NOVEL NEXT Chapter 2: Heartless, But Moral
I closed the entrance to the cave.
Now, I wouldn’t say that my decision was at all influenced by my previous humanity or any sort of aversion to murder. I think that those parts of me didn’t manage to follow me into this body, which was probably for the best.
No, I think it had more to do with my own idea of rules and fairness.
A Dungeon Master can’t simply throw a CR 21 undead at a level 1 adventuring party. At least, not unless they really deserve a TPK. Instead, it was best to slowly allow them to increase their strength through moderately dangerous encounters, let them get confident and familiar with their capabilities, and then throw the truly deadly stuff at them.
Now, I doubted that a level 1 Spatial Lich was equivalent to a Lich from TTRPGs, but hey, I was certain that I was much stronger than your average Joe, especially if I could spread my influence across the town.
Still, I wouldn’t do that. Instead, I’d stay here, build up some defenses, and then perhaps I’d release a couple of weak undead to harass the town and draw some attention to me. Not too much, though. I needed this dungeon to be considered safe enough that people would be willing to explore it in order to strengthen themselves, using my animated corpses as whetstones.
Now, it sounds stupid to want people to explore my lair and kill my minions, but there was a good reason.
I needed knowledge. Furthermore, I needed equipment, and a solid enough understanding of the magic of this world to make my own advances. I had goals, you see, plans.
I wanted to make a megadungeon. A spire. You may have heard of the type before, a spiraling tower with a seemingly limitless number of floors and endless monsters. The higher you went, the more powerful the enemies, until, at the very top, you encountered the king of the tower.
What other lair would be safer than such a skyscraper? I mean, this was assuming that there were no huge flying creatures that could knock down my tower with contemptuous ease, but I’d address that issue when the foundations were laid. My means would have expanded by then, I was sure of it.
In the meantime… Time to design a dungeon.
This place would be my test site. I’d make a couple rooms, fill them with undead, and place one big undead at the end. I’d throw some loot around. How I’d obtain it, I didn’t know, but I was sure I could figure something out soonish. Still, that was a problem for future Seif.
In the meantime, I needed a lot of corpses, and I currently only had one source of them. At least the jackalope I’d summoned would likely have a higher relation to other jackalopes, so it would be easier to obtain more.
I commanded my zombie jackalope to kill all the living ones I summoned, and got to work summoning more of them. For every one that I summoned, another joined the horde, and the next fell more swiftly. After some time and a few breaks to recharge my energy, I had about 50 Animated jackalopes. Hopefully these things weren’t endangered or anything. Or… would a lich want to extinct a species? That sounds correct. But if they went extinct, I wouldn’t be able to summon more.
Whatever, that doesn’t matter. Eventually, I’d Called a large number of jackalopes, and I felt something shudder in my soul. It was a previously unnoticed tendril of energy that connected myself and my Phylactery.
I approached the stone, and saw that a small change had been made to it.
Seif Ambrose
Spatial Lich 0
Phylactery 1
Undead Possession 1
Reconstitution 0
Necrosis Manipulation 1
Deadsight 1
Animate Necrosis 2
Domain of Undeath 1
Spread Undeath 2
Mold Terrain 1
Spatium Manipulation 0
Delinear Sight 0
Calling 1
Taglock 1
Available Boon (Mass Call, Nomantic Call)
I looked over my Calling Skill.
Firstly, it seemed that I had leveled the Taglock Boon as well as the Calling Skill itself. Perhaps they had some correlation? Based on my other Skills, it was clearly not additive. Perhaps it had something to do with minimums or averages, but I didn’t have enough information to make an educated guess at the moment.
Next, there were the new Boon options. Mass Call was immediately tempting. Currently, I needed to summon the beasts one at a time, which was rather tedious, but Mass Call would make that process much faster. I could sense that the Skill would become harder to use while the Boon was active, as I’d be pulling through multiple creatures at once, but I would soon become much stronger and more adept at the Skill, hopefully enabling me to use it the way I desired.
Nomantic Call was interesting. Currently, I could only summon jackalopes, but this Boon would fix that. I could summon anything that I could both picture and name.
Of course, that had some limitations. First of all, the strength of the spell would drop precipitously if the name I had was incomplete or fake, potentially allowing the Called being to wrest control over the cast from me. That would be very bad, effectively allowing them to either violently end the spell, or step through under their own power. Bringing a creature over was the goal, of course, but if it was strong enough to control the Calling spell, then it would probably be strong enough to kill me.
I debated the two options.
Mass Call was immediately helpful, and would likely stay helpful for some time. Nomantic Call, on the other hand, wasn’t all that good now, but had the potential to be amazing later on.
