[EoR] Chapter 89

The boat cut through the choppy waters, spraying me slightly with seawater. I was already completely damp from the journey, so I hardly minded. My eyes were laser focused ahead, searching for land.

My time with the Uli had been productive, both for them and for myself, though I couldn’t honestly say I had done everything I possibly could for them. In part, that was because I chose to work with the Uli, making compromises, rather than try and force changes. Had I employed an iron fist, crushing every Uli tribesmen who was Bloodied and using the strength from that to protect them while only allowing the next generation to Bond, and spent the rest of my life doing so, the Uli culture I left behind would be more similar to the Sheowon culture I was returning to.

That was nonsense, though, since in doing so, I would be setting an example that was the exact opposite of what I was trying to build. Once I was gone, it would only be a matter of time before someone tried to emulate me and take over. I also couldn’t guarantee that I would discover every Uli out there, and even leaving a single tribe could undo everything.

Besides, that wasn’t the agreement I made with the admin in the first place. She hadn’t wanted me to completely reform the Uli; I only needed to introduce the Bond and the religion of the All-Bonded. She could take it from there.

I handed off the position of the Grand Roba before I left, but I honestly wasn’t sure that would last. That higher-level governing was a bit abstract for the average Uli, and I didn’t really think they were fully prepared to maintain it just yet. It wouldn’t take much of a shove for the disparate villages to decide they wanted to be in charge of their own affairs, breaking back into individual powers rather than one nation, but that was fine. The Blood Bond would still persist, and trade would likely continue on, even if it became more mercantile and selfish rather than a product of sharing resources.

Adjusting the cast copper buckle of my belt, I looked down at some of the goods I was bringing back with me to the Sheowon. I couldn’t bring a ton of copper ingots, due to the weight, and the Sheowon didn’t really need them, but I knew my friends would be interested in the metal, so I had brought some. It was easier to ship it oversea rather than try and find a Sheowon-side vein.

Similarly, it was easier for the more distant Uli villages to just buy copper goods than it was to attempt to claim the resources and production methods for themselves. Coppersmiths would spread and more ore would be discovered in time, balancing the villages out over generations, but no single existing village could control the current flow of copper while also trying to claim the tar pits, especially on top of hunting and fishing and boat making to sustain themselves. I hoped that encouraged trade to persist into the future.

I could have stayed until the end of my days to continue things as they were for as long as possible, but ultimately, I would die, and have to leave it up to the Uli. I had done enough already, and, quite frankly, I didn’t like ruling, despite the fact that I kept winding up in a leadership situation. I was two for two in my reincarnated lives, with Nialdan and Bayhome both being things of my making, but I really just wanted a quiet, simple life.

Having done my due in exchange for the admin’s blessing, and having completed the things I had promised myself I would show the people who I was born to, I fully planned on claiming that in the peaceful Sheowon village as my reward, at least for the remainder of my years in this life. Next life, I would try harder to avoid standing out at all, so long as I was born in a culture that was decent from the start.

But I also knew that I wouldn’t be able to ignore true injustice, when I saw it. I couldn’t live with it, in the end, and I couldn’t outrun myself.

Land finally materialized on the horizon, and I watched it grow with a bit of nervous tension. The admin of this world and I had a weird relationship, and while she had told me she was sending me back, I couldn’t help but worry that she was actually sending me to one of the cannibal islands, either for another mission or just because she thought it would be funny.

Fortunately, as details began to come into focus, the shoreline was a familiar one. The village had changed, but not so much as to be unrecognizable. Small boats were on the water, pulling fish in, which I couldn’t help but smile at.

It had been a long time since I was last here, so the younger Sheowon working the shore might not recognize me. Having learned my lesson last time, I was wearing a tunic that covered my markings for my approach. I couldn’t change my face, or how dark red my skin had become, but it was better than nothing.

Whether due to my shirt, the fact that boats were no longer an unknown quantity, or stories about my last visit, I was happy to hear no screaming in terror as I made my way towards the shore. I waved at the fishermen as I sailed past them, and most of them waved back, despite the confusion on some of the younger Sheowon faces.

