***
Now, being able to relive my most important memories, I felt reinvigorated. Alive.
Like a dim fog in my head lifted, and my thinking broadened back to almost how it used to be. I couldn't be sure it wasn't a placebo effect, but I felt more like myself. I suppose that would have to do.
Which brought me here, to where I am. On the broad road towards the human village I didn't yet know the name of, dressed in the best-preserved torn cloak I looted in one of the nests, and other clothes I could find throughout the years.
Being a demon meant not knowing anxiety.
This, amongst other things, was one of the few perks of the few qualities of the demonic emotionally stunted state of being, that I enjoyed the benefits of.
Logically, in my situation, were I still a human, I would've known that I don't have many material possessions or attachments to my hut or this area. If I had to cut my losses and run, I had little to lose. Yet, I would've been anxious, even scared to go to a human village incognito. I would've been afraid of being discovered, of a confrontation that would follow, and of scorn and fear.
As a demon, I was simply aware that this would be a consequence of my discovery, and that there may be a threat to my life if the local elderly priest would start throwing around divine magic. I wasn't worried and did not hesitate.
Before going to the village, I prepared, of course.
There were rules that I had to follow, and consider before even thinking about going to the village. Those weren't the rules I set for myself. Those were the rules I knew from when I was a human, growing up in a religious family. Back in my previous life, I didn't give them much thought. I didn't have the power to truly ignore those rules; the society I've been a part of enforced them.
But I am beyond law enforcement as I am now.
And I had done some rethinking since. As Lord once commanded, I shall do, but not out of fear of punishment, but because I have a choice, and I choose to hear his word.
Everyone knows the commandments. They are the basis of morals as we know them now.
Honor only the one true God.
Do not make idols (idols), i.e., do not worship the creature, but the Creator.
Reverently pronounce the name of God, i.e., do not pronounce it in vain, without need.
Dedicate the seventh day of the week to God.
Honor your father and mother, so that it will be well with you, and so that you may live long on the earth.
Do not kill.
Do not steal.
Be faithful, keep your family holy, do not betray it, protect it.
Do not lie.
Do not envy.
Back in my previous life, I wasn't the most faithful Christian, and right now I am a demon. There could be many explanations for me being here, as I am now, but I would like to think it's a test from God.
Because it's a simple, elegant explanation, and because, despite all the modern slander of my age towards Christianity, fundamentally, the Christian virtues morally align with mine almost perfectly. If I were to choose a higher power that presides over me, I would choose the one true God, and I would like to have faith that he is righteous and kind. For the alternative is unsettling, even to my current cursed existence.
Because if it's not by God's grace that I am here, then I am a toy of some other force. I did not wish to have faith in that.
It might have been ironic on the surface for a demon to worship God, but I am not a demon of the bible. I am not damned by default, I know I have an immortal soul, my curse was structured around interacting with it!
I decided, in those first weeks in this world, that I was being tested. Not punished, not like Cain, because despite my concerns being centered on addressing the downsides of the current state of being, there were many upsides too. Many great gifts have been given to me in this new life. I was gifted great power, but the ability to be emotionally validated for doing good was taken.
Maybe it's hubris, but it sounded like the most biblical unwritten story I've ever heard of.
A man given great power, but his capacity to feel good for acts of altruism is taken away. Would that man choose to stay good?
T'was only me and my morals remaining, the same morals upon which my character was built. An evil man, or I imagine most men, would not be concerned with tainting their hands, once or twice.
But I knew that slope was a slippery one; I had no intentions of stepping on it in the first place, not without climbing gear.
Maybe it's my pride, but I believe that so far, I have endured the test admirably. My hands weren't stained by another's blood, my lips weren't tainted with lies, I had little opportunity to do good, so I did little of it, but I had great opportunity to easily dispense evil and savour pleasure from doing so, and chose not to.
It was this core of me, my most base righteousness, that was being tested. This is what I chose to believe.
