I woke up screaming the next morning as I watched my friends die. The last few months of my last life had not been kind to me, and for several moments, I was disoriented as to where I was. Dorflich. The past. A second chance. When my breathing calmed down, I slumped back down onto the mattress as the weight of my ki pressed down on me.

Oh right. That problem. I spent a few minutes bleeding off gray ki into the environment, lightening myself until I could stand up and make my way over to the dressed. While the water basin in the kitchenette had clearly been meant for drinking and cooking, this one was clearly meant for hygiene. With some difficulty, I channeled ki into it until I had a pool, then splashed my face with water.

It was cold! I glared at the runes in annoyance, wondering if the heat rune had been turned off or damaged, before realizing that there were no temperature control runes at all. Was Dorflich’s rune-knowledge always this bad? Or did I really end up in a hovel? I wasn’t sure which would be more problematic, but in any event, it did cross my mind that this building being named after an A-ranked beast was kitschy in a way most other cities would have looked down on.

Splashing some more water into my face and running my fingers through my hair, I glanced up. There was a piece of polished metal on the wall—bronze likely—making a crude mirror. And staring back at me was a face I hadn’t seen in decades—absent the one peek yesterday in the pool of water.

I was so young. My right index finger unconsciously traced where I had developed a scar in my previous life. It was of course not there—it wouldn’t form, if at all, for years to come—and the skin underneath was baby smooth, to my slight chagrin. Could I even grow a beard yet?

Taking that frivolity as a sign my night terrors had ended, I moseyed into the kitchen for a breakfast of bread and honey. Though just moving around to take care of that left me slightly winded by the time I sat back down on the bed to chew my way through my meager meal.

I started bleeding out additional ki while thinking over my plans for the day. I was already almost out of bread, and I really could use a little plant matter in my diet. And I really needed some more household goods—a table, chairs, utensils. I only had one other set of clothing, though I was pretty sure Lily said she did laundry. Should look into that. Then it would be good to prepare for training. Top of the list was acquiring some leather and iron ingots so that I could create some weights for my…

My thoughts came to a halt, and I absently stopped bleeding my ki a moment after that. After we had left Dorflich, we were introduced to the concept of full body weight training using a set of enscribed accessories. While Dorflich has the concept of using weights to train the body, what other cities had grasped was the constant use of weights through all phases of training, physical and spiritual. From there it was a natural leap to simply wear such weights at all times. Such training led to explosive growth not only in physical ability, but spiritual as well, as one’s ki sought to adapt to and fill out the newly acquired strength of the body.

But I was already being weighed down by a huge surplus of ki that my body simply wasn’t prepared for. While my soul was an unruly mess, the one part of it that was perfectly fine was that it was holding onto a level of ki far beyond what any 16 year old ought to have. Better still, the weight of my ki was uniformly spread across my body, working muscle groups that simply could not have been exercised using runic weights. This was obviously a fluke related to getting thrown into the past; under normal circumstances, a spiritualist could not achieve such a high ki level without also having gained great strength. But the disconnect between the two that had occurred to me…. This could be promising.

The thought was even more mind-boggling and with that, all my plans for the day were thrown out the window. I wolfed down what remained of my breakfast, threw a dried sausage and the remainder of the bread into a pack, and ran out the door with my sword. After conferring with Lily that she did indeed do laundry and that the price was not atrocious, I ran to the West Gate as fast as I could.

***

Notably, by the time I reached the West Gate, I was already breathing heavily. I may have bled off a fair bit of ki from this morning, but I was still twice as heavy as I ought to have been.

Traffic out the West Gate had always been a light affair, even though it had been built larger than either of the North or South Gates. Other than the rare expeditions past the Scarred Mountain due west, most traffic out of the West Gate immediately turned and headed either north or south towards the hamlets or homesteads scattered in the countryside.

And so out to the West I had kilometers of wilderness. More immediately before me, two or three kilometers of rolling grasslands, in patches of shorter and taller grasses. Forests cascaded down the mountains to the north and south, with delicate fingers reaching up to a kilometer into the valley. And off the Scarred Mountain to the west flowed the body of a darker, greener forest, which reached all the way across the valley floor to the mountains on the outside. From the forest at the base of Scarred Mountain, the Bonsacon River—more a large stream here—meandered between the hills in the valley down, joined by various creeks and smaller streams as it grew in size reaching towards the City. Despite the relatively high rise that was the West Gate, I was essentially looking uphill, and wide swatches of the valley were blocked from view by the occasional ridgeline or copse of trees.

My initial goal was to find a good spot to train. I didn’t want to be within sight of the City walls, and frankly wanted enough privacy that it was unlikely I’d be stumbled upon. A secluded glade or hidden valley would be best, though I neither recalled the local geography that well, nor had a map of same, and even in the latter case, it was doubtful a map would be detailed enough to capture what I was looking for. Fortunately, my interest through all this was training, and as lack of physical ability was my most acute concern, an exploratory run was at least a first step towards solving both problems.

