Maybe I should have realised that a game with the name “Road to Purgatory” involved a whole lot of roads and walking on them. Not that we truly had a road to march on, it was a foot-path with pretensions of grandeur, created by people walking across the land and later maintained by the few, brave merchants that worked the region. There simply was no overarching government that used resources gathered from a large population to maintain infrastructure, at least not in Aretia. The closest was the Merchant’s Guild, and they obviously focused on the more profitable routes, especially close to the ancient, imperial roads that partially maintained themselves. Part of me was curious how that would develop, once there were Travellers in this world, making their own roads, both literally and figuratively.

In a way, it would be akin to one of the civilisation-building games, where you had to organise and plan for hours, before you could make your ideas a reality. There had been a time when I had greatly enjoyed those games, the somewhat predictable nature in the patterns of their random elements appealing to certain parts of me. Later, when I had been at University, studying accounting, I had lost interest in them. Playing became more and more like work, and I had been told that I was supposed to keep what some called a “work-life balance”.

I wasn’t sure if I would even want to try creating any sort of political or economic influence within Road to Purgatory, the idea to pour over paperwork, reduced to delegating and ordering people made such desires vanish faster than ordinary snow in the summer sun. No, those games I had been playing had been enjoyable because the paperwork and the necessary subordinates had been simply programs, without motivations or ego of their own. Giving a command in one of those games meant that the command was carried out exactly as given, something I would never be able to assume with the natives of Mundus. No, it would be like working in the real world, with messy humans and their various, private ideas and motivations.

And how messy the natives could be was demonstrated as we followed the orc-army, triumphant in their return, even if some of the orcs were reduced to travelling on simple wagons, unable to walk on their own, due to wounds suffered in the fighting. I might have been able to heal some of them but I had never been asked, nor had I offered on my own.

But it was an interesting contrast, the relative discipline we had witnessed while hunting the centaurs compared to the pure elation the orcs were demonstrating now. It was reasonable and I could understand why they were acting the way they did. For them, the battle had been one of life and death, a fight in which they had lost comrades and friends and a battle that could have been a lot worse.

Once again, I was reminded that I was the odd one out, that I wasn’t risking anything but a little time and potential compared, while they were risking the one life they had. Resurrection-Magic did exist, at least according to the legends referred to on the forum, but it was just that, the stuff of Legends, attributed to a few deities that did their thing, and only to the recently dead. What we Travellers got was, to the locals, nothing short of a major miracle.

That subject got me into a certain line of thinking and discussion with Lenore, lasting us most of the day.

What was Death? How would one go about reversing it?

When we broke for lunch, we had a few thoughts more or less nailed down, even if experimental verification was still necessary. Such verification had the problem that we needed test-subjects and testing resurrection-magic had that small necessity that the test-subject needed to die first, before we could even begin testing. I somehow had doubts that finding voluntary test-subjects would be easy. There was the option to use Travellers but who knew if dying worked even remotely similar for a Traveller, compared to a native. Comparative tests would be necessary but again, a lack of voluntary subjects made such tests difficult. Involuntary was a different question but those had different problems, mostly with the other orcs. We had a few experiments we wanted to try, if we ever came across the right resources.

One of our theories was that resurrection would be possible if the body could be restored before the soul moved on, to whatever came next. There might be a need to restore the connections between body, mind and soul, which would require some serious magical foreknowledge or the subject would undoubtedly be fundamentally changed by the effect, but that was a subject for further research. It made me think that the first step for practical resurrection-magic was a method to capture the souls of the departed, essentially a need to devise soul-traps that triggered on the death of the wearer. That would give time to restore the body, which should be comparatively easy. It all depended on the type of wound that had caused the original death.

If it was only a simple wound that led to exsanguination, even I was able to fix it. A slit throat, a punctured heart, things like that. I might even be able to reverse the effects of drowning and similar suffocation effects but I had yet to see their effects with my magical senses.

On the other hand, if the body was seriously damaged, for example crushed or torn apart in some way, things would be more difficult. My blood-magic was far from capable of performing that task, but given how little I had worked with it, especially how little I had studied its effect on bodies, that was to be expected. As I had been reminded just the day before, more research and training required, as so often. Maybe a project for the full-release of the game.

Lastly, if there was no body at all, things would get truly difficult, getting into the realm that was normally reserved for science-fiction. Growing bodies from scratch, without the benefit of a mother or some sort of egg involved, essentially magical cloning. I didn’t even know where to start with that, but Lenore was deeply intrigued by the images and ideas flickering in my mind. It was such a fundamental riddle of life, that she wanted to study it closer. Maybe we should find some fertilised eggs for us to work with, to study when life began from an arcane point of view.

It made me realise that such studies were necessary anyway, to understand how the formation of a consciousness worked, those natural connections between body, mind and soul, how did they form in the first place? Studying that process might allow me to understand how to form them myself, if I ever got to the point that I wanted to resurrect someone.

It was also a worthwhile subject to look at, simply from a perspective of my Mind Magic, understanding how the connections between body and mind formed and in which ways they connected. Maybe it would allow me to understand the transfer of information from the body to the mind, and subsequent interpretation of the information. That hopefully would allow me to replicate such signals, letting me fool the mind into thinking that something had happened to the body, giving me a path towards the formation of mental illusions.

But even without the ability to form such illusions, merely understanding how the sensory organs report to the mind would be incredibly valuable, possibly allowing me to stop that report-function. That alone would be a major game-changer in combat, allowing Sigmir and the others to strike with impunity. Or, going the other direction, directly inducing pain would open up possibilities. I doubted it would work to directly damage an enemies life-force but it might work to stun them, taking away their ability to fight.

There were so many possible ways that the ability to influence an enemies perception would be useful, it was insane.

However, not as useful as resurrection-magic, which brought me up short. If it was so easy, for a given value of easy, to come up with a way to truly revive people, wouldn’t someone already be doing it? Sure, I had no idea how difficult it would be to create a soul-trap, let alone one that worked automatically, or the steps following that, but was I truly that arrogant, to think that I was the first person to have such an idea? Somehow, and Lenore agreed with me, I doubted I would be able to raise people from death, even if I were to be able to complete the steps I had thought of. Or that there would be some major hindrance on those steps, considering the lore regarding resurrection. The gods had to keep their reputation, afterall.