Of course, keeping to those principles was difficult, and would be even more difficult in the future. I have already elected that all of god's commandments only concern humans, elves, dwarves, and other emotionally and intellectually developed races that may exist in this world, not my fellow demons.
The Son of God once said: "So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets."
But demons are psychologically and intellectually incapable of reciprocating kindness and mercy, not until I develop my spell that would turn demons humane. As such, they are exempt from the scripture that teaches you to interact with fellow people, as demons aren't people. Not yet.
I am incapable of love, incapable of empathy, incapable of the most basic virtue the Bible teaches.
But that doesn't mean I can't act along with the book, and choose to one day be able to feel it with my heart once again, instead of mostly ignoring it like I did in the previous life.
That being said, not killing and not dying myself would be significantly easier with my new curse.
Seeing that it worked on a Demon who was experiencing the memory of a human, I was certain it would work on humans, too. It was an instinctual understanding, something I could explain in proper words.
My curse, the curse of the Resonant Soul, had limitations.
There were four that I was currently aware of.
I need to touch my target to cast the curse. I need to be aware of the memory I was willing the target to relive; I need to know what happened in this person's life to anchor the curse towards this event. The mana of the target and its amount, somehow correlated to the effectiveness of the curse. As my curse taps into the target's soul and forces that experience into their bodies, I can only make the target of the curse see its memories.
In essence, my curse lulled the one I cast it upon into a vision the target couldn't break out of. On monsters I cast it on, I could keep them incapacitated with it for an hour, but that was because they experienced the memory, at most, at four times the speed of the real world. Meaning that for every four hours of memories, they only lay incapacitated for an hour.
Humans who had weaker mana than monsters I tested it upon, which would be most humans, would therefore be incapacitated for at least this long with a simple touch, likely longer.
As a demon, I naturally practiced a lot with reinforcing my body with mana, trying to be faster, stronger, and more durable. A healthy body is a healthy mind.
I knew that a mage and, therefore, probably a demon can grow stronger by exercising with their energy, not unlike a human athlete can grow stronger by exercising their muscle, so I made sure to exhaust myself properly while training my basic abilities at least once a day, for the past fourteen years.
So if the fight broke out, I could reasonably move at inhuman speed to touch all my attackers, knocking them out, and retreat.
I, of course, did my research on the village before deciding to enter.
There were three persons of interest with above-average mana and somehow categorized as dangerous by my instincts and by logic, provided no one was living here while constantly hiding their mana.
I doubt anyone would do such a thing. It's not my demonic instincts talking, I simply remember now that in the show, it was shown as an extraordinary skill only Frieren, her apprentice, and her master practiced. It was far too labour-intensive and impractical for most humans to master.
As a demon who was currently trying to master it, I could confirm that living with your mana suppressed is hard. For a demon like me, it also felt instinctively wrong in every way imaginable, though it's probably just my nature giving me difficulties.
Still, there were three humans I needed to be wary of.
One was the priest, I never caught his name, only caught a glimpse of him once, after observing the village for the last week (except for Sunday, as I spent it in prayer). He was an elderly man.
There were also two hunters, one was named Mutig, and seemed to be a father. The name of the second one, still a growing young man, I wasn't able to overhear.
While the demon's senses are sharp, and I sharpened my senses further with magic, I could only overhear so much without approaching the village and risking discovery. The only reason I was confident enough to observe for so long and to approach now is because I am pretty good at masking my mana. I am always lowering it to a level of a normal human, as long as I don't cast any spells, and limit myself to simply enhancing myself, I probably would not be discovered.
Unfortunately, casting a curse makes my mana fluctuate a bit; I don't know how noticeable it is to others, but I decided to assume that it's very noticeable, to be safe, and go from there.
The imperfection of my craft irked my pride.
While worn and torn in places, my clothes looked presentable to my eye. I also carried with me one of the better preserved half-swords, which was strapped to my hip.
