It was midday when I got out of my lean-to. Emotionally I was drained. Overnight I had lived several lives, and most of them were evil. I had the memories of the first Lich locked inside me, yet they were fading fast. Not like those of a nightmare but rather like old memories from childhood. They were there but had to be called up.

Unlike memories from childhood, I hadn’t had the time to process the emotions. I felt like it was me that killed thousands. I felt like it was me that turned the living into the undead and raised skeletons to hunt those I hated. I felt like it was me who killed the Grand Shaman when I stole the notes for raising the undead. I felt like it was me who passed the knowledge of Necromancy to others and started the wars of the undead.

It was hard knowing that it wasn’t me that did these things. It was hard knowing that it wasn’t me that didn’t give mercy when it was begged of me by children. It was hard not hating myself for everything that everyone else did but that I lived through. I felt the joy of victory and the sting of defeat in my memories.

I also had to grapple with how to deal with my skill coming from so much death and evil. Power imbuing was created by evil men doing evil. While I could see the good in what the skill could do, how it came about was what was messing with me. All of the magical things that I had made with power imbuing were because of the dead.

In the past, when I first used a skill, I could either trust in the nudging or let the skill take over. I also could focus on how I learned the skill and pick up some extra around it. With the hunting skills, it was always living with the Wild Humans; with my Starting class skills, it was always life in a building, being shown over and over again how to do the skill.

Honestly, the ones from the Wild Humans had more love and kindness in them even though they were of a hard life. The Starting class skills were more or less what I would have thought of as a strict teacher. Someone paid to teach a skill but didn’t have love or patience for the pupil. When I looked at the memories of the skills I brought with me, like Fitness Training, I got crystal clear memories of being taught in my earth life. The thing was, I knew that I had moved further on in my skills I brought from Earth than when I came here to start. Yet, I didn’t have new memories of learning, just the urging of how to do something right.

What I wanted to try was to look at my power imbuing skill memories to see if I could get more information from it. I knew that memories could get made up; I didn’t fully trust the story that I had been given. Seeing how it came from a question to Sam, I figured that it was about a 70/30 bet that Sam was trying to hurt me. I felt like he had done a good job of messing with me on this one, but I wasn’t sure how much was fabricated and how much was real.

I sat down by the waterfall to watch for a while. I wanted to try to figure out what was going on with me and with my memories. I had always counted my memories as being mine and that I knew what had happened. Now I wasn’t sure how to recognize if a memory was mine or if it was something put in my head.

I grabbed a river stone and started to pass energy in. Like when I first tried, I wanted to take the time to focus and push the power in. I was dragging this out as long as I could. I was thinking about how I learned to do this and who taught me. I started to get memories of the room that I first learned how to imbue. There were 10 of us in there, each from a working family, each being taught how to do this skill so that we could work for an enchanter.

I was learning to work in the family business. My owner was an enchanter, and he made his living by making power stones and selling them. He would make them out of cut gemstones. Each one would take him close to a week to make, and he could sell it for enough money that we weren’t poor. It took lots of work for him to make these, and so we had to help out in other ways.

I saw that I kept the books for the family. I saw myself reading our ledgers and reading over contracts for the family. I got mad at that part; I had memories on this planet of reading, yet I could not. I lost the train of memories at that point and saw that the day was mostly gone.

Between my naps and trying to look at my memories, I had lost a whole day. It was needed because I needed to figure out what was going on, but I still hated losing time. Worse than that, I also was zoned out so much that I didn’t know what was going on around me. I might have missed anything.

I stood up to go towards my lean-to and tripped over Blink. She had been behind me and blended into the ground so that I didn’t see her. I caught myself into a shoulder roll and came up and yelled at her for tripping me.

She hissed and snapped at me for me tripping on her and yelling. Then she looked to her left and from the ground picked up in her mouth a rabbit and threw it at me. She huffed and walked towards the tent, giving me the stink eye as she did.

I picked up the rabbit and headed over to the fire to cook. It had been a hard day for me, and yelling at Blink wasn’t normal. I took the time to skin the rabbit and started to make food for us. I pulled out her favorite parts and brought them to where she was. When I held them out, she turned around and faced away from me.

I set down the plate that had the entrails on and backed away. Blink slowly turned back around and sniffed the guts. She looked up at me with an expression that could only be called loathing as she snapped up her part of the catch. She then humphed at me and walked around to the other side of the fire.

As I was working on the rabbit, I was trying to figure out what I could do to appease my pet and the only friend that I had in this world. I had been wrong for yelling at her because it was me that tripped, but she was hidden, so it was kind of on her too. Still, I shouldn’t have yelled, and she caught food from someplace.

I chose to grab my net and see if I could get her some of the smaller fish that she liked to snap up. When I got up close to the river, I cast out and started to pull my net in. I got my net in and discovered something was moving in it the wrong way. I was expecting the flipping of fish but what I saw was the slithering of a snake.

Now truth be told, there are few things in this world, from what I knew or all of my old world, that cause me as many problems as snakes. Yes, women are a universal problem, but snakes are one that always makes my legs scream and goosebumps rise up. I wouldn’t say that I had a snake phobia, but rather I didn’t like the idea of being bitten again, and these things always moved so quiet. So when I started to bash my net with my staff using fire strike, I thought that it was well worth the effort I was putting in.

I might have burned most of the net and many of the fish. I did manage to kill the snake. It was nice to know that snakes could be killed with a full-power strike.

I was worried that it would brush off the magic and kill me with a poison bite. Even when I look at it right now, burned in half, I was still worried about the side with the head. So after a few more strikes, I was sure that the head was broken.

This, of course, threw me into a whole nothing line of thinking that I hadn’t been on before. If one snake could get into my part of the river, then others could as well, and that meant that I might have to deal with snakes. I picked up all the fish that I had caught and even the bits of snake and headed back to my fire. When I got to the fire, I realized that I had been gone long enough, and my rabbit dinner was now burned. I wasn’t sure if it was because I was gone too long or if Blink had done something. My pan was in the fire upside-down.

I took the good fish and set them down on a plate, and put them down for Blink. I told her, “Sorry girl, I shouldn’t have yelled I hope that you like the little fish.”

I then laid the tail of the snake by her saying, “I thought that you might want to try this too.”

Blink took a bit of time, gave me a side-eye, and then scarfed down the fish. She nosed the snake a bit and then woofed it down like it was a hot dog. She walked over to me and laid down across my lap, and then acted like she was asleep. I gave her some pets and could see that she was starting to give me the lizard smile. After a few minutes, she stood up, licked my face with a fish smell, and walked into the lean-to.

There was still some sun out, but after the last time I asked Sam a question, I figured I was done for a while. There were things that I wanted to know that should fit in with what everyone knows but that I somehow didn’t. Like what country I was in and where the closest town was, but I wasn’t sure if I could bring myself to have another dream for a while.

I watched the sunset from my tree chair. It was nice seeing out over my river at sunset. To know that I was secure from snakes would be nice. I guessed that was something that I wanted to work on moving forward. I needed something that kept dangerous animals away without killing them. They were needed for the general ecosystem to work. However, they were not needed on my island ever.