling his lungs as the dim, cloudy skies above shone light down on him.

His eyes felt dry, throat parched and rusty, as his bones creaked with effort to get him moving. With an awkwardness long unfamiliar to him, he shoved himself to an upright position, fingers gently kneading the dirt under him.

Immediate relief flooded through him as soon as he saw the village. Still standing, without any fires or destruction. He felt immediately at gaze.

The next thing he noticed were the bodies. Demon corpses. Tens of them littered the field, from where he was all the way to the village.

So many. And they survived this? He struggled to believe it.

The third and final thing he noticed was the young girl to his left. Clad in armour, she felt familiar but as his bran grasped at the remnants of a memory, it slipped through his mental tendrils.

“Er…” Was the first word out of his mouth, his brain running slowly. “Wha-what happened?” There we go; finally said something coherent.

“What’s your name?” The strange girl immediately asked. Her face was impassive, her kneeling form tight and proper. Something about her was unsettling.

“Da-Daven.” He tilted his head and squinted his eyes. “I feel-” Cough. His throat felt strained. “-Like I know you. Do you- Do you have any water?”

The girl looked over her shoulder to two other figures–Meren and another girl–and the pieces finally clicked into place as she placed a hand on his shoulder.

Like a full-body workout, it felt like Daven’s whole body was drenched in sweat, but only for a second. His arms felt looser and stronger, his eyes moister as he blinked rapidly, and even an experimental cough didn’t feel like he was eating a gritty rock.

“You’re Riza, right? Lefie’s sister."

“Sister, yeah, sure. Look, what’s the last thing you remember?” She asked somewhat dismissively.

“Uh. Well, there was the hole. I remember falling a fair bit. I feel like I hit my head pretty hard, and everything is a blank after that.

“Uh huh. What about me? What’s your opinion on me?

Daven laughed awkwardly, trying to play off her weird questions.

“You seem, er… nice?”

She rolled her eyes before making quick eye contact and then getting to her feet. She lent him a hand and pulled him up with surprising strength given her form.

Her tiny form. He towered over once he was standing up and remembered where he was.

“What are you doing here? Where’s everybody else?”

Looking around, he underestimated how many demons there were. There had to be over a hundred, at least.

“Fucking hell!” His hand immediately swung to his side, searching for a weapon that wasn’t there, as he laid eyes on the monster to end all monsters.

Thankfully, it was dead. Somehow. Must’ve been as large as a couple of buildings put together. How ever did someone kill it?

“Relax,” Riza said, her gaze drifting to his hand. “What weapon did you use?”

“A sword. Not mine though; I just borrowed. Shit, if I lost it-”

“It’s fine,” Riza replied, walking a little and then bending down to pick up a sword. Not quite his but close enough. “Here.”

He took it from her, muscle memory taking over as he moved to sheath it and then having to pretend that wasn’t what he was doing and he instead just wanted to hold his sword at his side awkwardly. Luckily, she hadn’t seen anything, walking over to the other bodies of his fellow patrolmen.

“Fuck,” He muttered under his breath. Of course, with this many demons, there’d be a whole lot of deaths.

His heart felt heavy as he began to make his way over as well, seeing if there was anyone he recognised.

With each one he passed, he could place a name to the face. There weren’t many but they made up the majority of the patrolmen.

All of them dead.

Marnac, Levan, Siday, Brander… The names went on. Each one had a life, a family, and here they were, face full of dirt in a field surrounded by the bodies of their enemies.

One way to go out, he supposed. Valiantly defending the village.

He looked over at the monstrosity again. It was right by the hole. A miracle must’ve saved them from it. He was lucky to be alive, however he managed to do that.

Who had managed to survive? Meren. He looked over again and, yep, there she was still. Wearing armour and with a spear at her side. She’d be able to tell him what happened.

Meren was barely holding it together. Today and yesterday had been a rollercoaster and now… this?

Raising the fucking dead? Who the fuck was this woman?

Nausea threatened to overtake her as she watched one of her fellow patrol officers rise from the fucking ground. Without a scratch. She had seen his lifeless corpse just earlier today, as she looked over the bodies, and now here he was, walking about without a care that he was dead seconds earlier.

