What Happens After Death

[Planar Shift]

[Conditions for skill activation have not been met.]

[Long voyage]

[You have died.]

[Where would you like to resurrect?]

[Home]

[Chapelle Notre Dame de la Medaille Miraculeuse]

[Fields of Gregory- Albert III]

[++]

[Random]

The System notification screen vanished as soon as I opened my eyes. I was laying in a double bed, over freshly washed and neatly folded bedsheets. My ceiling, yet untouched by the leak that was causing mould to grow in certain corners of my bathroom, was staring back at me. I reached out to my right, to grab my phone. However, it was not on the nightstand. I must have dropped the damn thing during the attack. The screen was probably broken as well, now that I thought about it.

I got out of bed, and after checking my pockets for the rest of my belongings (aka my wallet and my keys) I headed to the kitchen to check the time. It was ten past six in the morning. The sunrise which could just about make out behind the surrounding buildings was also a witness to that.

I sigh in relief.

I wasn't dead.

I made myself some coffee, pulled the curtains open, and watched the sun slowly move upwards in the sky. My neighbourhood was by no means fancy, with old, tall, buildings, empty streets that would soon fill with students rushing to class, and the occasional driver trying his best to stay on the road.

I couldn't hear birds singing outside. I was hoping they would, but I guess it was too late in the morning now for them to bother with lifting my mood.

With a sad smile, I twirled around my coffee cup and watched as the lukewarm brown liquid formed a small whirlpool in the middle.

I was in denial. About everything. The attack, my death, my other death before that. It had been months, and yet it felt as if I had arrived here just this morning. In this strange world with systems, magic, and monsters.

Just by thinking about it, my status window popped before my eyes.

Two new skills had appeared on my ESW, but I paid no attention to them. It wasn't as if I knew what they actually meant or how to level them up. This was one of those things that had made The guide to modern immoral immortality" such a popular book in the first place.

The hero and his companions went through many hardships just trying to figure out what many of their skills did, with occasional collateral damage, and many, many, side quests based on misunderstandings or prejudice against certain classes and skills. In retrospect, that series must have been the worst junk-food fiction there was. But that too didn't matter anymore, since I no longer had access to it, and was instead forced into living in its world.

"Go away." I said as I gestured around to make the System window disappear.

I didn't have to do that, of course. Thinking about it would have yielded the exact same result, but I was in the kind of mood where if I didn't take out these emotions I was struggling to understand, I might snap and unload everything on someone around me.

I leaned back in my chair, putting away my coffee. It had become too cold even for me to drink.

This death thing was unsettling, to say the least.

I was aware of Laura as a character, of course. Well, not by name, but I remembered that her father had a stupid number of children, all with stupidly powerful skills and classes. That was one of the reasons why he had been a villain in that spin-off novel. The other reason was because his main source of income was large-scale embezzlement.

You may wonder why I hadn't decided to talk to him and try to 'change his ways' upon arriving in this world. In many isekai novels, that was exactly what the protagonists did when realizing that they were reincarnated as the child of a villain. But those people usually knew every single detail about the books or games they found themselves in or had some special cheat abilities. I didn't even remember the names of half the cast of the main book. I referred to a lot of them as 'ginger guy', 'water chick', 'pop star boum boum', or 'wolf lady'. This was because the main character (named Huáng Yǔháng Fú; my memory wasn't that bad) had renamed all of them when they joined his team, as a symbol of spiritual rebirth.

Sir Dubois de la Sablonnière was not only one of the only French characters in the whole series, but his last name was hard to miss due to how unique it was. It stood out a lot against a cast of Asian and American characters. Thus, when I woke up as Laura, it didn't take long to figure out who exactly I was.

To go back to the topic at hand, the reason why I didn't try and convert him to 'goodness' was because I was too weak to physically overpower him, and not witty enough to outsmart him in some complex conspiracy scheme. A pebble does not decide to fight a mountain, as some wise person might say.

But the death thing was new. It did make sense in retrospect, of course. And I had suspected that the skill was some sort of teleportation spell, but I had never wanted to try it out.

Well, all of this only meant one thing, and that was that I needed to see an Oracle sooner rather than later. I had just about saved up enough cash to do so. I didn't mind using my father's money to pay for my apartment or food, but I didn't want to use it on anything that could raise suspicion; like going to a skill-appraising Oracle, which was something only middle-class people did in the original novel, as most rich folks had other means of figuring out what their skills did.

When I looked up at the digital clock of my microwave, I saw that it was almost 7. I must have zoned out, looking at the sun, and thinking about birds.

I quickly rinsed my coffee cup in the sink, before rushing to my room to get ready for work. I wouldn't have the time to do my hair today, but after what had happened yesterday, that was the least of my worries.