A streak of vile yellow ichor stained the pure white snow as the champion flicked his spear clean. A second later, the two halves of the frost serpent's body hit the ground with a heavy, wet thud, disturbing the previously pristine and silent blanket of snow.

Warren looked down at the remains of the defeated beast with contempt on his hardened face as the frosty wind whipped past him, so strong it made his thick fur cloak flutter despite its heavy, sodden heft.

"Pathetic…" his husky voice muttered, roughed by months of a ceaseless journey.

The giant frost serpent, easily twice as tall as him when it stood up to attack, had been slain in a single strike, the tip of the adventurer's spear piercing through the diamond-like white scales of the beast as if they were paper. With an effortless flick of the wrist, Ren had cut his foe in half before even having time to break a sweat.

And now the creature stared back at him with cold, lifeless yellow eyes, surprise still expressed on its dilated pupils.

It was to be expected, it was only a level 60. It never stood a chance against the level 85 Champion.

Ren took the rectangular crystal mirror in his left hand and stored it back in one of his pockets. The trinket was something he had created himself from a pair of magical glasses looted from a shadow wizard a few months before.

The lenses allowed the wearer to perceive information about those seen through them, something the champion found rather useful. But wearing fragile glasses in the midst of battle was not something he considered practical.

Using his newly acquired artificer skills, the adventurer repurposed the magical crystals into a new artifact of his own creation, based on vague engineering concepts floating in his mind. It was rectangular, handheld, lightweight, and had an interface that could be navigated by just the touch of a finger. Merely pointing it at something or someone would present him with a descriptive report of things such as levels, types, qualities, and often short text descriptions, like an extension of the world's system he could already see in his head.

He was rather proud of his creation, and dubbed it the Smartmirror.

After putting it together using his superior talent for tinkering, he found himself wondering if his aptitude for such things meant he had been an engineer in his previous life.

Those questions were always maddening to him. To know there was a whole life right there, behind the thin, fluttering veil of his own mind, unreachable no matter how much he tried. To almost remember figures that were now just shadows dancing in his thoughts, faceless and nameless, without being able to say which were his friends, which were his family, and even which one was his love.

He couldn't bear it.

The only way he could keep moving forward was to push those questions down, away from his mind, and focus solely on his goal—to find the one responsible for his soul being brought there, to that world, and his memories having been scrambled.

Balthazar.

The champion's elusive nemesis. The so-called merchant he had been seeking since the fateful day he emerged on that beach. Somehow, the fiend had always managed to slip right between Ren's fingers. He had never even seen the man's face.

But he would. Soon. Once he was ready.

The champion was no fool—in fact, he was fairly certain he was among the smartest people in that whole world, judging by everyone else he had met so far. He knew that Balthazar was not to be underestimated. He was a master schemer. A manipulator who carried the worship of many. A ruiner of lives who commanded countless others.

Ren would need to be as powerful as he could possibly be if he ever hoped to come face-to-face with the villainous Balthazar, come out victorious, and with what had been taken from him restored—his stolen memories.

But his task was proving increasingly more difficult. Not because he had any trouble defeating every opponent he came across, but precisely because it was becoming harder and harder to find a challenge. The higher his level became, the less experience he was getting from defeating lower level foes.

The champion traveled far and wide across the continent searching for higher level enemies to challenge. He exhausted every meager source of experience he could find on the west, around the beach where he first arrived, but that area was clearly the easiest, and meant for beginners. Then he moved east, where he found slightly better challenges, but by the time he reached the coastal city of Marquessa, he had already outleveled everything the area had to offer and changed course toward the south. There he traveled through dense forests, leading into treacherous swamps that neighbored terrible wastelands and deadly deserts. His journey down the continent proved useful in gaining him the most levels, but just as soon as he'd find himself making good progress, Ren would also find himself already having outgrown the available foes and having to move on again.

It was there, in a tiny little settlement lost in the dunes of a desert, at an inn, that the champion first heard the rumor of a red dragon having been spotted far to the northwest of the continent, up on a mountain.

He immediately knew he had to hunt down this dragon. A creature of legend like that had to be incredibly high-level, and he needed that experience.

It didn't take him long to find the beast's lair and challenge it. In the end, not even that red dragon, an ancient creature of myth feared by every local who talked about it, could stand a chance against Ren's might and cunning.

The experience he gained from defeating the giant was a worthy reward, but the adventurer still felt cheated out of a potentially bigger reward if he had actually slain the beast. But in the end, even the prideful Queen of Flames fled before the power of the unwavering champion.

"Pathetic…" Ren muttered again before swinging his spear over his shoulder as if to attach it to his back, but instead, the weapon simply vanished from his grasp.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

A neat little trick the champion had picked up sometime after level 50, it allowed him to move about without cumbersome weapons attached to his back or waist, as well making it that much more difficult for a foe to predict when and with what the adventurer would strike in battle.

Stepping over the quickly freezing carcass of the serpent, Ren set his sights on the peak of the mountain and resumed his march toward the top.

Normally, no adventurer would pass up on the opportunity to loot the frost serpent and harvest its valuable scales. Mages in the capital would pay a small fortune to use them as materials to line their enchanted robes with. Alchemists would make a bidding war to get a single scale that they could use as a reagent for an extremely potent frost resistance elixir. Nobles would grow greedy at the idea of using such scales to adorn their fancy party headpieces.

