‘Hell! That is… unique.’

*Cough*

“What did you say this was Nifriden?”

John held up the flask the Elf had given him. He, Nifriden, and Recia found themselves in the sitting room following the end of Nifriden’s alchemic activities.

Just as promised, Nifriden had gotten him his drink. It was in the metallic flask he now proffered to the Elf.

Nifriden smiled at John’s question.

“It’s a special Elven brew. It doesn’t really intoxicate like most alcohols. Rather, it makes the imbiber’s mind more capable of coping with strange or shocking events.”

“I doubt it has kicked in yet, but at least I don’t find that surprising. You just had something like that laying around?”

“I may not be a brewmaster, but what sort of alchemist would I be if I didn’t have such a staple of Elven culture on hand. You wound me, my friend!”

At the dramatic display of Nifriden, Recia shook her head with a sigh.

“Master, shall we get on with it? You two aren’t taking this very seriously!”

The hint of petulance in her tone was something that did shock John, at least slightly. She had turned into a real person. No trace of her machine-like demeanor remained. Her attitude was reminiscent of a young woman, barely out of childhood.

‘I guess Nifriden and I can’t avoid the elephant in this room much longer.’

“So, Nifriden, what’s the deal with your servant here? She has to have had a good reason to play such an elaborate role.”

“Haaah… Yes, Recia is a rather special case you could say. But, as with all things, the beginning is where all things start.

“It was perhaps four years ago, maybe five. I had been obsessed with a project of mine. Any alchemist worth their salt has had delusions of grandeur. False confidence that told them they could accomplish great things. I was no different.

“For years, I had tracked down ancient writings, little known tomes, and scrawled words on faded parchment. I was looking for what many an alchemist has spent their lives in devotion.

“I sought to find and complete the formula for the most legendary of all alchemical creations. The primal distillation of life.

“Since the dawn of the written word, it has been spoken of as the secret to creating entirely new species. It lays forth the building blocks from which life may grow.

“In my zeal to succeed, I failed to take precautions. I found out just why there had been no record of success in all of the knowledge I had found from alchemical masters past.”

The Elf looked much closer to his actual age as he paused in thought. There was a weight to his words, a pain that came from regret. John understood the feeling himself.

“Nifriden, what happened…?”

“I killed her. I killed an innocent in my carelessness…

“Not only did I kill her, but I condemned an entire family to death!”

The Elf didn’t shift his eyes from the floor, he didn’t want to face whatever reaction John had. The turmoil inside of him was palpable. It was belied by the clenching of his hands, the twitching of his face, and the shaky breathing he struggled to control.

“The reason that no success is ever spoken of is because there is one final ingredient required to complete the mixture.”

Now the alchemist looked to John with his guilt-wracked eyes.

“To create life, you needed to destroy it.

“The beast of my own making attempted to use me to complete itself. I resisted it. My assistant was not so lucky.

“Her name was Recia.”

‘What?!’

John was surprised, shock eluded him with the help of the eleven brew, but he was still surprised nonetheless.

His eyes panned to the only other person in the room.

‘Recia…?’

The woman in question had a conflicted expression on her face, it spoke of emotions too complex to understand from an outsider’s perspective.

‘If what he says is true… Is this really Recia?’

“The monster of my own making decided to flee upon consuming the poor girl…

“I was too weakened to stop it; it had injured me grievously.

“It was only when I worked up the nerve to tell the girl’s family, her aunt, and cousins, that she had met her demise in an accident… I was unprepared for what greeted me in their home.”

The Elf’s expression told the story long before his words could.

“I have adventured for decades of my life, even before that I fought among my kin in the army of Altharic. I thought I had witnessed the worst atrocities that could be made reality. I was mistaken.

“The sight that greeted me in their family home was one of such pure, unadulterated, carnage that it shook me to my core. My monster was hungry, not for sustenance, but for knowledge. It wanted to steal the memories of the living, so that it may better replicate and slaughter us.

“I knew what I had to do. I made a request in the adventurer’s guild for a party of at least level fours. There was little chance of killing the monster.

