No. He doesn’t have the solution yet. And he should wait till he’s in a safer place before he thinks farther on it.

Then he will gather the bits of washed rubbish back into the bundle of his vest. He returns to the stained wall and places the makeshift sack on the ground just outside of his marked semicircle. He looks for a portion of gore that seems to have the highest concentration of the foreign, black material, and he uses his axe to excise a clump of it about the size of a crab apple.

He holds it up before his face and inhales deeply. Apart from the instinctive flinch from the odor, what else does he detect within it?

The most succinct description of the experience would be: wrong and complicated.

The substance seems to be off-gassing. The odor has an immediate sharpness that is both concerning and alluring, like distilled spirits or alchemical solvents.  It makes his sinuses tingle, and it comes with a kick, creating a moment of heightened wakefulness.

But the scent is more complex than any single compound should be. After the initial sharpness comes a much larger and varied hit to the palate. Through resemblance but not direct equality, it calls to mind petrichor, nitre, chocolate, and bat guano.  At the very back of the sensation is something that makes him think of burnt, gummy plant material in a jungle swamp.

Hmm.

That is definitely not something that his primary personality remembers. However, the scent is so peculiar that it may prove a valuable lead, if he can only find a sufficiently skilled chemist to identify it.

He uses the crumpled broadside to wrap up the thing as best as he can, and he stows it in his coin purse.

Then he returns to the mass in the corner. He is going to thoroughly rake through the material with the blade of his axe, breaking it into small pieces. He is looking for any small bits of jewelry, gemstones, or metals, and he is going to be thorough enough as to not miss even a single gold tooth.

What does he find?

He finds no precious metals nor jewels.  Sifting through the material reveals it to be a mix of blood, the strange black coagulant, and brain matter.  There are several pieces of small plate-like bones that suggest skull fragments.  He finds a two-inch piece of jaw bone with the teeth still attached.  If he holds it in his hand and raises it to his own jawline, he will be able to confirm that it is indeed the size of his own.

He does not find any coils of guts, nor fragments of the other large organs of the torso.

Trawling through his own bodily remains sure does give him a queer feeling.

The fact that there is a piece of his jaw both in his hand and currently attached to his skull is proof that his immortality can synthesize arbitrary parts of his body from whole cloth. But apparently it only does so sometimes, or when needful? Is there some limit to the restoration, a level of damage beyond which the existing material is not repaired but rather discarded to make new bodily tissues?

It occurs to him that this particular result is decidedly incompatible with a senseless explosion pulverizing a mortal man’s body against the wall. There should be more than just the remnants of the head.

So Option b) is unlikely.

He should further lay it to rest. He’ll make another pass of inspection, moving up the lane from the last corner. This time he is looking for any wall mounted wires or hooks. If the thing that killed him was a trap and not an active adversary, he wants to see what it left behind.

One of the doors in the lane has a loosely coiled brown string that hangs from a hook mounted atop its frame.  Judging by the look of the fibers, it has not been moved nor made to bear weight in years.

There is nothing else.

As he searches he continues to think.

Whether it’s the stimulant of this odor or the involuntary dry retching he did earlier, his digestive system has awoken now, and his stomach is tightening with hunger cramps, despite the overall gruesomeness of the scene. The desire to eat is beginning to distract him, and testing how his immortality handles mild starvation does not seem like a fruitful endeavor at this time.

He forcibly brings his attention back to the mystery of the jawbone. He knows something of how predators behave. Small pack hunters usually bite at the legs until the prey is immobilized, then make repeated small attacks till the thing bleeds out and lies still. A large predator is likely either to intentionally kill by ripping out the throat, like a lion, or to simply pin the thing and begin eating its trunk, like an ice bear. In all cases, the soft central organs tend to be the most prized portion for their taste and nutrients. Failing to find any of his own in a pile of this magnitude does suggest either that his torso was eaten or that the enemy preferentially smashed his head.

It feels like the same Option a), Option c) forking again… For if the enemy is clever and aware of his immortality, then it might choose to target the brain to cause maximum amnesia. And if the enemy is an insatiable predatory beast that enjoys the taste of his flesh in particular, then it may well have eaten the inner organs, which it did not need to shatter bone to reach, and then moved on to the brain, which it did not fully consume, but was obliged to smash his skull to reach.

