Chương 55: Chapter 54: Voidly Considerations

When the familiar void greeted Ren, he felt entirely resigned. And for the first few moments, he assumed the knight had killed him immediately. That would have been efficient, at least. Except the memory did not fit. Death usually had an ending Ren could point at. Pain, heat, or a weapon. His body failing in some sufficiently dramatic fashion before everything vanished and the void took its place. This had been different.

The charm had swallowed his sight first, then everything else had followed slowly enough for Ren to notice it happening. Sound had remained somewhere far away. Pressure had come and gone against his body. Movement had reached him through whatever held him, even after he could no longer tell where his arms or legs were. It had felt less like falling unconscious and more like being dragged beneath deep water, and then being kept there, no matter how hard he tried to surface. He never had.

And all of that meant the knight probably had not killed him in that room. Which would be encouraging… had he not ended up in the void anyway. Apparently it was possible to find disappointment even in learning that armed religious strangers had not murdered an infant directly in front of his grieving family. Ren went back over what little he could remember after the charm took hold.

He had been carried somewhere while voices blurred together beyond his reach, and the movement had lasted far longer than it should have taken to cross the church or even leave the building. After that came less noise, less motion, and eventually nothing at all. If those fading senses had been telling him anything useful, the knights had taken him away from the church first. Possibly out of the village. Then, at some point after that, they had killed him.

Ren would have liked to imagine a lengthy investigation after being taken beyond the village, perhaps to the city with proper tools, asking about what he could remember. Questions, examinations, anything. Any sincere attempt to determine whether the strange baby was actually possessed before reaching unfortunate conclusions. His continued presence in the void argued strongly against that interpretation. So much for due process.

Dying to an overeager magical-world inquisition had definitely not been on Ren's bingo card. Then again, neither had reincarnating as a baby, discovering a System, repeatedly dying to goblins, learning magic from an extremely sweet and knowledgeable teenage witch, or discovering that his complete lack of divine connection apparently made him suspicious enough to execute outright. His expectations had not exactly demonstrated great predictive value. Which was fine…

What was another obstacle when he had overcome so many already? Ren would adjust. As he always did. The knights were a solution turned problem now. Though Sister Calia was another problem. More importantly, whatever she had sensed – or failed to sense – would likely happen again. That meant the next loop could not merely be a faster version of the last one.

Ren had already been planning to warn everyone sooner, send for the knights sooner, prepare the village sooner, and get Bren away from the point where the goblin leader reached him. Now he also needed to avoid being identified as an unclean infant abomination by the overeager faithful arriving to save them. His nonexistent hands would have covered his face if the void had been considerate enough to provide any. Instead, Ren floated in nowhere and tried to add contingencies against religious persecution to the plan.

He could hide his progression better. Maybe. Walking and talking would become difficult to explain away once people saw him, and magic was worse. Sister Calia had noticed the absence of divine light before anyone started formally questioning him, though, which meant pretending to be stupid would only solve part of the problem. Could he avoid her entirely? Possibly. Could he avoid the knights entirely? Probably, but that defeated the point.

He needed them to reach the village earlier next time, before Bren ended up in front of the goblin leader. So Ren would have to solve both problems at once: get the holy knights there faster, then somehow keep them from deciding that the strange baby who summoned them was an affront to divine order. He could work out the details once he had a body again. That thought dragged his attention back to the void. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

He had been here often enough that it should have felt familiar by now, yet the place still refused to make sense. The strangest part was that being here seemed to take time. Or at least Ren experienced something that felt like time. He had no heartbeat to count, no breathing, no hunger, no aching muscles, and no sunlight shifting across a wall. None of the ordinary things that let him measure one moment against another existed here. His thoughts still came one after another. That had to mean something.

Did it mean time was actually passing? If the entire world rewound while Ren remained here, was the void outside whatever time was being reversed? Did he spend minutes here while no minutes existed anywhere else? Did the reset happen instantly and his mind merely insisted on manufacturing an interval between death and waking? Was his mind even here? Ren tried to stop thinking about it. Unfortunately, he had already started. If he had no body here, what exactly was doing the thinking?

Soul seemed like an obvious answer in a world where Sister Calia could apparently inspect people's connection to divine light, but obvious answers had become dangerous lately. Perhaps consciousness itself– Something resembling a headache began building despite Ren currently lacking the anatomical equipment required to have one. That was unfair. He did not even have a skull. He should at least receive the benefits of the arrangement.

