Death After Death PLUS 300-302

Wooooo! Chapter 300! What a milestone. I love it.

It's amazing how quickly stories add up if you just keep going. If you go this far, thanks for reading!

Ch. 300 - Field Research

As the winter progressed, Simon lost himself in his research. That wasn’t enough to bind him to the town he found himself, of course. He could perform these experiments anywhere. Even as he pursued them, though, he was swallowed up in a web of favors and friendships that captured him more quickly and thoroughly than any beast he’d fought. 

It wasn’t all perfect, of course. Some of the women who made it clear they’d love to be courted, and a couple that would have been happy with a dalliance, soured on him as he politely rebuffed their advances.

He couldn’t in good conscience, though. Not only did his interest in romance seem to wane more with every life, but when he realized just how close he and Freya had come to ending up here instead of Crovar? Well, that killed it for him.  

If only we’d stayed here instead of there, Simon told himself as he studied his map in a mirror he’d fashioned from a silver coin. 

Where he sat was less than 20 miles from the road they’d taken their wagon down. That would have been years in the future; he would have arrived much too late to save this place in their current hour of need, but even if it had been a shell of its former self, it would have been worlds better than the way that the Raithwaite family had treated him. 

At this point, Simon no longer mourned Freya. He didn’t really mourn any woman, and when he pressed himself on the issue one dark morning, he could admit that he’d burned out the part of his heart that needed love over his turbulent lifetimes. He could still regret his mistakes, though, and not knowing that he’d walked right by a better option certainly qualified. 

That winter, Simon learned a great many things. He didn’t have a shop that was well-equipped for experiments to draw definitive conclusions, but even so, some experiments yielded good results. The first was that wands couldn’t stand up to greater words, but staves could, once or twice. Stone did okay, but objects of wood seemed to handle magic better than metal, though silver and gold did a better job than iron or steel. The word was still out on copper, though it was a common enough metal in some parts of the world; here, he only found it in coins, and his finances were, for the moment, fairly tight, so he resisted the urge to melt any more currency down than he already had. 

Instead, he did things the only fashioned way, and with the help of the town smith, he forged a dagger with just the right sort of handle to embed the large crimson garnet he had. Then, with some careful work, he embedded that weapon with a word of transfer that linked to the stone instead of him and a word of lesser lesser transfer in the hilt. 

Then, with the snows piled high, he went hunting to test it. The lairs he’d purged were still empty, but something had dug its way out of one of the burrows he’d collapsed, so he went back in there for round two. This time, though, he took things slower. That was both because there was only a bare handful of goblins and because, this time, he was more interested in testing his new weapon than in purging everything that moved. 

Simon flooded the burrow with light and took on the shrieking goblins one at a time, watching the life drain from their eyes over the space of several seconds. It wasn’t a quick death, and it certainly would have been cruel to do to a human, but then, these weren’t humans. They were monsters, and he was hunting them in a fairly unconventional way.

Though the gemstone never started glowing, the fact that it would make his light stone glow if he used the dagger to power it told him it had worked. Otherwise, there were no other signs. He couldn’t even feel the lesser lesser transfer drip-feeding him with the stolen power, but then, that was the point. He didn’t want to be able to feel it. He wanted to be energized a little at all times, reducing his chances of addiction but offsetting his magical experiments completely. 

By the time spring was threatening to burst out in full force, he might have even been a little younger than he was when he first arrived in this town. He certainly felt better, though that was mostly just the progress he was making on everything else. By his math, he was pretty sure the distillation of a single goblin wasn’t worth quite one year of his life, and it took nearly a week to drain it completely. 

I could probably double that dose, or even triple it, and calibrate that dose more carefully if I had all the damn runes the Murani did, he thought to himself. The gaps in his knowledge, though shrinking, still existed, and that frustrated him. Every day, he learned something new, though, like the fact that a greater and a lesser word didn’t just cancel out like he’d assumed they would. 

He didn’t have a way to make definitive measurements, but a word of greater power used up a year of his life, making it ten or twelve times more powerful than a regular word. Likewise, a word of lesser power used a week of his life, making it about a quarter as expensive. So, eventually, he used them in combinations for certain circuits, making compound words that were three times and three-quarters of the strength of a standard word. 