A hood was thrown over my head, neatly concealing most of my hair, a good part of my head, and my horns. Luckily, the angle of my horns conveniently didn't make them poke at suspicious angles into the hood.
Otherwise, I would have to cut them off, and then resist the instinctive urge to regenerate. Of course, it would have been better to saw them off anyway, but Lord have Mercy, even if my sense of pain was dulled, I still had it, and the horns were very sensitive! More sensitive than almost everything else on my body, bar the genitals. I can only imagine how painful it would be to remove them, probably comparable to cutting away your foreskin as a human.
Not that I ever really understood that particular ritual, or Americans.
As I walked over another hill, the village was before me.
It sat quietly among tall pines and moss-covered stones, a handful of timber and stone houses nestled around a small, worn well. Thin smoke curled from chimneys, and the scent of firewood and baked grain lingered in the crisp air. Those smells failed to awaken anything pleasant in me, though I recognized them easily. Chickens wandered freely near crooked fences, and a dog barked once before retreating under a cart.
As I approached along the packed dirt road, two children paused their stick-duel to stare, and an old man at the edge of the field, his mana and his callused hands, telling me he was just a farmer, raised a hand in lazy greeting before returning to stacking chopped wood. A woman in a patched apron swept her porch, glancing up only briefly, and studied me approaching curiously, but didn't seem alarmed.
The forest pressed close at the edges, but the village seemed unafraid of it, used to its shadows, and the surrounding area was probably hunted free of monsters.
I paused briefly at the entrance. It's not like I expected to immediately be called out and greeted by pitchforks and torches, but my previous human experience gave me nothing when I was thinking of how to find the things I needed.
After a moment of hesitation, I walked in, heading towards the center of the village and the well I could see, to get a better look around.
The week I observed the village, I mostly managed to do so from the direction of the forest, hiding in shadows and careful not to leave any tracks, wary of hunters. So I only saw the village from one vantage point, and the size of their fields was rather impressive now that I was here.
I suppose they do need to eat.
"Excuse me," I approached the woman, the one who was sweeping her porch. I did so after lifting a bucket of water from the well and drinking from it. An empty gesture, but one I thought of beforehand for show, to quell some suspicion. "Is there a shop here, or someone who trades in writing supplies or cloth?"
The woman seemed a bit taken aback by my question, though not overly much. I could read her emotions with shocking clarity.
"Old Weise may have something," She said, unsurely, "I am not sure she will sell." She gestured towards one of the houses, one that had vines running across it, and that had a few flowers growing in many flowerbeds around it. "She lives there. You can also try old man Feuer, he is our priest."
I nodded, my instinct telling me to give her a sincere, charming smile, as my mouth was visible to her, to make my body language relieved and thankful, but all of that would've been a lie.
Do not lie.
"I assume Weise is a herbalist?" I asked, already deducing that much. I saw the woman she talked about while observing the village; she was indeed old, but I never caught her name. Her mana was stronger than average in the village, but I didn't consider her a threat; she was much magically weaker than I, and unlike hunters, I doubt she can compensate with tools or techniques, the physical age would also be crippling, if you weren't a mage.
"She is." Woman confirmed, a bit surprised, and as I suspected, taken aback by my cold attitude. "Or was. She doesn't sell many potions anymore, just some medicine if someone goes down with a fever."
"I would keep it in mind, thank you," I said, actively forcing myself not to fake any emotions with my voice or body language, but bowing a bit to her in a gesture of gratitude. This, unlike faking body language, wouldn't be a lie, as it's a gesture meant to convey gratitude without pretending that I feel it.
I then walked off, leaving the woman behind.
After knocking at the door, I wait.
Eventually, the door opens. On the other hand stands a woman in a very advanced age, definitely over sixty. She probably originally had lush, almost golden hair, but by now they were mostly grey, and her eyes were brown. She was short, and I wasn't sure how tall I was in this new life, but she barely reached my chest.
