Balor left the identity of Erul the hunter. He recreated the man with the stored soul matter that was actually converted from Erul’s own matter. For the man, this sudden rebirth was just as shocking as his sudden death days prior. He woke up in the middle of the massacred remains of the tree cutters. Naked from head to toe, he ran away, screaming back to the village, definitely becoming the biggest tale of his small community for decades to come.

  Balor could still shapeshift into Erul at any moment with great resolution in appearance and a decent resolution in behavior. He’d been the man long enough to have a lot of information to work with, now encoded into his soul matter. It wasn’t likely to be useful, however.

  He spent a lot of time traversing the continent, getting a better feel for the world than what he started with. Time passed rather quickly during this process; days turned into months and then years.

  Initially, he planned on swapping identities to investigate other settlements for the same belief system, but that hardly needed any more research. The entire first civilization had originated from the same predecessors, and the story behind The Call extended back to the cave-dwelling days to a common ancestor.

  He was going to find that story whether other settlements titled it ‘The Call’ or not. They definitely had different versions of the same story, and they were in conflict over which version of the tale was the most accurate.

  This didn’t mean Balor actually spent those years actively participating in the world. He turned invisible and scoped out his consciousness while his subconscious handled all the information gathering.

  At the end, he had a better picture of the environment and the current events surrounding the first civilization. He subconsciously stored everything into a base of knowledge that he could draw from, just like he could from his stellar core.

  This subconscious information-gathering streak ended with one key incident that he actually had to wake up for. It happened thirteen years after he was Erul.

  He ‘woke up’ from his ‘slumber’ and found himself idling near a trade route. Creature pulled caravans, and small teams of hominids traveled this route often, each with clearly valuable information that he could use.

  His soul matter subconsciously spoke to him just like his stellar core right after he woke up.

  Dissected species: 11,347

  Assimilated individuals: 1,398

  That was more than he thought it would be. He had subconsciously stalked and assimilated a lot of hominids during the last thirteen years, copying all of their information and then recreating them from scratch to let them go.

  Luckily for him, these assimilations weren’t as bad as Erul, who lost time in between and woke up in a completely different place. These were relatively quick and efficient procedures that the victims could pass off as some affliction, a hallucination, or a dream.

  The information gathered this way was invaluable. He didn’t need to examine them granularly to know how large his understanding of Veilthorn and its first civilization was now. After thirteen years of that ‘sleep,’ he felt more confident about the world.

  The reason he woke up demanded his immediate attention. It had breached his subconscious’s operational capabilities.

  Because he was in the middle of an ongoing slaughter.

  He was a young woman named Rakina, a trader’s daughter, soon to be coupled with a man from a settlement near the kingdom of Karatoca.

  He was currently being dragged by the hair into the woods, and a raiding party of bandits had attacked the trade caravan. She was among the spoils that the bandits intended to keep.

  Balor had additional context from one of these bandits that he’d assimilated during his sleep. These men were getting resources to be bandits. They traded stolen goods and slaves with Vaaltorenia.

  Definitely not the ideal situation to wake up in.

  The traders and the rest of her family were murdered with crude weapons as she was dragged across into the bushes to be tied up with the rest of the looted goods.

  He was subconsciously struggling against this, playing her expected role rather perfectly. Females were physically weaker hominids, and the fear and anxieties of a million years were flooding his mind, taking over his actions.

  This hasn’t happened for thirteen years, since he was asleep. He had been around this trade route for a long time, and by bandit standards, this was a bold move. They usually stuck to plaguing smaller communities in the fringes, not directly attacking a kingdom’s relatively important individuals.

  Trader families were held in high regard all across the civilization. This was a particularly ambitious raid for bandits. They were basically asking for retribution from much better-equipped warriors from a kingdom.

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  Bandits weren’t supposed to be wise, but this wasn’t going to be a sustainable exploit of resources. Just this one brutal attack would be enough for Karatoca to send armed men with their traders for the next few decades.

  Balor took over Rakina, extinguishing her panic completely. Getting into the role, he screamed and thrashed exactly like Rakina to not break the initial impression.

  He had to know what these ambitious bandits were doing. Rakina was a useless assimilation for now. It was a coddled young female perspective that didn’t offer much in the way of expanding the context of the current problem. Struggling against the man’s superior strength, he bided his time as he dragged Rakina deeper into the forest.

  They arrived at a donkey-pulled carriage decorated with leaves and ferns to blend into the surroundings. The bandits had piled all the loot from the trader caravan there, with more on the way.

  When they arrived, they were the only two there, which made Balor’s situation very precarious as a weak young woman.

  The man tossed Rakina unceremoniously into the same pile of goods, bent down with a groan, and grabbed her ankles. Gathering her legs with one hand, he felt around his waist for a length of rope.

  If Rakina were in control, she would’ve mistaken this as the first step of an opportunistic assault, but Balor knew something was different about this whole situation. This man had no ill intentions with a young woman like a proper bandit. He started tying her up with complete indifference.

