The first mark went on the cave wall the morning after his third death.
There were no mornings in that place, not really. There was no sun. There was waking on the stone, and there was dying, and there was whatever happened in between. But a soldier keeps count. Rations, arrows, days until the next pay that never arrives on time.
You count because it's the only part of the war that belongs to you.
So Jin found a sharp splinter of crystal and scratched a line into the wall beside the stone. One short line for every death. One long line for every sleep.
It's a good system. I'm proud of it.
He kept it up for a long time.
* * *
The early deaths were almost funny.
I want that on record, because later on, nothing was.
There was a cellar under one of the houses near the well. Jin went down into it looking for food, or a weapon, or some door out of this place he'd somehow missed. Halfway down the steps, something clicked under his boot, and the cellar filled with green smoke.
He stood in it, coughing, waiting to feel something.
Nothing. Of course nothing. Poison had never touched him in his life. He started laughing, standing in a cloud of gas that would have killed a whole squad, laughing so hard his ribs hurt.
Then the cellar door slammed shut above him, and the ceiling came down after it.
Eleven long lines later, he stepped on a glyph carved into the chapel floor. It flared red, and a curse crawled up his leg like cold water. It reached his knee and gave up.
I swear it looked embarrassed.
Something dropped on him from the rafters while he was laughing about that one, too.
I'm starting to see a pattern.
* * *
The middle deaths were not funny.
Goblins. Orcs. Things with too many legs that crawled out of the well whenever the light turned a certain shade of grey. Pits. Blades hidden in doorframes. Falling. Burning. Once, the well itself, the water closing over his head, and the long, slow minutes before it was over.
The System never lied. Every death hurt exactly as much as dying should.
It never got easier. He only learned the shape of it, the way a tongue learns the shape of a bad tooth.
He stopped laughing. He stopped talking out loud. Some days he sat on the stone after waking and didn't move for a long time, staring at the wall full of lines.
That's me. That's all of me, now.
Then he got up and went back out, because the alternative was sitting there for a thousand years.
And I'm not built for sitting.
* * *
He never knew when the goblin with the torn ear started to feel like a neighbour.
It was always there. Same roof, same crooked back, same curious tilt of the head when he came down the hill. He had killed it more times than he could count. It had killed him more times than he wanted to.
"Morning," he said to it one day.
It clicked something back.
He'd heard that clicking for so long by then that he knew some of it. Not words, exactly. More the way you learn to tell a dog's happy bark from its angry one. That click meant him again.
"Yeah," Jin said. "Me again."
Then they killed each other, and he went back to the stone.
* * *
He didn't notice he was getting stronger.
You'd think something like that would announce itself. A trumpet. A window. A voice saying "congratulations". The System talked plenty when it wanted me dead.
It said nothing at all while he changed.
He only noticed looking back. One morning the orc that had snapped his sword on the first day came out of the chapel, and Jin watched its club come down and thought: it's so slow. He stepped aside. The club hit the stones where he'd been standing. He stared at it, and then at the orc, and the orc stared back, and for a moment neither of them knew what to do about it.
He still died that day. But not to the orc.
After that, he paid attention.
Goblins he used to run from, he could outrun. Blows that used to kill him only knocked him down, and he got up again. He could hear the things in the well breathing from the far end of the square, then from two streets away, then from the cave itself. He could see trap wires in the dark that had caught him every time.
The cold stopped biting. The ash in the air stopped burning his throat. The well water, which had made him sick for what felt like a year, started to taste like water.
My body is learning this place. It's learning faster than I am.
He learned too. Every street. Every loose stone. Which houses hid pits and which hid blades. Which goblin went left and which went right when it panicked. The day he made it from the cave to the chapel and back without dying once, he sat on the stone and cried like a child.
I don't care who knows it.
* * *
The second wall filled faster than the first.
Somewhere on the third, he lost the count.
He never remembered how. A bad stretch, maybe: deaths stacked on deaths, waking and dying and waking without the sense to reach for the crystal. When he finally came back to himself and looked at the wall, he didn't know if he'd missed ten marks or ten thousand.
He stood there a long time with the crystal in his hand.
