After I calmed back down, I told Yishola I wanted to rest and think about things before continuing. She agreed, and we were escorted back to Ushem’s place, where she said goodbye and that she would visit me again in a few days.
I wanted to throw myself back into the bog iron project, but that would just be a distraction. Clearly, I needed to face my thoughts head-on, in a way I hadn’t for many years.
The problem wasn’t whether or not I had made the right decisions to get to this point, because I couldn’t change the past, and changing my framework for making related decisions would only affect the future. The problem was how I felt now. What I needed to do was face the emotions that I had been bottling up through this life, so I could move forward with a clearer conscience and stable head.
It didn’t matter if my decisions were right or wrong, be that morally or ethically or otherwise. I could make all the right choices and still wind up hurting.
There was no sequence of events that could have stopped me from passing on as Tovar, for example, and I had done my best to spend time with my family before I died and ensured they could be successful without me, but I still felt loss afterward. I spent years at the start of this life dealing with that, but even now, it was present. I thought I had moved on, but really, I only suppressed it, throwing myself into being something other than human.
I hadn’t really experienced loss in being reborn as Tovar; my memories from Earth were muddled and what I could remember of most of my life wasn’t worth missing. As a reincarnator, though, every single life where I found something worth living for, I would ultimately wind up losing it. Each life, those memories would be clearer and clearer, as my stats grew. If I bottled that up, life after life, how long before I could no longer handle it?
Even if I did everything right, I would suffer loss, but doing everything right was impossible. So, on top of any suffering that came from losing my purpose in life over and over with every reincarnation, I would also be carrying the guilt of everything I did wrong.
Going into this life, I thought I had developed a reasonable moral framework for what I would consider acceptable and not, but that was based on two limited human lives. It probably wouldn’t have been enough to account for all the variations possible in the multiverse of human life, let alone for non-human life.
When faced with the circumstances of my birth in this world, I told myself that things were different because I was Uli. Kill or be killed was just the way of the world. I justified killing Uqar-il Roru because if I didn’t kill him, he would have killed me. And I went on to kill more boys for the same reason, further justifying it because they had already killed.
But Uqar didn’t kill me, because I killed him. Whether or not he would have, he was innocent when he died. If I could argue that I didn’t have a choice in the matter, then the other boys who had killed to survive were also innocent, victims of systemic violence, and undeserving of death as well.
Telling myself that it was the Uli way of life and necessary to my survival allowed me to justify it for a while, but that fell apart in the face of Sheowon culture. It didn’t matter that there was no way for me to know that at the time; the recontextualization converted justification into guilt in the present.
Knowing that those I killed would reincarnate anyway did not change this. It still snuffed out the potential they had in this life, and those that remained would suffer the loss. Even if Uli culture normalized death, that didn’t mean the loss wasn’t felt, and didn’t have consequences. Losing lives to the uqandu showed me that, and to a lesser degree, so did the conflict between tribes. Killing each other without restriction, even if they were enemies, would ultimately cause more harm than good. If tribes killed each other to the last man, the Uli would be extinct before long. If I killed whoever I wanted because their souls would live again, especially as I grew increasingly powerful, I could completely alter the development of an entire species. Maybe even wipe some out entirely.
Just the guilt and losses from living a single life could be enough to overwhelm a person, let alone multiple lives. Had I continued living like an Uli, compartmentalizing everything away for the rest of this life, how many lives would it have taken before I came to face this properly? How much damage could I have done? It already felt devastated now, but if I had followed that path further, I wasn’t sure if I could come back from it.
The worst part was, there was no solution to that. If I reached a point where I couldn’t face myself, I was still doomed to face myself, through death, forever. At least, until I could find an enemy powerful enough to destroy my very soul, whatever that meant. I would likely go insane from the guilt, and given how powerful I may be at that point, I had no idea what the consequences of that could look like.
It was good that I found the Sheowon people and Yishola forced me to face this now. Admittedly, her tactics probably wouldn’t have worked on a normal Uli, at least not this quickly. My human lives and values primed me for it, and it was only because my mental stats were high enough from a lifetime of meditation and training that I had become so masterful at compartmentalizing my guilt and shame in order to live like an Uli. That had already let it fester into a minor trauma, but I could still heal from this.
I would need to be very careful in my future lives. My mental stats were only going to keep growing, and that didn’t necessarily make me any wiser, but it would make me better at coming up with justifications and controlling my thoughts to align myself to that new framework. Regularly checking in and allowing myself to feel the pain of loss and examine myself through that lens was crucial to keeping my humanity—whether I was human or not.
Maybe it was wrong to think that I needed to keep my humanity at all, but that was probably unavoidable at this point. My earliest memories were human, and the entire foundation of my existence was only further solidified as human through my first life as Tovar.
The very nature of stats and my Metasurvival meant that it wouldn’t fade in time like it might have if my memory was purely biological. Maybe I could change that with a high enough Mind, or Brain, or whatever my future lives’ stats were called, but to “fix” it would be akin to lobotomizing myself. I couldn’t see how that would be an improvement. My sense of self depended on those memories. No matter what I did through the rest of my lives, I would always miss Felris and my family, and that would always shape how I saw the world and who I was.
