As the winter progressed, Simon lost himself in his research. That wasn't enough to bind him to the town he found himself, of course. He could perform these experiments anywhere. Even as he pursued them, though, he was swallowed up in a web of favors and friendships that captured him more quickly and thoroughly than any beast he'd fought.

It wasn't all perfect, of course. Some of the women who made it clear they'd love to be courted, and a couple that would have been happy with a dalliance, soured on him as he politely rebuffed their advances.

He couldn't in good conscience, though. Not only did his interest in romance seem to wane more with every life, but when he realized just how close he and Freya had come to ending up here instead of Crovar? Well, that killed it for him.

If only we'd stayed here instead of there, Simon told himself as he studied his map in a mirror he'd fashioned from a silver coin.

Where he sat was less than 20 miles from the road they'd taken their wagon down. That would have been years in the future; he would have arrived much too late to save this place in their current hour of need, but even if it had been a shell of its former self, it would have been worlds better than the way that the Raithwaite family had treated him.

At this point, Simon no longer mourned Freya. He didn't really mourn any woman, and when he pressed himself on the issue one dark morning, he could admit that he'd burned out the part of his heart that needed love over his turbulent lifetimes. He could still regret his mistakes, though, and not knowing that he'd walked right by a better option certainly qualified.

That winter, Simon learned a great many things. He didn't have a shop that was well-equipped for experiments to draw definitive conclusions, but even so, some experiments yielded good results. The first was that wands couldn't stand up to greater words, but staves could, once or twice. Stone did okay, but objects of wood seemed to handle magic better than metal, though silver and gold did a better job than iron or steel. The word was still out on copper, though it was a common enough metal in some parts of the world; here, he only found it in coins, and his finances were, for the moment, fairly tight, so he resisted the urge to melt any more currency down than he already had.

Instead, he did things the only fashioned way, and with the help of the town smith, he forged a dagger with just the right sort of handle to embed the large crimson garnet he had. Then, with some careful work, he embedded that weapon with a word of transfer that linked to the stone instead of him and a word of lesser lesser transfer in the hilt.

Then, with the snows piled high, he went hunting to test it. The lairs he'd purged were still empty, but something had dug its way out of one of the burrows he'd collapsed, so he went back in there for round two. This time, though, he took things slower. That was both because there was only a bare handful of goblins and because, this time, he was more interested in testing his new weapon than in purging everything that moved.

Simon flooded the burrow with light and took on the shrieking goblins one at a time, watching the life drain from their eyes over the space of several seconds. It wasn't a quick death, and it certainly would have been cruel to do to a human, but then, these weren't humans. They were monsters, and he was hunting them in a fairly unconventional way.

Though the gemstone never started glowing, the fact that it would make his light stone glow if he used the dagger to power it told him it had worked. Otherwise, there were no other signs. He couldn't even feel the lesser lesser transfer drip-feeding him with the stolen power, but then, that was the point. He didn't want to be able to feel it. He wanted to be energized a little at all times, reducing his chances of addiction but offsetting his magical experiments completely.

By the time spring was threatening to burst out in full force, he might have even been a little younger than he was when he first arrived in this town. He certainly felt better, though that was mostly just the progress he was making on everything else. By his math, he was pretty sure the distillation of a single goblin wasn't worth quite one year of his life, and it took nearly a week to drain it completely.

I could probably double that dose, or even triple it, and calibrate that dose more carefully if I had all the damn runes the Murani did, he thought to himself. The gaps in his knowledge, though shrinking, still existed, and that frustrated him. Every day, he learned something new, though, like the fact that a greater and a lesser word didn't just cancel out like he'd assumed they would.

He didn't have a way to make definitive measurements, but a word of greater power used up a year of his life, making it ten or twelve times more powerful than a regular word. Likewise, a word of lesser power used a week of his life, making it about a quarter as expensive. So, eventually, he used them in combinations for certain circuits, making compound words that were three times and three-quarters of the strength of a standard word.

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Repeating patterned combinations of such words verbally would have been silly, but in a written form, it was manageable. As much as he enjoyed learning how to fine-tune those powers, though, once winter was finally done with them, Simon helped the good people of Ordenvale plant wheat and other vegetables.

