Chapter 145 Sometimes inevitable death can be avoided
It took a year for us to finally settle down and move south. It took so long because most of us were dealing with the undead still in the area while mapping the entire chunk of land out before we finally moved. I was also making trips from time to time to plant trees; not only did I make several orchards, but I also used the trees as waypoints and land markers for the land. Anyone who moved here would not go hungry from the plentiful fruit trees and wild crops.
The land was in better shape than most because the undead hadn’t really spread their decay or anything. It meant there was more wildlife, and the land quality was higher than normal from the lack of farming. While I was planting crops and finding the best place to make my farm, Delilah, Olivia, and Sarah were building towns that would become cities.
Five in total, one in each region of the land: the north, south, east, west, and center. We could house tens of thousands of people, but it was only us walking the lonely land right now. While they built, Tems, Silk, Sophia, and Leaf cleansed the land of the undead, focusing on wiping out the large numbers, but killing everything was impossible.
One of the problems the land would have would be the roaming undead, but as long as we built walls to protect the cities, they wouldn’t be any worse than the dungeon attacks that occurred elsewhere, no, perhaps even easier to deal with, as the undead were mostly beaten, leaving no leadership that could attack weak points. The undead would only cluster up from time to time and then attack the walls at the closest point they noticed them, instead of targeting open gates.
After a year of healing and reclaiming the land, we were finally open to bringing in refugees from both the east and west regions. I made the flower path, a road with flowers on the edges to help make the route from the west to the south safer, and the east had its gigantic wall separating them. All it took was my wives going along the wall and calling out to the guards that the land was now open to people wanting to try to make a living elsewhere.
Like that, our population began to grow as many people moved into the prebuilt towns, and even created their own. Some people tried to figure out if they could kill us and take over the country for themselves, but we just killed the lich who owned it; no one besides an entire country's army could contend with us anymore, and we had a good relationship with the king of the west, so only the nobles were a problem for me.
Cynthia and Mara took to their new positions like ducks to water. Cynthia made her living as queen, shaping the laws and writing the taxes the people would have to pay once we finally got around to taxing them in a few years. Mara worked as a major deterrent. The East wanted to test us; they even sent an army, but the gigantic dragon flying over them, which killed a large portion of them in a single breath, let them know they couldn’t just take our land without paying an extreme price for it.
Roka and Cherry were fine following me. Cherry got the worst out of the fight with the lich; she was almost killed, and the bolt hurt her chances of having children after they gave birth to all the children they were pregnant with from our trip south. At least, on paper, she would struggle to get pregnant and give birth. Luck seemed to make things that were supposed to be difficult effortless, as she was already pregnant again.
Time kept going on, and I could feel it. It was low at first, but I could feel my heart twinge. That wouldn’t mean anything to most, but my perception was high enough that I knew it was my own body almost tearing itself apart from stats it couldn’t handle. Every year, every boost in my stats through my skills meant that the feeling only got worse and worse.
I knew my life was going to be short, and that once my first set of children came of age, it would most likely mean the death of me, but… I was content with that. I would live more in my three and a half decades than most people wouldn’t live, even if they lived to be over a hundred years old. I still wanted to live, but I knew, even with my high luck, that the chances of survival were low.
Perhaps only reaching rare with my class and going through another status recalibration would lengthen my life, but it wasn’t something I actively pursued. Even still, from the experience I got from killing the lich and his army, plus all the experience I got making a much larger farm and orchards, I eventually reached it and went through the status recalibration.
It only helped slightly, and I would still most likely die once I started gaining a percentage of my children's stats. The heart tremors got worse and worse, up until my first children, Hamy and Niel, came of age. They were the oldest, and because of their kobold blood, they reached adulthood before the next closest by a year. It made the pain seep through my entire body, but I could still live; I could still function, with only the tremors causing small problems.
It wasn’t until Samson, Silk’s firstborn son, came of age that I felt my time was truly coming to an end. The twinges became full-blown heart attacks as my body couldn’t handle the sheer stats I had. Hamy and Niel were both non-combat classes, but Sampson got one of the worst classes for keeping me alive, Champion, which meant he gained more stats faster, and all of them knew it.
All three of them waited to level, but I couldn’t just let my children cripple their own growth, waiting for me to eventually die to finally live their lives. Before I could decide what to do, my new set of children came of age, and I felt it. My body began to tear itself apart, then something I didn’t expect to happen did. It forced me into another status recalibration.
There was nothing the system could do for me to live; I would die eventually unless I lost the skills that were providing my buffs, but if that happened, I knew the trump card I had that made my family so strong would disappear in the process. My death might cause it as well, but my family was already so strong; we already made a name for ourselves that it wouldn’t matter anymore after my death.
Except… That wasn’t what happened. I didn’t die. I felt my body break over and over again, this time fully awake through the recalibration, because it was such a rare thing to happen that the system in place didn’t have a way to deal with it. Something else happened in its place as I began to evolve. Humanoid races weren’t designed to evolve like this. There was no path set for humans evolving. As I went from a normal tier one human to a higher tier of being altogether, I evolved into a high human.
The system wasn’t a thinking being; it could only do what it was preprogrammed to do, but there was no program for what just happened to me, so it did what it thought was right. My human traits evolved, and I lost my class, both being rolled into what my race could do instead, as the children I had after becoming a high human would be more capable because of it. Magic and farming combined into chlorokinesis, something my children were more likely to unlock. Along with the higher stats, all of my love-related skills also disappeared, rolling into a symbiotic connection with my lovers and children instead.
The final shift was to my golem-making and dungeon skills as high humans became the de facto dungeon controller race. I could do everything instinctively, and if my children or I entered a dungeon, they could intuitively feel what was wrong with it, if there was. As I finally came to again, a month had passed, and the world had changed. I felt a renewed excitement for living as I wondered what new class I’d receive. I would have been fine dying for my family, but in the end, I was still happy I didn’t have to.