Repeating patterned combinations of such words verbally would have been silly, but in a written form, it was manageable. As much as he enjoyed learning how to fine-tune those powers, though, once winter was finally done with them, Simon helped the good people of Ordenvale plant wheat and other vegetables. 

More than once, he felt almost like he was being watched, and he was tempted to believe that his doppelgänger had arrived to make some trouble, but even using limited efforts to scry with his mirror and a pendulum was inconclusive. For a few days, he even considered summoning a demon to see what he might learn from such an encounter, though he decided against it for obvious reasons. 

It's an experiment I’ll need to try someday, Simon told himself, but it’s one that I will need a bit more privacy for in case something bad happens. However, during these efforts, he discovered something interesting. 

His words of Lesser connection didn’t reveal any threats related to vampires, doppelgängers, or even gods, though eventually, after a few more efforts, it did say that there was significant wealth to be had nearby. 

At first, Simon thought that meant his lost level two dungeon might be close by, but a few follow-up questions clarified the issue. It was not gold or even coins that were in the hills, but other mineral wealth. After a few nights, he was given hints of iron, tin, silver, and even gemstones in the mountains. He was intrigued, and when the planting was done, Simon marched out into the mountains to find out how right or wrong his little pendulum was. 

The world was a big place, though, so before he went, he made a tool to aid in his search. With the help of a quartz crystal, he crafted a dowsing rod made from a birch branch and inscribed with words of location. Then he set off into the mountains for what he told everyone else was a hunting trip. The only thing that Simon was hunting, though, was the rumors of wealth he’d uncovered. 

The mountains around Ordanvale were not unfamiliar to him. If he went far enough north and then crossed them to the west, he’d eventually reach his cabin. If he followed their curve to the south, eventually, he’d reach the wyvern that he’d killed several times. 

In between those two landmarks, though, were ragged snowcapped peaks dominated by sporadic pine forests, scree-covered slopes, and granite escarpments that the locals referred to as the Arpanian Range.

Simon didn’t care what they were called. He thought they were much more beautiful than the Raiden Mountains that hemmed in Ionia from its neighbors. Those were arid and dusty, dotted with scrub, whereas his current environs were full of life. Some of it even wanted to eat him, but Simon welcomed their efforts to try. 

Over the course of his week in the woods, climbing to ever higher slopes as he made a vast thirty-mile loop that eventually brought him back to town, he found a strange obelisk with words too eroded to read, a small village, two mountain lions, a goblin lair, and the tracks of an owlbear, though he never found the beast that made it. He even saw a pair of griffons prowling the sky once, but they never got close enough for him to worry about. 

Still, as interesting as those sites were, none of that was the important part of his exploration. What mattered was what he found along the way. His divining rod wasn’t perfect, but when he got within a couple miles of one of the deposits he was thinking of, it pointed like an arrow to it.

Then, with a little effort and exploration, he was able to find some part of the deposit where the vein touched the surface. After he found all the places he’d made note of during his scrying, he looked for more, and though he found only one batch of gems, one of the streams did seem to have gold in it, though he knew nothing about panning to retrieve some. 

By the time he returned, he had a pouch full of ore samples and even a large, uncut ruby that he’d pried out of a deposit. More importantly, though, he had their locations on the map. 

“Any one of these would be enough to build a town around,” Simon told himself as he walked back to Ordanvale. “With all of them, though, I suppose I could carve out a kingdom if I wanted to.”

He didn’t want to, of course. He had no idea how much such a change would affect future events, but even so, he definitely wanted to exploit at least the silver vein. 

When he got back to the village, he handled the information carefully and held quiet discussions with the headman about them. Simon didn’t do so out of greed but because he didn’t want to entirely upend the small town’s way of life. It was still recovering from the scars that the goblins had left behind. 

“We’ll have to tell the Earl,” the man said. Simon didn’t like the sound of that. “Technically, the lands in the mountain all belong to him.”

“And if he plans on doing any of the work in excavating the deposits, or at least sending me men to do it, I'm inclined to agree with that,” Simon answered. “But if he’s not…”

“He’s much more likely to celebrate your hard work and then extract his cut, as well as the king’s,” the headman admitted.

“Then I’m much more inclined to tell him to go to hell,” Simon growled. He’d had enough of people taking their cut in his previous lives. If he was going to put together an operation to fund his research, then he wasn’t going to give half of it away to those who didn’t contribute.