This shouldn’t be possible. Demons are one thing but they’re basically animals. You hit them hard enough, they die. Law of the world.

This ignored all of that. Riza killed without moving a muscle and could raise the dead effortlessly as well.

Oh, and there she goes again. Another body sat upright further afield. That was the tipping point. She barely managed to get her helmet out of the way in time for her breakfast to leave through her mouth.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Lefie said, patting her back. “You get used to it after a while. This is just what Riza does.”

Meren made sure everything was out before trying her best to clean herself up.

“What she does? How are you so casual about this? She’s raising the fucking dead, Lefie!”

“Well… it’s not true resurrection.”

“Because that makes it so much better.”

“It’s true! She doesn’t have enough essence to raise everyone.”

The world was swaying. Meren needed to sit down and the ground looked quite comfy at the moment.

“Hey, hey,” Lefie said softly, like she was talking to a child, as she knelt beside Meren. “Drink some water,” She said and of course, water magically appeared out of thin fucking air.

Meren lacked the energy to react as she drank down the refreshing fluid, quenching her apparent thirst.

“What did I sign myself up for?” She asked herself.

Unfortunately, there was no time for an answer as the first human Riza raised walked on over to them.

“Hey, Meren,” He said and right away, Meren recognised him. Daven. He was standing upright, looking as healthy as ever.

She didn’t answer, turning away suddenly and vomiting again. He was supposed to be dead!

“Is she okay?”

“Been through a lot. Hello Daven!” Lefie answered, sounding excited to see him and completely ignoring the fact he was a dead man walking.

“So…” He shifted from foot to foot, rubbing a hand along his arm as he loosely gestured around him. “What happened? I don’t remember much after the crater opened up. Sort of conked out of it,” He knocked against his helmet with his knuckles.

“It’s a long story. Better wait for Riza to return,” Lefie replied, looking around him.

“Yes. Riza… You know, when I woke up, she did something to me. Placed a hand on my shoulder and then I felt great. Right as rain. What’s up with that?”

“Best to let Riza explain,” Lefie said, contorting her face.

“You’re never going to believe it,” Meren said simultaneously, albeit quietly. She felt drained of energy, and her breakfast.

“Yeah. Wha-” He said, looking over his shoulder and pausing at the sight of another man waking up in front of Riza.

“Save your questions,” Lefie simply said.

It seems that Daven had ended up talking to Meren and Lefie while Riza was looking for her next suitable candidate. He was another patrol officer by the name of Sanders. Used a greatsword, albeit not the one he was holding right now.

He was a bit quiet but that could’ve just been shock. Riza wasn’t paying him much attention. Instead, she was battling with statuses.

Name Horse 1 Level 1 Health 20/20 Stamina 20/20 Essence

20/20 Power 1 (1) Constitution 1 (1) Endurance 1 (1) Vim 1 (1) Essence

1 (1) Spirit

1 (1) Health Regeneration

100/day Stamina Regeneration

100/day Essence Regeneration

100/day Name Horse 2 Level 1 Health 20/20 Stamina 20/20 Essence

20/20 Power 1 (1) Constitution 1 (1) Endurance 1 (1) Vim 1 (1) Essence

1 (1) Spirit

1 (1) Health Regeneration

100/day Stamina Regeneration

100/day Essence Regeneration

100/day Name Daven Level 5+ Health 120/120 Stamina 120/120 Essence

40/40 Power 6 (6) Constitution 5 (5) Endurance 6 (6) Vim 5 (5) Essence

2 (2) Spirit

1 (1) Health Regeneration

100/day Stamina Regeneration

100/day Essence Regeneration

100/day Name Sanders Level 5+ Health 100/100 Stamina 100/100 Essence

40/40 Power 5 (5) Constitution 6 (6) Endurance 5 (5) Vim 4 (4) Essence

2 (2) Spirit

3 (3) Health Regeneration

120/day Stamina Regeneration

100/day Essence Regeneration

100/day

For fuck’s sake. This is too unwieldy. They’re all different costs to maintain, with different levels and stats and eventually skills.

The interface was somewhat modular. Riza hadn’t experimented much, and it was a fair bit resistant to any major changes, but she had managed to force her main stat block to include her regenerations rather than hiding them away somewhere. Maybe she could do something about this?