I also had to consider my other Skills, and what sort of Boons they could offer me. For example, perhaps Domain of Undeath would allow me to summon skeletons straight from the floor, removing the effectiveness of Mass Call. There were a couple of other ways that I could gain the ability to create or gather more skeletons, including from the town below me. On the other hand I could see Spatium Manipulation maybe giving me the ability to teleport things I was familiar with to my location, but Nomantic Call was otherwise unique.
It wouldn’t do anything for me just yet, which sucked as I still had very few options and only a small amount of power, at least from my perspective, but it at least wouldn’t become completely redundant later on. Perhaps I could even name some of my creatures later down the line, and then gain the ability to summon them to my side at a moment’s notice?
I made my choice, locking in Nomantic Call as my choice.
I didn’t expect it to work, but I still tried to summon a dragon with the Boon, simply projecting “Dragon” in my mind as I pictured one of the huge scaly beasts. The spell immediately fizzled out, not having a target to latch onto.
Oh well.
I turned my attention back to my work, continuing the systematic slaughter. The process had grown faster, likely due to the leveling of the Skill and Boon combo I was using to do it. Eventually I felt another buzz, and found another set of options, this time for Necrosis Manipulation.
Necrosis Manipulation 2
Deadsight 1
Animate Necrosis 3
Available Boon (Bind Spirit, Shape Necrosis)
I looked over the entry with a slow, boney nod. It seemed that it was, indeed, based on averages, though it appeared to be rounded down, since my other Skills with a 1.5 average had yet to level.
Anyways, the options themselves were also interesting. Bind Spirit was a bit… finicky, though. Focusing on the Boon sent a shiver down my spine, which was a very interesting experience, since I didn’t have normal flesh or nerves, and couldn’t regularly feel much of anything.
Come to think of it, why hadn’t that been more concerning to me? Right, lich instinct stuff.
I digress. Bind Spirit would allow me to attach souls to certain valuable items, much like my own Phylactery. I would be in control of them, though they would have a will of their own and be a bit more intelligent than the average undead I created.
Two main issues there. I didn’t have anything valuable to attach a soul to. I felt that gems would do best, and high quality tools were also a good fit, but I didn’t have any tools and the only gem I had was my Phylactery, but there was no way I was letting some measly spirit squat in there. That was my place.
The other issue was that the spirits would have an innate rebellious streak until the memories of their past life had been completely cleansed by Lethe. They would work against me whenever they had an opportunity to do so. That sounded awful.
I already knew I didn’t want Bind Spirit, but I looked over Shape Necrosis just to make sure it wasn’t any worse.
This Boon was actually quite cool. I didn’t like how many jackalopes I had to summon, and how little mob variety this dungeon would have. This Boon would fix that for me.
Shape Necrosis, somewhat obviously, would allow me to alter and control anything that contained high concentrations of Necrosis. This ranged from raw energy to magic materials, but most importantly, flesh and bone.
I accepted the Boon and grinned at my poor little summons. One of them stepped forward, and I reached towards it with a skeletal palm that seemed to drip with dark power.
The zombified jackalope’s body started to twist, its bones cracked, and then… I was left with a twitching pile of flesh. Hmm. I dismissed the animation of that creature, and the flesh returned to a completely dead state.
I looked down to my hand, trying to figure out what happened. I’d felt some resistance from the spell, but I assumed that was just natural, since the creature had once been alive.
I tried to shape the pile of flesh again, and found that it was far more malleable. Perhaps the Animate Necrosis and Shape Necrosis Boons had some conflict between them?
My hand was coated in that energy once more, and yet another lagomorph’s body twisted unnaturally. This time, my Deadsight and Delinear Sight were both cranked up to 11, and I spotted the issue. It wasn’t a conflict between the spells, it was simply that they were both using the same energy.
Animate Necrosis was using the death energy in the creature to allow it to move, but Shape Necrosis needed to use it to alter its flesh. Both Boons were drawing from the same source, attempting to do different things with the same limited energy supply.
I tried again, but this time, I focused intensely on my Necrosis Manipulation Skill and, for the first time, tried to use it freeform. I drew Necrosis from the surroundings into this next zombie, and saw that some of it was slowly siphoned away from the two fleshy masses in the vicinity, but most of it came directly from my Domain of Undeath. For the first time, I got to really see what it did, other than allow me to Mold Terrain with my Boon.
When I gave the Shape Necrosis another shot on this new infused jackalope, the spell went off without a hitch, and soon the beast was standing on two feet, somewhat resembling a modern depiction of a wendigo, though only if you also made it a rabbit in addition to being part deer and part undead horror. Also, much smaller. Though…
I started to infuse two more jackalopes with a roughly similar amount of energy, and then used Shape Necrosis on all. This massively increased the drain on my mental energy, and I felt a feeling of strain coming from the bones of my fingers. Still, I pressed on, too enamored by the sight before me.