The headman didn’t like that idea, but Simon didn’t care. “Maybe you should just forget about this conversation, and I’ll find a few guys around town to help me get this started instead.”

Ch. 301 - Furnaces and Foundations

Deciding that asking for forgiveness was better than permission was the right answer in Simon’s book. While Ordanvale’s headman disagreed with that approach, he agreed to forget about Simon’s finds as long as he kept his operations quiet. 

After that, thanks to his efforts to purge the local monsters for their life force as much as anything else, there was plenty of extra manpower available in the seasons between planting and harvest. Simon had no trouble at all finding men who were interested in making money, and he gathered half a dozen strong men with families with the promise of equal shares and paid for the smith to make the tools they’d need, along with a few donkeys to carry the weight.

After that, they got to work. One day, the seven of them just went up the mountain without telling anyone where they were going, and they didn’t come back for two weeks. They brought back almost no ore with them that time, but they got a lot of work done besides. 

They felled a hundred trees, built a small lodge, started a mine shaft deeper into the vein, and split timbers to shore it up as they went. More importantly, though, Simon started building a smelter out of mountain stone and waste rock, cemented together with mud.

One of the men asked why they didn’t bring the ore back with them, but to Simon, the math was simple. “This ore is 90% worthless rock and 10% precious silver. Less, maybe. I don't know. Carrying it all the way back is a lot more work than just dumping the worthless part and turning it into ingots first.”

Though he’d need to purchase or manufacture large bellows for the thing, it was doable, and as soon as he melted down a crucible of ore to make a few ounces of molten silver metal in the blacksmith’s shop, he knew his plan would work. 

Unfortunately Simon had only smelted gold before, and not everything he knew was applicable to silver, so he swore the smith to secrecy, and he joined them on their second trip to help set things properly in return for a small share of the profits. He helped Simon design the airflow, explained the importance of doing the whole thing on a bed of bone ash, and showed him how to bake the material first to release the sulfur before raising the temperature to release the metal from the rock matrix. 

Even eight men, though, there was only so much they could get done. Once their smelting furnace was done, it ran almost continuously, and he devoted more men to gathering firewood than to mining ore after that. Even then, the ore was piling up faster than he could use it. 

Simon could think of a hundred ways he could speed this up with magic, but he didn’t wish to pay the cost or reveal that his knowledge extended to more than goblin slaying or prospecting. He’d let his legend build up organically off those ideas and didn’t think he’d be able to squeeze warlock in there in any way that didn’t get him lynched. 

Still, he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about the way he might use a word of fire to precisely heat the stuff. He might even be able to use the waste heat to power a secondary heat source to cut down on the firewood overall, but he’d have to rebuild the thing and put runes in the chimney. 

Hell, I could probably use fire to power a word of earth to draw the metal out directly, he realized. It would be purer, too, but it would be obvious that there was magic involved. 

He wasn’t limited to using magic to enhance the smelter, either. Simon might not have the faintest idea of how gunpowder or dynamite was made, but he knew that blasting was the cornerstone of mining, and at the end of the day, all that was was force with a chemical source. He could do the same thing with magical force, and he strongly suspected he could fuel it with pieces of stranger's souls or even demonology. They were dangerous thoughts. It would take calibration, of course, but still, it felt like opening Pandora’s box. 

If I use force to build a mineshaft, then why not use it to undermine a castle wall or power a cannon? He asked himself as he worked. 

Slowly but surely, Simon could see all of these inventions stretching into other inventions in a way that would surely lead to any number of terrible consequences. 

The consequences that were almost as easy to see, though, were what all of this silver would do to the local economy. By the time they were getting ready to head back down the mountain the second time, they’d be doing it with ten pounds of ingots and a plan. Simon wanted to build a gravity mint, like the one he’d built before in Schwarzenbruck. Well, the one I will build there in a few years, he told himself, mentally correcting his own convoluted timeline. 

This time, though, instead of minting a new local currency, he’d decided to counterfeit Brinnish coins. After all, as he’d explained to his crew, “Having a bunch of silver we shouldn’t is mysterious enough, but having it in raw form is just begging for the tax man to ask all of the unwanted questions.”

