Desmond’s attention was drawn back to the shards of broken glass scattered across the plane. Since he first saw them, he had this intense feeling of wrongness and a desire to put them back together like some kind of giant jigsaw puzzle. However, the problem was that it would no doubt be a very time-consuming task, and Desmond didn’t know what was going on in the outside world while he was stuck in here. Another beast could very well be drawn to the scent of blood from the dead panther.

Desmond was torn between trying to leave immediately or trying to put fragments of his memories back together. In the end, Desmond didn’t even know how he got here, and although [Mirror to the Soul] indicated he should be able to come and go, that hadn’t exactly been working out for him so far. It was possible that this might be his only opportunity to fix this. A chance he couldn’t afford to miss. So Desmond set to work. He picked up shards of glass one at a time and sorted them into a roughly chronological order.

After a few hours of sorting, Desmond had discovered a few things. First, the glass pieces, as scrambled up as they were, already had some order to them. The older memories were in the area he called the bottom left, and the newer memories were in the area he defined as the top right. The second thing he discovered was that he was pretty sure the memories came together to form a square or rectangle, as he found edge pieces and even a corner on his oldest memory as Allan. Desmond had started putting the glass pieces together from this corner and was making good progress until he came across a glass shard that was very different.

The third thing Desmond discovered, was that he had lived more than just these two lives. The glass shards that contained his memories relating to his lives as Allan and Desmond were light blue and about 3cm thick. Desmond had found another set of glass fragments around 1cm thick and almost perfectly clear. The memories contained in these glass fragments were blurry and hard to distinguish. When he looked at these thinner shards, he couldn’t recall the memory as he did with the ones representing Allan or Desmond. But he still got a strong feeling that this was a life he had lived. From what he could see in the glass shards, he had been some kind of farmer in this past life. He also seemed to use some magic to assist with the farming.

Desmond didn’t know what to do with these pieces of glass. The difference in thickness and his inability to recall the memories indicated to him that they were not part of the same structure as the others. So he decided to place them off to the side for now and worry about them later.

He even discovered another set of glass that was even thinner at only a few millimeters. These shards were perfectly transparent and very difficult to find in this star-filled void. They didn’t seem to contain any memories or images at all, and Desmond simply put them in another pile beside the magic farmer pile. Then he returned to work, slowly putting the Allan and Desmond glass fragments together.

***

After what felt like a day of sorting and fitting glass pieces together. Desmond finally had what looked like a large three by three meter plane of glass in front of him. It was made up of several hundred shards of glass of various sizes and didn’t fit together as nicely as he hoped. The bottom left corner, which was made up of his oldest memories from Allan’s childhood, looked perfect, with all the glass fitting together like it was made that way. The top right corner, made up of his most recent memories as Desmond, also fit together really well. It was not perfect like the bottom left, but it was close enough that he knew he was on the right track.

The problem came in the middle. To put it simply, it looked like an absolute mess. The corners were easy as the pieces only had so many places they could go, but when he started to have a larger leading edge to work with, it was almost impossible to find the right spot for each memory shard. Errors seemed to compound, and soon enough, he had thrown the whole chronological thing out the window and was just trying to keep the gaps to a minimum. Desmond felt he had done a pretty good job with that, as the whole thing looked almost perfectly square.

He wasn’t able to remove all the gaps, but honestly, he didn’t see how he could do any better unless he was willing to take the whole thing apart and start from the beginning. But Desmond felt that if he did that, then his obsessive-compulsive disorder would force him to stay here for months trying to get things perfect. And he could tell it would never be perfect with one glance. So it would just have to be good enough for now. Desmond had stacked the glass shards from Past Life 2 and Past Life 3 over to the side as he was still unsure how they fit into the whole picture.

When he had finished perfectly constructing the bottom left corner, Desmond had made an important discovery. When the glass plane he was building got big enough, he could pass through it. At first, it was only his hand, but as the construct grew, he could pass more and more of himself through. Desmond estimated that when he was around half done, he would have been able to pass his whole body through the glass, but he had not wanted to stop halfway. His new hypothesis was that this glass plane was his link between the Soul Realm and the real world, and that passing through it should send him back. This was a more probable solution than knocking himself out with mana use.

