Ryan admitted to himself that he was a little thrown. Why did this blasted world have to be so full of inexplicable things?
First of all, this probably isn't normal, right?
As far as he could remember, ordinary people didn't produce anything like this after death. But given how fragmented the big lug's memories were, he'd leave room for doubt for now.
He plucked a blade of grass and crouched down. After untying the knot to expose the deep crimson mass to the open air, he prodded it with the grass. It had a satisfying spring to it — like a gelatin cube. Except gelatin cubes didn't typically emerge from human skulls.
He was certain this thing was connected to Extraordinary power. Not just because of the strangeness of the phenomenon, but because even without looking at it, the thing had an inexplicably strong presence. That was why, even though he hadn't been paying the slightest attention to the body, he'd noticed the moment it appeared. And there was something else — a vague, indefinable pull it seemed to have on him.
Something only Beyonders have, that ordinary people don't. Could this actually be... the potion material?
More precisely, the primary ingredient of a potion. Combining his own experience with what old Schneider had said, it wasn't difficult to figure out that the supplementary ingredients had no real connection to the Extraordinary powers a potion bestowed — the primary ingredient was what actually granted those powers. The supplementary materials were just the scaffolding.
But why only one mass? Did the two primary materials merge into one? And if so, can it still be used?
His head was a mess of questions. Truly maddening.
And that wasn't all. Looking at the deep crimson mass, Ryan found himself thinking again about the strange sensation from right after the kill: a clearly foreign presence beginning to dissolve, beginning to integrate with himself.
Brief as it had been, someone who had already been put through the wringer by a potion twice wasn't going to dismiss it as imagination. Because of the risk of losing control, he'd become acutely attuned to any irregularity in his own body.
Looking at this similarly un-human-looking crimson mass, he naturally began connecting it to that internal foreign presence. After all, he was an Extraordinaire himself — it made sense that he'd have something similar inside him.
It's like one of those cultivational-magic-type artifacts from a web novel, he thought, the kind you can refine and absorb into yourself. Something that stays dormant normally, only stirs when it senses a death, and suddenly makes itself felt.
Okay, follow that logic: if the potion's side effects are basically what happens when you haven't fully refined the artifact yet — then maybe that dissolving sensation was part of it being refined further. Triggered by someone dying. So what would happen if it dissolved completely?
Of course, the resemblance wasn't proof of equivalence. Ryan was only reaching for familiar terms because he'd been caught off guard.
When the ache in his hands eased up a bit, he tore another strip from the corpse's undershirt and, being careful not to touch it directly, wrapped the crimson mass and tied it off.
He set the wrapped bundle on the body's stomach, hoisted the corpse again, and started walking. The speculation could wait — the body disposal absolutely couldn't.
A few minutes later, spotting a sizable rock, Ryan decided on burial. Even if it did turn into a vengeful spirit, at least he'd know where to find it — this world apparently shared the idea that such spirits could only haunt the place where they had died. Whether that was actually true was another matter. He'd assume it was for now.
He felt reasonably good about himself for having thought this through at all. Anything more would be beyond his current knowledge, and he wasn't going to hold himself to impossible standards. As long as his conscience was clear.
After snapping off a sturdy branch, Ryan spent what must have been an hour getting everything sorted.
"Broke as anything. No money, fine — but what kind of street criminal doesn't even carry a weapon?"
He'd gotten nothing from the body search, and he was genuinely irritated, so he snapped off the man's forearms and shins and tossed them in the river.
Then immediately second-guessed himself.
Vengeful spirits probably don't form near scattered body parts, right?
A little mortified, he realized he'd been so focused on separating the limbs that he'd forgotten to think about that. But the pieces were in the river now, and he wasn't about to fish them out. After a few seconds' thought, Ryan decided to forgive himself.
He picked up the knotted strip of undershirt containing the crimson mass and headed back.
He'd done plenty of thinking while digging. Whether the deep crimson thing was useful at all remained uncertain — besides trying to dig up more information somehow, there was nothing to be gained from speculating on his own.
What felt more worth examining was the strange internal sensation itself. The question nagging at him most was whether it might be the key to avoiding the potion's influence — the thing that every Extraordinaire at a certain level apparently knew about, the method for preventing mental contamination.
Revisiting the sensation carefully, Ryan was inclined to believe it wasn't harmful. There'd been no negative feeling at the time — if anything, he'd felt very slightly lighter afterward. And if this was something triggered by killing, the Church wouldn't need to work hard at maintaining any kind of order; they could simply sit back and watch Beyonders and commoners getting along wonderfully on their own.
Although that sensation probably isn't purely a result of killing.
If killing someone alone were enough to trigger it, loss of control wouldn't be the second most common cause of death among Beyonders.
Is my reasoning too optimistic? Or does it work this way specifically because the potion I drank is called "Assassin," and killing triggers it for that reason?
Either way, Ryan decided he needed to try reproducing the sensation. Without more data points, any further speculation was groundless. He wasn't particularly worried that this would cause some irreversible harm to the potion's latent dangers — after all, an Assassin that couldn't kill would be a rather absurd joke.
And verification was straightforward enough. Even in his own stable, peaceful era, people were sentenced to death. In the one he now inhabited, the options were even more plentiful.
He also didn't particularly mind killing for the sake of testing a theory. Because he'd long ago concluded that killing and unforgivable acts weren't the same thing.
The soldier who pulls a trigger in war. The officer who carries out a lawful execution. The armed police officer who puts down a violent criminal. The mother who demands a life in answer for her child's death. None of them were committing unforgivable acts. What made a murderer unforgivable was never the act of killing itself — it was the motive that no reasonable person could accept.
So Ryan had absolutely no reservations about eliminating a few people who posed a genuine threat to peace and stability, while also taking the opportunity to test his theory.
If killing a single capitalist wouldn't actually change anything, he'd already be giving serious thought to the feasibility of lamp-post justice.