CHAPTER 2 — “Dead Soil” #2
Too late. I’m thinking about Persephone.
I’m thinking about her hands on my shoulders, glowing with golden light.
I’m thinking about her voice telling me to rest, to let her take care of things, to trust her.
I’m thinking about the way she held my hand while I died, squeezing gently, whispering that it was better this way.
It’s better this way, my love.
My foot catches on a rock. I stumble, catch myself, stand there in the middle of the road breathing hard.
Not because of the stumble. Because of the memory.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────┐│ MENTAL STATUS CHECK │├─────────────────────────────────────────────────┤│ Emotional State: Unstable ││ Primary Emotion: Rage (suppressed) ││ Secondary Emotion: Grief (suppressed harder) ││ Tertiary Emotion: Confusion (not suppressed, ││ just kind of floating around being unhelpful) ││ ││ Recommendation: Find healthy coping mechanisms ││ ││ "Or unhealthy ones.
I'm not your therapist." │└─────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
I didn’t ask for a mental status check.
The System doesn’t care what I asked for. The System does what it wants, apparently. Two hundred years of development and they gave it a personality. Great. Wonderful. Exactly what I needed in my life—a sarcastic blue box judging my emotional processing.
I keep walking.
The road curves through a stretch of woods—thin, sickly trees that look like they’re barely holding on. The mana saturation from the dungeon, probably. Plants can’t handle raw magic any better than people can. It warps them, changes them, turns them into something else.
Like me, I guess.
I was human once. Then I was an Archmage. Then I was dead. Now I’m… what? A ghost wearing a dead man’s body? A soul without a home? A vengeful spirit with a really bad case of joint pain?
All of the above. None of the above. Does it matter?
I’m alive. That’s the important thing. I’m alive, and they think I’m dead, and somewhere out there Dario is sitting on a throne built from my stolen power while Persephone stands beside him wearing my wedding ring on a chain around her neck.
I saw that. In those last moments. She was wearing it like a trophy.
The rage comes back, cold and patient. I let it sit there, let it settle into my bones. Rage is useful. Rage is motivation. Rage will keep me moving when everything else fails.
But I can’t act on it yet. I’m Level 1. I have twelve mana. My most powerful skill is [Weed Identification].
Revenge requires surviving first.
Millbrook appears through the trees like a sigh of disappointment made physical.
It’s small—maybe thirty buildings, clustered around a central square with a well that looks like it actually works.
There’s a tavern with a crooked sign, a blacksmith’s forge with smoke rising from the chimney, a general store with dusty windows, and a scattering of houses in various states of disrepair.
The people match the buildings. Tired faces, slumped shoulders, the kind of wary look you get when you’ve been beaten down so many times you’ve stopped expecting anything better.
They watch me as I walk into the square, not hostile exactly, but not welcoming either.
Suspicious. Like I might be another problem they don’t have the energy to deal with.
I’ve seen villages like this before. Border towns. Frontier settlements. Places that exist on the edge of civilization, forgotten by the powers that be, left to fend for themselves against whatever the wilderness throws at them.
“You lost?”
The voice comes from my right. I turn to find an old woman sitting on a porch, wrapped in shawls despite the warm weather, watching me with eyes that are way too sharp for someone her age. Her face is a topographical map of wrinkles, and her expression suggests she’s already decided I’m an idiot.
“Not lost,” I say. “New. I inherited the Thatch farm.”
“Edrin’s place?” She snorts. “Boy finally died, then. Took him long enough. Mana sickness should’ve killed him years ago, but he was too stubborn to let it.”
There’s something almost like respect in her voice. Almost.
“I’m Granny Thorn,” she continues, not waiting for me to introduce myself. “I run this village. Unofficially. The official leadership died of monster attacks three years ago and nobody’s bothered to replace them. You planning to stay?”
“That’s the idea.”
“Bad idea.”
“I’m aware.”
She studies me for a long moment, those sharp eyes taking in everything—my too-thin frame, my borrowed clothes, my complete lack of gear or supplies or anything resembling a plan. I can see her calculating my odds of survival and coming up short.
“The dungeon’s been getting worse,” she says finally. “Monsters used to stay underground. Now they’re coming up. Two families dead last month. Another one this week. The Brennan boy—twelve years old, just unlocked his first class—got dragged off while checking the sheep.”