He supposed doing this could send him to some memory world within his soul, but he would deal with that if it happened. Desmond had decided to take on one problem at a time. He gazed outwards, observing the galaxies and stars around him once more. This sight would truly never get old. Standing there beside a sun that glowed in yellow and blue light, while surrounded by stars of all colors left Desmond feeling tranquil. He supposed he should start calling them souls at some point. The whites, yellows, blues, and reds fit well with the sun narrative, but the purples and greens seemed out of place in the space context. But now he was just procrastinating. Desmond looked around his soul once more, and seeing nothing out of place, he steeled his nerves. He took a step forward and stood atop the plain of glass he had constructed. Slowly, he felt himself start to sink down. He made sure to stand on the bottom left corner, just to be sure the gaps in the glass didn’t fuck something up.

After a few minutes, the glass had consumed up to his knees, and he was starting to regret standing on it. The process was just too damn slow. He would have just laid down on it if he knew it would take this long. At least if he had done that, he would be wherever he was going by now, and he was going somewhere. Desmond was still close enough to the side of the glass to look over the edge, and no feet were coming out of the bottom. But wherever he was going, he wasn’t going there very fast.

After another 15 minutes, he was sunk up to his chin. His body felt like it was submerged in a very thick liquid, sort of like what he thought being trapped in quicksand would feel like. The metaphor didn’t make him feel any better, as he tilted his head upwards to get a few more breaths of air before he was completely submerged.

As the liquid fully consumed him, the familiar feeling of vertigo hit. This was reassuring, as he had just started to get the feeling that this was very a bad idea. Desmond closed his eyes as the vertigo got worse.

***

After a few moments, he came up gasping for breath. He was back! Looking around the crater, everything in his sight looked just like how he had left it. The sun was still shining, the panther’s corpse was still there, he was still nude, and nothing had come along to eat him. All was right with the world. Based on the position of the sun, he would say 3 or 4 hours had passed in the real world as it was getting close to sunset now. He didn’t know how long he had spent in the Soul Realm, but it had definitely been longer than that.

Getting to his feet, Desmond had to change this hypothesis. His body was almost fully healed, not something that could happen in just a few hours. He estimated that he would have needed around two days to recover this much. So, unless going to the Soul Realm magically healed him. He had been lying here undefended for the last two days. A shudder ran through him. When he decided to stay and fix his memories, he had been hoping for or maybe even expecting some sort of time dilation. Staying in the Soul Realm had been a bigger risk than he anticipated, and in hindsight, he should have left as soon as he was able. Which would have been around when he was halfway done putting everything back together. But he could do nothing about this now, except be happy that nothing had come by to eat him.

Desmond looked up at the sun. He had about two hours of light left. There wasn’t enough time to return to the Lodge today, so it looked like Desmond was spending another night in the Expanse. The camp he and Ben made was only a few kilometers away and would still have the enchantments set up to repel beasts. It would make for much safer sleeping than here. Desmond sighed again. He supposed it made sense that no beast came by while he was incapacitated. After all, the mutated shadow panther had been a calamity class beast, and nothing would enter its territory unless it was looking for a fight. Still, Desmond had no intentions of rolling that dice again.

Desmond reached up to run his hand through his hair, only to find a bald head. Momentarily shocked, he remembered the multiple fire baths he had gotten from Ben. Hair did not receive the same toughness from the Constitution stat that skin did. It also didn’t help grow hair back any quicker. This did make shaving easy, but had led to him being bald more than a few times throughout his life. Desmond reached up to check his eyebrows. He was happy to find them still there. They felt slightly singed but were still present and accounted for. From experience, he knew those took a long ass time to grow back. It would seem his effort to save his eyes from the worst of the fire had the unintended benefit of saving his brows.

Desmond took a moment to examine his newly healed body. He had always taken pride in his powerful physique. He was standing there, 7 foot 2, and built like a Greek God. Well, a hairless Greek God at least. Now that he thought about it, his height and build probably had something to do with his [Giant’s Blood]. The tan he had slowly built up over the past few months was gone, replaced by new peachy skin that made him look a little pale. Besides his eyebrows, it would seem that not a single other hair had survived on his body. The flame baths had been quite thorough. He had never gotten a wax in any of his lives, but he assumed this was what it would feel like. Though he could have gone without the head waxing, or armpit waxing for that matter.

Desmond walked over to the panther’s corpse and grabbed it by a leg, it was time to get moving. As he started to drag the body to the crater edge, he shot a cursory glance at Ben’s body just to make sure it was still there, and still dead. This instantly brought him to a full stop. Desmond sighed. It looked like the clothes would have to wait.