Player 0.4 [You have died.] [Reset in progress.]

I squinted ahead, still getting used to the brightness of the room.

I'm in a shop?

I found myself in what appeared to be a bookstore. Small tables and colorful couches and armchairs littered the floor. The walls were made up of shelves stuffed with books of every type. A homey smell of paper and hot tea filled the air.

Behind a counter on my right sat a thin woman with her heeled black boots raised atop a table. She held a cup of tea in her left hand and a book in her right. However, given her long bangs of black hair, I had no idea how she could read or see anything. Her bangs covered her eyes and hung to the tip of her nose.

"Not that I get all too many customers either…." The woman muttered to herself and turned a page of the book she was reading.

I gathered myself up and closed up the wardrobe doors behind me. It felt only proper.

"Where am I?" I asked and sat across from the woman on a bar stool.

She didn't bother looking up at me and instead set down her cup and tapped on a little signpost on the bar table.

"Lisa's Books and Tea Shop?" I repeated the title on the signpost to her. "Are you Lisa?"

"Bingo." She snapped her left finger and pointed her index finger toward me. "That's right. I'm Lisa. Ah, just so you know, I don't like parting with any of my books, so you can't buy them. You can order a cup of tea and read a book inside if you want. Or you can leave. I don't care either way."

She turned another page. She honestly didn't seem to care one bit.

Who was this strange woman?

I gazed out the shop windows, but there wasn't much of a view. The glass appeared not to have been cleaned in a decade or so. As a result, it was impossible to make anything of the outside except a few shapes and shadows. However, while the windows were unclean, the interior was well-maintained and cozy.

"Well, what can I get you if you're sticking around?" Lisa asked. "I just brewed some green tea from the southern mountains of Kobar for myself."

I smiled. A Kobar knight might have killed me in the past, but their tea never had.

"Why not? I'll have a cup of that," I said.

Lisa poured a large cup of hot green tea from a cast iron black kettle and placed the cup before me.

I put a silver coin on the bar and took the hot cup into my hands. The warmth felt soothing.

"Young man, I have good tea. But it's not a silver coin good."

That didn't stop her from pocketing the coin, however.

I took a sip of tea and smiled. It was good. And best of all, I didn't have any traumatic memories come up at its scent. Images of a lush forest came to mind instead.

"Keep it," I said. "I don't have any copper coins on me right now. And I'll likely come by again."

I wasn't sure if it was the mulungu tea Remlend had given me earlier kicking in or this strange little shop, but I felt oddly at peace in here. It was as if all my worries and concerns had melted away. Of course, it helped how nonchalant this woman was, even though I barged in through her wardrobe.

"I'm Luca, by the way," I introduced myself belatedly.

Lisa set down her book and appeared to have focused her attention on me. Not that I could honestly tell. Her black curtain bangs made it impossible to see what she was gazing at. For all I knew, she might have had three eyes or none at all.

"And what brought you here today, Luca?" She asked.

I could only gauge her expression by the movement of her lips and body language. By the light lines around her mouth, I guessed her age to be in her late thirties or early forties.

"It was by accident," I replied. "I took a path I had never seen and found myself here."

"By accident, was it? Is that how you stumbled in here through my wardrobe?" She looked amused. The corners of her mouth curled up.

I nodded.

"Yes, I didn't expect to find myself in your wardrobe either," I said and took another sip of tea.

There was no benefit in divulging the secret passageway and the portal mirrors. That was a secret of the Frey manor, and I intended on keeping it to myself.

But who knows? It is her shop, so she may know more about the portal in her wardrobe than me. She certainly wasn't probing me any further on how I came to be in her wardrobe.

"Where is this shop located anyhow?" I asked, changing the subject.

I turned to look out the dirty windows again, but it was impossible to gauge the location.

"East Genise," Lisa replied. "I'd tell you what street we're on, but I think it changed again this week, and I haven't bothered to step out and check what it's called now."

I nodded my head in understanding.

East Genise lacked every bit of order that West Genise had. The streets rarely had signs, and the buildings were constantly demolished and rebuilt within a matter of days. It was the embodiment of chaos.

In my original life, I had lived my later years in East Genise, but if I stepped out into the street right now, I would have been as lost as any out-of-town tourist. The city would look too different from what I remembered in the future.

"I rarely ever see any customers be honest. I normally have the whole place to myself. So I drink tea and read all day by myself. But it's not unwelcome to have someone drop by now and then."

Lisa lounged back in her chair, looking both relaxed and amused.

"Don't you need customers to afford to live?" I asked. "Isn't this a shop?"

"No." She waved her hand. "This shop is more of a hobby than anything else. I don't need the income. I set it up so I could have some interesting company from time to time."

She patted her pocket, in which coins clanked against one another.

"Oh. But don't get any ideas. Just because I don't care about making money doesn't mean the tea is free. I'm keeping the silver."

I chuckled and continued to enjoy my tea.

"I wouldn't have asked for it back," I said.

