I dreamt of tentacles and of the woods that wend with a thousand young.
I snapped awake, drenched with sweat and hoarse from screaming and flailing my arms. Panting, I sat there in bed for a while before shaking my head. To call those dreams a nightmare was like calling World War One a small misunderstanding.
Still, there was something different about me now. That should have rendered me a complete wreck, but already I was feeling calm again. It didn't help me at all in the midst of the nightmare or if I was foolish enough to attempt to remember my pet goat, but I had a new and remarkable resilience to what might make another person gibbering mad. I didn't know what to think about it, nor did I know the origin of it, but I couldn't say it wasn't better to have than not.
But had it changed my personality? Perhaps, in fact, I thought it had, but so had ingesting the entire memory of a twenty-something elf woman.
Shrugging, I stood up and found my clothes. Cleaning them with magic, I went downstairs and pumped out some water from the well in the middle of the courtyard. I had to pump continuously for a good fifteen minutes before the water ran clean, but after that, I used it to clean off before getting dressed.
The chill was less now that the sun was out, and I didn't mean the temperature. The odd coldness of the magic was lessened during the day, and things were a little less odd around here. The fog was gone, as was the surreal feeling.
I sat down and cast Unseen Servant several times again and ordered them to clean the courtyard while I had a skeleton go out and drag back two more bodies. I didn't actually know the spell Flay, so I would continue to use my wand to demeat my future Skeletons. It was a lot easier and less messy than trying to do so on my own.
Perhaps, over time, I would deduce how Flay worked and recreate it, but for now, I wasn't particularly upset about my two-cast-a-day limit. All other things being equal, more skeletons were better than fewer skeletons, but I really didn't want to butcher and debone two dozen zombies. I didn't even think I had a sharp enough implement not to make a mess of it, honestly.
This time, one of the skeletons had a broken femur, so I carefully sat all the pieces together and used the Mending cantrip several times until it was all better. If that hadn't worked, then I could have used some first-level Necromancy spells that could "heal" the dead. They were mostly only useful for those practising Mortuary Science and needed a way to make someone presentable for an open-casket funeral. They were Mend Bone and Seal Wounds. They weren't very practical, otherwise, because they only worked on the dead and not the undead.
If I wanted a zombie that looked more or less like a living person, I could use them, though. Combined with the cantrip Death Aura to halt the decay process, you could almost get a zombie that didn't stink too much. You'd have to recast Death Aura quite often, though. Death Aura was a popular cantrip that even non-magical people liked learning for its utility.
Not only could it work on food, causing rations to last a lot longer as it killed all the bacteria, but it was strong enough to kill small flying insects like mosquitoes. You could keep it cast as long as you concentrated, and small flying insects would immediately die if they got close to you. Merildwen's memories suggested that it was almost a required cantrip for adventurers in some swampy areas.
From my perspective, if this skeleton's femur had been crushed to splinters, I could have used Mend Bone to fix it. However, since the fractures were just small, I could use the normal Mending cantrip on bones, which was quite nice.
Proper maintenance on your skeletons was important, after all.
It took an hour and a half to animate the two new members of my skellie gang, as well as to refresh the control spells of my two existing skeletons and my shadow. Timing was very important to a necromancer because if I forgot to refresh these spells, all of my minions would immediately try to murder me, so while they lasted a full twenty-four hours, I decided to recast them twice a day—once in the morning and once in the evening. I was already faster than yesterday, so it was good practice in any event.
I spent the rest of the day investigating the village I found myself in. I collected all the bodies and anything of value, including some tools and a lot of clothes. Some of which was what the zombies were wearing, but a fair amount was inside the dozen or so houses in the small village. Most were, of course, poor-quality weave and probably not valuable, but a few outfits in the large building I had co-opted were made of nice silks, but all of them were soiled, ripped and damaged. It was kind of a theme about this village.
Still, it was nothing a few casts of Mending couldn't solve, for the most part.
The next day, I continued exploring the village and started walking with my squad of six skeletons in the nearby forest.
Although Mr. Ghost had some unfortunate limitations, namely his time limit, he had other abilities that made him a lot more useful than a standard familiar. For one, he was a ghost. I didn't know if he followed the Monster Manual, but if he was close, then he was a Challenge Rating five monster, and that came with a lot of abilities. He refused to possess people for me, not that there were any people around to possess in the first place, but he could fly remarkably fast.
I needed to know more about where I was and what was nearby. I had a few weeks of food, but after that, I would need to either start hunting game in the forest or find civilisation. I wasn't really in that much of a hurry to find any civilisation. I didn't speak the language and could only even understand it at one-hour intervals.
"Today, go as high as you can and go straight north for your full duration. Make sure to pay good attention to everything you see. Tomorrow, you'll tell me anything interesting, and then you'll repeat the process going east," I told the ghost my plan, who seemed a little surprised at my idea.
I already had him expand outwards from the village in a spiral pattern, having him tell me everything he saw. I suppose he expected me to continue that, except it would take too long. It was fine enough that I knew what dangers were around the village that I might run into. Now, I needed to know some things to create some longer-term plans.
