Chapter 18: That Time I Accidentally Became A Demon (Chapter 18) (Pain And The Future)

Pain. I hadn’t really thought anything of it, like most normal people who go through life. The last week or two of my life had been… hectic. But I went through it and tried to remember all the times I remembered actually feeling any pain. 

 

The last time I can remember recently was accidentally brushing up against the weird mental-soul barrier in my mind that I didn’t understand. 

 

The earliest was the slight headache I had when my mind was ripped apart due to, well, my soul experiencing hell and breaking my mind. God, I hope that didn’t come back to bite me in my ass one day. 

 

But between those two times? I couldn’t remember any pain at all. But I could remember a lot of times I should have. 

 

I didn’t feel anything when I was getting slashed up by swords. I had just thought it was the adrenaline at the time. I mean, after all, that wasn’t too abnormal. Besides, I had passed out shortly afterwards. Still, it was the first time I had been wounded that badly, ever. By fucking swords. I should have felt something. 

 

And what about when I woke up? Did my wounds hurt even a little bit? Did I even notice them? I remember looking down and slightly collapsing at seeing my bandages and remembering the memories. I had thought it had been straight denial and me just ignoring it. But I didn’t suddenly feel stiff or wince every time after the fact. I hadn’t noticed them afterwards. I don’t even remember when I took them off. 

 

Then there was… well… Celena. Typically, it hurts to be oversensitive. It’s kind of… mixed but pain is definitely an element of oversensitivity. I had thought my… extreme reaction was just because my new body was demonic or new. It made sense to me at the time. 

 

And then the most damning of them all. I had been flambaed, turned into a burnt corpse. I hadn’t been able to feel anything at first, so much so that I thought I had just gone and instantly died. My eyes were burnt out of my sockets, my skin carbonized, my organs burnt from the inside out to the point my lungs could barely breathe… even Konahora had said I should’ve been in immense agony. Yet I just, never felt anything like that. Not during, before, or afterwards. 

 

And that was the extremely obvious stuff. I looked at my arm where I had poked a small hole in it. I couldn’t feel it. Even now, directly looking right at it, focusing on it, I couldn’t feel it. It was just, too small. I had no doubt if it was a bigger hole my nerves would tell me it was there, but, pain seemed to be gone. 

 

The reason wasn’t exactly hard to guess. Whatever I had experienced, now lost to me and sealed away, must’ve caused it. After all, what else could it be? Not to mention I still felt pain when I focused in on the barrier in my head. 

 

This wasn’t good. 

 

Sure, pain wasn’t a great thing to feel, but my worries were three fold. For starter’s, pain isn’t there for no reason. An excessive amount is bad, but a tiny amount tells you there’s a problem. You feel it all the time, just at such low levels that you’ve filtered it out completely. Everyone has some level of pain tolerance after all. But it being completely gone? There’s a disease that causes that. 

 

It’s called leprosy. 

 

And it causes people to lose body parts. 

 

A shiver went up my spine. It would be so easy, to just walk for a few days straight and look down, only to realize both my feet were bleeding, infected, and needed to be cut off. I’m going to have to check my whole body routinely for damage or I might literally kill myself by accident. 

 

But that was only one of my worries. The next was simple. I still felt pain, the sensation wasn’t removed. But only when I brushed that mental barrier. But was that because of the barrier…. Or because everything was too light in comparison? I knew I had gone through hell, there were snippets of pure information in my head about it, but I couldn’t actually remember anything. Not in a way a normal person does. I knew that nothing deserved it, that it had a countless amount of souls there, that atrocities beyond compare and imagination existed there, and it was… horrible. It was in fact so god damn horrible, that I somehow forced myself to forget it, and somehow forged a barrier with my… mind and/or soul.

 

So my question was… had I experienced so much pain in hell that a mortal amount didn’t compare? 

 

That thought was scary. 

 

And finally, maybe most damning of them all, was; what else had changed? My mind had become more, me. I knew that, overall, but not what it meant. And yet, this immunity to pain wasn’t part of that, despite how much it affected me. It didn’t affect my personality or decisions directly, but impacted both indirectly. Because of my pain immunity I had to be careful but could also afford to be more reckless than anyone else if I knew what I was doing, which I did not. The point was, what else was out there, inside my head or body, that I just didn’t understand or know? 

 

My entire body was a god damn mystery already and my mind might be just as much of one. My mind told me a lot of things, but could I trust the very thing I was concerned had been altered and changed? My soul had been shattered and dusted to near nothing, then reformed. But it was not the same, not nearly the same. That was included in my information packet left behind. My soul had literally been altered and my mind rebuilt. 

 

Was I still Derek Springer? 

 

“Are you alright?” I looked up, seeing Konahora looking at me with concern. 

 

“I’m fi-” I started but then paused before letting out a sigh. Lying to the priestess of Truth was clearly a not-good idea. 