Tightening the sword sheath onto my back, I took off at a good pace northwest towards the forest at the base of the mountains.

***

A fifth of a bell—and several rests—later, I finally arrived at the beginning of the forest. For all of my “farmer’s disposition,” I still had a G-ranked 16 year old body, and with the ki doubling my weight, long distance runs were going to be tricky. But I could feel the burn in my legs and my lungs from the exercise, and even my arms were getting a fair bit of workout.

Now, having arrived at the forest, I had a bit of a problem. A glade was, by definition, difficult to find. It could be easily invisible from just a hundred meters away, so unless I intended to crisscross every patch of forest in a fine pattern, it could take me days to find one that would suit my purposes. What I needed was a higher vantage point. That, regretfully, was not something I would find on the valley floor, as uneven as it was. But, looking up at the nearest mountain, I did see a rock jutting out into free space about 400 meter up. I should be able to get a really good view of all the forest within a few kilometers from there, though it’d be quite the hike. But, with nothing better to do this morning, up I went.

***

Over a bell later, I finally reached the rocky outcropping. And I had thought that running on mostly flat ground with double my weight was difficult. This mountain, hah hah hah—wait, why am I panting in my own thoughts—wasn’t even that steep. I reached for my bottomless flask on my left hip and—oh wait, that was my last life. I didn’t have a bottomless flask yet.

Well, this was awkward. After giving myself a few more minutes to catch my breath, I was still parched. I guess now was as good as any time to practice my ki control.

Reaching into myself, I pushed out ki into a ball floating in front of me. While not strictly necessary, I held out one hand in an effort to help myself visualize the gray ki in front of me forming a ball. The ball was loose, and the gray ki was moving about more than I’d like, so I put out my other arm to help visualize stabilizing it. It was still wobbly—almost like holding a sack of water—but it would have to do for now. With the gray ki as my focus, I attuned it to water ki and a liter of water suddenly appeared in midair.

Half of this promptly fell and splashed on the rock and got my pants wet.

But half of it was still floating in midair. I slowly brought the ball of water floating down to my lips, and starting drinking greedily. I got about halfway through, when I had to take a gulp of fresh air, and that’s when the rest decided to fall on my lap.

Well, I thought to myself chagrined and soaked, I got some water.

I tried to use my ki to remove the excess water from me, but I immediately realized that this was a futile effort. My control simply wasn’t what I needed it to be in order to dry myself off like that. It was like using a bucket when a thimble was needed. I briefly considered getting around this by using my ki to invoke a stream of hot air, but quickly abandoned the notion. For all I knew, I would electrocute myself or blow myself off the mountain.

Control then was the name of the game. I got myself up and patted myself off, wandering over to a small boulder which would be a much better seat. For nearly a fifth of a bell, I practiced forming balls of water one liter at a time, drinking my fill when I could. Eventually, I pulled out the loaf of bread and the dried sausage—there was a good deal of sage in the latter—and helped myself to lunch. When the sausage was all gone, and only a small portion of bread remained, I walked over to the edge of the rocky outcropping to actually accomplish what I had come up here for.

I’ll say, I had a damn fantastic view up here.

After admiring the scenery for several minutes, I focused on the forest abutting the base of the mountain range I was upon. Looking around, I had an excellent view of the forest about two kilometers out, and a decent view another kilometer beyond that.

Still, it was a large area, and I spent a tenth of a bell scanning the forest looking for usable glades, and then another half bell committing their locations to memory as best I could. There were, I thought, four promising candidates. There were two smaller glades nearly adjacent to each other to my right, just at the foot of the slope. There was a large glade to my left near the edge of the forest. And then dead center in the bit of forest sticking out, there was a more moderately sized glade. I wasn’t quite sure from here, but it looked like a creek might run near that last candidate. If so, that was already short-listed as my first choice.

That said, the sun was already heading down, so I had to get moving if I wanted to inspect all of them and get back to the City before dark. Taking in the sight one last time, I packed my belongings, and started down the slope.

***

An half bell before dusk bell, I exited the forest and started back to the City. Having inspected all four glades, I had chosen the last to be my training grounds for the near future. On the ground, it had turned out to be an oval space nearly a hundred meters long. The glade was mostly short grasses, but also had a few rocky outcroppings breaking up the terrain. And, to my pleasant surprise, the creek—which was actually almost a small stream—ran right on the edge, dipping in and cutting off about a tenth of the glade. Furthermore, where the creek made a series of turns, there was a large oak tree providing a pleasant shady spot, as well as a pool of calmer waters. It was, in essence nearly ideal.

That said, my post-climb expedition had taken far longer than I expected—not helped out by the fact I had gotten lost at least once. I was exhausted and didn’t have it in me to run back to the City, and, at my current pace, I’d make it back right at dusk bell, when most shops had already closed. All the food I had left back at the apartment was meat; needing something more substantial, I resolved to eat at a tavern, and get to sleep early.

Tomorrow was, after all, another day.