The first step I’d taken was to strip the flesh from the beasts so I’d be able to get a good picture of their skeletal structure. That way, even if this didn’t work, I’d have a better picture of their anatomy for future attempts.
Currently, the flesh oozed and undulated beneath the still-standing skeleton of the first jackalope I’d shoved additional Necrosis into, and the bones of the others floated in that semisolid muck. I pulled the bones of the jackalope I was working on apart, and pulled the bones of the others towards them, standing them next to each other and willing them to fuse into one.
At first, the hard structures resisted liquifying into the mold of my mental image, but eventually they caved. At first, it seemed that the bones had been welded together, but as I applied pressure, they became more and more like putty, until the bones had all grown larger. They now had approximately the same size ratios, but with triple the mass. Now, I drew the flesh back on to the beast. This was… somewhat successful? The muscles were attached to the bones all wrong, and most were visible. I hadn’t thought to separate the hide from the flesh, and so it had mixed in as chunks of skin and fur, some of which stuck through the skin. I also hadn’t accounted for the skull, and now the beast’s head wore its skull like a helmet. In fact, a couple of the beast’s ribs stuck through its chest as well.
If the thing had looked like a wendigo before, it was now a mix between one of those monstrosities and a gibbering mouther. There were also a couple of organs that didn’t mix quite right. There were three eyes shoved into each of its eye sockets, it had tongues sticking out from the bottom of its jaw, and I hadn’t actually managed to merge the antlers, since they were more resistant to the rudimentary energy infusion I’d created with raw Necrosis Manipulation. I supposed it had something to do with them not technically being dead, since they were never really alive in the first place? Anyways, the additional pairs stuck out from random spots on its skull, from where the skulls had melted into each other. Even stranger, even though the bodies were one, the mental spaces of each of them were still individual.
If I told them to kill something, they would all leap onto the task immediately. There might be some infighting if they found different ways to do it, but that was unlikely. If I told them to do different things, though? This beast would tear itself apart.
I’m sure if this thing were alive, it would be in quite a bit of pain. I’m also sure that if I were alive, I would find it horrifying and disgusting. Luckily, neither of us were shackled by the struggles of mortal life.
“I think I’ll name you my Caerbalope,” my voice reverberated through my skull. I flinched. I hadn’t heard myself speak in this form yet, and it sounded quite different from my normal voice, but that wasn’t what made me react in such a way.
That was caused by the buzzing that resonated through my bones when I named the creature.
I trudged back to my Phylactery, looking for answers. I found one.
Seif Ambrose
Spatial Lich 0
Phylactery 1
Undead Possession 1
Reconstitution 0
Necrosis Manipulation 2
Deadsight 1
Animate Necrosis 3
Shape Necrosis 2
Domain of Undeath 1
Spread Undeath 2
Mold Terrain 1
Spatium Manipulation 0
Delinear Sight 0
Calling 1
Taglock 1
Nomantic Call 0
Named Belongings: Caerbalope
I focused on the new entry, and an image of my Caerbalope filled my mind. I knew roughly how powerful it was, its entire anatomy, and how it was made. Finally, I knew its rough location, which was improved by my Delinear Sight. In fact, both of my vision enhancing abilities did wonders for this. My Delinear Sight helped me examine the anatomy of the creature, knowing the exact scale of it, and my Deadsight showed me the varying concentrations of its Necrosis, how there was more in the flesh than the bones, and more in the bones than in the antlers. Strangely, it seemed that the major internal organs that had managed to mostly survive the dissolution of flesh–those being the hearts, lungs, and eyes–had a much higher concentration of energy than any other parts. I’d have to experiment with that later, on another creature.
I also got the feeling that I’d be able to use my Nomantic Calling on Caerbalopes with extreme efficiency now, seeing as I’d provided them with a true name.
This Named Belongings thing was extremely convenient. I’m sure that this would typically be used by crafters to gauge their work, or perhaps by common individuals to mark items with sentimental value to them. I felt that I wouldn’t be able to name anything else until I increased my Spatial Lich level, unless I wanted to strip the name of the Caerbalope from my soul, which would effectively delete all knowledge of it from my mind.
I didn’t particularly feel like doing that, so I instead turned my attention back to the other jackalopes in the room. I didn’t love the idea of having an entirely homogeneous dungeon, nor did I want it to be full of regular old jackalopes.
I decided right then and there that I, in fact, wouldn’t have any jackalopes.
Caerbalopes it is, then.