Hunting with a squad of a dozen or so skeletons was a bit difficult. I could move quietly, but they weren't up to it. So we basically could only take game that wasn't afraid of us. Large, poisonous snakes the size of giant anacondas had been the most common animal that I could easily take down and was still tasty enough to eat.
I felt good that for once, rather than the experience of studying magic for twenty-five years, what was more useful was my experience as a tween with a varmint rifle in the hills of West Virginia. Meril didn't know how to butcher a snake and eat it, but I sure did. Bigger snek was still snek.
There were quite a few giant spiders that wandered out of their territory and a few large cats. The latter were the most dangerous as they seemed to ignore the skellies and pounce at me with some stealth, especially from the high branches. Seeing one leaping at your throat in mid-air certainly got the juices flowing. Having it maul your arm before being put down was a bit traumatising, too. I had to use one of my limited supplies of about a dozen healing potions for that wound.
The cats and sneks tasted pretty good, especially with Prestidigitation to flavour the meat in something close to a nice BBQ rub. However, no amount of castings did anything to make the spider legs palatable. There were limits to magic, apparently, and I had found one.
I wasn't out hunting today, though. I was currently doing my best to backtrack to where I originated in this world. I had left a half dozen useful weapons on the ground because they wouldn't fit in my hammerspace, and they were too useful for me right now to ignore. My squad of skellies were armed with the most formidable weapon I had access to: long sticks. One had a hammer, and one had my bow. I was able to continually repair the arrows with Mending, being lucky enough that the shafts hadn't utterly splintered to bits yet, but that was it.
This was one of the classic limitations to low-level Necromancers whenever someone tried to play them, namely equipping all of your skeletons.
I had animated all of the village by now, and I had quickened the time it took me to cast the spell quite a lot. It took me about forty-five minutes each morning to go through the spell five times and the same in the evening when I went to sleep.
That was good progress. My nightmares, however, remained a serious problem. However, I no longer woke up screaming. But... I had a bit of a problem falling asleep, though, knowing what was waiting for me, so my eyes were a bit haggard, and I took small naps during the day. If I slept for only an hour or so, I wouldn't dream at all.
It got to the point where I was quite concerned I would get so sleep-deprived that I might sleep through recasting Animate Dead and Chain Spirit and have the skellies or shadow murder me in my sleep. The latter, especially, wanted to, and it was very close to me at all times. I suppose I could put it in the amulet at night and lock my door in the bedroom, but staying close to spirits was one way to increase my affinity to necromancy, and it was also a last line of defence if someone snuck into the village, bypassed my alarm wards and attacked me in my sleep. As such, I took different precautions.
I used the second-level Illusion spell Magic Mouth to create something akin to an alarm clock. That spell allowed you to record a message, but most importantly, it allowed you to set conditions about when the recording would play. It also lasted forever, until it was dispelled or until the object it was cast on was destroyed.
The conditions could be quite convoluted, to the point where I thought a smarter person might even be able to make an eight-bit computer utilising thousands and thousands of castings, like using Redstone in Minecraft. However, in my case, I just had it tell me loudly to wake up every twelve hours. I cast it on a small wooden disk that I had found, and I would immediately put it away in my hammerspace when I woke up.
I had already discovered that time didn't seem to pass inside there due to meals staying warm, so it amounted to a twelve-hour timer every time I took it out.
The nightmares were getting better, though. I wasn't sure if I could consider them less severe each day or if I was just getting used to it, but each day was a bit easier than the last. Still, it would be really nice to find something to help me with them.
I frowned, coming out of my reverie and immediately leapt and rolled to the side as a pair of giant spiders landed in the location I was previously in. They looked at least twice as big as the usual variety, which caused me to pause. I decided to cast Mirror Image immediately, and three illusory versions of myself stepped out of my body.
At the same time, the skellies turned and started to attack the spiders. One was restrained right away, while the other leapt at me like a pouncing cat, attempting to bowl me over and flew through one of my illusory copies, tumbling into the tall trunk of a tree with a loud thud, shaking some branches enough that a few leaves started to slowly float to the ground.
The force of that pounce was alarming; it likely would have broken some bones.
I held out my hand and cast Ray of Frost, striking it head-on. I had noticed that both my necromantic spells and, surprisingly, my ice evocations were extra effective in this world. I could cast Ray of Frost for half the effort, and it was twice as effective, while the opposite was true with Fire Bolt.
Other evocation cantrips like Shocking Grasp seemed to be slightly less effective than I would expect them to be, but nothing as bad as Fire Bolt. I didn't know why this happened, but I was pleased with it. It made casting all of my necromantic spells quicker and more effective, and that was my main strength.
Ray of Frost was becoming my favourite cantrip since it seemed excessively powerful when I cast it. It lashed out with a hissing noise, striking the spider directly on its carapace, freezing it to the tree!
Granted, not for long. The monster just had to exercise its Peter Parker strength to crunch the ice and get free, but in that time, my one skellie archer had put two arrows into him, and I followed up with Toll the Dead, killing it.