“From my identification, I knew it was a Flesh Fiend. It had long been hypothesized where those particular monsters came from. The connection was never made that all notes of primal life distillation were usually in the lairs of these beasts.

“The only way I could think to stop it was by facing it as an alchemist, rather than a fighter. So, with my hired band of adventurers, we tracked down the beast in the sewers where it had made its lair. When they had done their best to distract it, I made my move.

“Using my expertise in alchemy, I removed a single part of its nature. The very part that wanted to grow and devour.

“It went into a frenzy, killing all five of the adventurers. Its form then destabilized, and sections of its horrid exterior sloughed off.

“In the end, only a body was left. The ‘new’ Recia.”

With that, he gestured to the Recia I had gotten to know. She averted her gaze from mine. Seemingly afraid of judgment. The words she then spoke were the most laden in emotion I had yet heard from her.

“I-I don’t remember any of it or anything from before the change. I just know that I am not that girl. I wear her face, use her voice, and am physically the same as her, but I am not her. I just woke up to master in those sewers. That is my first memory…”

‘Well, I definitely wasn’t expecting this. It is very good that I had that brew after all. Just, wow…’

Nifriden spoke again.

“There we are, John…

“It seems we are both aware of each other’s secrets. I hope that it puts you at ease.”

The last words were meant to be sarcastic, but the pain and weariness of the Elf couldn’t quite communicate it.

“Thank you for telling me this Nifriden. I’m going to have to take some time to fully digest it, but I have to ask, is Recia well, normal?”

He cringed at his tactless question and at the pained look Recia’s face adorned at the query.

The Elf nodded. He was expecting as much from his guest.

“Yes, as far as I or any healers can tell. Recia is no different from a normal Wolfkin in all but one way. Some part of her core nature remained, her ability to learn and rank up her skills and attributes does put the average Wolfkin to shame.

“Besides that, she is as normal as you or I am among Humans or Elves.”

John nodded.

“And why the elaborate act?”

Recia answered that one.

“I don’t want to get close to anyone while I wear a dead girl’s face. I am content to interact with no one. I would feel uncomfortable changing the type of person Recia was by my actions.”

“Then why use her name?”

“For the same reason, her body was born with that name. It would feel wrong to call her face by a different name.”

John understood, he didn’t agree, but he understood. He would need time to process the whole of this.

‘The crazy stuff always happens to me it seems…’

***

John’s next couple of days were much less exciting than his first two.

Understanding that he needed some time to himself, Nifriden let him peruse his library with the condition that he makes sure things are put back as they were.

To John, it was a miracle. Questions and conversations took time and energy. Reading books was both more efficient and much less draining on his mind.

The first thing he noticed in his perusal of the texts was the written language. It twisted and flowed in unfamiliar patterns. It certainly wasn’t English.

In defiance of the unfamiliarity, John was capable of understanding the words written down as if they were as natural as his native tongue. The feeling was odd, but if he didn’t dwell on it, he hardly noticed.

The first of the books he would pick up was a smaller book on the general appearance of the world. He easily committed the descriptions and maps to memory.

He finally had some sense of where he was in the world.

He was on the Uriat continent. It was longer than it was wide and stretched from north to south the majority of the distance of the map. The shape was basically ovoid, with a larger flare of land off the southeastern coast that preceded a large archipelago.

The kingdom of Tyrshal that John currently found himself in was on the northwestern half of the continent, but close to the center.

The other continents of Cuerus other than Uriat were named Litol, Murhad, and Rundag. They were all separated by fairly large oceans with the exception of Murhad and Rundag that found themselves connected by a relatively narrow stretch of land. Murhad to the north, Rundag to the south. They were vaguely reminiscent of the Americas to John’s memory.

If the two connected continents were to take the place of the Americas on a world map, then Uriat would occupy portions of where eastern Asia and Australia would be. Litol would be in the Atlantic Ocean, its northern-most point slightly above the equator and generally the same shape as Australia, though it was probably larger.

The position of the Pacific Ocean was only marked as ‘uncharted seas’.

John learned much more than geography in that library in those two days. He could only wish he had a memory as robust as his was now when he was a student in school.