What a strange person. Eccentric? The word didn't quite fit. Eccentric typically indicated a level of energy someone exhibited. On the other hand, this woman oozed a sense of calmness and lacked any hurry. It was as if time had no consequence for her.

I looked about the place again.

"How long have you had this shop?" I asked.

She laughed.

"Ah, I wonder that too. I lost track of time. I know how many books I've finished, though."

"How many have you read?"

"212,926."

I choked on my tea at her answer.

Looking at her, I didn't see how she could read so many books for her age. Unless she was a sorceress or had some other magical means, or was she messing with me?

"You must be a fast reader," I mused.

"I am." She smiled. "Ah, but I have re-read some books quite a few times. One of my favorites I have re-read sixty-seven times. It changed every time I read it, so I never got bored."

There was something odd about how she tapped her fingers and smirked while talking as if she was in on a joke I would not understand.

I take it back. She's eccentric. The word fits her perfectly.

"So, Luca, what's your story? You seem troubled. I can tell."

"I found out my maid had poisoned my tea all this time," I responded truthfully.

"What's the specific problem, though?" Lisa asked.

I chuckled at her odd question. Being poisoned wasn't problematic enough for this woman. She was right, though. That wasn't my issue either. Poison, and even death, I could handle; it was the circumstances that had me troubled.

"She's the beloved sister of a good friend of mine," I said. "So I can't simply kill or toss her in a cell."

"And yet she poisoned her brother's good friend?" Lisa asked.

"Well, she doesn't know we're friends," I said.

Or rather, that we will become friends. Fin and I hadn't met in this lifetime yet. However, we were excellent friends in my original life.

I picked up my warm cup of green tea and took a long sip.

"But regardless of that, she still poisoned you. Do you know why?" Lisa asked.

"I don't know. I'm not worth poisoning; I'm not all that important." I shook my head. "And she's not a bad person."

"One doesn't need to be a bad person to do bad things," Lisa waved her hand. "Nor does one have to be worthy or important enough to be harmed. Sometimes, it's the circumstances. Maybe she was ordered by someone?"

I sighed.

"I'm not sure. But if she was ordered, I suspect it was by a rather troublesome organization."

However, I didn't understand what the Spiders could gain from harming the Luca Frey of this period. I was known as a prankster and a fool, hardly someone worth sending an assassin after.

"What's the issue, though?" Lisa probed again. "Can't you just get your good friend's help regarding his sister? Comm-uni-ca-tion. Young man, sometimes things are far simpler if you communicate properly."

Clank.

I set my teacup down. The dots abruptly connected. But unlike how Lisa was suggesting, the matter was conceivably far more complicated rather than simpler.

"No… I can't communicate with him. I–I don't know where he is." I stared down into my teacup. A small piece of leaf floated at the top.

"How can you not know? Aren't you good friends?" Lisa asked.

Damn it. I'm an idiot.

Fin had told me bits and pieces of his childhood. And the start of his nightmarish abyss was when Denise died, and he was taken in by the Spiders. However, what if that wasn't quite right? What if he had already been taken at this point? What if he was being held hostage while they had Denise to do their bidding?

He had undergone so much trauma in his younger years; how trustworthy was his memory of his youth when I met him in my original life? I knew from experience how my memories were full of blacked-out gaps to retain a certain semblance of sanity.

Perhaps that's why she looked like that when I mentioned Fin?

I recalled Denise's shocked expression when I asked about Fin a few days back. I summed it up to her being protective over him, but what if that wasn't it all? What if she reacted out of worry that I had discovered her connection to the Spiders?

And besides, the detail of Fin's recollection that I had always found odd was that the Spiders didn't begin the mana treatment on him right away like they did with other gifted children. As Fin put it, it wasn't all that terrible initially. A kind man looked after him, such that he didn't even realize he was in the clutches of the notorious criminal organization. However, one day everything suddenly shifted, and the kind man tossed him to the wolves to undergo the painful treatment to increase his mana levels.

[ Intelligence: +1 ]

[ Intelligence: 53 ]

I stared at the blue screen that appeared before me. The System confirmed my theory.

"Damn it. I think he's already been captured by the troublesome organization," I concluded.

"Well, you ought to do something about that then." Lisa picked up her book again, and her attention seemed to have shifted away from me.

"I have to go." I jumped out of my stool. "Thanks for the tea."

"Toodle-oo!" Lisa called out after me. "Drop in through my wardrobe, or preferably the front door, again anytime."

If I didn't know what I needed to do next about Denise's betrayal, now I had a sense of direction for Round 8. I needed to find Fin and prevent all the needless deaths that dominoed after his capture.

Unfortunately, that also meant I would need to take on the Spiders, the number one, most dangerous, and most powerful syndicate on the entire continent.

 

AlekAundra

One fun little tidbit about this and the past couple of chapters is that I wrote them back in March 2022, according to Google Docs (well, I edited and updated them since then). I have a habit of writing future chapters/segments when inspiration hits, knowing they won't see the light of day for a while. So it's exciting to see the story get to one of those points. Har har har...

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