That was my main combo with these giant spiders, Ray of Frost and then Toll the Dead. The latter did a lot more damage, too, and it did even more if the enemy was already hurt a little. Those two would kill a regular giant spider, but this was the first time I had seen these extra-large versions. They appeared to be somewhat intelligent, or at least they had an animal's cunning. They knew to target me, rather than the smaller ones that just threw themselves at my skellies.
That didn't bode well. I knew from Mr. Ghost that we were barely on the perimeter of the spider territory, so I wondered if they got progressively stronger as you approached the centre, like a video game. Maybe with giant sapient Spider Queens at the end, who would suck all your juices? I didn't want to find out.
It took the better part of the morning to find the gear, and it was guarded by two more of those super spiders as well as three of the regular variety. I held back this time and let my skellies take the brunt of the fight. Only when the two giant spiders were more or less committed did I come in and start slinging spells.
My caution caused four of my skeletons to cross from being undead to being just dead, though, but I thought it was worth it. I could bring their bones back with me and re-animate them after we got back to my base. The entire purpose of my skeletons was to protect me, after all. Knowing when to throw them away was a vital part of being a Nec, I thought.
I dumped all of their bones into a large bag I had found in the village and had one of the other skeletons take it while the rest grabbed all the stuff I left behind. There were four swords and two spears. I would have loved a dozen spears, as, really, the skeletons weren't that great in terms of their technique, but it was hard to beat a ton of spears trying to poke you to death.
That said, I would take what I could get. The rest I took back were a half dozen books from the vault that I had already committed to memory. Not very useful, but not useless either. There was a level two transmutation spell that I couldn't quite cast that could totally blank an entire book, so I could practice it and get a book to write in or to sell.
If I was going to be a Necromancer experimenting with dark things beyond mortal ken and best left forgotten, then I had to have journals and lab notes! I just needed to find some pens and ink next!
Cackling quietly, I led my band of jolly skellies back to base.
Or, at least, I would have if something hadn't caused me to feel unease right as I saw the village. I paused, frowning, trying to identify what was wrong.
I stood there motionless for a moment before I could figure it out. There was movement in the village. I summoned Mr Ghost, "Please look around the village without being seen, and return to tell me what is going on."
He nodded and vanished, presumably into the ethereal plane or whatever this plane called it, and I waited patiently, half-hidden behind a tree. Casting Comprehend Language using one of my spell slots, I then waited for him to return. Ten minutes later or so, he returned, appearing right in front of me and tilted his head to the side, "It looks like a regular village, Miss. There are about twenty to thirty villagers going about their everyday business."
I frowned... had I gotten lost? No, I didn't think so. I recognised the large courtyard-style building I had been holding up in. I said, "How interesting..."
I didn't want to waste another first-level spell slot, so instead, I brought out everything I needed to cast Detect Magic and looked at the village again. It was absolutely covered in chilly necromantic blues and the tell-tale rainbow of illusory spells.
The colours looked a little different than I was used to. The necromantic blues were different, and the rainbow hues were darker, but I didn't think that this world used the same type of magic that I did, but it was definitely close enough that Detect Magic worked.
I tapped my fingers on the bark of the tree I was concealing myself behind and considered. I had found the corpses of twenty-five villagers when I arrived here. Twenty-five zombie villagers. That they had been undead was indisputable.
Mr. Ghost asked, "I'm pretty sure it's the same village, though. A lot of your things were still in the large courtyard. The place is also draped with strong yin qi and possible illusory formations. A mystery. Are you going to try to communicate with them?" He seemed curious.
"Fuck no," I murmured. I could guess how this would go. They would be welcoming despite the communications issues and invite me in. Perhaps serve me food. And then?
I had noticed that there was a cycle in this place. What Mr. Ghost called "yin qi" I considered pretty comfortable, so I noticed its ebbs and flows. It was strongest at night. And I noticed that the energy seemed to be a little stronger each night than the previous one. And as soon as the sun fell, I suspected these "villagers" would reveal themselves to be some type of zombie and tear me to pieces.
I gave Mr. Ghost my theory and asked him if anything like this happened naturally in this world. Monsters and undead could appear from almost nothing, but seeing an entire village spring up from nothing was weird. He tried to look sympathetic, but it came off fake and said, "I really can't say."
"That is bullshit. Tixit was capable of answering general questions about the prime material, and for things that he didn't know, he could give me some of the collected wisdom of all the devil's above his chain of command, all the way up to the fucking Archdevil in charge of his particular layer of Hell. I had significant credit for these types of questions banked, so you should be able to fucking answer my question. Now, you will answer me, or I will consider Judge Wu in breach of contract, at least for the familiar clause," I hissed out, finally so annoyed that I snapped, simultaneously causing a full handful of ghost dust to appear in my hand, secretly.
Honestly, I didn't know how to bring up legal action against a theoretic ghost in the netherworld, but I would fucking figure it out if this motherfucker didn't get with the program. He had been irritating me for days with his simpering refusal to provide much assistance at all. I was really close to changing him in for a crow. Now that I wasn't hanging as much on death's door as I had been the first day, I was just about done with this asshole.