Really, replicating the dies to fabricate coinage wouldn’t be hard. The hardest part would be convincing himself not to pretty them up as he did so. The kingdom’s silver was functional but ugly as sin. One side was a sword and crown, and the back was an unfortunate-looking portrait of one of the recent kings. They were crude things, and he would have done much better if he could. 

Still,  even though all these steps were taking time, and the only ones that were getting paid were the merchants he was buying supplies from, there were no complaints. Then, men could see the silver, and they knew they would be paid out soon with more than any of them expected to get from their harvests. 

By the time summer had arrived in all its glory, They had two men at the mine at all times, feeding the smelter and turning rocks into lumps of metal that then were pounded flat into counterfeit coins. Their labor force had expanded, too, mostly because people couldn’t keep their mouths shut. What had started as seven men and a complicit smith had blossomed into twenty. 

That was when Simon put his foot down. Until that point, they could always use another good set of hands, but eventually, even running their smelter twenty-four hours a day, they always had more ore than they knew what to do with. 

That was when they were attacked for the first time by goatmen. He lost a lot of workers after that, not to the violence but to fear. Only the man working the smelter had been seriously hurt after that, and with a little surreptitious magic, Simon dragged him back from death's door and had mostly returned him to health again after only a few days of convalescence. 

After that, he left his men to run the mine and his furnaces, and he set off into the wilds to hunt the hoofed bastards before they hurt anyone else. With the help of his divining rod, this actually wasn’t very hard. He’d never tried to locate a living thing with it, but it worked surprisingly well at it, and as a result, he spent those first beautiful weeks of summer hiking to the top of snow-covered peaks and burning their primitive villages to the ground. 

Simon killed four tribes of the monsters, and though he was able to harvest so much life force that he actually swapped out his gem for one of his rubies lest he overfill it, he didn’t find any of them to be a challenge. Even eight-foot-tall beasts with horns as long as his arm weren’t too challenging when he could fling them off the mountain cliffs with magic whenever they outnumbered him. 

Simon tried to avoid using magic. What he really wanted to do was go back to not using it at all to see if he could regain that clarity he’d been missing for so long. With magical creations powered by gemstones, that seemed entirely possible, but life kept getting in the way, and if a big hairy asshole was swinging a tree trunk at him as a club, he’d rather speak a word and end it than get his skull cracked. 

When Simon returned, he gave his men a sanitized version of the highlights, but even those they found impressive. Still, it was always something, though, and despite the relative peace after they returned to the steady rhythm of mining ore and pounding coins, the next complication turned out to be theft. 

Not of silver ingots or even coins, but ore. It was a stupid thing to steal since the only man in the region who could melt it for them was on Simon’s payroll, but people still tried it anyway, which earned them a beat down for their troubles. 

Simon didn’t like the idea of punishing them like that, but he liked the idea of what would happen to their little operation once the word reached the wrong ears, even worse. 

“These are the men you’ve stolen from,” Simon would say as his wayward workman begged for mercy. “Ask them, not me.” 

No one ever died from those punishments, but all three men who tried to steal from his little mine ended up black and blue. They were kicked off of work that touched silver in any way, and their share of the spoils was cut in half as they hauled lumber and stood watch. Even so, none of them quit. The money was too good, and half a payday was better than none. 

Simon would have preferred to remove them from his little operation entirely, but he had no doubt that as soon as anyone no longer had their fortunes tied to its secrecy and success, they’d tell the whole world. So, since he didn’t want to kill them or murder the Earl’s men if he didn’t have to, he kept everyone’s incentives aligned. 

“This is the way we individually get rich,” he said often enough when he paid people out their share for the month and made them sign for it in his ledger. “But it’s also the way that we make Ordanvale better.”

It was easy to see the way the town was benefiting from this illicit income stream in a thousand little ways, but mostly in the quality of cloth and food that was being imported. When Simon arrived in the small herding community half a year ago, they were a simple place beset by goblins.

Now, not only was that hazard erased, but new funds were flowing in from his illicit source, and everyone was benefiting. More colorful fabrics and higher-quality foods were imported from other nearby communities. As the residents’ diets improved, so did their health. Simon hadn’t intended to set roots down here, but each time he returned to Ordanvale, he found it to be a little bit nicer of a place, and it was hard to complain about that, and he built his wealth and planned new experiments. 

