It didn’t really take all that long for me to return to the doctor and discuss methods of actually procuring a body for use in post-mortem testing. I, thankfully, found out that it wasn’t a point of religious interest. It was very possible that some believed that defiling the body in death transferred to damage to the spirit of some sort, and I was infinitely glad that it didn’t seem to be the case here. Maybe the belief of Arun, the Death God, was the chief reason for this. Though I don’t know much, if anything, about him.

I quickly brought up the fact that it might possibly be easier to convince someone of this if they were offered compensation of some description. The knee-jerk reaction was to offer payment in actual coin, but I shot that one down pretty quickly. Judging by the reactions I’ve received from simple payments and other monetary reimbursement, paying for a corpse seems like it would ruffle some feathers big-time.

So, there came the idea of offering mortuary services as reimbursement. Gram wasn’t entirely understanding of what I meant when I placed the idea on the table, but before long he was on board with the idea.

The dead here are treated with a level of disgust, simply because the people of this world, and possibly the other world as well, don’t have a widespread method of preserving the body—at least not reliably or well. So, the body is generally buried soon after being found dead, with very little time for the family to come to grips with the death of the person. Gram explained to me that this was likely because of a fear of disease or a miasma like effect on the surrounding people.

So, simply, as a small reimbursement for the use of the body in post-mortem tests, Gram will clean and prepare the body for being viewed by the family. There would probably be extenuating circumstances where the body was irreparably damaged, either during a post-mortem, or from injury or disease that killed the person in the first place. Other things could likely be done in the place of mortuary services, possibly transferring into health check-ups for the family that Gram would usually charge for.

This conversation only took maybe an hour to work it all out, and now we had a clear idea of what we could give in return. I was oddly excited to convince people of post-mortem procedures; I was beginning to feel confident in my ability to do so, strangely.

After another few days of simply repeating the Sharah and learning with Mayer in the mornings, the time finally came for me to go do what I had signed up for. A man named Renit was going to die of a disease or infection that Gram wasn’t able to identify. I walked to the man’s house, finding him surrounded by family, but all at a distance except for an elderly lady who was tending directly to the man laying bed, half comatose. It made me smile a little. Looks like Grandma didn’t care one second for her kin not being treated well, especially not because of a little infection.

A few seconds into the conversation, it became clear that both him and the family understood that he was going to die. It seems that they were still in the process of accepting that in its totality, but the man himself was actually resolved about it. He exuded a sense of calm dread at what was happening to him, but he didn’t seem like the sort of man that would bow his head in front of death.

He was perfect.

Words flowed from my mouth like nothing else I had every really experienced, the other few times only being close. I soaked up how they felt about every word I said and, depending on the reaction to that, I would use the next to tinker with the atmosphere—releasing calming words when bad emotions came to the forefront of their minds, and saying empowering things when defeat was written on their faces.

The man himself was easily drawn into my world. I spoke to him of duties that only he could carry out. That his contribution to the world would be far, far greater than anything than he could possibly know.

As his attention began to focus on what I was proposing, there was a slight hesitation, before he quashed it mightily with all his will. I explained to him the possibilities that could arise from such testing and told him that there was no way that the information gathered would ever be truly useless. It might not always come to fruition immediately, but in the next generation it could save lives in numbers that we couldn’t truly comprehend.

And so, the man was sold. Tied to a sense of duty that was greater than his instinct of preserving, his body, and the piece of mind that it would offer him to keep them intact. As I walked through the dirt streets only a few minutes after the conversation, a pleasant feeling tickled my mind, and something popped into my mind.

[Read a Room: Flexing your uncanny ability to read a room, you handled an extremely difficult topic with absolute grace. +2 Mind]

I couldn’t help but grin. This is what I had hoped would happen. Learning anatomy with Gram was my first choice initially, but mostly because I didn’t see any other way I could realistically raise my Mind stat. Now it was different—I could do this for Gram whenever it was needed, make myself available for mediation between people and patients, and my Mind stat would steadily increase.

It had been so long since I had received a stat increase that I had almost forgotten that they should be more of a priority. Not as if there wasn’t reasoning for the other things that I was doing, though.

Firstly, the Sharah practice was endlessly helpful in control of my body, but didn’t inherently increase my Might or my Agility. Maybe the Sharah and other fighting skills fell outside the purview of the screen, or millions of other possible answers for why I wasn’t receiving stat rewards from something as physically demanding as the Sharah.

In recent days, I came to the realisation that my mindset from the very beginning of my transportation had completely shifted, and rapidly too. Originally, I was thinking in an extremely game oriented way, but when I saw people and spoke with them—Mayer, Rethi and his Mother, Master Gram and his daughter Alena so on and so forth—it became strikingly clear that they were real, and genuine. There was nothing NPC-like about them. Mayer, as typical as you could get from ‘old man is powerful and teaches wayward child’, was still different than I would have expected. His hand never forced me into situations I wasn’t comfortable with—he was open and willing to converse, rather that telling me to sit down and be told how the world is. In fact, I feel like we’ve both informed each-other about how the world works, rather than just one of us pulling back the veil over the other’s eyes.

The more days I pondered on likening this world to a game, the more I realised that it wasn’t going to be so convenient for me. In a game, you would be swept into a series of events that you weren’t able to stray from—not really anyways. But here I was, maybe only two weeks and some change into my stay here in this world, and I was already effectively master of my own time, with enough reputation to sink a battleship in this tiny little town, and the ear of a very powerful man.