Her voice doesn’t waver when she says it. She’s had practice delivering bad news. Too much practice.
“Nobody’s doing anything about it?”
“Like what? We’ve got no adventurers. No guards.
No money to hire either. The nearest Guild outpost is three days’ ride, and they don’t give a shit about a village that can’t pay their fees.
” She shrugs, a tired gesture that says everything about how many times she’s had this conversation.
“We survive or we don’t. That’s how it’s always been out here. ”
I look around the square. At the tired faces. At the boarded-up windows. At the fresh grave markers I can see in the distance, more than there should be for a village this size.
“The dungeon,” I say. “Has anyone tried to clear it?”
Granny Thorn laughs. It’s not a happy sound.
“Clear it? Boy, people have been trying to clear that thing for two hundred years. The first three floors are easy enough—goblins, fungus, some flooded ruins. But after that?” She shakes her head.
“Something’s blocking the way. Some kind of seal.
Nobody can get past it. The best adventurers in the province have tried.
Guild-certified delvers with gear worth more than this whole village. They all hit the same wall. Literally.”
I keep my face neutral.
“So the dungeon just… sits there? Spawning monsters forever?”
“Forever or until it kills us all. Whichever comes first.” She fixes me with that sharp gaze again. “You’re asking a lot of questions for a farmboy.”
“I’m curious by nature.”
“Curiosity’s what killed Edrin. Well, that and the mana sickness.
But the curiosity didn’t help.” She pushes herself up from her chair, joints popping audibly.
“There’s a meeting tonight. Tavern, sundown.
We’re deciding whether to abandon the village or try to stick it out another season.
You’re welcome to come, if you want to watch democracy in action. Or despair. Same thing, really.”
She shuffles past me without waiting for a response, disappearing into a house that looks marginally less decrepit than the others.
I stand in the square, surrounded by a dying village, and I think about sealed dungeons and stolen power and the twelve mana points I have to work with.
This is insane.
I should leave.
I should find somewhere safer, somewhere with infrastructure and support and a functioning economy, somewhere I can build strength without also having to worry about monster attacks and failing crops and traumatized villagers who’ve already given up hope.
But.
There’s a dungeon under my farm that only I can access.
There’s a village full of people who are going to die if someone doesn’t do something.
And there’s a version of me from two hundred years ago who built a failsafe specifically for this situation, because apparently past me knew something about present me that I haven’t figured out yet.
Stubborn, Granny Thorn called Edrin. Too stubborn to die.
Yeah.
I know the type.
I spend the rest of the afternoon exploring the village.
It’s worse than I thought. The blacksmith’s forge is cold more often than it’s hot—no materials, no customers, no point.
The general store has empty shelves where supplies should be.
The well water has a faint metallic taste that suggests mana contamination, and the crops in the communal garden are twisted, wrong, mutations caused by too much ambient magic and not enough expertise to filter it.
But the people.
The people are still here.
There’s a little girl sitting by one of the graves, talking quietly to a headstone. I catch fragments as I walk past—“Mama said you’d come back, but you didn’t, and now Mama’s crying all the time”—and something in my chest clenches hard enough to hurt.
There’s a young man at the blacksmith’s forge, hammering away at a piece of metal that’s going to be worthless no matter how hard he works it, because the technique is wrong and the materials are wrong and nobody ever taught him how to do it right.
But he’s trying. Sweat dripping, muscles straining, trying.
There’s an old man sitting outside the tavern, staring at nothing, and when I get close enough I see his stats flicker in my vision—[Garrett, Level 42, Retired Adventurer, Class: Swordmaster]—and I understand why he’s staring at nothing.
He’s remembering when he could do something about problems like this.
Remembering when his body worked and his sword arm was strong and the world hadn’t beaten all the fight out of him.
These people are dying.
Not all at once, not dramatically. Slowly. Quietly. One monster attack at a time, one bad harvest at a time, one funeral at a time. They’re dying, and nobody’s coming to save them, and they’ve accepted it.
I’ve seen it before. In the war. Villages that gave up, that stopped fighting, that just… faded away. The monsters didn’t even have to kill them. The despair did most of the work.