It was a weird sensation to describe, like trying to move a non-existent limb. She felt some pushback in her brain at her first attempt. Maybe she was being too complicated?

Something smaller. Like cutting out the stats. With a bit of pushing and prodding, and a final, mental pop like a sudden release of energy, the blue box morphed into shape.

Name Daven Level 5+ Health 120/120 Stamina 120/120 Essence

40/40

Good, good. What about more changes? Could I rearrange things more? Not just subtraction or addition. Could I slim it up a bit?

A bit of time later, she had actually managed it.

Name Level Health Stamina Essence Daven 5+ 120/120 120/120 40/40

Much nicer. Big improvement…

It looks a bit like a spreadsheet now. Could I add other details? Like what skill I used and how much he’s costing me?

Name Skill Level Health Stamina Essence Cost Daven Raise Dead 5+ 120/120 120/120 40/40 2.5 es/sec

These latter changes were more and more easy to implement and took far less time. It was like the interface was happily bending to her will.

Wait a minute… That’s a decimal! What the fuck? You son of a bitch can display decimals! Why the fuck do you truncate everything then?

Out of frustration, Riza brought up her [Heal] skill block and adjusted the strength to be a non-integer and…

Still truncated. Of course it is. Fine, I won’t bother with it right now.

Can I still access his full stat block?

Name Daven Level 5+ Health 120/120 Stamina 120/120 Essence

40/40 Power 6 (6) Constitution 5 (5) Endurance 6 (6) Vim 5 (5) Essence

2 (2) Spirit

1 (1) Health Regeneration

100/day Stamina Regeneration

100/day Essence Regeneration

100/day

I can. So, this isn’t a replacement but something new? Did I create a new subsection? What else can I do?

Riza continued fiddling around even after she and Sanders had reunited with the rest. Someone had tried calling her name but gave up when she didn’t answer.

Eventually, she managed to get something that would be very helpful in the future, and she was even able to name it too.

Entity Manager Excess Essence 7.20 es/sec

Entity Name Skill Level Health Stamina Essence Cost (es/sec) Horse Reanimate 1 20/20 20/20 20/20 0.5 Horse Reanimate 1 20/20 20/20 20/20 0.5 Daven Raise Dead 5+ 120/120 120/120 40/40 2.5 Sanders Raise Dead 5+ 100/100 100/100 40/40 2.5

No critters yet. Annoyingly, I have to manually add them to this. Also had to limit it to two decimal places.

Finally finished, she raised her head to see three very confused and concerned faces looking back at her. At least Lefie was smiling.

“Yes? Did I miss something?” Sanders barked out a laugh and twisted away while Meren and Daven just sighed.

“We’ve been calling your name for the last few minutes? Where have you been?” Daven asked.

“I was just messing around with my interface.” Meren gave a strange look at that.

“Well, anyway. I-I’ve got some questions.”

“Go ahead,” Riza nodded, expecting this. She had some questions of her own, though she doubted they were the same ones he had.

“What the fuck happened here?” He said with gusto, spreading his arms out to gesture at the entire field. “And how did that thing-,” He pointed to the large demon “Die?”

Riza shifted her weight to her other foot as she thought about how to answer. A check of her parasite skill cost alerted her that she still had a handful left over so she was in no immediate danger.

“Do you trust me?” She asked.

“Yeah. Of course I trust you,” Daven immediately replied, unaware of the strangeness of what he just said.

“Well… You’re dead.”

Sanders was giving her a strange look and Daven was befuddled.

“Dead? No, no… that’s impossible. That’s not how this works… But you can’t be lying.” He devolved into muttering to himself but something he said caught Riza’s attention.

“‘How this works’? What do you mean?”

He didn’t answer, so Riza repeated the question to Meren, who scoffed like it was a childish thing to ask.

“You raise them from the dead and don’t even know why that should be impossible?”

Riza fixed with her a stern glare and mustered courage and firmness in her voice.

“Correct. Why should this be impossible?”

“They’re dead! They’re meant to be babies; that’s how this works!” Meren said, still sitting on the ground but pointing towards both Daven and Sanders. “Not, walking around and whatever else they’re doing.”

