Since no one was interested in Simon, or even the fact that he was the only one walking uphill while everyone else ran down, he decided to check the temples. He wasn't exactly interested in beating the answer out of someone on what was almost certainly the worst day of their lives. He knew. He'd lived here in the years leading up to this moment, and it was as close to paradise as he'd probably ever come.

While he didn't think any of the Temples had a calendar on their walls or anything, he'd be able to get pretty close just by seeing what offerings had been left and what holy days were coming up. If I can't find what I'm looking for there, I can just ransack the queen's library. Surely she'll have messages from the last few days that I can…

Even that glancing thought about Elthena was too much. He might not pine over her in the way he had with Freya for life after life, but it was a wound he didn't want to rub salt in unless he had to, and the easiest way to find the answers he needed was anywhere but the palace.

In the high city, all of the most important temples were on the same street, and surprisingly, he didn't see a single looter on it. The Way of the Revered was a winding road near a precipice that made it stand two stories above the next street, letting all of the gods look out and take in both the city and the sea.

The Temple of the Sea was the largest of the fine buildings, as it was in every Ionian city he'd been to. It was flanked on either side with slightly smaller marble palaces dedicated to the Goddess of Wine and Harvests and the God of War. Other smaller temples, including some dedicated to Elthena's ancestors, who had been elevated to the status of deity upon their death, continued on in a line down the winding way, but Simon didn't think his answer would be hard to find.

He started in the Temple to the Sea God, but only because it had been so long since he'd walked inside the place that he wanted to take a moment to appreciate its mosaics despite the distant rumbling. He was in no hurry. It would be hours until the lava reached the palace.

Though he was certain he'd find the answer more quickly in his next stop, Simon took a moment to appreciate the artistry of Ionar's second most beautiful building, apart from the palace. Despite the fresh cracks that had almost certainly been caused by the violent tremors, the illusion of undulating waves on the floor of the building was still intact, and Simon took a moment to appreciate not just the artistry but the cost of the endeavor.

The floor had been made to look like waves in a delicate repeating pattern, but the walls were the true beauty. Every one of them was covered in a frieze depicting some myth or legend of the sea, and even at the peak of his talents, Simon wasn't certain he could have painted some of them any better. He took several minutes to take those in on both a technical and purely aesthetic level before the distant thunder of the volcano goaded him forward.

The last time he'd been here was before he'd been an artist and understood the price of good, ultramarine pigments. Now that he was looking at the place with a new eye, it might as well have been covered in gold.

Simon found prayers against the summer storms on the altar and concluded that it was early summer. That corresponded with his dim memory of events, but after helping himself to the silver that had been left as offerings, he moved on to the Temple of Harvests. There, he found more specific information about the cycles of the moon and the upcoming harvest prayers. This disaster was happening in the 11th year of Elthena's reign, four or five days after the Fire Moon, which was basically June in the calendar he'd grown up with.

Measuring time had been a frustrating thing for Simon across his many lives for a couple different reasons. The first was because the literacy rates across the world were so low. Ionar's was quite high compared to Brin's, but even so, less than half of the nobles could read and write. The rest used slaves, and amongst commoners, it was a vanishingly rare skill limited to certain trades, such as merchants and artists.

On top of that, every kingdom and region had a different calendar. The people of Ionia reset their calendar with every ruler, while the Murani measured their time from the founding of Zurari and not the beginning of the God-King's reign, which surprised him.

It was a mess, which made it hard for him to track what was going to happen and where. "My map is in pretty good shape, and I've noted most of the levels on it," Simon told himself as he walked to the palace. "Now I'm going to need to figure out a calendar and get everyone to adopt it, just so I can make a proper plan."

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In theory, that was the right way to handle the Pit. He understood that. What he really needed to do was spend a few lives indifferent to the suffering of people and just study the world around him. He needed to map out the important events, note them all down, and decide on a plan. Helades and the Oracle would both agree with that.

Well, no, they wouldn't, actually, Simon corrected himself as he made his way up the lava-streaked road to the palace and noted that its lush gardens were on fire. The Oracle would tell me that change is only possible with that understanding but not necessarily desirable, and Helades would tell me just to follow her plan.

Sometimes, Simon was tempted to throw both away and start over, which he supposed was what he'd done in his last life when he'd used level zero to fix levels four and six. Maybe that was the right decision, and maybe it wasn't. He didn't know, but right now, it felt better to fret about it than think too much about the building he was walking into.

Gazing at the burning gardens made him think of all the days he'd spent teaching his son as well as the other members of his class. That was touching, even if he felt like the fire ruined the memories of watching boys learning to swordfight to some degree. He didn't feel the same emotional tug when he entered the grand hall of the palace. That place only made him think of Elthena's war councils, and he didn't have nearly as much emotional attachment to those.

"What's even the point of all of this anymore?" he asked, stopping before the empty throne and the open portal to the forest in one of the archways behind it like he expected an answer. "Why do I even need to finish the Pit? What is waiting for me if I finish, anyway?"

Simon spoke to himself, but he addressed the room as if he could make Helades respond and address him for his impudence. She wouldn't, of course, but he was feeling rather impudent, so he sat on the queen's throne as he continued to process all of this.

He'd only planned to stay here for as long as it took to get to the forest, but he'd already been in Ionar for an hour now, and a few more minutes wouldn't hurt anything. So he sat there on the queen's gaudy, golden throne and looked at the volcano erupting through the windows on one side of the room and the buildings of the upper city burning out of the windows on the other.

"And to think, I did this, didn't I? Some version of me, at least," he sighed. Part of Simon expected his evil twin to pop up and complain about the way he'd phrased that. But nothing of the sort happened. Instead, he sat there, like the ruler of all he surveyed, and wondered why he was still doing this.

"Forty-five deaths, and all so I can be the king of ashes," he complained. "I might as well make a farm after all. Maybe I don't need to save the whole world. Maybe I should stake out a valley like that vampiric bitch did and rule over it with an iron fist. Then everything else can burn."

He said the words, but he didn't mean them. While Simon wasn't sure he wanted to finish or even leave the Pit at this point, the last thing he wanted to do was stop making the world a better place. He needed to. It was why he kept doing this, and while he didn't think that either one of the women who were trying to tell him how to go about it was right, he hoped he could learn from both.

Simon might have stayed there for hours pondering the topic if a fireball hadn't struck the roof directly, flinging pieces of roof tile and plaster throughout the hall. That was his cue to get up and walk to the portal. One more rock from the heavens could very easily shatter the arch, and then he'd be stuck here for another life, and as grumpy as he was, he had no wish to fight a lava titan, if only because it would lock in the level in its miserable state.

I could not bear to see Ionar look like that in life after life, he thought with a shake of his head as he remembered just how broken this city had looked when he'd seen what the demon seed had done to its ruins.

The dark forest was utterly unchanged from his last visit, and after a cursory glance, Simon left the smoky throne room behind for the soft rain of the forest, immediately feeling his mood improved. This was the first level he'd ever completed, and he'd only reset it by accident once in all the runs since then, so it had been a very, very long time since he'd been here.

The first thing he did was draw his sword, even though he knew it would do almost nothing to the beast in question, as he tried to remember which way he was supposed to go.

Was it slightly left or slightly right? He wondered. All he could really remember was crawling beneath a fallen log once, but he didn't see any of those around. In theory, the way the road was shaped, he had at least a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right, but something about visiting levels that had been solved for most of the time he'd been in the pit made him feel completely off.

As he set off into the woods, he kept an ear open for the sound of predators. The owlbear was frighteningly fast, but it would only take one spell to cut it down, so Simon only needed a moment to turn ambush into victory.

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