Word had spread as I made my approach, and a number of Sheowon had gathered on the shore before I made landfall. I looked over the faces, searching, until the crowd split for two latecomers, who were slightly out of breath, probably from racing across the village. The smithy was pretty out of the way, after all.

I jumped out of the boat, wading out of the shallows to meet their eager smiles.

“Welcome home,” Ibriya and Shappi said.

“It’s good to be back,” I said, before I found myself in their warm embrace.

*

Time was relentless, and I had spent many years among the Uli. That meant that some of the faces I had hoped to see again were gone, off to their next lives in the multiverse.

I paid my respects and bade them goodbye, wishing Yishola, Owawu, Nupeal, and Brumesh all the best. It was thanks to them that I had been given the chance to prove myself among the Sheowon in the first place.

The new elders were familiar, thankfully, since hostile elders would have spoiled my reunion with Ibriya and Shappi. I sat in front of Ushem, Pliwa, Keo, and Lowar, reporting my success as the [Missionary of the All-Bonded] to the village’s leadership.

Keo had mellowed out over the years, though she still didn’t seem all that fond of me, but she acknowledged me all the same. “It was good that we gave you the chance,” she conceded.

With that out of the way, we headed for the outskirts of the village, towards the familiar sounds of hammering metal.

“Weomik has taken over most of the forge work,” Ibriya said, and I poked my head in to see a largely unchanged smithy. The Sheowon was working alongside a younger male, and looked to be training an apprentice.

“Good to see him again. Who’s the apprentice?”

“That’s our son,” Shappi said. “His name is Mali.”

I looked back at my friends in surprise.

“We didn’t know if we would see you again,” Ibriya said with a shrug. “And we wanted to honor you.”

“Well, it’s going to get a bit confusing now,” I finally managed to get out, chuckling.

Mowala, their daughter, had already grown and had a Bonded partner of her own. She didn’t really remember me outside of stories from her parents, which was a bit sad, but understandable. I hoped to rebuild our relationship as her “uncle”, but she had her own life now, with her own Bonded partner.

Ibriya and Shappi hadn’t Bonded with anyone else over the years, and stopped having children after their son.

“So what have you two been doing instead of working the forge, all this time?” I asked.

Shappi grinned. “Training.”

My friends had no intention of becoming the village elders, and weren’t particularly interested in hunting and peacekeeping, but they had vowed to get strong enough to Bond with me when I returned, and they had. I still out-powered each of them individually, but together, they had more Blood than me, within the margin of error for a safe Bonding.

I double-checked with the admin to make sure it would be safe, as it was a bit unusual for a trained pair to Bond with a single powerful individual, and she told me it was. And so, after a quiet ritual, I was finally Bonded, and my friends became family.

My love for Ibriya and Shappi had always been more familial than anything else, and little about that changed after the Bond. It wasn’t a romantic love—that was fairly common among both Uli and Sheowon, who bordered on asexuality outside of the breeding season—but that was fine by me. I wasn’t sure I was ready for romantic love again anyway, after Felris. It was simply deep companionship, something I badly needed in this life, and something I enjoyed for the remainder of my days.

We told stories. We did some forging. We sat in the company of one another. The days were peaceful and easy, comfortably directionless after the work I had done with the Uli.

And, beyond that, we trained. Ibriya and Shappi had needed to train hard to get strong enough to Bond with me, and had come to enjoy it, which was something I understood well. They wouldn’t carry their gains into their next lives, but self-improvement was rewarding, even with a single life that would come to an end.

When my father, Daru, taught me my first Blood techniques, he had advised mastering a few rather than spreading myself too wide. It had been an aspect of his own success, one I was happy to emulate. That had paid off, though it wasn’t meant to be my permanent state. Our tribe’s migration and his subsequent demise had stopped me from learning more from him.

