As irritating as it was to be stuck in Hebron for weeks, it's kind of nice to return and see that things haven't fallen apart since we were away. Stopping in at the core room for a report indicates that there haven't been any real problems in the interim. Some orcs have run the trap gauntlet and killed a few centipedes. A few particularly stupid ones died to the traps and Hebron absorbed the corpses.

Uncle Falcon and three Heroic adventurers whose names I haven't caught yet are coming along with us. (I may have been spending too much time paying attention to things other than people talking.)

"I'll take the opportunity to get here before Hawk comes in here with his big Epics."

"Will you be alright?" Rowan asks. "We don't know what's down here and we didn't explore very far."

"We should be able to withdraw if we run into anything tougher than we can handle readily. It's unlikely there's anything Legendary or up this close to a low level area. Most of the creatures around here are Basics with the occasional Elite, and one Heroic swamp monster that acts as a roaming boss."

"I'll be going in first," says the Heroic Rogue, a woman wearing gratuitous black leather. "My Subterfuge and Enhanced Feet skills keep almost anything from noticing me if I don't want them to."

Uncle Falcon rubs his gray beard. "We have a month to do this before we have to leave to make sure we're home before swarm season."

"If we run across something dangerous, so much the better," says the Heroic Alchemist (also cook), a halfling in a stained apron. "We're all old Heroics. We either die trying to do something Epic or we stay in our Hearths quietly accumulating aging debuffs. There's worse ways to go out than being eaten by a dragon."

"You say this now, while not currently being eaten by a dragon," I comment.

"My kind only live ten years unless we reach Epic," says the party's Wizard, some sort of blue-skinned humanoid I haven't seen any other examples of.

Uncle Falcon says, "Anything low level enough that we can bypass it without killing it, we'll leave to you kids."

"That's fair," I say.

"Happy to be the B-party," Basalt says with a chuckle.

Crazy old adventurers hoping to find something strong enough to kill them, because success will mean a chance at immortality.

We do some work on Hebron and skill training in the meantime while the Heroic party explores. We'd loaded up our luggage with wood and other materials.

"What are we going to make?" Juniper asks.

"We need some new staves, for one thing," I say. "They keep breaking."

"Well, we keep hitting things with them. Why don't we just hit things with normal sticks and keep the fancy carving to sticks we don't hit things with?"

"Sure, but it's good practice," I say. "If I'm going to make crappy carvings for practice, I may as well use them until they break and not just toss them to a core for recycling."

I spend some time making several new staves with snake carvings on them. I've noticed that they do give bonuses to [Rapid Healing].

Skills increased: Crafting (Woodworking), Enhanced Hands (Labor of Love, Mass Production)

Without being able to see the sky, I need another source of Inspiration regeneration. Which means I need to locate a ghost I can call up for [Fractal Consciousness] who can simply keep [Fantastic Inspiration] running in the background at all times.

I really don't need Estelle for this and was just humoring Juniper's ghost-mania. And I really need to stop being afraid of my past selves. The astral plane looks intimidating but I'm a reincarnator and a [Psychic Child] and it's a part of me, even if that part involved sticking a ghost tendril into a baby.

I lay down on a small pile of pillows and blankets next to Hebron's life fountain, clutching the spirit amethyst from the Living Stone Caverns and my best attempt yet at carving a snake onto a stick. I close my eyes and look beyond my physical vision.

Each of the bulbs along the endless vine of my history is a different color, shape, size, and brightness. I lived many varied lives and sometimes I succeeded, and sometimes I did not. Most of them lay dormant, with no pulse or movement. The most recent one, Liu Xing, seems to be breathing a little but otherwise shows no activity at the moment.

I'm careful not to awaken any until I've found one suitable for what I have in mind. I can readily identify their ranks and classes from here, at least, and I can assume they won't have a personality so radically different from my own that we can't get along. I'm not the sort of person that would fight my other selves.

Warriors, wizards, pirates and thieves. Among all of them, I find a Bard who never even made Elite rank. This one might be good for the task at hand, and is weak and short enough that I don't think I'd be overwhelmed by his memories if I lose containment. It's only three lives ago, so it's easy enough to reach even with my low skills. (The first life is different. That one is the vine and not the bulbs.)

I remember watching how Estelle woke up Liu Xing's memory. There's nothing stopping me from doing it myself. I don't need Necromancy for affecting things inside my own body, mind, and soul with spirits that are already a part of me.

Reaching back with a tendril of thought, I focus on the faintly glowing violet bulb. It doesn't take much for it to stir and open like the weirdest tentacle ghost flower. I gently pull a strand of it into [Fractal Consciousness] in order to communicate without simply being this other me.

[Hello?] I ask tentatively.