Mr. Ghost's facial expression immediately shifted from inauthentic sympathy to shock, and he frowned, looking a little uneasy. Finally, he said, with a sigh, "Look, there is no need to get anyone else involved, Miss. Fine. That village is likely a semi-naturally occurring well of yin energy. They're considered anomalies, and it is pretty much exactly what you suspected."
"So nobody raised those villagers from the dead?" I asked, curious.
He shook his head, then paused and then said, "Well, I don't know. Maybe the first time. But it's also as likely that they turned that way due to exposure to the yin energy. That you survived even several hours in there is shocking, much less a week." I gripped my hand tightly, almost drawing blood with my long nails that had somehow survived without breaking yet. This motherfucker hadn't thought that was a good thing for me to know? Was he trying to get me killed?
He continued, "The fact that they reappear periodically has more to do with time being locally unstable. Really, that village is close to a small world that gets reset to a past point in time once the yin qi builds up to a certain level." He then narrowed his eyes at me and asked, "Is that sufficient, Miss?"
I wanted to just dismiss him, but asked, "Clarify. Small world. Do you mean a demi-plane?"
He frowned, considering it, before nodding, "Yes. You should notice as you pass the barrier. It's likely that you'd find it more difficult to leave that place now as its natural illusory formations are active again."
I nodded decisively, "Now that is sufficient. I never want to see you again." And with that, I dismissed him permanently. I saw his face wince as the familiar bond snapped like a rope under excessive tension.
I hissed and shook my head. I had a light headache, too, but it was quickly fading. Perhaps that had been short-sighted, but I honestly had started to get the opinion that he was trying to get me killed while acting within the limits of being a familiar.
The first few days, he had been helpful, but it had just gone downhill from there. I had attempted to interrogate him about the plane, but he had refused. I had let it go, not wanting to alienate the only sapient entity around, despite knowing I should be able to get some information, but I had snapped when he refused information that could be life and death to me.
I had been slowly coming to the conclusion that he thought I was an interesting distraction at first, but he felt I was going to die in the first few days and was getting increasingly annoyed that I clung to life or even thrived. Perhaps I was taking him away from all the ghost women, or his weekly canasta game, or something. I didn't know, but I had enough of it. The fact that he neglected to tell me that he thought I would die if I stayed in the village longer than a few hours was the final straw.
After I took care of these undead squatters in my base, I would find myself a good cat or crow. Maybe an owl, like Harry Potter!
I withdrew a good hundred metres back into the forest in case one of the "villagers" saw me. I didn't know how they worked. They might be aware that they were undead, or they might not. Either case, I didn't want them to see me.
For a moment, I just considered leaving. I sort of knew which direction to go to get to the nearest road that seemed well-travelled, but it was barely visible two hours of Mr. Ghost flying to the northwest. He did fly pretty fast, so I suspected it might take me days to reach there, then god knows how long to find civilisation from there.
No. I was comfortable here. The fact that all of the zombies had already been killed when I arrived tended to make me believe that this location was periodically culled. The fact that my stuff still existed in the courtyard and all twenty-five villagers meant that this wasn't as simple as going back in time—as I had at least twelve of their skeletons here.
I frowned. Could this be farmed like a dungeon, like in Danmachi? Where did the extra mass come from? How much "yin qi" equalled one gram of generated mass? Well, who knew? It might be conjured from any number of planes if it was like Merildwen's world, some of which were infinite. Expecting a fantasy world to follow the conservation of energy was stupid of me in the first place.
Could I use this place to ... farm skeletons? As well as whatever goodies that existed in this village before it was ransacked? Well, it was worth a try.
I dumped out the dead skeletons' bones from the sacks and sat about mending them before re-animating them again, getting back to full strength.
I wish I had brought my whole platoon, but I didn't think it was necessary. Now, they were probably dead or something. I couldn't feel any connection to them, but I wasn't quite in range to do so. But I wasn't optimistic. I felt it likely that they might have been considered part of the villagers' bodies and reintegrated or something, that or all of the villagers swarmed them.
I sat down on the soft soil of the forest and waited for the sun to set, studying some books in my Mental Palace while I waited.
I could tell not so much from the sun disappearing over the horizon, which wasn't visible in the forest, but from the feeling of the magic in the air. As if a switch was thrown, things got weirder. I had been used to the change for at least a week, but I hadn't quite put things together. I just thought the whole world was like this, as I tried not to be far from the village when the sunset.
That could have been a disaster if it did work that way, and my skellies just vanished when the villagers returned. If I had been in the village and I suddenly lost all of my skeletons?! I let out a breath of air, shaking my head and stood up and my squad and I set out.
Before I left, I cast Detect Magic one more time as a ritual but didn't bother recasting Comprehend Language. The time for talkin' was over, I felt. We approached the village from near the large courtyard building. I figured it was the mayor's house or whatever the local hegemon was called.
Surprisingly, we were able to get rather close before a zombie noticed us. I didn't know if he was a guard precisely, but he was armed with a sword and challenged us, or perhaps he was just shuffling towards us. I peered at him, testing his aura and sniffing.