Now, in this last chapter of my Uli life, I sought new skills, since I wasn’t sure if I would ever get a chance to acquire them again after I died. I hadn’t yet cracked how to use skills from my last life in this one, but one day, I hoped to solve that, at which point I could further level my weaker skills up.

The Sheowon were fond of certain skills, some of which I encountered when I first arrived, notable [Blood Lance] and [Blood Shackle]. I could emulate these with [Blood Control], but in order to perform them together alongside my Bonded family, I acquired both of them.

I also learned [Blood Whip], something I remembered from my battle against my tribe’s former Roba, which was a good mixed skill for both offense and defense. [Blood Shield] was almost purely defensive, and I learned that too, though it wasn’t as good as high-level [Blood Augmentation], so I rarely trained it. [Blood Claws] was an interesting one, reminiscent of the technique I used for detail carving.

Blood was pretty good at piercing and whipping, but it wasn’t as good at slicing and smashing, which seemed to inform the well-known skills. [Blood Slicer] was the skill the Sheowon used to dig turf, but the glorified shovel skill led me to believe I could learn more with my existing knowledge. Sure enough, I was able to acquire [Blood Hammer] and [Blood Blade] with a bit of effort.

The main benefit to the structure of these single-purpose construct skills, in addition to making it less mentally taxing to wield multiple at once, was that I could boost them with a skill called [Blood Compression]. With my Blood stat, it wasn’t too hard to master, squeezing the sanguine constructs into a darker, denser form.

It was still quite hard to combine that with free-form [Blood Control], since the control difficulty skyrocketed when blood was compressed, but it hugely strengthened the armaments, turning them into something more akin to a true object, at quite the cost to my energy reserves. Still, it made skills like [Blood Blade] and [Blood Hammer] more practical, if still inefficient.

With a strong enough [Blood Compression], one could learn [Blood Explosion], by inverting the technique to rapidly expand compressed blood. This was a very costly skill, making it hard to level up, and at the low levels it didn’t pack much of a punch. I learned it anyway, in case I could continue leveling it up across multiple lives.

I tried to extrapolate from the armament constructs, forming wings of blood that I hoped would materialize into a flight skill, but either it wasn’t a thing or I simply wasn’t strong enough. I was rather huge and heavy, which could have been a factor; the size of the wings I would need to actually fly probably required more blood than I could afford to expel from my body, unfortunately.

Magic Blood constructs were all well and good, but they distracted from some useful foundational skills. Building off of [Blood-Empowered Blow], I acquired [Blood-Empowered Leap], which I immediately regretted not learning earlier in life. If nothing else, super-powered jumping was extremely fun. Landing was fairly dangerous, though, which was probably why Daru hadn’t taught it to me in my youth. I had long since gained the [Blood Restoration] skill level to take the risk, and I enjoyed leaping up towards the red sun of this world with childish glee.

Restoration was probably my most useful skill, and while looking at my magic skills from Tovar’s life, I considered other aspects of healing. Specifically, I wondered if I could learn something like [Purify]. In order to figure it out, I had to poison myself a few times, which was… unpleasant. I didn’t consume anything that would kill me, but I often found myself bed-bound for days.

It clicked when I tried to expel the poison, rather than purify it, and I learned a skill called [Bloodletting]. It left me rather weakened, but nothing food and sleep didn’t recover.

Having a way to survive poisoning and other toxins might keep me alive in a future life, so much to Ibriya and Shappi’s displeasure, I sourced increasingly dangerous venomous animals and poisonous mushrooms in order to grind the skill to level 3 before I stopped.

The relentless march of time began to catch up to us, though, and soon, my Ibriya and Shappi were too old to keep pushing. They weren’t reincarnators, after all, so there was no more reason to train once the end was in sight. I ceased my training as well, more interested in spending time with them and our other friends and family than eking out a small amount of additional strength, especially since I wasn’t sure if I could even use it.

What I knew I could use for certain in my next life was the increase to my stats, which had become fairly impressive. The discrepancy between my Blood and Will never fully rectified, but the Bond helped it grow nonetheless.

