I was too relieved my gambit had worked and that I had finally reached the local administrator to reply immediately.
“Right in the middle of one of my Sheowon settlements,” the massive goddess muttered, her many arms clipping through each other as they shifted positions. “How did it even—is that a boat?”
When I first contacted the admin as Tovar, he hadn’t immediately clocked me as a reincarnator. It wasn’t until after I contacted him, seeking my magical revelation, that he clued in to my existence. It was something I had noticed, but assumed it was due to the fact that I was almost indistinguishable from a new soul at the time.
This life, I wasn’t an entirely fresh-faced soul with no skills and stat points, though ignoring my age, I still fell within a plausible “normal” range for this world. But I had tried to contact the local admin when I was a kid, praying despite a lack of gods, and couldn’t make a connection.
Time didn’t move the same way in the metaversal borderlands as it did in reality, which is why I wasn’t currently worried about my body. If this goddess hasn’t stopped time from passing when I first got here, she surely had now, to examine what she could about my surprise appearance. Given my conversations with the last admin, I was fairly certain that administrators could only move forward in time, albeit at whatever rate they wanted.
Overseeing nigh-infinite time was surely a grind, though, and while administrators were decidedly more than something like myself, they weren’t entirely incomprehensible deities. They did seem to have a limited focus, albeit one that was incredibly impressive.
It was possible there were administrators who looked over their entire universe at each and every microsecond, tracking every change obsessively. But, more likely than not, most admins allowed time to pass while just checking in with points of interest, like prayer sites and major events. They weren’t actually gods, and there was simply too much time to do anything else. That meant I could likely go relatively unnoticed by an admin, if need be and I was careful; I just had to act normal enough to not draw attention to myself. They certainly didn’t seem to get any kind of notice when someone with a [Metasurvival] skill was born into a world under their purview, at least.
“I’m a Metasurvivor,” I clarified, and the admin shifted immediately.
Instead of a sixteen-armed goddess, she now looked a lot like one of the people I had stumbled upon. She had used the word Sheowon, though I wasn’t sure if that was the name of the people, the place, or something else entirely.
“What? No. How? That’s not possible,” she said, squinting at me. “This world’s way too weak for a soul strong enough to have developed [Metasurvival] to be born here. But... yeah, huh, there it is.”
“Uh, well, the circumstances of my skill acquisition were a bit… unusual,” I said, briefly recounting how I had come to exist, insofar as I understood it. “So yeah,” I concluded, “I was… sent here, basically, to get my bearings and as training.”
“Bad luck getting reborn as Uli. You’re lucky you survived childhood. Still,” she said, frowning slightly. “I would have preferred you didn’t come here. This is going to complicate things.”
I had been stifling it, but my curiosity was bubbling over. “Sorry, but, I have so many questions. How far back is our last common ancestor? Are Uli and Sheowon—is that what these people are called? Sheowon? Are we just, like, a different race, or a different species? How different, genetically, are they, and can they—”
“Whoa,” the admin said, holding up a hand. “Look, kid, I’m glad you’re excited, but… I don’t care. I have half a mind to command my followers to kill you and destroy your boat as some kind of evil artifact so I can get back to work without a massive disruption.”
I paused. The previous admin had been pretty friendly, on the whole, and had been such a huge help to me that I assumed this one would be cool, too. But, in retrospect, the previous admin had also warned me that some would take issue with me interrupting their work.
“Can I… help, somehow? What are you working on?”
The admin stared at me, and enough time passed that I started to wither from her intense gaze, before she finally spoke up. “Maybe you could help,” she said, and I started to sigh in relief. “But you have to survive Sheowon capture first. And yes, that’s what the people call themselves.”
“Well, they haven’t killed me yet,” I said. “If they were going to, they should have before I made landfall. They took me right into their village.”
“Yeah. I’m pretty pleased about that. It took a lot of work to… well, never mind that right now. Tell you what,” she said. “If you can find a way to get through this and get accepted by the Sheowon, I’ll answer some of your questions. This culture clash was going to come up eventually, and this could be a good first test for me. Hopefully I won’t have to go scorched earth.”
“That’s, uh, fine,” I said, skipping right past that last bit, “but there’s the language barrier.”
“Right,” she said. “Well, I can give you the language, but it’ll cost you. It’ll likely set the course for the rest of this life, which might not help you in future reincarnations. It’s not a real skill—you won’t keep it into your next life.”
“Like a blessing? My last world had something like that.”
Taking on a blessing would open some doors for me, but it would close others. Had I become an actual [Sage] in my last life, no one would have ever let me pick up a sword again; my sole focus would have had to be on magic, in order to have the greatest change of defeating the demon king. The entire Five Guardian Faith had somewhat adopted that mentality, where the first skill a person gained tended to be their entire focus.
Thanks to the admin pushing me towards [Mana Manipulation], and Somnial and Byron being so open-minded, I had been incredibly privileged to be able to spread my focus and pick up a variety of skills. That had been quite helpful already, as if I had singularly been focused on magic as Tovar, I would barely have had any physical advantages in this world, as Mali. That might have cost me my life when I fought Uqar-il Roru in my First Blood ritual.
But that was then, and this was now. Rejecting this blessing wouldn’t help me, because unless I wanted to fight my way out and possibly kill a bunch of completely innocent people—which I had no intention of doing—I would have to accept being put to death, if that was what the Sheowon decided.