Something that fascinated him to no end was the religion that populated this world. On Earth, he was an atheist. Religion was a joke to him. But here, they seemed to be very real.

Really, it was one huge pantheon of gods. Each race had its own deity that represented their interests as a whole.

That was not to say that each race worshipped their own god though. John was surprised to learn that there were any number of worshippers from each race for each god. If anything, religion was more tied to the profession or interests of a person than their race. That only fully applied to the ‘inner gods’.

Beyond the racial deities. There were the ‘outer gods’, beings of great power that were ascended to godhood. These gods often had cult-like followers that obeyed all commands of their god. They also broke away from the nomenclature of inner gods.

As John had noted with ‘Greenguard’, the ‘Maiden of Light’, and the ‘Stonelord’, they did not possess orthodox names and instead took an epithet based on what they presided over. The outer gods were not named like that and instead took a godly name like those of mortals.

Among these gods was Gharab, the deity of the northern human nation of Gharabis, who, as the name suggests, fiercely worship their god and his policies of slaughtering or enslaving those of inferior, lesser, or cursed blood.

Genocidal gods aside, Other facets of Cueric society were also worthy of note.

The adventurer’s guild that Nefriden had mentioned was an organization of mercenaries basically. They were individuals or ‘parties’ that accepted requests by paying customers. They covered the known world and had power on the scale of kingdoms.

Those adventurers are also often noted to delve into ‘dungeons’. John first thought they meant like a prison or some weird fetish thing, but they were actually like the type he barely drudged up from memories of nerdy individuals he knew.

They were manifestations of mana that were created by the system. Adventurers would delve into them and fight off hordes of monsters to secure loot created by the system. It was lucrative and necessary, as dungeons would grow if unattended, often to the peril of villages and travelers.

It was near the end of his second day reading in the library that his focus shifted onto the future. The grand chair he sat himself in was surrounded by books upon books.

‘To get the power I want, I’m going to need to fight. It all comes down to combat in the end.’

His research on skills proved fruitful as he learned more about the nuances of leveling and rank-ups.

He was given a brief rundown by Jerry before being reborn, and he’d picked up tidbits here and there from his companions.

Now though? He was well aware of how to efficiently gain proficiency and eventual rank-ups. The act of defeating another creature in combat would raise any skill that could be utilized in combat by leaps and bounds. Blacksmiths would use objects they created in battle to add proficiency to their ranks. The same was true of all other trade skills too. They didn’t even have to be directly involved either. They would gain proficiency if someone else used their creations in combat.

Clearly, the system promoted combat no matter what. To gain influence in this society, you either fought or supported those who were fighting.

Nations are encouraged to go to war by it! Gladiatorial combat was a common attraction the world over! Pacifists were just free proficiency waiting to be grabbed!

John needed to get in on the action if he wanted to get anywhere in this life!

In the library chair. He contemplated his options.

‘Rune Writing is my ticket to the big time, I’m sure of it. If I can get it to work and have Nifriden train me… I will do the same magic they can do with even more efficiency and certainty!’

John grinned despite himself.

‘And the whole crafting thing. In fantasy stories, runes were used to enchant things. That is something I need to look into. Their method of enchanting is like shooting fish in a barrel compared to what I know I can do! I just need to be able to write the damn characters!’

He had already processed the story of Recia, he was over that by now.

The grin adorning John’s face now was the most physical sign of it. It wasn’t the type of look a man dwelling on disturbing thoughts would have.

This grin, it was the sort that a madman would have. The sort that was found on the faces of men who had figured out ways to ‘cheat the system’.

The universe, fate, destiny, his luck attribute even. They had given him a weapon to fight to the top in this world.

If his opponents were valorous knights on a battlefield, he was the apache attack helicopter, set on mowing down the hapless inferiors.

The world was his obstacle to success, but at that moment, his future was wide open!

There were those who wanted to experience all the world had to offer.

There were those who wanted to save the world from its threats.

There were even those who just wanted to watch it burn.

In John though, there was a mind who realized what it wanted from the world at that moment.

He wanted to take the world as his own!