I had hoped to break 100 in all three stats, but there wasn’t enough time.

Ibriya was the first to go, and Shappi was almost inconsolable, only able to hold it together for me and her children. As we were Bonded, we both knew we would soon follow. We made our final arrangements and we said our goodbyes. As my eyes shut and I heaved my last breath, I hoped my impact on this world had been a positive one.

My journey through the Engine of Reincarnation was like my last; dreamlike and infinite as I was pulled towards a new life, safely ensconced in the protection of [Metasurvival]. Here, my System showed all my skills active, though I couldn’t use any of them, as I had no body. Rather, I was my System. Like me, my skills felt formless, almost ductile.

What were they, really? What was I?

I had no answers to this, save for the only answer I ever had: I was myself. That was something I was aware of more than ever, after this past life, and a truth I would constantly remind myself in the next one.

Then I was through the Engine, born again. My mother’s tongue finished cleaning me, and I rolled over, nestling deeper into the warmth of the pile of my litter-mates.

AN: And that's Part Two of the first book done, and on to Part Three!

Thank you for the skill suggestions last chapter! There were some very cool ideas, although I wasn't really able to use most of them. To be fair, that's mostly on me: there are things I haven't explained about the System which would be spoilers, though we'll get those answers at the end of Part Three. I can't wait for that so I can stop tiptoeing around potential spoilers, but hopefully it all makes sense then. We'll see how much I end up needing to retcon in the final edit... hopefully not too much.

Writing-stats wise, Mali's life was 39 chapters compared to Tovar's 49 (as chapter 1 was an introduction to the metaverse and multiverse, not really a part of either life.) Tovar's 49 chapters were 123k words, so an average of 2.5k words per chapter, and Mali's 39 chapters were a bit over 91k, so an average of about 2.34k words per chapter. I had a few really short chapters in Part Two dragging the average down because of winter woes and writing blocks, which hopefully will be rectified as we move into both Part Three and spring irl.

So far, the first volume is about 217k words total at the moment. I'm expecting Part Three to be the shortest, though we'll see how that goes, with the total book somewhere in the 250k-300k zone. I might catch a cool thread while discovery writing Part Three and end up following that for a while, but I can't imagine it would end up longer than Mali's life. I only have the broad strokes of this life pictured, but that'll cap off this volume, and then I'm hoping to start off volume two with a bang.

I'm definitely less happy with Mali's life than Tovar's, on the whole, though I'm also not entirely sure what I would change. This whole first volume is about our MC discovering himself in the new context of being effectively immortal and facing the unknown, with a whole mess of scattered sub-themes. In Tovar's life, the MC learned to appreciate life again, specifically as a reincarnator, and how to build a life worth living; in Mali's life, in addition to dealing with the loss of a life worth living, the MC learned about the limits of what he's willing to do, how to be true to himself in the face of conflicting ideals, and when and how to fight for his life on his terms... or at least, that was the idea. I wanted the Uli to force Mali into a life that ran contrary to Tovar's, which it kind of did, and then deal with the consequences. I really don't know if I stuck the landing on it. Perhaps we'll see it all resolve in Part Three.

Volume two will see our MC more sure of himself, less rumination (ideally) and a bit more "power fantasy", but... I don't want to get ahead of myself. I still have a lot I need to work out for that. Fair warning, there will probably be a hiatus after I finish volume one, but I'll pause billing if so. Hopefully I can avoid it entirely, but we'll worry about that then.

Lastly, EoR's doing well on Royal Road, despite the moderation issue at the start of the year. It's been teasing 7k followers for a while now (keeps climbing into then dipping back out of the last 10 to 7k) and will probably break 1M total views with today's chapter. If you haven't already, and this is a 5 star fic (for RR) in your eyes, I would very much appreciate it if you put that into words by leaving a review. Since I'd like to stub/publish volume one quite soon after I finish it as a result of the moderation issue, this may be the last push for real RR growth. Follows and favorites are also appreciated!

Thanks so much everyone, have a great weekend and see you on Monday. <3