No doubt that he was a zombie. I waved at him and casually shifted my wave into the somatic component for Ice Knife while quickly closing my hand around the drop of water I had dropped into my other palm earlier. I had been making progress with my evocations. I could now cast another first-level one besides Magic Missile. I think it helped a lot that it was ice-based, as I had a real talent for that type of magic, it seemed.
It was still just level one, but it seemed to have the firepower of a level two spell, so it was now my go-to artillery spell. Instantly, a "knife" the size of a claymore sword formed next to my outstretched hand and then shot out like a bullet, accurately striking the undead man in the chest with explosive force. He let out a keening scream before falling over, dead.
Nice. I had a few more of those in me, too. Now, I let my skeletons advance ahead of me, with two behind me to guard my back.
The "man" looked like he had been dead for some time. And now the keening could be heard all over the village. I thought, 'Ah, we aggroed them.'
Two more zombies shambled pretty quickly out of one of the buildings and rushed us. My two skeletons with spears held them off while I alternated between Ray of Frost and Eldritch Blast, and the other skeletons harried them. Toll the Dead didn't work too well on the undead, and neither did Ray of Frost, honestly, so I mostly used that to slow the enemies down while blasting force with the definitive Warlock cantrip.
We got over halfway through the village that way, not having lost more than one skeleton before everything went quiet, and I paused.
Then I heard a roar, and it seemed like the rest of the village, twelve zombies, rushed us, along with a hugely fat zombie that I didn't quite remember. I would have remembered Flaying this one for sure.
My skeletons closed ranks, and I cast three more Ice Knives at the horde, causing some area damage, killing three of the zombies and incapacitating two more with the explosions. The fat zombie roared and bashed a skeleton out of the way, causing it to fly a good ten metres into the air, tumbling end over in a ballistic parabola, its spear hitting the ground with a clank behind me, which made my eyes widen in shock.
What the fuck?! I backed up, casting a quick Ray of Frost at its legs to slow it down. This zom was way stronger than the others, at least from physical strength alone. I ordered my men to swarm him while I backed up.
Fortunately for me, he seemed to aggro on my skeletons, but two of the other zombies did not. I kept backing up and almost tripped over the spear that the flying skeleton had been holding when the fat zom bashed him into the air. I quickly reached down to grab it, using it to attempt to hold off the two zombies bearing down on me as I repeatedly cast Eldritch Blast.
The fat zom was going down, but every time he struck out, a skeleton was eradicated. He punched a skeleton in the head, and its fucking skull exploded into powder. Seeing it, I almost cast Invisibility and ran away in fright!
Instead, I saw an opportunity and thrust wildly with the spear instead of casting a spell, and I caught one of the two zombies harrying me in the eye. I tried putting my weight behind it, and the spear came out the other side of his head.
I winced as the second zombie swiped at me with fingers that were closer to claws, drawing blood from my arm and ripping my robe. Not stopping, he enveloped me with both hands, grabbing and lifting me into the air, looking like he wanted to take a bite out of my face.
I opened my eyes in shock. The Shadow that lived in my shadow darted out and wrapped itself around the zombie, but they had very limited utility against other undead. However, I had a sudden idea and held my free hand over the zombie's head and summoned the thick iron barrel of ghost dust from my hammerspace. The barrel only held maybe three litres of the stuff, but I really thought that this crap might be made of uranium because it was heavy! It only fell thirty centimetres, but it brained the zombie good, causing it to drop me. I shoved my hand towards the undead's face and, at the last moment, summoned my Flay wand, triggering it after I shoved the wand into the zombie's eye.
His head exploded grossly, and the zombie fell over dead, with my wand still sticking out of his orbital socket. I panted and looked around for any others but was relieved that I couldn't find any.
Only two of my skeletons were still operational, and one was missing an arm, but the super-zombie and all the rest were dead at their feet. I quickly counted all of the downed zombies and nodded. Theoretically, that should be all of them, but I needed to get my skeletons swiftly repaired just in case I was wrong.
"Okay, that was a lot more perilous than I thought," I said to myself as I held my injured arm. It wasn't bleeding a lot, and I'd rather not waste one of my precious and possibly irreplaceable healing potions on a small injury, but glancing at the wound, I winced. I triggered Death Aura, kept it running and hoped that it would kill all of whatever zombie germs on the wound before I caught a disease. I didn't have any potions or scrolls of Remove Disease at all, so that would be a real problem.
"Come back, Chad," I mumbled, and Chad the Shadow slinked around me and disappeared into my shadow again. I then walked over and peered at the super-zombie, frowning. I hadn't expected some kind of... boss fight. And how the fuck was that guy so strong? That one zombie took down half of the skeletons by itself.
Sighing, I walked around and moved dead zombies and piles of bones out of the way. I would need an open space for a new Animate Dead ritual circle. I was totally tapped as far as spells were concerned, with only one second-level spell left, which I kept for an emergency casting of Invisibility in case I was about to be killed. I only had cantrips left, which proved a lot less effective on the undead than on spiders and sneks.