Perhaps his torso was broken open, furnishing some of the volume of blood (there sure is a lot here) but it then reconstituted itself in place, while his head was so shattered that it had to be built from scratch? 

Does that mean his tattoos did not need to be restored in this cycle? And if his body were burned to ashes, upon resurrecting, would he have fresh, clear skin? Or would it be restored even more grizzled but with the tattoos intact?

When he's finished his search, he returns to the doors of the lane and knocks again, this time more loudly. He’ll wait about two minutes between each door.

No sounds this time.

Okay. He’s pushing the limits of his abilities as a criminal detective.

He closes his eyes a moment. If he leaves now, what will he regret not having done here?

He might regret not testing the place for the presence of a Sigil portal, but he lacks the means to do so now. He might regret abandoning some obscurely hidden gate key or journal among the rubbish lying about, but that is why he has already doffed his vest and laid it up.

What remains is to stroll about this neighborhood and commit several landmarks to memory so that he can return here later.

He should also speak with those street children they passed earlier.

He returns to the wall, and he ties his vest and its contents up into a bindle that can be looped over his left wrist. The axe he carries in his right. He walks back to the pump and the masonry arch to look for the children.

There are none now loitering about the compound’s entrance. He does continue to hear some occasional high pitched shouts and snippets of conversation from out in the streets beyond.

Unfortunate.

Then he will walk a loop of around two hundred yards radius, marking any visible tall spires or prominent shop fronts and signs. What does he see?

He sees a butcher shop with a line of skinned hogs hanging by their feet.  He sees a schoolhouse with a tall cupola and an iron cross bar where a bell might be expected to hang, but doesn’t.  He sees a large, squat, civic-looking building with an arcade front and a piqued roof wherein a clock is mounted.  The time reads mid-afternoon.

On the opposite side of his circle there is a long line of temporary merchant stalls displaying everything from cookware to leatherwork to street meat.

The rest of the neighborhood could largely be described as brick townhomes and broad lanes.

Then he will enter the butcher shop and part with a common or two in exchange of some waxed butcher paper in which to wrap his pile of Flint Court rubbish. He’d like to be able to don his vest again and be less conspicuous walking abroad.

Glossing over the part where a large shirtless man wielding a battle axe and a bundle of trash enters a butcher shop to general consternation?

Being confirmed now in his belief that he is a well spoken and patient man, and not a bedlam beggar, he will persist and succeed at securing butcher paper if there is any in the establishment, despite the disadvantage of his first impressions.

Plus one square yard of butcher paper.  Minus two commons.

He swaps the vest bundle with the paper. Then he’ll browse the line of merchant stalls in search of a knapsack and a strap or holster for his axe.

At present his wealth amounts to one gold ring, three silver coins totaling four or five ounces, and around four score commons. He is willing to spend some minutes in haggling, and he is unwilling to spend more than a silver on both a knapsack and strap, something that will keep the axe held close across his back, with neither the spike nor the blade end liable to dig into his skull if he is rudely jostled.

At that price, he can purchase this leather satchel with a darkened pattern of the palm-and-eye, and this claymore scabbard with a shaft that is deep enough to secure his axe and whose attached leather belt is cut wide enough to be worn as a bandolier.  The satchel is of thoroughly cracked and blemished leather, and it certainly wouldn’t pass muster in polite company, but it is watertight and not an ill match for his vest and loincloth.

The shopkeeper of the leather goods stall is a duergar with a lazy eye, and he’s a hard bargainer to boot. It takes The Nameless One a solid half hour to locate and complete the purchase of the items he set out for.

Perfect.

The butcher paper parcel goes into the satchel. He keeps the coin purse secreted within his loincloth.

In parting, he asks the duergar which way to “The Mortuary, or Tarry Fields, if you please.”

The Nameless One will obligingly be pointed in a westerly direction.

Then he’ll buy a few commons worth of street meat skewers and swiftly devour them. If the meat vendor gives directions that are remotely in alignment with those of the duergar, he’ll set off there at once.