I can sense the dead Bard's disorientation as he adjusts to his current circumstances, and double-check to make sure that he's capable of accessing [Telepathy] from there.

[Hello!] the Bard replies after a few minutes. [A budding young psychic, are you? Trying your hand at contacting one of these ghosts that's a little less scary, hmm?]

[How much can you see from there?] I wonder.

[I can see whatever you can see. Ah, wait, do you even know my name? Your senses aren't quite good enough to pick up names yet, I don't think. Well, you'll get there. Let me introduce myself, then. Aside from our shared origin as Alexander Fizzlesnipe, I am also Galliard Avairon Mistral Nevellos.]

[Not sure where Nevellos Skymote is exactly, but nice to meet you,] I think. [I'm Drake Corwen Tempest Tiganna.]

[So, did you wake me up just to chat and experiment with your abilities, or is there something specific you need from me? I see that you are still only Basic rank, so you probably don't need me to animate a singing sword or a dancing skeleton.]

[Would you be willing to?] I ask. [Or would you rather just have another life of your own?]

[Do you need me to remind you how troublesome eating, sleeping, and other bodily functions are? Blech. No, thank you. I will happily be a ghost in your head or go back to sleep until you see fit to put me in an item or skeleton.]

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

[That's fair,] I think. [Can you produce more Inspiration by narrating my adventures than would be needed to keep a fractal of you going?]

[You want the ghost of a failed Bard to ride along narrating your life?] Galliard's mental voice ripples with amusement. [I must warn you, my style is not the most marketable. I was not a success in my time. I write in first person present tense. And I was never very good at fight scenes. And I don't do romance, not that that would be a consideration at your age.]

[Selling it isn't really my highest priority,] I think.

[And you're already almost 9 years old! It's a pity I wasn't awake sooner, but I'm sure there will be plenty of fine adventures ahead of you. I will need to go back through your memories and properly document your younger years. Do you mind?]

[If it's generating Inspiration, I really don't care what you're writing.]

[One day, you will find a way to let me animate a pen. Until then, I will work on my manuscript by writing on nothing in my mind. Congratulations! You have your very own ghost writer.]

[Fantastic.]

Galliard adds, [Did I mention that my books were so unpopular that I literally starved to death?]

Skills increased: Recollection (Astral Vision, Suppression), Enhanced Soul (Fractal Consciousness, Salubrity, Gentle Soul), Enhanced Mind (Fantastic Inspiration), Clairvoyance (Aspect Analysis)

I get up and gather my pillows and blankets before returning to the common area. The bustling sounds of conversation and the clatter of kitchen utensils greet me first.

While I've been busy, Uncle Falcon's party returned from their explorations. The Alchemist is cooking up the unidentifiable remains of some monster they must have fought. It looks and smells like meat, at any rate, so I'm not terribly picky.

"Did you have a nice nap?" Uncle Falcon asks.

"I wasn't napping," I say. "I was just doing the sort of psychic stuff that looks like napping. I was trying to set up something to generate Inspiration. It's… currently burning more Inspiration than it's producing, but I think I just need to level it up. How did your scouting go?"

"Well enough considering we don't have an actual Ranger in the party," Uncle Falcon says. "These winding tunnels are more complex than I had anticipated and it took us half the day just to map out a network of small caves that ultimately took us nowhere. How in the Void did you kids manage down here by yourselves?"

"Very carefully," I say.

"We're not going to be able to fully explore the place this year by any means. And Hawk will be back from his trip to Hush by next year and will be muscling in. Hopefully we'll find something worthwhile before then. Seems almost too much to hope for at this point to find something to propel us to Epic."

"I haven't even been able to figure out the criteria," I admit.

"Do you think subjugating those orcs will end up being necessary?" Uncle Falcon asks. "We haven't found their Hearth yet, but we're definitely keeping an eye out for it."

"Maybe, but they haven't been back since we got here at any rate."

"Well, if they do show up, make sure you're hidden in the core room and they don't catch you napping."

The next time Uncle Falcon and his party return, it's with much more interesting news than that they found something edible.

"We found a mine!" Uncle Falcon exclaims.

He comes up to my table and lays a lumpy chunk of reddish, slightly shiny ore. I don't even need my skills to guess what it is, but I put them to use anyway.

Skills increased: Enhanced Mind (Mental Encyclopedia), Knowledge (Geology)

"Native copper!" I say. "Please tell me that it was actually on the walls or something and not that there were animated copper monsters attacking you."

Uncle Falcon laughs heartily. "No, this mine looked like an actual mine! The monsters in the upper floors are bats and spiders. We left them for you. The lower floors were full of dwarf-shaped skeletons, and we cleared those out while we were there."

"What was the final boss?" I ask.