So, what else was there? What was I doing here?

What were my true goals, and what would I need to achieve them?

My feet met the wood of Mayer’s doorstep, and I walked in, sitting on ‘my’ chair across from the man who seemed like he was eternally sipping tea and reading. Retirement, I guess. One look at me and I could tell he knew that I wanted to have a heavy conversation. Something that happened far more than I’d like to admit. He sighed and closed his book, placing it on the table beside him and crossed his legs.

“I don’t know how to say it without sounding like I’m full of myself, so I’ll just say it.” I paused for a second, “I am way, way too good at people. It’s only started becoming really obvious recently, but now it’s getting to the point where I can’t ignore it even if I try.”

Mayer’s face didn’t change but I could feel that things were clicking for the man.

“I can feel it. I know something is clicking for you.” The man’s eyebrows shot up. It wasn’t really surprise, but the feeling of an entire picture coming into view. The man was stock still for only a moment, before he gently placed his cup of tea down, and looked at me in the eyes. A seriousness in his countenance that only really appeared ever once and a while.

“Well,” he started hesitantly, “wou are a natural empath. An extraordinarily rare trait. In fact, I believe that the only other human natural empaths that have existed are Soul-Seekers, though they are considered Long Dead now.” It was my turn to raise an eyebrow.

“Uh, being ‘Long Dead’ doesn’t seem like something I really want to be.” Mayer nodded.

“Some you really don’t want to be. A Long Dead is simply a title for a human variant that has been either eradicated in its entirety, or just stopped appearing altogether. Though I doubt that you could actually be considered a Soul-Seeker at all. Being from another world entirely and all.”

Well, that was easy to understand then.

“You are a natural empath. Effectively, you are just naturally able to use your soul to do what an empathic shifter does with shifting. Usually at the cost of being able to shift ether altogether.” I thought on that for a moment. A natural empath. So not mind reading level, per se, but just able to sense feelings then. That seemed to line up, at least a little bit.

It was maybe a few weeks ago when I noticed it, unexplained flashes of ‘I swear I can feel what they’re feeling’, but nothing on the level of what I was feeling now. Now, I was getting clearer signals, like scrubbing through the radio waves on a long car trip, in the middle of a nowhere-road, and then finally managing to hook into a radio station. It started fuzzy and indistinct, and maybe that was where I am now. Maybe it’d even get stronger with time?

“Will I not be able to shift then?” Mayer waved his hand dismissively.

“You are a Champion, that in and of itself overrides that limitation. Though whether or not that restriction applied to you in the first is up for debate. It was likely that your natural empathic trait began to awaken only recently, since coming here where the ether or other, more nebulous energies, reside to power it.” I nodded.

“Is being a Soul-Seeker, or just a natural empath, all that strong? I understand that I can…” I hesitated find the right word, “convince really well. But I don’t understand how I would be able to beat someone that has a similar alignment towards anything combat or otherwise.” Mayer gave me an incredulous look.

“I thought you were smart. The answer is that you don’t match up against them, you get someone else to do that for you.” Mayer laughed and continued regardless of my eyes rolling, “Empathic shifting is extremely powerful. Many of the most powerful leaders to have ever existed were extremely potent empathic shifters. The most legendary were Soul-Seekers or from races with natural empathic abilities. Instead of being good at hitting things real hard, or the shifter equivalent, you are able to walk into a room with some of the most powerful people alive and convince them that your cause is worth fighting for.” Mayer shrugged and I nodded stiffly, seeing his point and trying to discard my preconceived notions.

Though there were extremes on all ends. There was probably another man who could walk into a room with exactly the same people and wipe the floor with all of them. I guess that just meant that I’d have to convince that person too. And those that can beat them or gather enough allies to beat those that could never be convinced. The social power games were already hurting my head and I wasn’t even involved yet.

“When you put it that way, it seems like something extremely powerful. Maybe even overly so.” Mayer shrugged again, picking up his tea and sipping.

“Yes and no. In this world there are just about an infinite amount of ways you can tackle a problem. People develop new ways of tackling those problems all the time. Shifting and ether are just blanket terms—people utilise ether extremely differently across civilisations and continents. To put a long story short, yes you have a very powerful asset, but it isn’t like there aren’t others that have assets just as good or greater than yours. Just because most people that are Kings and Emperors have access to empathic shifting of some description, doesn’t mean that all that have access to empathic shifting are Kings and Emperors, or even nobles and merchants.”

“Well, at least I have that going for me. At least I can claim that I wasn’t total cannon fodder for this Champion War.” Mayer gave a short laugh and I smiled along with his grin.

“You are also probably the strongest naturally empathic human to live, seeing as none of them would have been able to naturally train to the state you’re in physically, even now. So that is also an upside.” I laughed along with him this time, relaxing a little now that I knew that I wasn’t going insane from delusions of grandeur. Though I guess that still didn’t make me a genius, like the rest of the Champions. My natural empathy could only be used as well as my smarts would let me, and if I didn’t use it well enough, it’d be exactly like I’d never had it in the first place. It was just another tool in the toolbox, right alongside the Soul Hammer.

I sighed deeply, only to return my gaze to Mayer, wry grin growing on my face without restraint.

“Hooray for not being crippled, I guess.”