Jay was beginning to think he had gotten really unlucky to have been attacked by the macabre parasite. He’d been creeping around the swamp and its stupid atmospherically creepy bare trees for hours and hadn’t seen a single other one. Or anything else alive.

  Trying to hunt may have been a bad idea. He had no idea about what kinds of things that lived here, whether they were nocturnal or not, or even whether they’d be more in the water or on the trees. Jay hated working blind, but what other option did he have? If the armored horseman had followed him into the swamp, he couldn’t try to leave again in the same direction without running the risk of crossing paths with him and his claymore.

  The sun was starting to set, too. Not imminently, but half the day had burned away before Jay had even fled into the swamp. There couldn’t be more than a couple of hours of light left. He needed to start looking for a dry spot to sleep. Hopefully the little spot he’d arrived in wasn’t the singular spot of dry land in this entire swamp. There was no way it was the only one, right? That sounded environmentally improbable at best.

  Actually, he should probably find the furthest edge of the swamp in the other direction, shouldn’t he? Maybe there were towns or something in that direction. Maybe he’d get really lucky and there’d be a fully functioning, extremely conveniently placed inn in the depths of the swamp. An actual bed would be good.

  That was a pipe dream and Jay knew it. Even if Halea had inns like that, there wouldn’t be one in some random swamp that everyone hated. There weren’t even any roads leading to the Blight, much less running through it.

  It was just such a tempting thing to hope for.

  Jay kept moving, shifting his Crystalband from a sword to a staff so he could poke around ahead of him. For a long while, it was just him and the repeated squelching of the staff hitting the muddy swamp bottom. There wasn’t a dry spot, parasite, or animal in view anywhere.

  And then, as he skirted around the edge of a treeless clearing, his staff didn’t squelch. It thunked. A hard, resonant thunk that jarred Jay out of the mental list-making he’d occupied himself while watching and walking. That wasn’t mud, and it didn’t feel like one of the tree roots either. He’d hit plenty of both to know the difference.

  He poked around a little bit more with the end of the staff, trying to figure out what it was. It was smallish, about the size of his foot, and sharply rectangular enough to be clearly artificial. That narrowed things down. If it had been anywhere else, he’d have guessed it was a stone brick of some kind, but there hadn’t been any buildings – or even signs of ruined buildings – anywhere in this swamp.

  He pulled the staff back into its band form and shoved his hands in the water to grab it. He almost recoiled from the frigid temperature, which probably wasn’t a good sign given that his feet had been in it nearly all day and he had apparently stopped feeling it, but he grabbed the thing anyway. It stuck in the mud as he pulled on it, but not firmly enough to keep it from surfacing with a little bit more tugging.

  It was definitely a brick. There wasn’t much else that it could be, really, being made of white stone with sharp corners that couldn’t be more obviously artificial. But why was it out here by itself?

  Jay eyed the roughly circular clear portion of swamp. It didn’t look deep, not like the other open spots he’d been avoiding that took the already-dark water and made it even darker with depth. There were even a few seedlings coming up in the clearing, though they weren’t poking far up from the water’s surface and seemed confined to the edges.

  He shifted the Crystalband back to the staff it had just been, hoping it didn’t secretly have emotions to resent the rapid changes, and poked his way forward into the clearing proper. Jay had only taken a few steps when the end of it thunked against something else that clearly wasn’t a root. There were more beside it, but he didn’t bother pulling any of them up. No sense wetting his hands again after he’d just patted them dry, especially to confirm something he was almost completely sure of.

  Instead, he traced where the bricks were laid, thunking along with his Crystalstaff to make sure he turned when it did. The end result seemed to be the remains of a mostly pentagonal structure with a few odd protrusions: one triangular outcropping on the long side and an extension jutting out on two of the points that mirrored the form of the rest of the wall’s line. Rooms, maybe, built into the edge of whatever this building had been.

  This had to have been dry land at some point, then, before something happened to drown it. Seasonal tides, maybe. Did swamps have tides? Did Halea have tides? Jay had passed out too quickly to notice last night and hadn’t been in a fit state of mind to see if there was a moon still hanging in the sky in the morning.

  God. This was only his second day after coming back to life. Were they all going to be like this? This chaotic, this overwhelming? He’d had years on Earth that hadn’t felt as eventful as these two days had been, even if the specifics were fuzzy enough to be reduced to vague impressions. He’d need to find one of the life-extension methods the binder had mentioned if that was going to be the case or he’d end up having a heart attack before he could do much of anything.

  Jay distracted himself from the thought of just how little it felt like he could do – which was only outweighed by how much he had to do – by poking around within the brick outline, hoping to find some forgotten piece of interestingness. Sadly, whatever this building had been, it had either been cleaned out with an obsessive attention to detail or the things left behind had decayed once the flooding had happened. The thoroughness was almost eerie; there weren’t even shards of stone left. If Jay hadn’t found the one brick out of place, he’d have never known a structure had stood here.

  The sun met the horizon and Jay cursed to himself. He still needed to find a place to sleep, not to mention that he’d managed to get himself so turned around that he didn’t even know the direction he’d been walking in from the direction he’d come from anymore. Any direction he chose could be right back into that armored man’s hands.

  Or his sword.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  Jay looked around, trying to find a landmark – any landmark – that would tell him where he had already been. He hadn’t noticed before but this area had a decent outlook over the rest of the swamp, even if it was mostly in a single direction. He hadn’t even realized he was sloping up as he walked, but that was probably more to do with the fact that it wasn’t that high of a hill than any athleticism he had. Was that why the building had been here? A watchpost of some sort? Maybe it had been an oddly shaped tower.

  Honestly, the revelation that he was at the top of a hill only made the questions around what had drowned the stones multiply. There wasn’t much of a chance Jay was going to be able to find answers for any of those questions, which was unfortunate, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that either. He just needed to take the chance to scout around a little.