“Babies? Dead people get reborn? Oh, like reincarnation?”

A soul exists so maybe reincarnation is possible? If so, I wonder why souls stay around for a bit.

Meren nodded.

Lefie shrugged. “I didn’t know either,” She said.

“Daven, Daven. Daven,” Riza called out, eventually grabbing ahold of his arms and forcing him to look at her. She glanced out the corner of her eye at Sanders who had taken a seat on the grass and was looking nowhere in particular.

“Calm down. You’re dead but do you feel dead?”

“What? No, no, no. I-I-I feel good. Great. Yeah, I feel great.” His eyes moved about erratically.

“That’s good. You were dead but now you’re not. Nothing to worry about, right?”

“No, but… no.” He was shaking his head.

This isn’t working.

Time for something new.

Riza navigated to Daven’s stats, and then his skills, and purchased [Meditate].

“Close your eyes and breathe. Focus on your breath, focus on [Meditate],” She advised as he dutifully followed along.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. Riza slipped her hand down to his wrist, searching for a pulse. As soon as her thumb landed on that rhythmic pulsing:

That’s interesting.

Shifting her gaze from his wrist back to his face, eyes still closed.

“Feel better?” No response.

Shit. Forgot that it blocks all senses. Oh well. He’ll come out of that in due time.

“Keep an eye on him,” Riza told Lefie as she let go and walked over to where Sanders was sitting.

She crouched down before him as he failed to meet her eyes. He wasn’t looking away, just wasn’t looking at anything.

“Hey, Sanders?” She said, voice soft and gentle. No response from him.

Reaching out for his wrist, she found his pulse as well. Slow and steady.

Doesn’t seem to be panicking. Hmmm.

Riza tried calling out his name a few more times but no responses then either. Out of ideas, she tried using [Heal] to see if that helped but it didn’t so she did the same thing she did with Daven; getting Sanders to take [Mediate] and then close his eyes and sink into that comforting abyss.

Her orders to use the skill got through, interestingly, and now they had two comatose men on their hands.

This was not going as well as Riza expected.

“Keep an eye on both of them,” Riza told Lefie and Meren, the latter of which was currently helping to lower Daven to a sitting position.

“Where are you going?” Lefie asked as Riza was turning to walk away.

“Gonna look at the crater a little. If someone comes up… throw a stone down or something.” She said before finally turning and jogging over to the hole.

The circumference was raised from the earth and actually required her to climb up and over it. From there, she could see the entire expanse–how the walls sloped downwards, how rocks jutted out like they were unaffected by whatever caused this, and how the bottom of the hole was lost to fog.

Just like in the first village.

It just opened up randomly. Riza looked over her shoulder. Maybe it wasn’t random. It’s very close to Litchendorf, all things considered.

A hole in the middle of a village and another just on its borders. Only two instances but it can’t be random. The demons must have an ability to open up these holes. Maybe a high tier earth skill? That doesn’t sound unreasonable.

How would they operate, then? Travel underground, locate a village, create a big hole to release your demons onto said village. Rinse and repeat.

Except, if they want to repeat it, why send the big fucker out? He’d destroy the village, making it a one-time feast. And why stop after the big fucker as well? They can’t have ran out because they’ve still got a demon with earth skills in reserve.

No more thinking. Time for a bit of action.

Riza hopped down and scuttled to the nearest beast demon, reanimating that one with orders to stick by her for now.

She repeated this a few more times, gathering five beast demons before finally giving them orders to descend into the hole. They’d follow along the tunnel but were ordered to stay within 100 metres of Riza.

Just in case, there was another order for the demons to return to the surface after half an hour.

The demons raced down the sides of the crater, their sharp claws digging into the ground as they descended. Riza sunk into the vision of the closest one, seeing barely anything until her senses suddenly expanded around her.

She was in.

Beneath the fog, the crater converged to a hole that was an almost vertical drop downwards. And downwards. And downwards.

By the time her demons reached the end of the ascension tunnel, there wasn’t much further they could go before her vision cut out. All she could make out was gigantic, circular tunnels running off in every direction, smooth, clean walls just like when Dave was tunnelling, and a stark absence of anything demonic.