Ren attempted to redirect toward practical matters, but the void gave him very little practical material to work with. No System window appeared. Mana remained absent or unreachable. There was nothing to Appraise, nothing to Sense, nothing to move, and certainly nothing to train unless excessive speculation unlocked something weird and useless, like Philosophy. He would have shuddered if he had a body to do it with. Actually– No. Ren almost tried to turn the whole thing into another training opportunity!

He had enough skills already, and there was a limit to how much dignity remained in attempting to grind weird progression while technically dead. Would it even count in this weird space? He didn't know. Thinking about the next loop was more useful anyway. Bren needed to live. That meant Ren had to compress everything he had learned into a better start. He already knew what to do, and could do it faster. There was also Sister Calia.

Ren would need to solve the minor problem of being apparently disconnected from the Divine forces in a society where that was suspicious enough to get him killed. Probably manageable. At least compared to goblins. His mind drifted back toward the void and the weird contradiction of time passing in a timeless space before he could stop it.

His old life had contained plenty of theories about time, and Ren had half-assedly absorbed exactly enough parts of them to be dangerous to himself, yet too little to recall even a single one of them in full. Space and time stuff was probably involved somehow. Dimensions maybe too? Along with observers, light, and an example involving a train that he could no longer reconstruct with any confidence.

Ren searched Memory for whatever scraps remained and received several half-understood diagrams, an old video thumbnail, and the strong conviction that attempting theoretical physics from memory was how people accidentally invented nonsense. There was also something about everything being cake. Or a lie? Ren paused. No, that had definitely been the internet. Probably? His phantom headache intensified. Unfair! He abandoned cosmology before the void could somehow give him a migraine without nerves.

A good thing, as just then the void folded, and the world returned. Ren opened his eyes. The ceiling waited where it always waited: seven beams, thumb knot, smoke stain, blue charm. Fever heat pressed under his skin. Cloth clung to one leg. Elna's hand rested on his forehead, cool and alive, and Bren's footsteps thudded below in the first-morning pattern.

"Bren," Elna called, voice tight with the familiar fear.

"He's awake." He returned from the dead once more. Ren lay still beneath her hand while the room settled around him, but this time the familiarity did very little to steady him. He had spent the void thinking about the knights, the village, the next loop, and every problem he would have to solve differently. None of that prepared him for hearing Bren moving downstairs. Elna leaned over the crib.

"Ren?" Ren looked at her and felt his throat tighten. Her face carried only the familiar worry of his fever, with no grief hollowing out her eyes and no memory of walking out of the church to find her husband dead. Then Bren's footsteps came up the stairs. Ren tried to hold himself together. He really did. Bren entered the room with his hair loose and his tunic half-fastened, looking exactly as alive as he had every other time Ren woke here.

"How is he?"

"He only just woke," Elna said.

"He's still warm." Bren stepped closer and reached down to touch Ren's forehead. That finished him. Ren's vision blurred, and the first sob escaped before he could do anything about it. Elna startled and immediately lifted him from the crib, settling him against her shoulder while Bren's hand moved carefully to his back.

"There, little spark," Elna murmured.

"You scared yourself awake." Ren clutched her dress and cried harder. Bren was alive. The same father Ren had watched disappear beneath the goblin leader's strike was standing beside him, worried about a fever. Tessa was nearby, alive as well, and Elna was holding him without any idea that she had spent the previous loop mourning her husband. Ren had known the reset would undo Bren's death. He had hoped and trusted exactly that certainty while floating in the void.

Knowing it and seeing Bren alive again were apparently very different things. Bren rubbed his back once.

"Bad dream?" Ren pressed his face deeper into Elna's shoulder. … That was one way to describe it. A particularly persistent bad dream involving goblins, religious kidnapping, murder, and several weeks of work, but close enough for someone who had no chance of understanding the real answer. The thought should have been funny. Instead another sob shook through him. Being relieved that he had died again was a deeply unpleasant thing to examine, so Ren decided not to examine it yet. Death had brought him here.

And the 'here' had his father alive beside him. For the moment, that was all he could care about. Elna kept rocking him while Bren stayed close, and Ren let himself listen to both of them until the tightness in his chest finally began to loosen. His father was alive, and the world felt whole again. It was good to be back.