Then he put it down, and never picked it up again.
That was the day the years stopped being years. They became the time. It went on, and he went on in it.
Sometimes he tried to remember them. Daewon, Takumi, Elise, Shaun. His mother's voice. His little sister Hana, who used to follow him around the house asking why poison didn't work on him, as if it were a trick he could teach her.
He got pieces. Daewon's beard, but not his eyes. Takumi's laugh, but not the jokes. Elise humming, but not the tune.
And the fog was always there, behind everything. He'd stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing rain on a roof. He had forgotten what his head felt like without it. He had forgotten it had ever been any other way.
* * *
The death that changed everything didn't look like anything special.
A goblin's spear. A stupid mistake he'd made a thousand times.
But when he woke on the stone, he didn't wake up right.
His body was burning. Not like fire. Like every part of him was being taken apart and put back together, one piece at a time, by something that didn't care whether it hurt. He lay on the stone and couldn't move, couldn't scream, could only feel it: bone, muscle, blood, all of it breaking down and rebuilding into something not quite the same shape as before.
It went on for what felt like days.
Then, for the first time in what must have been centuries, the voice spoke.
[Repeated deaths have exceeded the limit of the host body]
[Host body is adapting]
[Evolution complete]
Jin lay there breathing. Every breath went deeper than it used to. He could hear his own heart, slow and heavy, like a drum in another room.
Then a window opened in front of his eyes.
He had forgotten about the windows. The last time he'd seen one, Takumi had been poking at a barrier with one of his gadgets and Daewon had been trying to punch his way through it. Jin had been too busy staring at the sky to read it properly.
He read it now.
Most of it was numbers that meant nothing to him. But near the bottom, one line did.
[Innate Skill: Poison and Curse Immunity, Lv 10]
He stared at it.
A skill. I've had a skill all along, since before the System even existed. Since a mushroom in the woods when I was sixteen. The thing Priest Hwan poked and prodded and wrote down in his little book has a name.
While he stared, the line changed.
[Skill level limit exceeded]
[Innate Skill evolved: Status Immunity, Lv ???]
[Immune to poison, curses, paralysis, mind control and all other status effects]
[????? has taken a liking to you.]
[????? is watching.]
The last two lines were gone almost before he had read them. He looked around the cave anyway. Crystals. Dark. Nobody.
I've known skills exist for exactly one day before I died. I've never heard of one changing. I've never heard of anyone who has.
And I have no idea what a ????? is.
Then the fog in his head switched off.
* * *
There was no other way to describe it. One moment it was there, as it had been for longer than he could remember. The next, it wasn't.
Silence.
Not the silence of the village. The silence of his own head, clear and cold and empty, like a room after someone throws open the windows.
That was when he understood it had never been dizziness.
Something's been leaning on my mind since the first step out of the cave. Pressing. Blurring. Keeping things from me. And now it can't get in.
His memories came back all at once. Not all of them. But enough.
The chapel with the crooked bell. He had sat on those chipped steps at sixteen while Priest Hwan poured things into a cup and watched him drink them.
The shop with the sword-shaped sign. His father's shop. Sang-ho had carved that sign himself, badly, because he couldn't afford to pay someone to do it well.
The well in the square, where his mother sent him for water every morning, and where Hana had fallen in once and he'd pulled her out by the collar.
Jin sat on the stone and put his face in his hands.
It's home.
All this time. All those deaths. I've been dying in my own village and I didn't even know it.
The immunity had taken the fog away. It hadn't taken anything else. The grief was all his, and it hit him like the orc's club had on the first day, and he let it. He sat there and felt every bit of it. He had been numb for so long that even this was better.
Either the trial built my home just to kill me in it, or something happened to the real one.
I don't know which is worse.
I'll live long enough to find out.
* * *
Later (he didn't know how much later; he had stopped knowing) he was still sitting there, clear-headed, listening to his new heart beat.
And he noticed something he could never have felt through the fog.
A warmth.
Faint. Moving under his skin, slow, like a second pulse that didn't follow the first. It started somewhere behind his stomach and drifted, as if it were looking for something.
He held still and followed it with his mind.
It moved when he followed it.
Huh.