From Corpse to Crown: Reborn as a Mortician in Another World-Chapter 57: The Lesson I Didn’t Learn

They found the entrance to the Vale at dusk.

The sky here had always been a muted blue--neither day or night. As Lucian took a second look at the trees, he noticed they didn’t have any leaves. Instead, there were glyphs etched into their trunks, like someone had carved out memories with a trembling hand.

Lucian said nothing as they crossed into the threshold.

But the moment he stepped over the boundary stone, the world shifted.

A ripple, like breath caught in a throat.

The others kept walking—Merry, Cadrel, and Alice. They didn’t notice he’d stopped.

That was because in their eyes, he hadn’t. Not visibly.

But the world around him had become surrounded by fog, and then slowly peeled back.

+

He stood now in a wide, cold room with slate-colored floors. A black desk. A chair that creaked. And shelves upon shelves of mortuary textbooks, ritual guides, and Crown-approved ethical frameworks.

Lucian’s eyes widened when he realized.

This looks like my mortuary school on Earth.

Grief Counseling 101.

Professor Andrew Lestrel stood at the front of the room, whiteboard marker hovering above the board as if paused mid-thought.

Lucian sat at his desk. Younger. Sharper. Arrogant.

He remembered this day. The final exam.

Back then, he didn’t understand why it mattered. Grief was grief. People would cry, or not cry. The dead didn’t care. They couldn’t.

Now, instead of pride, Lucian felt ashamed.

I spent weeks memorizing every recommended phrase...and I asked several classmates what the appropriate responses could be before I made a script.

I didn’t understand what they meant by ’this is literally the subject none of us think about, Luci. It’s weird that you have to, when you’re so good at everything else.’

He saw himself typing feverishly at his laptop and knew it was for a case study. The assignment was to interview a grieving family and then recommend the best funeral within their budget. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

Lucian didn’t want to speak to complete strangers, so he’d made one up instead.

He invented a fictional grieving father and checked the funeral parlor near his university for the prices of funeral urns, coffins, caskets, and flowers.

Then he just inserted all the correct phrases and made up a low budget on the spot.

The grade came back: Distinction.

He saw younger Lucian act so proud about the feedback he received. On his paper, written in red ink: "Ethically sound with thorough research. Arranging an affordable funeral for a grieving father. Emotionally calibrated. Demonstrates empathy and mastery of tone."

Lucian stared now at the page in front of him.

The Vale had recreated it perfectly.

His own idea, and his own lie. For the rest of the semester, he happily spent it alone, or with a few friends from mortuary school. By the time he was working as a mortician, Lucian had lost contact with them.

+

"Why are you showing me this?" he asked aloud.

The classroom was empty. Frozen. Quiet.

Except for the desk beside him.

A soft sob echoed.

He turned—and there, in the next seat, was a woman.

Familiar.

Her face had been lost to time, but he remembered her eyes.

She had wept in the waiting room at his first solo mortuary posting.

He hadn’t comforted her. He hadn’t asked how she wanted to proceed.

He’d handed her a form. Told her the body would be prepped within forty-eight hours. And turned away. He told her to go to one of the other staff next--and they were in charge of comforting her.

Now that he knew the emotional cost of death and being put to rest, he was appalled at how cold he used to be.

"I didn’t even ask if you wanted lavender oil or cedar," he whispered now.

The woman didn’t look up.

She just kept weeping.

+

Lucian wandered the echo of the Vale for what felt like hours.

No wind. No footsteps. Only his own memory breathing down his neck.

He passed rooms that were his—his dormitory, his counseling lab, the shadowed stone corridor where he once laughed behind another student’s back for crying during the empathy exam.

"It’s not our job to feel it," he’d said. "Just to name it."

Now, he stopped.

Because the Vale had built a new room.

A ritual space, but wrong. Broken. Ritual lines unfinished. Candles half-melted.

In the center: a raised platform.

A body on the slab.

Not dead.

But grieving.

Lucian stepped closer.

It was him.

Not how he looked now—but the version of him who had walked out of the Queen’s academy with a perfect record and no concept of what it meant to carry another’s pain.

The echo-Lucian blinked up at him. Hollow-eyed. Smiling faintly.

"You did everything right," it said.

"But you didn’t do anything true."

Lucian stood frozen as the glyphs began to light around the slab.

They weren’t familiar.

They weren’t taught.

They were trying to form—out of his memories, his failings, his shame. Not to destroy him.

But to give him a chance to rewrite the rite.

He held out his hand, palm up, and tried to summon his Echoheart System, trembling.

"Help me," he whispered.

The Grimoire flickered, then opened.

Not with answers.

But with blank pages.

+

At the end of the path, just beyond where even memory dared not go, he saw her.

There was a figure seated at a wide, warped loom made of bone and old iron. Several threads of emotion--raw, real, unnamed--ran through her fingers like silver veins.

It hadn’t done so for a very long time, but his Grimoire gave him an update:

[CODEX UPDATE]

Name: The Spinnermaid.

Faction: Fatespinner (Future)

Note: She is an expert on grief and wields it with utmost gentleness. A sighting is extremely rare. Lives within the Vale of Unfinished Rites.

Warning: Do not disrespect her, or touch her Loom.

She was ancient, faceless beneath a mourning veil, and still her presence made his knees go weak.

She looked at him—but not directly. Her face remained turned toward her work.

"I have been waiting," she said, voice like fabric torn and re-sewn.

Lucian swallowed. "For what?"

"For one who understands that rites are not completed," she said, "until they are felt."

He took a hesitant step closer. "Are you the one who built these glyphs?"

"No," she said. "I only finish what others refuse to."

She gestured to the threads. Some shimmered. Others twisted in agony. A few glowed with a steady peace.

"I can teach you," she said. "One of you. Only one."

Lucian blinked. "One?"

"You may share what you learn. But it will never be as perfect as mine. I am the last thread of the original Fatespinners. I will not choose lightly."

Lucian looked down at his hands.

The Echoheart fluttered at his side.

A single phrase shimmered into view on the blank page:

This time, do not cheat.