"Oh my, a visitor, and a traveler no less," She said, opening her door wider and smiling at me pleasantly. "Can I help you with something, young man?"
"That would depend on whether you can sell me some items," I answered politely. "I need certain things, and I have some coin on me." I proposed simply.
The woman blinked, taken aback by something in my attitude, I could tell. But even with my human memories fresh in my head, I couldn't tell what exactly in my attitude made her, and the other woman, react like this.
"Of course, we can talk inside. Please come in." She stepped aside, offering me to enter.
I did, but internally, I was a bit confused.
I expected more suspicion. More caution. I am a demon, and I had so little trouble infiltrating. If I weren't who I am, this whole village would've been slaughtered, unable to mount any resistance.
I am a young demon, but I can say with some confidence that I would've been able to kill most humans here.
Maybe the priest or the hunters could've killed me, though it's also possible that I am overestimating humans based on examples from the story. Either way, this was precisely why I approached the village while hunters were away, and the priest rarely leaves the church in the first place.
I expected more caution. They are too careless.
Following the owner, I passed through the lobby. Inside the house proper, the air was thick with the mingled scents of dried herbs, earth, and old parchment. Bundles of lavender, sage, and unknown forest plants hung from the rafters, their colors faded but their aromas potent. Shelves lined the walls, cluttered with glass jars containing roots, powders, and preserved specimens, each labeled in a meticulous hand.
A sturdy wooden table occupied the center of the room, its surface scarred by years of use. Mortars and pestles, along with various cutting tools, lay scattered atop it, alongside open books filled with handwritten notes and botanical illustrations.
The herbalist herself moved confidently, her hands stained from years of handling plants. She wore a simple, earth-toned dress, and her once golden hair, now streaked with silver, was tied back with a strip of cloth.
"Come along, come along, I will make some tea," She hustled, as I was seated at the small dinner table on the edge of the room.
With some genuine interest, I studied the specimens and plants she preserved, memorizing them. I recognized a few. I've seen them in the forest before. Now I know which plants are valuable to collect. The samples also helped me understand which parts were valuable, the roots, the stems, or the flowers.
"So, how can I help you?" She asked, after a few minutes, pouring us both some herbal tea, and sitting opposite me.
The smell of the tea was undoubtedly herbal, but to my demonic instinct, it didn't smell like anything appetizing. The humans in the village did.
For the first time in years, I felt hungry.
The impulse to kill wasn't as strong, not after I grew used to it after a week, but it was still there.
"As you can see, I don't have much on me," I said slowly, after taking a big sip of the tea. It tasted just like it smelled, like nothing my palate cared for. "The clothes I have on me are the only clothes I own, besides some torn-up wraps. I would like to buy something less torn apart." I explained, "But maybe not from you." I added, gesturing at her house. "The reason I came to you is that I also need some ink, paper, and books. Preferably, a map you have one. I can see you are a learned woman, so I hope you have at least some of the things I look for."
The woman looked a bit surprised, resting in her chair as she did, she lifted an eyebrow.
"What sort of books exactly?"
"Anything," I said, after a moment of consideration. "If you have an encyclopedia on monsters or plants, I would take it. If you have anything about history, I would buy it too. Religious texts are fine." I paused for a moment, shaking my head slowly and deliberately. "Anything will do, because I simply need books to pass the time, and maybe learn something new."
This was true. I didn't expect that she would have anything of real value here.
"What a strange thing to search for!" The woman laughed, seemingly genuinely.
I kept quiet.
"Ah, I don't mean to mock you, young man, but for a traveler so battered, you really have your priorities straight," She said fondly and with thick sarcasm, "I can't sell you a map, unfortunately, it's the only one I have, and I don't know if the passing merchant will be selling it again. I have some ink and paper, if you are interested. And you may be surprised, but I have some clothes from my son, he was about your size, they may just fit you."
I blinked. This was surprising; she was right.
"I am glad to hear it," I said truthfully. Though it was more me appreciating that I wouldn't be inconvenienced by asking around the village, hoping to buy clothes from other humans.