Unfortunately, the heat slowed down work after that, but even so, Simon was satisfied with the progress. He even paid other men in town to start work on a new home for him, a little further from the town proper. This one would have a basement and space for a workshop. More importantly, though, it would have privacy, and if he made any terrible mistakes while he was experimenting, he would only kill himself instead of his neighbors.

Ch. 302 - A Profitable Endeavor

Unfortunately, despite how simple his new cottage was, it wouldn’t be something he could move into until the spring, but that didn’t stop Simon from working on everything else. His mine continued to churn out silver to the men who worked for him, and then from there, it found half a hundred ways into Ordanvale’s economy, at least until harvest time. 

When that got close, his labor pool dried up overnight, but that was fine. Despite all of his hard work, he had almost no silver to show for it. He’d used the intervening months to make many strange orders to a variety of traveling merchants for all the tools he’d need to occupy him for the winter. 

He purchased a variety of metals to test, and the tools to draw them into wire. He’d obtained a variety of gemstones for similar reasons, along with dyes, pigments, paper, blank tomes, and even a high-quality glass mirror so that he could read his notes better. 

Such purchases, in a vacuum, might have been suspicious to some, so he also obtained canvas and the materials to make oil paints. It had been a long time since he’d done a real art project, and the mural he started on the wall of the tavern along the main square to venerate the city’s absentee landlord Earl of Greyden, which was a name that sounded more familiar than it should, even if he couldn’t quite place it.

Simon started the project to allay suspicion about how much more prosperous the town had become in the last year. After all, how could a noble doubt the success caused by their own hard work of doing nothing at all? So Simon decided a nice vanity mural was in order. He painted the mountains, and an idealized version of the town nestled in them, surrounded by bountiful fields and flocks of sheep. 

He’d planned to put the man in the middle of the background, lording over everything, very benevolent and very far away, where he belonged. Simon didn’t care if he got the credit, so long as he stayed away.

However, that all changed when the man finally visited, and Simon finally got a look at the man so he could see his face. The Earl smiled and shook his hand. Simon even smiled back, but in that smile, he saw something from a life centuries before. He saw the man who’d ambushed Baron Corwin and the other Barons that served him in the lead up to Brin’s civil war. He’d even murdered Simon in that life, though Simon was less concerned about that than his generally duplicitous nature.

Just like that, he was happier than ever that he’d cheated this man out of his share of the mine’s wealth. Simon played nice as long as he was there. He introduced himself as a mercenary from the south who liked to dabble in art.

It wasn’t exactly his most convincing disguise, but then, the nobleman didn’t care. He sat for Simon, so that he could sketch the man’s portrait, but Simon could see from the first moment how uninterested he was. 

Once the Earl left town, a few days later, Simon changed his plan, but only slightly. He’d already gone to the trouble to paint the rest of the mural, and the residents of the town were clearly looking forward to seeing it finished. So, he didn’t disappoint them. Instead of making it a pure vanity project, he made it a slightly subversive piece of propaganda. 

The Earl’s face was no longer benevolent, and Simon didn’t paint his arms as outstretched and welcoming, but as reaching toward the town. He painted the main raining silver coins down on the people… well, at least that was what he would say he’d painted if anyone asked. What he did instead was change the expressions of everyone, looking in the direction of that coin cascade, making them look ever so slightly sad as the Earl drew their wealth away with his outstretched hand.

Simon had no idea what effect such small changes would have. Truthfully, a revolution would be inconvenient for him now. It could spawn a whole series of side quests when he was supposed to be waiting another decade and a half for a certain volcano to erupt. Still, he couldn’t help it. The memory of the man left too bad of a taste in his mouth, and Simon knew exactly what sort of opportunist he’d be the moment there was war or strife. 

Maybe I should see if his sons are worth salvaging and then find some subtle way to bump him off, he mused as he finished the picture. 

No one ever commented on his changes, which were to the good, since he didn’t want to have to fight a war or lead a rebellion. Still, he enjoyed the little details whenever he walked through the square, especially the fact that his silver mine was right where the top button on the man’s jacket was. It felt like a fine bit of symmetry.

In the winter, he kept the mine going, but at a much slower pace than in the warmer seasons. This was largely because they’d only managed to stack up enough cords of wood before the harvest to run it for part of the winter. Simon wasn’t concerned, and by this point, he’d largely passed off his duties to his foreman, Ennis.