An hour later, I had six skeletons repaired, armed to the teeth. Due to the super zom, some skeletons could not be repaired. I couldn't use Mend Bone to fix a skull if the skull was reduced to powder, and that happened three times. The rest might be able to come back with some repairs, but I was going with speed right now, putting a skull from a tiny woman on a giant man's body and more. I just needed a few guards.
I glanced down at the dead super zom and shook my head, holding out my Flay wand. I cast the spell and took two steps back as all of his meat just peeled off of his bones like a mandarin orange.
I carefully fished his bones out, and they did indeed look different. In fact, they felt a lot stronger than regular bones. I was wondering if this guy would make a better skeleton.
When I pulled his ribs out, I found something interesting. It was something like a stone sphere, ice cold to the touch. I didn't even need Detect Magic to realise it was full of an incredibly cold, necromantic energy.
I frowned. Were these in all of the zombies all along? Because this seemed useful, even if I didn't know a use for it right now. Things full of magic were rarely useless, but they could be dangerous, so I decided to isolate it in my hammerspace for now.
When I raised the super-zom's bones into a skeleton, he had a darker look to him and seemed a hair smarter and stronger even—a little better with the sword I gave him, which would be awesome!
The durability of his bones was the best thing, though. They were at least three times as strong as a normal person's bones.
I stared at the new skeleton and said, "Okay, you're Big Chungus." I'd take silence for assent; on that basis, it seemed to love its new name!
I popped my knuckles and grinned, "Time to search for loot!" Already, I knew this place looked a bit different than usual. For one, about half of the zombies had been... well, I wouldn't say armed. But they had weapons, even if they didn't use them. It kind of made me want to approach the village during the day to see if they were, as I suspected, sapient. It was possible to use a spirit as a type of artificial intelligence, but they didn't have much creativity and would generally not pass an in-depth Turing Test. If things were different here, it would be a very interesting thing to study.
I picked night because I didn't think they'd let me approach with a dozen skeletons, and the night around here felt better for me. It might be the same with the zombies. I wouldn't be surprised if they were stronger at night, either, but I thought it was still the correct choice. I could have done a better job at kiting the large mass of zombies during the last battle, though.
"Come, BC," I said, and we set off to thoroughly explore the village.
Surprisingly, there was a lot of loot. A lot of the weapons were broken, dull or both, but they were mostly clean breaks that I could use Mending to fix, and I knew at least enough how to sharpen a blade. One of the houses had been a blacksmith, or perhaps just the village handyman, and the house still had some of its tools this time.
I was assuming Big Chungus was the mayor, given that he was both fat and wearing silks and his house, which I had been squatting in, had a number of interesting things as well. Five books, which I was really glad to see. I used Comprehend Language immediately and looked through them. Three of them were erotica, which was a bit disappointing. One was a history, which would be useful. The last was a thick tome that had been written by a scribe and was titled "Five Phases Method."
I had to read the first few pages a few times because it was a little confusing even with my ability to understand any language, but it billed itself as a magic technique to allow a person to grasp Qi, the energy of heaven and earth, allowing them to strengthen their body, mind and even soul.
My first thought was to throw it away. It sounded like how one would Multiclass into a Monk, and the idea of a Wizard/Monk was ridiculous. However, I paused. I kept having to remind myself that this wasn't a game. There were no stat point limits. Just because I worked out to make myself stronger didn't mean I would make myself stupider, like the way a regular character sheet would work.
While it was true that I only had so many hours in the day, and anything I spent on this could also be used to learn spells I couldn't cast, I had already intended to work out a little more. Lift a few weights and run for cardio.
Also, something about what the text said kept having me re-read it. It was written in rather flowery language, but it basically claimed that if you could grow this Qi in your body, it would strengthen your mind to the extent that you wouldn't have unnatural fears or nightmares. It also said that it would make you significantly smarter, or at least you could think and react a lot faster.
That was very tempting. But how did this work? Comprehend Language only lasted an hour at a go; it would take me days and days to read this thing, especially if I had to keep re-reading areas.
The next week passed more or less how I expected it would, with me repeatedly casting Comprehend Language to read areas of the Five Phases Method. Reading it over and over, I realised that one didn't grow Qi but "cultivated" it. The nuance was a bit different, but I felt it was important.
Cultivating qi wasn't quite what I thought, either. I was the internal energy that Kung Fu masters were said to have, but this was allegedly on a level higher than that. Things moved a lot more quickly when I decided to just call it Chinese magic instead of something from Kung Fu or something that Monks in Merildwen's life did.
I mean, I could see the Qi with Detect Magic, and I could feel it with my magical senses, so it was magic. That made things a lot easier to understand, even if the explanations in the book were a lot more philosophic and esoteric.
It was said that it would take six months of meditation to get to the point where you could feel and perceive the "energy of heaven and earth." Especially gifted individuals could do it in three, but if you still couldn't do it within nine to twelve months, then you "had no fate as a cultivator."
