Despite Simon’s near miss with the orb, he was undeterred. While it was fun to improve the lives of those in Ordanvale, and that summer he opened up a copper mine after a goblin purge one valley over from the small town, his focus continued to be on his own experiments. Indeed, now that he had more money than he could reasonably spend, he largely left those affairs to others as he worked on his own projects.

The ladies of the town had largely given up on him. There were even some rumors, with all of his activities in the woods, that he must prefer the company of men or even animals, but the truth was far simpler. He just had no desire to get hung up on anyone else. At best, such a relationship would be a distraction, and at worst, well, the fact that he was still hesitant to return to Ionar a decade from now served as an ample cautionary tale for such things.

The closest he got to women now was painting them. That had largely become his cover story for the reason his new home was more art studio and workshop than living quarters. As long as he showed off a new oil painting every few months and cleaned up before he invited anyone over for tea, no one wondered what he was up to in the middle of the night, which worked out perfectly for Simon. He’d much rather people gossip about his sex life than his mines or his magical experiments.

Those were growing ever more complex. Simon had lived almost fifty lives, but in all that time, he’d never experimented with magic as he had in this one. He wasn’t just trying to create practical objects, but a nuanced understanding. He had equations now. They were often wrong and needed to be revised, but then, that was the point of experimentation.

More than anything, though, those experiments made one thing very clear, and that was that the reason no one really understood magic, beyond White Cloak meddling, was that it would take far more than a single lifetime to really understand it, based solely on the costs of spell casting.

“It would be like trying to make electrical appliances if all of the electricity on earth had to be strip-mined from human brains,” he told himself one day while he was etching some symbols into a wooden blank before he embedded it with copper wire to make them extra durable.

As a metaphor, he thought it was a good one. Blood magic and slavery were definitely linked in the Murani lands to the north, but they would probably be in any industrial society that tried to use magic on such a scale.

Simon tried to use another mechanism to power various wards, and they worked, but less well. While they were interesting, they were largely only toys compared to fueling them directly with his soul. He could power lesser words with light, though it left the glade where he tested it noticeably dim. He could power words with the heat of a hearth or the lingering death of a graveyard, though he worried what might do to the souls of those who lay in peace.

Simon had only tried to fuel a magical reaction with pure soul magic once by transforming a dead man’s femur into a stick of dynamite with some carved force magic runes. That had blasted apart a mountainside in a way that was very satisfying, but in doing so, he’d earned himself -2,000 experience immediately. So, effective as it was, he didn’t repeat it.

Overall, his experience picture was looking quite good; other than that one serious mistake, it was improving by a couple hundred points a week on average. Sometimes it doubled that when he made a particularly engrossing discovery, but on the whole, he was getting ever closer to -60,000. It would still take him years to reach zero, but he had years to accomplish that.

I wonder what will happen when I’m in the positives? He asked himself. Simon reflected on that often. If one needed a million to get a normal reincarnation, he suspected that number was fairly common. It only took 30 a day for a normal life to reach that level, but what if he got to five million, or ten million? If I didn’t keep torturing myself for decades, I’d already be close to two or three million. How would people react at that level?

As effective as using souls was, he didn’t really need it. While he didn’t mind using bad people’s lives to fuel his magic, it was no longer necessary.

During that second summer, after discovering a vein of obsidian, he decided to kill two birds with one stone and fashioned arrows of life-stealing. After several attempts to carve the complicated runes by hand, which were met with failure and more than a few lacerations, he was forced to use lesser words of earth to mark the things. This broke his nearly year-long streak of not using magic directly as he tried to cultivate some of the serenity he’d known during his time in the Oracle’s little cult, but it was worth it.

With these weapons, he was able to shoot a wolf or a goblin, and then watch it slowly run down like a broken toy as it tried to fight or flee. Simon did timed versions of these experiments and concluded that it would take days for such an object to fully drain a man, but that wouldn’t be possible. An obsidian crystal of that size could only hold a few years at most, but an entire goblin's life wasn’t worth a full human year.

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Of course, once charged, those arrowheads could be retrieved and used to fuel any number of small experiments. Such techniques were far more effective than his knife of draining, and eventually he had to make a new one, because the one he’d crafted to discharge continuously as he held it made him look so young after a time that people were starting to notice.