  There were a couple more clearings scattered around, a thin column of smoke rising from one direction that was probably the only other person he knew was anywhere nearby, and – faintly visible on the very furthest edges of the horizon – what looked like a large unbroken expanse of water. Jay didn’t know if it was just a big river, an oversized lake, or even an ocean, but it was the only thing he’d seen that might be a way for him to get some food. And hopefully some water. It was shocking enough that he hadn’t started feeling the lack of either yet, but it couldn’t be that much longer before it would start hitting him.

  Jay almost thought he saw a small patch of dry land too. He wasn’t sure, it being so far away, but it looked closer than anything else did. It also had the benefit of being a good distance away from the smoke, so if he made it there and found a way to mark the direction he’d been going before he slept, he’d be guaranteed to be on a different path than the man with the painted helmet.

  Assuming the fire was him, at least. Even if it wasn’t, he probably didn’t want to meet whoever it was. The odds of it being from some undead-type thing were too high, and if it was something like that and could still make fire, it might even have a Class itself. Then there was no way it wouldn’t be too strong for Jay to handle.

  Jay made sure he knew which direction the smoke was relative to the sun and the few other standout landmarks he could see. He should be able to use that to keep on the same track. Hopefully he’d also be able to make it to the dry-looking spot before dark hit. He thunked the bricks of the building’s remnant one more time as a goodbye and set out.

  *

  Now that he’d made it to the dryer island in the swamp, he could see that it was actually larger than it had looked from the hill. About a quarter of it had been completely covered by a fallen tree that hadn’t seemed to have fallen from his viewpoint that far away. At least he’d have somewhere to sit. Maybe he’d lean against it to sleep the same way he had the monument stone.

  Before he forgot about it, Jay marked an arrow in the soggy mud to make sure he didn’t get turned around in the night. It filled in with water almost immediately, but at the very least it remained distinct enough that he should be able to find it in the morning and keep moving in the same direction. Getting turned around might kill him at this point and he knew it.

  Once that was done, and against his own better judgement, Jay took off his shoes, socks, and pants to try to get them to dry out after all the watery trudging he’d been doing over the last two days. He probably should have done the same thing when he first left the swamp, but he hadn’t really been thinking about anything except sleep at the time.

  Come to think of it, why wasn’t he as tired now as he had been then? Had the reincarnation taken energy from him somehow? Sure, it had been creating his body presumably out of nothing, but the idea that that could take more energy out of him than two days of frenetic activity was almost a little ridiculous. Maybe it had been all the changes of adjusting to the System and whatever the “Gilt” thing had been.

  At least he hadn’t had to dance around with a parasite in his neck while also pantsless. He was already grimy enough from sweating and what mud had gotten on him, having more of the latter splattered up his legs would just be annoying. At least until he could find a way to actually wash himself somehow. Preferably with clean, heated water instead of just the filthy stuff that was making him dirty anyway. There was residue on Jay’s skin where it had been, staining it an odd, almost sickly, grayish color. Surprising, given the brownness of the water itself, but maybe it was whatever else was in here.

  At some point he’d need to find a way to make fire, too. Maybe if he could actually find something to hunt once the night had passed, he’d be able to get a spell to do that. He might be a necromancer, but even necromancers needed to stay warm to live.

  Was it weird how quickly he’d come to accept the label? Sure, the Class itself he hadn’t had much choice about accepting, but seeing that written out on a summary sheet versus actually calling himself that was a big difference. It almost felt like he was being too eager to embrace it and –

  The fallen tree he was sitting on moved. Jay hadn’t moved, hadn’t even shifted his weight, but it definitely jolted enough to be noticeable. He started wiggling back into the clothes he had shed, none of which had dried nearly at all in the hour or so he’d been sitting there, doing his best not to move too much in case whatever it was that had moved the tree noticed.

  As he did, he fought with himself. This was the only island he’d seen from the hilltop except for the one that may or may not exist but that was almost definitely occupied by the armored man if it did. Should he run anyway, try to pull an all-night travel session toward the giant body of water? Should he be a horror-movie-style cliche and try to get a look at whatever it was that he was sharing the place with?

  It was probably some horrifically large snake. Jay shuddered just thinking about it. He really didn’t want to look, but if he didn’t, he definitely wouldn’t be able to sleep. He’d just keep thinking about it. Filling in details in his head that would haunt his dreams and jerk him back awake every time he got anywhere near rest. He had to look. He didn’t want to. But he really, really had to.

  Jay stood up. He stepped as gingerly as possible around to the end of the fallen tree. He bent down until he could just barely look inside the apparently hollowed-out tree trunk.

  It was an otter. It was a massive otter, sure, but it was an otter! He’d been scared of an otter. Of all the things Jay had been scared of in his life, an otter was new. He could never tell anyone about this, assuming he ever met someone who didn’t want to kill him.

  The otter was looking back at him from its position pressed as far up against the other end of the hollow space as it could get, making some kind of noise that began as a trilling chirp and ended as the next best thing to a hiss. Clearly it didn’t want Jay there, and after a second he could see why: it – she – wasn’t alone in the little den. There were two much smaller otters barely visible from where the larger one was pressing them against the wall of the den.

  So not only had he been scared of an otter, he had been scared of a mother otter. Whether that was better or worse, he didn’t know, but at least he’d be able to sleep knowing he wasn’t sharing a relatively tiny space of dryness with some gigantic snake.

  Jay stepped away from the fallen tree and its protective inhabitant. The sudden relief of there not being a snake in the immediate vicinity had him feeling his tiredness in a way he hadn’t been before. He leaned himself up against the solid end of the trunk to avoid disturbing the otters and finally – finally! – was able to sleep.