However, if it was just magic, then I could already feel it. Learning to feel magic was also the hardest part of studying Wizardry at first, but I felt that budding Wizards had a lot better ways to do so. The Five Phase Method suggests that you should meditate on the energy of heaven and earth continually until you succeed.
That sounded pretty fucking hard to me! There was a certain amount of meditation in the early parts of wizardry, too. However, the standard way to get a new Apprentice aware of magic was to place him or her in a magic circle that isolated all outside energy so that it was completely calm and then use a magical device that did nothing but emit magical energy. Really high-quality ones could detect your heartbeat, and it would move and agitate the magical energy in time to your heartbeat.
It only took maybe a week. A month at most, and you didn't have to sit there navel-gazing while you did it. You could study. Eventually, you would feel it; it was basically guaranteed unless you were a total magical null. Once you could feel it, it wasn't hard to move to manipulate it. From that point, wizardry became much more of an intellectual discipline. Lots of reading books, trying spells and testing them out. Experimentation, like scientists.
If it was any harder than this, then magic would be a lot harder to do, and there would be no Arcane Tricksters or Spellblades.
However, wizards didn't purposefully accumulate, drawing magical energy in their bodies systematically; in fact, it was generally considered insane. It would have been like me trying to bulk up in my past life by sitting next to a hot nuclear fuel rod. Or swallowing gasoline because you want to run fast.
However, the Five Phase Method claimed to be a method by which such a thing was both possible and beneficial. It was also a prerequisite to casting any "spells." None of which were
Could I practice it, with already being a wizard? It was worth a try, I supposed.
One thing became quite clear early on, and it was something that caused me a lot of relief. I wouldn't be "surprised" when this village reset. As soon as I eliminated all of the zombies, I noticed a significant drop in the ambient magical energy level, and now that I was purposefully and systematically trying to absorb it in accordance with a weird Chinese magic manual, I realised that the baseline energy recovered a little bit every day.
It wasn't a steady amount every day, but on average, I thought it would take at least another week before it got to the same level I remembered just before the village reset.
That wouldn't surprise me, but I was still a little concerned other things would. The zombies had been dead when I arrived at the village the first time. Killed by swords and spears. And the village was looted. That means someone killed them. It occurred to me that this place might be periodically culled. I was pretty sure that the "yin" energy would continue to expand even after the village reset. Perhaps it would never stop. If so, wouldn't that be bad for the surrounding area? Beyond just using it to farm slightly useful things, it might be culled periodically to keep it from expanding.
Now that I wasn't worried about being surprised one way, I was worried about being surprised another. As such, I got myself a nice raven familiar that I had continually flying around. It had a little intelligence, enough to fly a way out and return and tell me if it saw people. That was as much as I could do now.
I also found the skeletons that I left behind in the village. They didn't vanish or reincorporate with the villagers, as I worried, but they had just looked like they dropped dead. It was as if something seriously interfered with the magic that kept them animated, so I was a bit concerned that if I was in the village when that happened, I would die a dog's death.
What was a Nec if all of her skeletons just dropped dead? Dead, that's what! Err, his. I still wasn't quite ready to totally adopt the identity of a woman. I was just being stubborn, though. I didn't expect to wake up someday and be back in my body in America.
Also, to be honest, ever since I was ripped out of my body and spent what seemed like a hundred years in the woods that wend before I found myself in "the frozen lands" with Meril's memories, I had an altered perspective on the subject.
So, it wasn't like I really cared that much anymore. I was just running on residual pride now.
Anyway, I had a pretty good way to detect when the village was about to reset. I even remembered a kind of vibration in the magic when I left the village that morning, so I was fairly confident I could decamp the village with my skeletons before I lost them.
Being snuck up by real people was something I was less confident about.
It turned out that I was short by a day. When I woke up, I felt the magic in the air vibrating as if it was trying to shake free of some shackles; I gathered up all of my skeletons and everything I couldn't bear to lose and decamped into the forest.
Big Chungus could one punch a large cat, so he formed the core of my personal protective detail, and I was looking forward to securing a Chungus the Second this morning as well. As far as other skeletons, well, I had already kind of hit the limit of what was comfortable for me to control.
I had reached the point where I could cast Animate Dead using a spell slot, so I supposed I could consider that I had levelled up to the equivalent of a level five Wizard, but that was the only spell I could thus cast. I was practising with Vampiric Touch, but the lack of living things around to practice was a bit of a roadblock. Since I had to cast it as a ritual while practising, I couldn't use it in combat, either.
Still, I could drain plants and also the odd large cat or other animal that I could have my skeletons knock out without instantly killing it, so I was pretty confident I would be able to work that into my spell list shortly.
"Cultivating" wasn't as intellectually stimulating as practising spells, at least at this level. I had captured my first whisp of Qi, though, but I was still months away from reaching what it called the first level of Qi Gathering. Until then, I wasn't even considered to be really cultivating, according to the book. I didn't really know what the fuck I was doing if it wasn't the thing I was trying to do, though, but I generally ignored the lofty and esoteric language in the manual—it was about a third of it.
