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She just wanted to know who he killed, if he consorted with the dead and other things like that. Even though he told her nothing but the truth, and she seemed to have some charm, she kept consulting to determine if he was lying. Despite that, she still had trouble believing him.

“Are you sure you aren’t leaving anything out there, Simon?” she demanded eventually, but he’d just laughed.

“Yeah,” he smiled. “I’m on a mission to save the world.”

She’d looked at him sourly for a moment, but then she just shook her head, ending their rather tense discussion by saying, “I know that you’re bad news, and I want you out of our town just as soon as you’re able, but if you deal with neither demons nor the dead I have no idea why you’ve been marked as damned!”

Marked as damned. That was an interesting phrase, and he wanted to follow up on it, but right now, his mind just worked so slowly that he let it pass. She wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was he. Not right now, anyway. He was certain he wouldn’t make it through the ice level that came next without recovering, and he still needed to study that grimoire if he could find it.

Studying wasn’t going to happen until his vision and his concentration cleared up anyway, so after he moved out of his deathbed and into a nicer room at the end, he spent a few days just relaxing. The people of the village were a mixture of friendly and fearful, and though he paid for his meals, most nights, the other men at the bar paid for his drinks.

The very first thing he did was check the door that led to the next level. It was the door to someone’s house, but he’d watched it for several days and assumed that they must have died because no one came or went. Eventually, he tried the handle, and instead of finding an empty room, he immediately found a winter wonderland.

Simon closed it immediately, of course, but still, it was reassuring. He would, in fact, have a way out of here when the time came, though that certainly wasn’t now.

He didn’t have a bad time while he recovered, though, even if he knew they secretly suspected him of planning to kill them all, summon demons, or whatever else it was that Warlocks were supposed to do. Day by day, his condition improved, and his thoughts became clearer as he went on strolls through the countryside to better understand the region. Sometimes Majoria would tag along with him on his walks, and other times he’d wander the village and the surrounding countryside himself.

It was clear that she had some sort of weird crush on him, but Simon did his best to brush that off without hurting her feelings. She was a wonderful nurse, but she was only nineteen, and as far as he was concerned, barely legal. More importantly, she wasn’t Freya, so he had zero interest in getting to know her better.

So, when one day she asked him, “Do you have anyone you fancy, you know, when you go back to this mysterious home of yours?” he quashed it then and there harder than he needed to, probably.

“I had a wife, but she’s dead now,” Simon said, pulling out the ring to show it to the young girl. “So I’m afraid romance just isn’t in the cards for me anymore.”

She didn’t seek him out any more after that.

It took him almost a week to remember where he’d left the book, and by the time he found it, he was shocked that it hadn’t been damaged by rain or animals. Still, hiding it under the porch had been a pretty solid decision on his part, and he thanked the past version of himself for being so clever.

Once Simon had the book, he rarely left his room at the inn. He still went down for meals, but he drank a lot less too, and when people asked about it, he lied and said, “I’m just not feeling too great.”

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He couldn’t tell them the truth, of course. ‘I’m reading an ancient book written by an obviously evil person that tells me how to summon the armies of hell and raise the dead,’ just didn’t sound the same as ‘Sorry guys, I just need to spend more time in bed.’

The book told him all that and more. It provided a basis for finally understanding how magic worked in this gods forsaken world. Most of it was nonsense, of course. It was just like the engravings he’d read in the temple where he’d learned magic, but there was good information in there too.

If he looked past the long lists of demonic names and the blandishments he would need to provide them if he wished to gain their boons, he found a few other words he didn’t already know. Transfer, ice, protection, boundary, light, and cure were all present as the strange anti-language he’d come to know.

At the moment, the one that struck him was the most interesting was, ‘D̶͓̐e̵͚͛l̸͔̑z̵̙͋á̵̜m̴̜͊,’ or cure. Apparently, healing applied only to trauma, while D̶͓̐e̵͚͛l̸͔̑z̵̙͋á̵̜m̴̜͊

applied to what he might call status effects in a game. Poison, sickness, and other things that harmed a person while they suffered no actual bodily harm were treated totally differently. It was a strange sort of logic, and he didn’t see why the same magic that could work on cuts and bruises couldn’t work just as well on cyanide or rabies, but he wasn’t the one that had designed it.

Still, he couldn’t help but wonder about edge cases. In a video game, blind was an effect that had to be cured away. In older games, they had their own potion for each effect, but in newer ones, it was just a cure-all sort of thing. So, did he use the words for cure or heal to handle cataracts? What about a nutritional ailment like rickets or scurvy?

The book didn’t say. It didn’t even know what those things were. He’d only found the words for cure in a section on venereal diseases, which had some particularly gross illustrations. It was a strange thing to want to curse your rivals with, of course, and that implied he could use the words to induce negative effects, but he wasn’t about to try that out. Especially not here, where the local wise woman was already just a misstep or two away from burning him at the stake.

It seemed difficult for him to believe that one could go from hero to zero, but he’d already learned that lesson the hard way once in Slany. The people here in Rivenwood probably thought they were being incredibly tolerant to let a man like him breathe after he’d done something as terrible as save their lives, but what was he going to do?

Even if they were dicks, he couldn’t just let them die, could he? Though he knew that he couldn’t save everyone, increasingly, it was his opinion that even if that was true, he owed it to them to try.

He learned other things from the book too, but they were more complicated, and he wasn’t sure how well he’d remember them once he lost this font of knowledge which he definitely would eventually.

In many places, the book contained the same sort of inscrutable symbols he’d seen on the church floor too. Sometimes these did, in fact, seem to be the names of demons, as he’d guessed before, but other times they were linking symbols that seemed to be more like the logical symbols of equivalence and negation that he’d learned in his philosophy classes or maybe the greater than and lesser than symbols in math class.

That made Simon groan. He always got those confused. In this case, though, getting one of them backward might create hell on Earth or make whatever magic item you were creating explode.

The idea that there were magical items was insanely cool, but that excitement was almost immediately counterbalanced by the fact that every time he died, he would have to make a new ring of protection or whatever.

Mostly the book went into creating wands and staves to more efficiently use the words of power that he already knew, but given that he could just say them, that seemed like an unnecessary pain in the ass.

He sighed. “Well, I’m not going anywhere very quickly if I want to figure this shit out,” he told himself as he leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes.

Memorization was getting easier all the time, but having to sort through the mysticism to find the magic in this thing was really slowing him down, and he would have yelled about the obvious contradictions it contained a dozen times by now if he wasn’t worried about what people might make of such deranged rantings from a supposed warlock.

Simon was in no hurry, though. Next time he went through, he might not have this book, so if he had to go back through the cold level again, this time, he might as well try to do it with a little planning and preparation rather than just running through and hoping for the best.

Taking a quill and a blank page from the back of the book, he started to make a list of everything he was going to need to get where he was going. Food and water weren’t really high on his list, but he would need furs to make warm clothes, specially treated thread to try his hand at making a protection rune, and something sharp so he could scribe shapes into his sword.

The book had an example of a frost blade that looked almost like one that the skeleton knight wielded, but he didn’t see a reason why he couldn’t just substitute the rune for fire where the rune for ice had been and get a flaming sword that should be able to deal with the ice quite handily.

As he pondered what else he was going to need, he finally added one more thing to his list: lots of fucking practice with his bow.