Physically, he was certainly in his twenties, not his thirties now, thanks to regular hunting trips, but he didn’t need to go any further than that. He’d been young once already, and had no desire to do so again any time soon.

Using life to fuel magic was a bloody calculus, but it only became more important when he made his plans to contact demons for the first time. For a very long time, Simon had believed that was a boundary he would never cross because the dangers were too great. Now, he knew he would definitely have to one day, if only to better understand the way the world’s rules worked.

He kept putting it off, of course. There were always more interesting projects to be done. There was his teleport spell that never quite seemed to work. Then, there were more experiments on divination in his never-ending quest to make his pendulum predictions more accurate. He even tried crystal gazing, certain that something along the lines of what he did with his mirror should work, but he couldn’t figure out how to make the magic work.

One thing he did, though, was figure out his demon summoning circle. It was an elaborate thing, carved into the stone floor of his basement, and cast in bronze, one crucible at a time. If some witch hunter ever started sniffing around, it would be impossible to hide, but Simon didn’t care. No one had even tried to come into his basement since the men he’d hired had finished constructing it.

It took Simon more than six months to finalize the runes, based on the circle he’d seen in the church so many times, but only six weeks of carving and casting to create them. There were several differences, though, from that original circle. The first was the disconnect he added. While most of the thing was one solid piece that was impossible to accidentally obliterate the way that one might with chalk or blood, he’d built in a little mechanism to pull the plug on the spell and dissipate it, making it all but idiot-proof, which made his second mechanism that much more important.

In theory, if Simon just copied the original circle and cast it in bronze, he’d open an always open hole in the world that would be very hard to turn off. Worse, it would always summon that same demon. While he didn’t know all the names he’d learned from damnable tomes in the Unspoken’s library, he had more than a few jotted down in the mirror from his various encounters over the years. These, he carved into silver plates that were meant to be fitted into his bronze ring, completing the circuit.

Unfortunately, Simon could not also use that mechanism for his off switch, because turning it off from a section other than the mark that powered the whole thing risked setting the demon free. Worse, it might unleash hell for a moment, allowing it to consume him, his house, or maybe even the surrounding area before the magic abated. That was the reason that he’d moved so far out of town. If he were to perish in a blaze of fire, all that would be at risk was his herb garden and his chickens.

Even after all that was done, he still needed a way to kill himself should the worst befall him. Freya had shown him proof of that. So, he created what amounted to an ejection seat. If he activated it, it would certainly throw him away from the portal he was building with enough force to kill him as it drove his corpse through the floorboards above him, and the thatching beyond that. In such an eventuality, he didn’t really care what happened to him as long as he woke up back on his lumpy old bed instead of burning in hell.

After all that, he still hesitated for months, considering all of the hypothetical consequences. Not only was there the ever present risk that he’d screwed something up, or that he might make a misstep and be dragged into hell. It was also entirely possible that something unforeseen might be let loose. The only demon he’d ever fought before was monstrously powerful, and now that he was just a human and not a supernatural monster, he would stand little chance against it.

Still, there were so many insights to be gained that, eventually, one stormy night, nearly two years into this life, he finally summoned his first demon. There was no chant or offering, which the books he’d read nearly always argued in favor of. There was only a single candle to show him the room, and a few clicks of metal as the circle came to life.

All at once, the runes flared with light, glowing in the dark room as the stone floor between them began to collapse into a singularity that expanded outward to the edge of his circle to reveal the fiery circle of hell beyond.

It was a terrible sight. Simon could see bodies, or perhaps souls, raining from the ashen sky. There were a few scattered portals like this one, sprinkled throughout the scene, which was otherwise consumed with a sea of burning tar and a storm of flames. In all of this wicked, inhuman shapes flittered too and fro. It was not one of those small ones that came at his call, though. Instead, it was someone more familiar, Vargarzeleth.

It didn’t take the cocky man he’d fought as a vampire long to appear. He soared to the ring with four copies of himself, who spent the first half minute ignoring their summoner as they strutted around their cage, checking for weaknesses. When they found none, one of the copies turned to Simon without a hint of recognition in his gaze and said, “Who summons the great legion of Vargarzeleth?” The handsome demon asked with a smile. “Tell me your reason for intruding on my decadence, and I may spare you after I finish doing whatever task it is you may require.”