With two dozen skeletons and Big Chungus, I felt very confident about quickly clearing this village.
In the aftermath of the battle, I was shocked to hear a mental *ting* that I immediately recognised as the alert built-in to a Sending spell. Words flowed into my head, and it was Meril's mom.
"Meril! Are you okay? It took us a day to get a Sending that would work. We're no longer in Borea. I think the teleportation circle was a bit off!"
You could only send about forty words using either Message or it's Big Brother Sending, so I wasn't expecting a large message. Honestly, I wasn't expecting anything. It had been over three weeks. I had concluded that they had passed away or that communication was a lot more difficult than I originally thought. However, their message implied it had only been a day from their perspective.
I didn't have much time to reply, so I just sent what came to my head, "Mom, it has been over three weeks here. Not same plane. Not same prime material. Oriella sold contract. My plane running faster temporally? I'll work on Evocations. Try to master Sending."
Surprisingly, about an hour later I got another message from her, "Fuck! Pay off that debt as soon as possible. Oriella known quantity. New one not. We have no idea how to travel to different primes. We don't know how to come to you, or go back to Borea."
I replied, "Don't worry. I had been intending to go off on my own; this is just a bit ahead of schedule. At least we can stay in touch. Focus on your safety. I'll get my debt paid."
I sat down in one of the mayor's comfortable chairs and frowned, not sure how to feel. I had done a number of experiments to examine my soul in the past days, and I was pretty sure that Meril's parents wouldn't be able to tell unless they ripped my soul out of my body. You see, I was still surrounded by Merildwen's spirit.
Normally, when you pull out a soul, you pull it out along with the spirit. But, of course, Great Old Ones had to be special. It was like it had cored me and Meril like an apple. It was no wonder it was so excruciatingly painful, and also why it was so easy to "think" as Merildwen when I wanted to. As such, there was a part of me that was trying not to cry.
I shook my head and pushed that feeling away.
It had been something like three months or the way I was calculating time, seven Chungi. I continued as I had been, but every week or so I would share a quick message with Meril's parents, and I was surprised at how much I looked forward to each message. Enough that I was systematically practising my evocations, even the difficult fire ones.
I often didn't even loot much anymore when the village reset, except for a few things. The books I took as I could blank them and use them for notebooks. A couple of the swords were a cut above the rest, so I took them.
There was also an unusual flower in the mayor's courtyard. It was a completely white lotus that gave off a chilly energy. It was a bit different than the necromantic energy around everywhere that I was used to, and from my study of the Five Phases Manual, I decided to call this a "natural yin" type of energy, with the energy of undeath being a subset of yin.
I wasn't sure if that was right, I was making shit up as I went along, but I still attempted to replant the lotus every reset. I killed it the first two times despite significant herbology training that Meril's mother gave her, but now I had five of them that I tended to as potted plants.
Big Chungus' ice stone, I also always took. And that was it, basically.
And I found these ice stones to be very useful. At first, I thought it could be an incredible necromantic catalyst, but I hadn't figured out how to use it that way. But I had figured out how to use it to create longer-lasting spells, specifically illusions.
I could cast Major Image as a ritual, and if I used an ice stone in a key position in the ritual, then the illusion could last... well, I didn't think forever. But it had been weeks, and I hadn't noticed the ice stone being substantially depleted yet.
I used this to hide what was already a secret entrance to the mayor's basement. In life, it was something like a huge sex dungeon, but I used it to store supplies, most of the skeletons I didn't have actively animated and as a secret retreat in case people came. The Major Image illusion caused the already concealed entrance to be virtually impossible to find unless you could see through illusions.
To be honest, I wasn't sure why I remained here except to accumulate more Chungi. I suppose I didn't have anywhere else to be, and I was still making progress in both my studies and my "cultivation." I was officially a cultivator now, being in the first level of the Qi Gathering stage. What that meant was that I was stronger, faster, and my mind thought a bit faster than I did before.
That was expected, but it also seemed to help in my wizardry, so I thought it was a win-win. I had been worried that the accumulation and circulation of magical energy in my body would stunt my spells or perhaps make me explode, but if anything, it made each casting a tiny bit easier, a tiny bit smoother.
Sitting amongst a slaughtered village, I had the feeling that this wasn't a peaceful world, so I wasn't really that much in a hurry to be thrust into it.
However, I just learned from my raven familiar, which I had named Crow, that people were coming. I had quickly ushered most of my Chungi into the secret room, except one. I had a suspicion that these people were here to pacify the town, so I was going to give them a town full of monsters and expected loot to pacify.
They might be skeletons and not zombies, but who really cared? If I didn't do this, then they'd definitely send someone to investigate, eventually. Probably somebody strong who would find me hidden in the basement.
Even though I suspected they were doing this to keep this place safe, I could just bet what I was doing was considered the equivalent of illegal poaching.
Governments never changed. Resources, even if they weren't worth that much, could be attained here, so they'd hassle me if I didn't have a permit and pay taxes or whatever the local equivalent was.
Sighing, I realised that while I was content to hide myself from the world for now, the world was knocking at my door.