But Ren cared little for any of that. He was so far beyond that point already, that stopping to loot a defeated level 60 foe was just not worth his time anymore.

He had a far higher priority target to chase.

After defeating the red dragon in combat, the champion came back down from its lair and went into the nearest town. Despite his victory, he still felt empty. He was hollow and unfulfilled. He had beaten the strongest being he knew of in this world, and yet, he was still nowhere near powerful enough. He needed more.

But destiny smiled at him once more as he sat at the counter of that small, dingy tavern, staring emptily at the idle carvings some drunk had made on the wood with the tip of a knife likely years before.

His enhanced sense of hearing picked up a conversation from between the idle chatter that always filled places like that.

That one piece of a rumor rekindled his spirit and was the spark that set ablaze the trail the champion would follow in the months to come.

There was a figure, mysterious and rarely seen. He was a man—or so most assumed—who wandered the land. Nobody knew since when, where from, or where to. Tales of his sightings stretched back to the days when the locals' forefathers were still young, so no one could say for certain if it was even the same man.

But the description always matched, no matter the time period or where the tale of his sighting came from on the continent.

A tall man draped in all black, with old, torn mantles and a hood obscuring most of his features. The few who claimed to have come close to the traveler said they caught glimpses of a face wrapped in old, sallow bandages.

Despite some claiming to have briefly interacted with him and heard his weathered, gravelly voice, none ever got much insight into who he was.

The man never shared a tale, a background, a purpose, or even a name. Everyone Ren met anywhere on the continent who knew about the mysterious figure always called him the same thing—The Stranger.

This elusive legend that appeared in no books or scrolls but instead only in the rumored whispers of the local populace began to burrow itself into the champion's mind.

The more he learned about this Stranger, the more Ren was convinced he had to be someone incredibly powerful. What little clues he could unearth using his incredibly sharp powers of deduction and natural detective instincts convinced him that the mysterious character was likely an adventurer like him.

Someone that ancient, and that powerful… He was Ren's best shot at reaching new heights. This man had to know things the champion did not. He needed to find him.

And so, for months, the adventurer cursed with the burden of remembering that he had forgotten, chased after a trail that could lead him to a nameless and faceless stranger.

He had no doubt that anyone else would have failed in finding him, but Ren was not just anyone. His determination finally paid off when he picked up a trail of the man a week prior.

Barely stopping to rest or even sleep, the champion made his way up north. Through the frozen tundra and almost to the very tip of the continent, where the Forbidden City sits at the edge of a frozen cliff and where only the mightiest of adventurers dare to tread—Ren continued to follow.

But his destination was not there, it was to the west, halfway to the icy coast. There he found a small village in the middle of the snowy forest.

It was there that he finally found him. From afar, he saw the sinister tall figure of a man covered in black. The Stranger left a shop and headed out of town, toward the mountain, toward a ferocious blizzard that no sane person would ever willingly enter.

And the champion followed.

He was careful, meticulously so. Always kept a huge distance from his target, using his enhanced vision to not lose the dark figure in the middle of the sea of white on their way up the mountain. Despite that, he could not see enough of the Stranger from that far away to get an impression of him, and his smartmirror was unable to get a read on a target from that distance.

And so they climbed, for hours, through the biting wind and freezing temperatures, the man in black casually walking as if unfazed by the harsh weather, and the champion stoically enduring mother nature's beating with his empowered physique and enchanted gear.

The adventurer's thick layers of rune-etched clothing covered up most of his mastercrafted armor beneath, the total weight of it all more than any regular man would be able to wear for a short jog, let alone hours of mountain climbing under unforgiving weather. For Ren, it was barely a hindrance.

With each step a leap, the tireless champion ascended toward the blizzard-veiled peak, eager to catch up to his mark. The momentary distraction by the frost serpent had been enough to make him lose direct sight of the Stranger, but he was not worried about losing him any longer.

That far up, there was nowhere else the mysterious figure could go but up—to the peak.

As for what he was going there for, that's the question Ren really wanted to find the answer to.

Still, the sharp-minded adventurer couldn't help but find it eerie how, if he didn't already know the man had gone that way, he would have not a single track to follow, despite his tracking skills. The Stranger left no footprints, no disturbed snow, not a trail of any kind, not even a scent that Ren's enhanced sense of smell could pick up.

He was good, but thankfully for the champion, he still had one advantage over his quarry—his superior smarts.

I got you now. Ren whispered in his inner thoughts.

Climbing over a rock, the seeker found the sought.

Near the tall snow-covered boulder that marked the tallest peak of the mountain, hunched over a small hole dug in the ground, was a black-clad figure, his back turned to the champion.

Tossing a small portable shovel aside, the Stranger reached down into the freshly-dug hole in the snow and retrieved an object.

Ren's eagle eyes narrowed to focus on the distant item through the streaks of white wind that battered the mountaintop. It was a box, with a top lid, like a chest. It was made of dark wood that had been worn and weathered by the ages, and on its surface was a mark.

Carved into the rugged wood of the box's lid was an artful depiction of a bird—a flying dove.

Ren's eyes narrowed even further with curiosity. What's in that box so precious that you'd hide it all the way up here?

The Stranger cradled the small chest in his hands as he slowly stood up, back still partially turned to his pursuer. The large black cowl over the man's head obscured his face, but Ren could perceive him turning slightly to his left.

"I know you're there. You can come out now."

The champion's heart skipped a beat upon hearing the Stranger's rough, weathered voice for the first time.

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