 

“I’m concerned about some things but overall I’m okay.”  I answered, honestly. She still frowned at me, but I was pretty damn sure I had told the truth. Maybe it was just concern. 

 

“Would you like to talk about it.” 

 

“No-” God. Damn it. I actually had to think about my answer and not react automatically. Did I want to talk about it? Sure, I’d have loved to. Emotional stiffness and bottling things up made you a dead, sad creature barely fit to be called human. I’d seen it too many times with my male friends. And they made you even worse at responding to emotion. That propped up some dark memories I had to shake off. 

 

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Still, with most people, I’d have just said no. It was still just a bit too odd to open up to near total strangers. Even with friends, I’d have probably said no and then thought about it before bringing it up if it stayed on my mind. The question was, did I want to talk to one of the three people that could end my life, and could do so with no warning, about my personal troubles? 

 

Eh, sure. Why not? What do I got to lose? 

 

“Kinda. I don’t feel- I almost don’t feel any pain and I only just realized that after nearly being burnt alive. It… kinda scares me.” 

 

“Why? That sounds amazing.” Tyler spoke up, turning around to look at me. He seemed to have an awestruck look on his face. 

 

As for Riary… she looked deeply, deeply offended, as if I had just spit in her face. She turned away, loudly cursing. “Damn you and your rotten blood you dirty shit filled-” I tuned it out. I was not all prepared to deal with fantasy racism. 

 

“Because-” Ah, my brain just filled in why telling people about my pain immunity was a very bad idea, but that ship had sadly already sailed “-That’s how you lose body parts. I won’t even notice if I’m hurt or somethings infected if I don’t pay attention.” 

 

Tyler blinked while looking at me in shock. Clearly he hadn’t thought through the implications quite yet. He didn’t seem to have anything to say to that, and my words seemed to quiet down Riary a bit. Clearly, she was imagining me slowly falling apart and filled with horror as I only noticed it right near the end. 

 

Well, whatever makes her less angry at me, the better. 

 

Konahora nodded at me but didn’t ask anything else. I had noticed early on that Konahora seemed to be more in the background. With her powers, it made more sense. Her questions weren’t really, exactly, questions. It was more on the bridge of mind reading. Either you answered truthfully, or you lied, and she knew you lied, and depending on the question asked, now knew the truth. 

 

And she seemed to strongly dislike lying. So every question asked must be like offering to get slapped in the face. She and politicians must be natural enemies. I’m pretty sure I’d paid to see her and certain world leaders in the same room, though she’d probably die of an aneurysm. 

 

“You do that a lot.” A statement, not a question, by Konahora. 

 

“Do what?” 

 

“Recede into your own thoughts.” 

 

I shifted a bit and felt vaguely uncomfortable. How much attention are you paying me to notice that? Or do I really do it that much? 

 

“Life has been incredibly stressful, then shockingly relaxing, then incredibly stressful again. I don’t know… it’s just easier to think about things rather than pay attention to all the stressful stuff.” 

 

“What will you do after you reach the Elven Kingdom?” 

 

I smiled bitterly at that one. They had cared a surprising amount about what I planned to do once I left the human kingdom. But I really only had one answer. Both then and now. 

 

“I don’t know. Relax I guess. Learn more about this world. Keep out of trouble, stay safe, do something for basic amounts of money. Someones gotta need someone for lifting heavy items.” 

 

I honestly still felt like a leaf on the wind, lost and floaty. I’m sure other, more badass people, adapted to a fantasy world instantly. I did not. Hell, it felt like all the worst parts of becoming an adult were happening all over again. ‘What are you going to do for a career?’ ‘When will you get married?’ ‘What are your plans after high school?’ ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ Just over and over and over again. Future, always the future. I didn’t know then and I didn’t know now. I had held a semi-okay job as a boring security officer and had stayed because it gave semi-okay money and they let me play on my phone for my entire shift. If I had died, the best you could write about me and my accomplishments was ‘Random guy who mostly kinda enjoyed life’. 

 

Honestly, getting back to that normalcy seemed like a beautiful goal, the more I thought about it. Yeah, there are no phones, so being security would probably really suck… and be a lot more, well, serious… but having some basic job, a basic apartment to sleep in (please have apartments here), and a few books or something sounded alright. 

 

…And just like the first time I had that thought, it sounded incredibly dull and utterly boring. 

 

Sigh. 

 

I was in a fan-ta-sy world! Wasting my time like that just sounded, ridiculous. But that didn’t mean I suddenly knew what I wanted to do! I had an inkling of an idea but… it’d really have to wait till I actually reached the stupid elven town. If anything was possible… well… 

 

We’ll have to see. My heart beat a little faster as some far more entertaining ideas started to fill my head. It’s a fantasy world right? So…

 

Shouldn’t I be able to live my fantasies? 

 

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