"We didn't find any bosses, which is a little concerning," Uncle Falcon says. "You and Basalt should take a thorough look through the place with your Clairvoyance and [Stone Sense]. I get the feeling we missed some secret areas. Just be sure to come get us if you run across anything Heroic or higher, or more Elites at once than you can handle."

I nod. "Of course."

The Heroic party escorts us to the entrance to the mine dungeon to make sure we don't get lost or run across any orcs or wandering monsters we wouldn't be able to deal with. Part of me feels like it's overkill, but I don't complain. It's certainly less nerve-wracking than our prior very careful explorations.

You have discovered the Copper Mine.

Not the most imaginative of names, but it's concise.

Tucked away incongruously in a tunnel too narrow to be practical to get ore out of, a creaky wooden door is hardly more than some rotting boards attached to hinges. Clairvoyance doesn't detect any hint of actual rot in the wood, though, so it seems the dungeon just liked the aesthetic. At least this core is clearer on what an ancient, abandoned ruin should look like than Hebron was with its clean door and shiny fixtures.

The higher levels set up watch outside (by which I mean two of them set up watch, and the other two break out a game of cards) and we head in.

Past the rickety door lies a rough stone corridor shored up by wooden beams and pillars. Flickering crystal lamps hang from the ceiling at intervals too far to fully illuminate the mine. The auras of low level monsters stand out in the dim lighting, and I mentally point out their positions to my party.

The bats and spiders on this floor don't have any unusual characteristics or behaviors as compared to similar monsters elsewhere. By which I mean they annoyingly fly up in our faces and try to entangle us in webs as usual.

We fight our way past the low level monsters, carefully searching for anything the Heroic party might have missed. They're higher level than us, but we have a few skills they lack nonetheless. We leave the ore for now. We'll grab as much as we can carry before we leave the mine but we'll finish exploring it first.

As we go further in, more and more places look like they've collapsed. Shafts and corridors here and there are blocked off by rubble and broken beams. I might be more concerned about the safety of being in here if I couldn't tell that no actual collapse took place here. The dungeon simply spawned rubble to block the way.

"No wonder they didn't find any bosses," Basalt says, standing before one of the blocked off tunnels. "I suppose they couldn't be bothered to go digging. Mighty Heroic adventurers afraid of getting their hands dirty."

[Do you want to dig them up?] I ask. [How long would this even take?]

"Not sure. Let's keep going for now. This place has plenty of secrets."

We kill all the monsters in the upper floors that we can easily get to, but I can sense more with [Aura Sight] past the walls and Basalt reports detecting plenty of additional passages.

Skills increased: Athletics (Dodging), Blocking (Cover, Staffwork), Striking (Bashing), Enhanced Heart (Rapid Healing), Enhanced Feet (Freedom of Movement)

Once we get down to the lower floors where the Heroics already cleared out the monsters, we take it slower and grow more cautious. They missed a lot and there's no guarantee that whatever they didn't find won't find us.

Ten paces into the fifth floor, a powerful presence sends an involuntary shiver up my spine.

[Back!] I tell my party hastily. [Back up the stairs, now!]

My companions don't need to be told twice. We're already scrambling up the stairs by the time the presence makes itself audibly known. A moan like a crushing wave of terror echoes through the mine. Fortunately, it's the sort of mental attack that makes people want to flee rather than freeze. Doubly fortunately, it doesn't follow us up the stairs.

"What in the Void was that?" Anise wonders once everyone manages to stop fleeing (around the second floor).

"Wraith," I say. "Heroic rank."

"The final boss?" Rowan asks.

I shake my head. "Don't think so. I think it's there to scare low level parties away from the deeper floors."

"That would explain why it didn't appear to Uncle Falcon's party," Anise says. "What now?"

Basalt goes over to a seam of native copper jutting out of the wall, and taps it with his pickaxe. "Grab some copper on the way out. This will come out easily enough."

I join in with my own flint pick, and while I don't have any dwarfy bonuses, I still get some out myself. Enough for what I'm planning, at any rate. The metal I dig up myself has a bit of my own essence in it, and none of anyone else's essence. Perfect.

Skills increased: Clairvoyance (Aura Sight, Psychometry), Search (Inspection, Digging), Discipline (Fear Resistance)

With our metallic bounty in our packs, we return to the entrance where the Heroic party is waiting for us. From her smug aura, it seems that Belladonna the Rogue has been winning at cards. We debrief on what we found down there.

"No surprise about the blocked passages," Uncle Falcon says. "Sometimes they lead somewhere, sometimes they don't. And you're right, the wraith is probably a Discipline check against low level parties getting in over their heads. The mine goes down seven floors. Whatever the final boss is still has to be done there somewhere. Unfortunately, I don't think we can access it right now. We'll need to come back later, next year most likely. Maybe we can find someone with earth manipulation skills to recruit."

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