Chapter 172: Blending In
The way to Darndelle was longer than Simon remembered. He was pretty sure it had taken him five days to get here once upon a time, but it took closer to a week before he sighted the city. He’d forgotten how much he hated this part of his cycle. The only way to really appreciate how soft and weak he’d been in his past life was to be forced to wallow in it after spending years feeling strong and vital.
This time, it wasn’t even the weight or his severe lack of cardio. It was how prone his feet were to blisters and how much he sweated under the heat of the midday sun. He could use words of lesser healing to address the minor wounds, but only time would take care of everything else.
“What I need is a word that lets me reshape my body,” he told himself one day while he rested in the shade. “Like a word of greater transformation or something. Hell, I’d take a word of lesser weight loss.”
Despite his griping about his physical condition, his skills were only slightly dulled by it, and thanks to his bow, he ate well on the trip back. One night, he slow-roasted a rabbit on a handmade rotisserie with sage, and another night, he had fire-roasted fish that he caught in a raging stream he crossed earlier that day. Even at his worst, this was hardly a bad life.
Simon didn’t encounter any bandits, and though he saw the tracks of a beastman tribe, he never actually saw them, which was just as well since he was trying not to kill everything in sight on this trip. He did walk with a caravan for the last few days once he reached the road. He told them that he was a traveling scholar, which wasn’t so far from the truth. They seemed skeptical, given his leather armor and his skill with a bow, but all he could do about that was lamely offer that the road was a very dangerous place for scholars.
Still, it was good feedback, and the first thing he did when he reached Darndelle once he’d secured a room at a cheap inn was to visit a tailor and have something more appropriate made. He planned on spending a lot of time at the libraries of the trade city, and the last thing he wanted to do was stand out like a sore thumb.
The second thing he did, after he’d wasted half of his precious few gold coins on a new outfit, was to go visit the graveyard where he’d spent so much time. He didn’t actually enter it, of course. Instead, he leaned on the fence and watched the mist coalesce nearby as it sensed his life force.
“I’d be careful if I were you, stranger,” a man said in passing as Simon studied the place. “You set foot in there after dark, and your life is forfeit. No one is going to be foolish enough to try to save you.”
Simon nodded and thanked the man, but he kept looking just the same. Fixing this particular problem in the future was one of his biggest accomplishments, and it felt weird to see that it was all undone like this. Part of him wanted to be here to watch when his past self finally burned all this away, but that was decades from now and well after the date he planned to be in Ionar.