I spent the rest of the day laying in Ushem’s home, effectively by myself while he and his Bonded family trained outside, allowing myself to think through everything. It hurt, but that was better than not feeling anything at all. Part of this was in order to adjust my personal moral framework, and how to better deal with completely foreign ethics that ran contrary to it. I could no longer say that I would live no matter what in order to find meaning and happiness in every life. I was still opposed to self-sacrifice, but if the threat to my life involved doing something I was morally opposed to, it was acceptable to fight and die while attempting to find another way.
Maybe it wouldn’t work out and maybe I would wind up missing things that would be of value to me, but since I had infinite lives, I needed to be able to live with myself. Better to suffer the regret of missed opportunities than the regret of mistakes I couldn’t take back. Looking back at Tovar’s life, I couldn’t imagine how things would have turned out had I sacrificed Felris to survive the Obdorn dungeon unscathed. I had the right of it to stand and fight in order to help Felris escape. Peculiarly, it was living in the future that came from that which changed me to the point where I was willing to do the inverse. Time didn’t always bring wisdom, either; sometimes it just reinforced a faulty belief, one which was better off being reexamined.
This also didn’t mean I would never kill again. Total pacifism wasn’t the solution, as it allowed violent evils to go unchecked. But most people weren’t pure evil, and if I decided to take a life, I had to be sure I could live with the guilt and consequences.
With all that realized, I still needed to find a way to deal with the guilt I had already developed. I could not give Uqar his life back, nor could I do anything for all the countless boys who had died so that Uli tribes had the strength to survive, but there were things I could give back.
I had started that with the fishing boats, but walked away when challenged. I hadn’t been ready for the responsibility I would have to take on if I fought and won, especially if it meant continuing to make boys to kill each other so that the tribe could survive. Perhaps I just wanted to run away from the guilt I was suppressing. That led me here, to the Sheowon, and to the Blood Bond.
While I used the idea of bringing the Blood Bond back to the Uli as an excuse to be allowed to live among them, that had largely come from the administrator’s blessing. My own interest in the Bond was intellectual and, largely, selfish, as I had hoped to use it to increase my own Blood stat. I had no problem bringing it back to the Uli, in theory, but in practice I had doubted that it was even possible. My boat barely made the journey here, and getting back seemed like a shot in the dark.
But I owed it to Uqar and all the other boys to see this through to the fullest of my potential. I would make it my priority. I might have had concerns about altering the course of an entire species’ development, but the admin’s blessing told me this was the right thing to do. The Uli didn’t have domestic livestock, nor the ecosystem to support that, but they could keep developing fishing, and between that and the Blood Bond it would give them a non-violent way to live. Once the Blood Bond was stable and strong enough, the Uli could still hunt mirulu and uqandu, and they should be able to thrive without the ritualized killing.
It wouldn’t bring back those that were lost, but nothing would. All I could do was prevent future tragedy. Hopefully that would be enough to ease my heart before this life was over.
*
The next day, I dragged myself back out into village. I still had a lot of steps to take to get to a point where I could follow through on my decisions. Nothing had fundamentally changed about my plan to move forward aside from my mindset. Having metal as a resource was still both a good way to earn a place among the Sheowon and a means of making improvements to my boat so that I could one day return to the Uli, so I headed back to Ibriya’s place to meet up with him and get started on it. I was pleasantly surprised to find him testing out a few designs, in miniature.
At my arrival, Ibriya looked up from where he was sitting and playing with the prototypes, and smiled sheepishly. “I couldn’t stop thinking about what we were talking about, so I made a few samples.”
That brought a small but genuine smile to my face, the first since I had been forced to face my demons.
“Let’s see how they work,” I said, sitting down beside him. “And what improvements we need to make for the real thing.”
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AN: I didn't really want this whole chapter to be more rumination, but it seemed kinda-sorta necessary after the end of the last chapter. With this, it's pretty much all sorted and out of the way, and more clearly reveals the path forward, at least for the rest of Mali's life. I think facing it now will help avoid a repeat of this issue in future lives, but I'll admit this might be overkill since we've already seen a lot of this at the surface level already.
It's a bit slow for a Monday chapter, but them's the breaks with serialization. In book form, it won't be as big of a slow down, assuming I don't make large revisions to Mali's life that make some of this less necessary. I think, rather than strip these last two chapters in an edit, I'd strip a lot of the comparable insights Mali's had earlier in his life up to this point, and make that stuff more subtle/hint at how much he's bottling up so that these chapters have more of an impact. (Specifically chapters 63-65, but maybe some of the earlier chapters as well.) In any case, I don't think there's a need for much more of this, so I expect most of the rest of Mali's life will be events which drive the plot, save for maybe the conversation Mali gets with the admin once he figures out the Blood Bond. I'm looking forward to writing that, when it comes.