The tunnels were empty, and that was when sight returned to Riza.

If she wanted more details, she’d have to go down there herself.

Too risky. No leech and there’s a high level, earth demon down there as well. I’ll just wait for them to return.

And return they did, unscathed. While demons weren’t hostile to one another by default, demons that acted strange (such as the ones Riza resurrected) would sometimes be attacked by other demons.

Since the ones she had raised were all level 1 and were all intact, that suggested they encountered no other significant demons while down there.

All-in-all, if she had to guess, she’d say that the crater was empty.

Shit.

Daven and Sanders eventually calmed down from whatever was going through their minds. Unfortunately, it took a while and that meant Riza struggling with Meren taking most of the weight of their bodies, piling them into the wagon.

And Riza feeling not the least bit envious at how large Meren’s arms were. She kept glancing at them out of the corner of her eye when Riza thought she wasn’t looking.

They had already made a fair bit of distance from Litchendorf by the time the pair woke up but, surprisingly, when they were told they were going to assist the group from now on, neither of them gave more than a token resistance to the concept.

Meren was a bit confused at that but Lefie just took it in stride, much like everything else Riza could do.

Riza, however, thought it was more significant than the others realised. Neither Sanders nor Daven consciously noticed their super agreeable nature, nor their easy trust and lack of substantial fear of Riza.

Riza noticed, and it got her wondering about her thoughts on the soul from earlier. She’d need to do more tests but… She didn’t want to think about the implications.

Meren mostly recovered from her little freakout about Riza’s abilities. After she dealt with the philosophical implications and how what Riza could do completely contradicted a tenant of reality that she was taught from birth, she was actually quite curious about how it all worked.

Riza was a bit wary to share many details. Unlike everyone else in the wagon, she didn’t have absolute loyalty from Meren and so kept it somewhat vague. She made no mention of the different skills such as reanimate and raise dead, nor cite specific numbers to her.

However, what she did say seemed to be enough to satisfy Meren’s curiosity.

As it turned out, souls weren’t a foreign concept here. From birth, everyone is taught that you have a soul and if you do good things, please Skaldur and devote your life to the Empire, you will be rewarded with being reincarnated into a good life. You still have to start as a baby but that philosophy suggested an element of fate or determinism was involved somehow.

This, of course, led to many questions. Information was falling into place, bit by bit.

There was actually a religion people believed in. It didn’t get talked about much while Riza was undercover because, why would they? Everyone believed the same thing and it didn’t require any rituals to be performed.

The Dominion of Skaldur and Skaldur’s Chosen weren’t just national bodies, such as the state army, but rather, religious institutions. The entire Empire followed a state religion surrounding the god Skaldur and no other gods. Daven even looked a bit offended at Riza suggesting there were other gods, and Meren quickly looked away.

The Regent was granted power by Skaldur like a divine right to be the Regent. No one knew how they ascended to Regency but rather that spread a sense of illegitimacy, that lack of information just seemed to enshrine their divine righteousness to be Regent.

As far as people were concerned, the Regent was always the Regent. From the sounds of it, the Regent was immortal.

Very suspicious.

Everyone talked in quiet, respectful tones and believed everything they told Riza. It was only Lefie who seemed to have no apparent respect for the person.

When asked why, she said:

“Because they’re the reason why my family had to live in forests! We go to a village and then they’d threaten to kill us for ‘being a tarny’ and ‘it’s against what Skaldur desires’,” She explained, voice dripping with contempt.

As interesting as it was to hear about, Riza had to admit she doubted most of the claims mentioned. Immortal Regent? Sure, if they were using [Senescence]. Power granted by Skaldur? That’s just an excuse. The closest thing to a god Riza had experienced in this new world was the system, the blue boxes that let her bend reality to her will.

So, she took in everything with a grain of salt, including the information about reincarnation. People believed it back on earth as well but, here, she had proof what people believed wasn’t the truth. Souls just stuck around after dying, for some reason.

As interesting as it all was, there was a lot of information to take in so Riza settled this topic of discussion and focused on the journey ahead.

The sun was high in the sky and Litchendorf was shrinking by the minute. She had an adventure to experience.