More than once, he felt almost like he was being watched, and he was tempted to believe that his doppelgänger had arrived to make some trouble, but even using limited efforts to scry with his mirror and a pendulum was inconclusive. For a few days, he even considered summoning a demon to see what he might learn from such an encounter, though he decided against it for obvious reasons.

It's an experiment I'll need to try someday, Simon told himself, but it's one that I will need a bit more privacy for in case something bad happens. However, during these efforts, he discovered something interesting.

His words of Lesser connection didn't reveal any threats related to vampires, doppelgängers, or even gods, though eventually, after a few more efforts, it did say that there was significant wealth to be had nearby.

At first, Simon thought that meant his lost level two dungeon might be close by, but a few follow-up questions clarified the issue. It was not gold or even coins that were in the hills, but other mineral wealth. After a few nights, he was given hints of iron, tin, silver, and even gemstones in the mountains. He was intrigued, and when the planting was done, Simon marched out into the mountains to find out how right or wrong his little pendulum was.

The world was a big place, though, so before he went, he made a tool to aid in his search. With the help of a quartz crystal, he crafted a dowsing rod made from a birch branch and inscribed with words of location. Then he set off into the mountains for what he told everyone else was a hunting trip. The only thing that Simon was hunting, though, was the rumors of wealth he'd uncovered.

The mountains around Ordanvale were not unfamiliar to him. If he went far enough north and then crossed them to the west, he'd eventually reach his cabin. If he followed their curve to the south, eventually, he'd reach the wyvern that he'd killed several times.

In between those two landmarks, though, were ragged snowcapped peaks dominated by sporadic pine forests, scree-covered slopes, and granite escarpments that the locals referred to as the Arpanian Range.

Simon didn't care what they were called. He thought they were much more beautiful than the Raiden Mountains that hemmed in Ionia from its neighbors. Those were arid and dusty, dotted with scrub, whereas his current environs were full of life. Some of it even wanted to eat him, but Simon welcomed their efforts to try.

Over the course of his week in the woods, climbing to ever higher slopes as he made a vast thirty-mile loop that eventually brought him back to town, he found a strange obelisk with words too eroded to read, a small village, two mountain lions, a goblin lair, and the tracks of an owlbear, though he never found the beast that made it. He even saw a pair of griffons prowling the sky once, but they never got close enough for him to worry about.

Still, as interesting as those sites were, none of that was the important part of his exploration. What mattered was what he found along the way. His divining rod wasn't perfect, but when he got within a couple miles of one of the deposits he was thinking of, it pointed like an arrow to it.

Then, with a little effort and exploration, he was able to find some part of the deposit where the vein touched the surface. After he found all the places he'd made note of during his scrying, he looked for more, and though he found only one batch of gems, one of the streams did seem to have gold in it, though he knew nothing about panning to retrieve some.

By the time he returned, he had a pouch full of ore samples and even a large, uncut ruby that he'd pried out of a deposit. More importantly, though, he had their locations on the map.

"Any one of these would be enough to build a town around," Simon told himself as he walked back to Ordanvale. "With all of them, though, I suppose I could carve out a kingdom if I wanted to."

He didn't want to, of course. He had no idea how much such a change would affect future events, but even so, he definitely wanted to exploit at least the silver vein.

When he got back to the village, he handled the information carefully and held quiet discussions with the headman about them. Simon didn't do so out of greed but because he didn't want to entirely upend the small town's way of life. It was still recovering from the scars that the goblins had left behind.

"We'll have to tell the Earl," the man said. Simon didn't like the sound of that. "Technically, the lands in the mountain all belong to him."

"And if he plans on doing any of the work in excavating the deposits, or at least sending me men to do it, I'm inclined to agree with that," Simon answered. "But if he's not…"

"He's much more likely to celebrate your hard work and then extract his cut, as well as the king's," the headman admitted.

"Then I'm much more inclined to tell him to go to hell," Simon growled. He'd had enough of people taking their cut in his previous lives. If he was going to put together an operation to fund his research, then he wasn't going to give half of it away to those who didn't contribute.

The headman didn't like that idea, but Simon didn't care. "Maybe you should just forget about this conversation, and I'll find a few guys around town to help me get this started instead."

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