This had been a hard life, at times, but it wasn’t all bad, and I liked what I had seen here in this village. I wanted to learn more about the Sheowon, and more about this world. It might not be the most advantageous way to live in order to acquire the most amount of power for my next life, but as I had learned quickly as Tovar, that wasn’t the only purpose of these reincarnated lives.
Satisfying my curiosity was a completely valid reason to live, and this was an opportunity to do just that. Plus, I could always spend my next life grinding whatever weak points that came about as a result of this life.
“Okay,” I said, coming to a decision. “I accept.”
*
I returned to reality bracing myself for possible attack, but when it didn’t come, I continued to “pray” while I pulled up my System to take a look at my new blessing.
[Missionary of the All-Bonded]
Blessing for proselytizing belief in the All-Bonded and Her teachings. Passively translates languages to aid in this goal. All stats slightly empowered while on a mission.
I had to suppress a laugh at the fact that I, a lifelong atheist, had become a missionary for a goddess. It helped that I knew she wasn’t real, although perhaps that was the wrong way to look at it. The admins were effectively deities to the people of their worlds, just not the omniscient, omnipotent, creator of the universe type.
Other than the translation, it was a pretty shitty blessing. I wasn’t sure exactly how slight the empowerment was, but all else being equal, it probably wasn’t worth being so tied to this one task. The blessing didn’t say anything about failure, but her eyes were on me now, and I strongly doubted I could just choose not to do this without some kind of repercussions.
Those thoughts were sidelined as I tuned in to the debate happening between my captors. It took me a second to realize I could now understand what they were saying, which was a strangely disturbing feeling at first. I could hear the words as they were spoken, but despite not knowing them like I did English, Argadian, or the Uli language, I was still comprehending them as if I did.
It didn’t take long for that feeling to pass, though. I already knew multiple languages thanks to my multiple lives, although I would probably never get a chance to actually speak English or Argadian again, but this was more like how words worked in the metaverse, like when I spoke with the admins or Detective Gudell: meaning which transcended language, though limited by the interpretation of the listener.
“I told you the savage is too dangerous! It broke right through our constraints,” one of the Sheowon hissed.
“What’s it even doing?” another voice asked.
“Looks like it’s praying,” said the third.
“There’s no way it’s praying, Ushem. Just look at it.”
“Murderous savage,” the first voice spat.
“How can it possibly follow the All-Bonded looking like that?”
“I have eyes, Pliwa, I can see the Blood retaliation. I can also see it prostrating before Her.”
“That makes no sense!” the one named Pliwa, exclaimed.
“It’s disgusting,” the first voice added. She was really not a fan of me, not that I could entirely blame her.
“All right, calm down, Keo,” someone—Ushem, maybe—said.
“How can you tell me to calm down? Look at how many it’s killed! Why aren’t you more outraged?”
“Outrage isn’t going to bring back the dead. We need to know why it’s here.”
“The savage doesn’t even speak sense, there’s nothing to learn,” Keo said, still heated.
That seemed like as good a time as any to chime in. “Actually, you should be able to understand me now,” I said, slowly lifting my head so I could see what was happening.
Four Sheowon stared back at me dumbly for a second, before they burst into shouting.
“It tricked us!” Keo said, pointing at me. “Who knows what it’s capable of!”
“Don’t move,” the fourth one, the male who hadn’t spoken before, commanded, grabbing Keo’s other hand. I watched with interest as together they channeled their Blood into a lance, like those they had pointed at me earlier, though it wasn’t as large as when all four of them had been working together.
“Everyone calm down,” Ushem said, raising his upper two hands, though he was holding the hand of a female I assumed to be Pliwa with one of his lower pair. His eyes were locked on mine. “Explain yourself.”
“My name is Mali-iq Rumi,” I said. “I’m from… a distant land. I left my people in search of something different, and I found it here. The All-Bonded has blessed me with your language so that I can bring her teachings back to my people.”
“Why would she bless you?” Keo snarled. “You’re a mass murderer!”
I frowned. “All the males of my tribe are like me. We’re forced to fight as children until only the strong remain.”
There was a pregnant silence after that. Four pairs of wide eyes looked back at me.
Pliwa finally spoke up, albeit barely. “Children?” she whispered in horror.
I glanced down at my body. “Oh, no, it’s not all kids—and I didn’t kill that many,” I protested. “The trailing names are actually their kills, which get carried over when—”
“Stop,” Ushem said, looking sick. He took a slow breath. “You say the All-Bonded has blessed you. Can you prove it?”
“…Beyond gaining the ability to speak your language now?”
Ushem glanced at Keo, then back to me. “That could be a trick. You could have already known it, learned it before.”
“Well, the blessing should work on any language, so if you can bring me to someone who knows another language, I should be able to speak with them, too. Unless you think I somehow learned every language spoken. My stats should also get boosted a bit when I go on a mission to spread the All-Bonded’s teachings, but I, uh… don’t really know what that entails yet.”
In fact, I barely knew anything about their religion or practices at all. The name “All-Bonded” and the way they held hands while using Blood techniques gave me some hints, though, as did their revulsion about murder. Not that one needed religion to be repulsed by killing, but I had lived with it for a long time now.
My four captors looked at each other.
“If that’s true, then this is far beyond us,” Ushem finally said. “Get up. We’re taking you to the village elders. They’ll be the ones to decide your fate.”