Rewind: A Grimdark LitRPG Series (Pyresouls Apocalypse, Book 1) by James Callum (reading tree .txt) 📕

distributed repository and often left unopened. Only now, with their ability to send Jacob back was it relevant.

And so Jacob listened with rapt attention as they rattled off potential items near his position, confirmed that there was a Pyre only two hallways away to the south, and gave him pointers on where to go next.

Included in that laundry list was the recommended parameters and level he should have for the coming area, the Desecrated Catacombs.

“Wait,” he said suddenly. “I thought I was going into the Corpse Garden?”

That was, after all, where he knew the nearest Spell Gem was from his last playthrough.

“Well, yes,” Alec said, “But there’s a secret entrance into the Desecrated Catacombs that will allow you to skip the Corpse Garden entirely by going beneath it. I didn’t know of it when I played and besides, I cleared the asylum by ringing the bell. Which you told me you didn’t have any intention of doing.

“You have enough Souls that you can probably survive the upper levels of the catacombs if you’re smart about what fights you pick and move quickly. Do not linger, Jacob. You know the reputation that place has.”

Jacob nodded. It was one of the most horrible places in the entire game by all accounts. An area he hadn’t reached last time. He wasn’t looking forward to traversing its cramped warrens filled with unkillable skeletons.

“He will need to return there later, yes? For the…” Alice looked at her tablet, swiping down to read a particular note. “For the Ring of Broken Vows that will let you enter the Smog Rifts. Why does he not save time and get it now?”

Alec was shaking his head from the first sentence. “No, he’s not strong enough for that yet. Not only is the Gnawing Hunger down there guarding the ring but there’s a Crossing halfway through. He needs at least plus five armor and ideally a plus ten weapon. Otherwise, they’ll just one-shot him.”

That hardly seemed to disturb Alice who leaned back in her chair stroking her chin thoughtfully. Big surprise there. She wasn’t the one who would be brutally murdered.

Kat reached out and held Jacob’s hand, lacing her fingers through his. “Just go through the catacombs, make it through to Hollow Dreams and get some better equipment from the merchants there. If you see me there… tell me you know Ryan Thorne and he said I could trust you to trade with. I might have something you can use.”

“That’s a good idea,” Alec said. “But try not to do that with anybody else you already know. You might say something that could have a ripple effect. Nobody’s going to believe you about the Collapse, unfortunately. At worse, people will think you’re trying to scare others into quitting to give yourself a better chance and they’ll attack you for it.

“At best, they’ll think you’re some kind of doomsayer and laugh at you. Either way, calling attention to yourself isn’t a great idea. I had more than one person come out of nowhere and kill me. They only take a portion of your Souls when they do that but I lost a lot of time getting that back.”

“Crossings are different. If somebody kills you, they take a quarter of your currently held Souls. That’s what makes the areas so dangerous. At the same time, you can find a lot of people willing to trade and there are often merchants there too.”

“Why don’t people just kill each other then? The two Crossings I went to were surprisingly tame,” Jacob asked.

“You were there a little later,” Alec explained. “At first, once people realized they could kill each other for a portion of their victim’s Souls it was a constant free-for-all. Only, once people realized the losses they incurred did they stop. A lot of people thought it was basically just ‘free Souls’ since a wisp wasn’t dropped. Fear is a powerful motivator in Pyresouls, the fear of losing so much work kept a lot of people in line.”

“But the first people to realize they could do it, did so with reckless abandon,” Jacob said, coming to understand just how different the game was for Alec than it was for him.

“Exactly.”

Not long after that Jacob was lying down, counting back from 100 and getting ready to go back home. He started at the mental slip and had to start counting down from 100 again.

Home? he thought to himself.

But as he drifted off, he had to admit there was a grain of truth to the slip. The world Post-Collapse was, bit by bit, becoming a place he was unfamiliar with.

The constant ache of being there, the cold that never seemed to abate, and even the events he remembered clearly were all unwelcoming. On the other hand, Pyresouls Online welcomed him back with open arms.

He was in no threat of permanent death. The flames of the Pyre warmed his world-weary soul and reinvigorated him. Even after a gruesome death, their comforting flames gave him the determination to get up and go out again.

And Camilla…. He still wasn’t sure how he felt about her but he was glad for the company.

With the taste of blue raspberries on his tongue, Jacob opened his eyes.

August 31st, 2035 – 13 days remain before the Collapse.

Camilla straddled his body, weaving his [Longsword] in a clumsy pattern as she just barely managed to hold off three Gekks that were testing her defenses.

The bodies of more Gekks lay scattered around them. How long had passed here?

“Oh good, you’re not dead,” Camilla said flatly. She stabbed his [Longsword] into the stone right between his legs. Without another word she lurched toward the leftmost creature, leaving the other two for Jacob.

Even though he was still getting his bearings, Jacob had enough training and presence of mind to get up to one knee. Instead of wasting time pulling the sword free from the stone – a feat that was surprising given Camilla’s Sorcerous leanings – he dismissed and summoned it to his hand.

While Jacob