"Would you allow me to redraw your map on one of the parchments, for some extra pay?"
The woman seemed surprised by my question, but shook her head.
"Don't worry, if you just need to look and copy what you can, you don't have to pay me for it. I would hardly be losing anything after all."
That's surprisingly kind of her. With my curse, a single glance at the map would be enough for me to recall it in perfect detail for the rest of my life. Not that she knew that.
"Thank you. And any books you can sell me?"
The woman glanced at me for a moment, shaking her head.
"I don't have any books I am ready to part with for money, sunny. Though…" She glanced for a moment at my sword.
I simply waited for her to come to a decision.
"...I can give you a grimoire with a folk spell, if you can help the village. There is a monster in the forest that is a bit too dangerous for Mutig and little Schnell, they were worried sick about it." She said carefully. "You have the air of an adventurer around you. Can you help them?"
I considered her question for a moment.
It was dangerous, coming in contact with some of the people I designated as dangerous beforehand.
But the woman showed kindness to me. This kindness couldn't move my non-existent heart, but it was kindness nonetheless. Such things need to be reciprocated, when possible.
"I probably can," I say truthfully. "And if your village is in trouble, I will." I looked into the woman's eyes calmly. "I would like to receive the clothes first, this attire isn't comfortable."
I added, after a moment.
The woman laughed.
"Ah, you just have to tell me what happened! Those rugs look like you wore them for weeks on end, and rolled in the dirt wearing them besides!"
"That's not completely inaccurate," I said, glancing at the table, and trying to structure my words properly, to not accidentally fall into what's natural, to not accidentally lie. "I found those clothing in a ruined carriage, ten or so miles south-west of here, in the forest. It looked like a monster dropped it to crack it open. After my encounter with a flying monster earlier, those clothes were better than what I had." I explained truthfully, just not mentioning that all of this happened around seven years ago.
"Oh dear, that explains why you have practically nothing on you," The woman shook her head. "Alright, let me go in the back and see what I have for you. Enjoy your tea," She stood up with some difficulty, before glancing at me, "Ah, I completely forgot, my name is Weise, how can I call you, young man?"
I obediently took a cup of tea, smelled it once more, before taking a long, indulgent gulp.
"I am Albert."
The woman nodded happily and headed deeper into the house.
So far, most of my goals for visiting the village have been met.
I needed to know where I am, and when I am on the timeline. The timeline of Frieren wasn't obvious, but with my spell that lets me relive reading the manga, it was trivial to recall most of the dates, names, and places mentioned, even though I had terrible memory for such things, back when I was a human.
I needed to know if I was anywhere near where I knew Demon King's armies would rampage, which is frankly most of the continent, and if I was before or after Hero Himmel. I knew I wasn't in the mythical era, because the holy scripture I learned the language from was written about it. But besides that, I was dangerously clueless about the surrounding world.
I also needed to leave; the monsters on the mountain I frequented were running out, and I needed fresh test subjects. Learning where I could go was important; my little hut in the woods was redundant and served no purpose anymore; nothing kept me in this area.
The map would surely help me with knowing where I am, and a few careful questions should help me to learn if Hero Himmel was already famous, or maybe, if he has already passed. Learning if the Demon King was slain should also be relatively simple.
Hopefully, the Demon King is dead, and I don't have to worry about widespread attacks by demons and someone attempting to press-gang me into service.
Pleased, I sat alone. There was quite anticipation building, despite the possible danger of hunters recognizing me for what I am, as I may just see my very first Grimoire. I was very curious how humans do magic.
Besides fresh monster specimens, human magic grimoires were probably the most important component for my research.
After a long moment, I stood up, hearing the woman search for something in the next room over, muttering to herself. Deciding it wouldn't be much of a breach in privacy, I approached her work table and gently studied the journals and books around.
With quite interest, I submerged myself into reading about recipes and terms that meant nothing at all to the current me.