Ennis worried they’d tap out the mine soon, but Simon assured him that there was nothing to worry about. “There’s other minerals nearly as valuable out there in the mountains. Train your replacement well, because when it warms up, we’ll be out there starting something new.”

Mostly, once it got cold, Simon worked on his magical experiments, only venturing from the village to do some killing if someone reported monster activity or a particularly aggressive wolfpack. 

Every day, he pretended to be another member of the community and helped people in the community with various projects. It was only at night when he closed his shutters and worked on what really mattered. 

He designed a blade with selective runes depending on how he held it. He designed a wand that would cast its spells from a charged stone rather than from his own lifespan. He sketched out dozens of small things he could use to make his life easier. 

He didn’t make all of those things, of course. He would do that when he had his own private cottage and small forge well outside of town. For now, he only designed interesting things; the only actual artifact he worked on over the course of the winter was the rough draft of the orb that he planned to use to shut down the eruption at Mount Karkosia.

He’d still show up with fire-resistant armor and a sword that could channel cold just in case, though, but they would be plan B. He’d died in that place, every way he cared to, and had no wish to recover from a shattered spine again. 

This time, his plan was a simple one. He was going to drop a bomb, the same way his doppelgänger did. Evil Simon threw in something that was hot enough to light the volcano off. He was going to throw in something to turn all that heat into cold. 

He knew it was possible. He’d done it with armor before, and doing it with the orb was even easier. It was like working with a sheet of paper that continued on all directions, so you could draw lines without crossing over each other. 

In his case, he planned to cast the thing in ceramic and make a silver-infused glaze to survive the extreme temperatures, but for now, he was just using ink on wood. It didn’t look like much to the uninitiated, and if anyone noticed it, he could say it was an art project or a map of the night sky. He rarely had guests in his simple one-room apartment, but those that he did have wouldn’t know the difference.

Line by line, he worked it out. He’d need materials that could stand up to greater words, but he was testing those, too. Originally, he planned to make it steal heat to power runes of distant cold. He’d almost worked out the design of that when he realized that the thing would have one terrible problem: if it cooled everything it touched, it would quickly insulate itself and before nothing but a rocky ice cube in the flaming caldera. 

“For it to work, it needs to be exposed to heat,” Simon muttered as he sanded away some of the lines to try again.

His second draft was better. This time, he didn’t plan to use direct heat to power it. He planned to use the area of heat and radiate cold as distant diffuse cold. While that still meant that someday it would become an ice cube, it would really be more like an iceberg, and that was all he really wanted. Something that size would keep a lid on things and keep the volcano nice and sedate, which was all he wanted. 

Adding that many extra runes complicated his design, but it was doable, even on a small sphere, and let him practice his calligraphy quite a bit, which he appreciated. Simon was almost done with the prototype of this project one night when he made one crucial error. 

He’d drawn the thing in great detail, but intentionally kept the power runes separated from the effect runes so as not to cause any mishaps. One dribble of ink from his quill later, Simon almost had a serious mishap. 

As the ink drooled down the side of the thing, he caught it and wiped it away with his finger. Even as he did so, though, he froze, not because of the cold, but because of a memory. 

Even if he connected every rune on this thing, he didn’t think it could instantly freeze him fast enough to stop it, but he had seen an orb that could, once upon a time, and for just an instant, the similarities were eerie. 

Simon remembered finding that metal orb. He remembered the building and the town they were in. He even remembered how close it was to the temple he ultimately left through, and though that place was hundreds of miles and years away from where he was right now, he was suddenly overwhelmed by the memory of it. It seemed too close a parallel to be a coincidence. He was even on the third floor, just like the man who’d actually frozen his home. 

Lost in thought, Simon didn’t work on anything else for the rest of the night. In fact, he didn’t work on anything else that might hurt anyone for the rest of the winter. He still theorized and made notes, but the idea that some experiment of his might go berserk because of a single drop of ink and kill a dozen people whose only crime was living too close to him was too much for his conscience to bear. 

“Just imagine how much a mistake like that could cost you if you summoned a demon,” Simon chastised himself on a regular basis after that. Every time he screwed something up when he was working on a new project, he imagined that he was dragged to hell as a result. It did an excellent job of making him more careful.