Deny deny deny deny.
He woke up early the next day and left while both Thera and Sonya still slept, off to do exactly what he’d thought about only the day before, going to get ingredients.
He did his best to ignore the shop as he passed through, not wanting to feel any temptation from the things it held but chose to take the mini gate to his workshop in Anailia rather than pass through Thera’s family home to get to the main gate network and went on from there to do his shopping.
With many of the original gate cities at least partially abandoned due to their proximity to invasion points, he used what little knowledge he had of the safe ones to go to a city he’d built the gate for himself, walking through to one that was enjoying a breezy afternoon on a coast.
While coastal cities made for an easier route for the terrestrial and aquatic races to meet, it also meant they were valuable regions for trade, telling him that even if he hadn’t been there before, their shops and markets would likely be filled with interesting products and ingredients to get his hands on as he started his exploration down the streets, jogging through them to see as much as he could while popping into any shops that caught his eyes.
With the rings on his fingers, he wasn’t much limited by space either as he went, finding a spice store early on and peppering the shopkeeper with questions as he asked how different ones would be used and what they would be good for before buying a few pounds of every variety that was held to play with later and going on from there.
It wasn’t long after that he found a fish market to spend some time in too, looking deeply at the options while finding out what he could from the salesmen about those strange forms of life.
Like the terrestrial side of the planet he lived on, the ecosystem of the aquatic side was a mess as well due to all of the groups that had been scooped up and brought along by their gods, accidentally or intentionally bringing along some of the life of their worlds too, carving out new niches in their new home that was kept constantly out of balance by the sheer virtue of the scale of that change.
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“Thank you.”
“It’s no problem, happy to help.”
They exchanged a few more words before leaving, letting Ben get back to his day as new feelings began stabbing into him from that small meeting.
If he abandoned the world to its fate then he’d be abandoning people to die, billions of people, with many of them being children. It was easy to say he didn’t care when they weren’t around, out of sight out of mind, but as we walked the streets, was he really willing to leave so many to such a fate?
And if not then what did that mean? Rolling over for the gods so he could take what bits of strength for himself he could while letting them delay him for their own goals? It wasn’t like they were wrong that helping so many finish their jobs could benefit them and the world but helping the third tiers finish their jobs would delay him by weeks or months, possibly longer depending on if any of them had advanced variants to go through and he was sure that would be true of more than a few, even if he hadn’t gotten so lucky himself. ℟
So was he willing to just be nothing more than experience for others if it meant he’d still be able to snag some growth for himself? Even if slowed, it would still surely help him on the way to his goals.
“...Deny.”
His feelings were a mess so he decided to give up on thinking as best he could, instead doing a few more hours of shopping for whatever interesting things he might find before heading home for the day, continuing to put off the problems of just what he should do in the future.