  Something is not adding up. Was she targeted because she’s somehow important?

  That couldn’t be the case. Rakina was nothing special. She was from a middle-status family. She was actually about to be paired downward the social hierarchy to a young man in a bordering settlement. She wasn’t particularly attractive either, her only real charm being her young age. Her father, as much as she knew, wasn’t an exceptionally important man either.

  It was more than likely that this bandit was someone with more discipline than a simple-minded miscreant. He seemed to value the task at hand without getting distracted by a vulnerable woman.

  Balor stopped screaming and struggling right away. Rakina’s body relaxed in a split second, her expression turning flat immediately.

  The man suddenly turned to her, noticing the abrupt change.

  Balor split Rakina’s head open from the mouth, his horizontal slit emerging from within as the rest of her body dissolved into soul matter.

  “What in the—”

  The man gasped, leaping away from his grotesque mid-transformation form. He unsheathed a dagger, his body trembling in fear.

  Balor cast the light of assimilation on the man, engulfing him in a bright cone of light. His body froze, the dagger falling off his relaxed fingers. He stared at Balor with his terrified eyes, his mouth wide open in a permanent scream.

  The rest of Rakina’s shape dissolved into soul matter around him, as his serpent body materialized, twice as large as the largest hominid.

  The blue light dissolved the bandit mid-air, dismantling him into soul matter that could be repurposed. Balor made himself invisible just in time to avoid two bandits hauling a long wooden box. He now had soul matter worth two individuals, Rakina and the Bandit.

  While cloaked in complete invisibility, he slowly shapeshifted into the bandit. This gave him a crucial piece of information right away.

  This man was no bandit.

  This was a Vaalthorenian soldier dressed as one.

  “Grodal! Where is that woman?” Balor heard as he woke up.

  He was pretending to be passed out to make an excuse for not losing Rakina. Ideally, he could’ve recreated her and tied her up, but he felt her form would be useful for a different plan.

  The man kneeling over him was named Darvek, and he was the second-oldest soldier of their unit. This made him a group leader of sorts in the absence of their commander. Darvek was in charge of filling up the donkey carriage with all the loot.

  Grodal, the man Balor assimilated with, was a direct underling of Darvek, who now seemed to be more disappointed in him than ever. Grodal was one of the best soldiers in the unit, and now he had failed to secure a young woman one-third his size.

  “I–I have no idea!” he said, looking around frantically. “She was right here!”

  “Did you kill her?” Darvek asked, looking up and down. “I said no playing with that thing. The ransom could’ve gotten us a hundred like her. You couldn’t wait, could you? Where did you hide the body?!”

  “I didn’t do anything!” Balor said in an exasperated voice. “I was tying her up right here, see, the ropes!” he pointed at the limp rope now lying across the dirt. “I passed out, I don’t know how!”

  “Don’t tell me that girl hit you over the head and escaped?” Darvek frowned angrily. “That sounds way worse!”

  “She didn’t hit me, I just passed out. Something wrong with me, she must’ve escaped!”

  “Curses! Get the dogs!” Darvek yelled over his shoulder. “Search the woods! She can’t have gone far!”

  Balor struggled to his feet, swaying. He pretended to be sick.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Darvek asked, shaking him by the shoulder. “You never get sick. Is this something you ate?”

  “I have no idea,” he mumbled, pretending to be airy.

  “Steady yourself, man!”

  He slumped where he stood, falling on one knee. Darvek groaned. Bending over, the old man sniffed near Grodal’s mouth. “No ale either. You’re really sick?!”

  “Yes… ” Balor whispered.

  Cursing under his breath, Darvek slid an arm under him and hoisted him up. “You can’t have picked a worse time to be sick!”

  A short while later, all the bandits gathered at the carriage and packed it with loot wherever they fit. They discarded a bunch of intricate pottery and decorative utensils.

  Balor lay amidst all the stolen loot, the only one allowed to ride the carriage because he was unwell. He caught some looks from other soldiers, looks that would doubt Grodal’s reliability and strength for decades to come.

  The man would’ve been pressed to prove himself otherwise, but Balor didn’t care about the well-being of this disguise. He had to get to the Vaalthorenian’s main camp, which was leagues away.

  Grodal wasn’t informed about this covert mission in any amount of detail. He was following orders, and as far as he knew, the commander and Darvek were following their own orders.

  He could assimilate the commander to check what those were, but he didn’t have an opportunity yet. The man was always surrounded by others.

  The loot was secondary to the mission. As far as he could tell, stealing wasn’t as important as killing a Karatoca trader caravan.

  Maybe Vaalthorenia wants to stop Karatoca from trading with the settlements.

  It was a good guess, but it had too many holes that couldn’t be filled with more information. He had to assimilate yet again in a more useful form. He needed to become a Vaalthorenian important enough to know the reasoning behind this move.

  I’ll find one when I get there. Rakina could be useful.