I examined the entire anatomy of the creature, and my Delinear Sight Boon seemed to copy it into my mind as I went. When I looked back at one of the regular jackalope zombies, an image of a Caerbalope overlaid it like a hologram.
With a smile, I started melting corpses together like a madman.
By the time I was done, there wasn’t a single regular jackalope left in the room. Instead, they’d all been mashed together into Caerbalopes of varying sizes and shapes. As I’d created more with different numbers of, they’d been added to the Caerbalope Named Belongings profile, making it into a folder of sorts.
Now, I’d gone a bit overboard mixing three the first time. I’d tried making another immediately after, but had found myself too drained, and needed to take a moment to recover halfway through the formation of the second Caerbalope. After that, I’d stuck to making amalgamations that combined just two of the jackalopes into a single Caerbalope, but broke up the monotony by throwing in a few triples, and at the end, I got bored and jumped to make a few quadruple Caerbalopes.
Necrosis Manipulation 2
Deadsight 2
Animate Necrosis 3
Shape Necrosis 3
Shape Necrosis had quickly risen in levels, first from the creation of the original Caerbalope and then from their repeated creation. Deadsight wasn’t far behind it. If my theory of it being averaged and then rounded down was correct, a single level in any of my Boons would level Necrosis Manipulation.
My specialization, on the other hand, was a different story entirely.
If it were averaged, then by now I would have increased in level, even if it were rounded down. The only scenarios I could see now was that either the average level of my Skills needed to surpass one above my level, which I thought to be unlikely and somewhat random, or it was based on my lowest Skill, which was currently Spatium Manipulation.
I’d been using Delinear Sight quite a bit for the past while, and felt that I was approaching a threshold, but there was still something holding me back. I couldn’t quite put my index phalanges on it, though.
In any case, now that I had mobs, I needed a dungeon to put them in. First, I cataloged how many undead monstrosities I had. Overall, I counted 23 dual Caerbalopes, 9 triple Caerbalopes, and 4 quadruple Caerbalopes. There were the trash mobs, the common soldiers, and then the elites.
I’d also need a boss, but I had something of an idea for that and would save it until the end.
For this trial run of a dungeon setup, I was thinking I’d set up three basic fighting rooms and a boss room. I’d also like to make a trap room, but didn’t know quite how I’d manage that. I assumed that living presences would interfere with my Domain of Undeath, which would prevent me from directly altering the room while they were inside of it. I didn’t know enough about technology to figure out a setup to move doors back and forth, and would eventually need to figure out a way to do it magically.
In any case, Delinear Sight helped me sketch out what I wanted the rooms to look like, and then I pushed on Mold Terrain to make my ideas into reality. The process seemed much smoother with the Skill than it had been without, as though Mold Terrain was drawing its instructions from Delinear Sight, rather than myself.
Once the process was finally done, I felt another buzz, twice as strong as the ones before, signaling a double Skill increase. Then, there was a third buzz, accompanied by a tug.
Seif Ambrose
Spatial Lich 1
Phylactery 1
Undead Possession 1
Reconstitution 0
Necrosis Manipulation 2
Deadsight 2
Animate Necrosis 3
Shape Necrosis 3
Domain of Undeath 2
Spread Undeath 2
Mold Terrain 2
Available Boon (Transmute, Solid Death)
Spatium Manipulation 1
Delinear Sight 1
Available Boon (Stitching, Banding)
Calling 1
Taglock 1
Nomantic Call 0
Available Enhancement (Reinforcement, Willpower)
Named Belongings: Caerbalope
Okay, three things to think over. First off, the easy one. Domain of Undeath was offering me either Transmute, which would let me turn one thing into another, with some limitations, or Solid Death, which would allow me to create objects made of condensed death energy. While the latter sounded useful, and might even be able to make magic items, the first was more immediately helpful. Currently, all I had to work with was stone, and that just wasn’t enough. Not to mention, I could Transmute some stone into gold and use that as a reward for dungeoneers.
Transmute couldn’t increase or decrease an object’s mass, meaning that the weight of the object you transmuted would remain the same. It could, however, change the size of something, either increasing density to match a heavier material, or decreasing it to bridge the gap to a lighter one.
Next up… the one that didn’t give me a headache from simply considering it. The Enhancement. Reinforcement or Willpower. Both affected the soul, but Reinforcement focused on bodily empowerment, while Willpower improved the fortitude of the mind.
I picked Willpower. A stronger mind had a larger capacity of mental energy, which could be converted into other types of energy, i.e., Necrosis and Spatium. It would also provide a greater ability to comprehend new subjects, and that would prove critical in the next selection I made. I couldn’t afford to trade away the potential for increased comprehension at this juncture.
My gaze flicked to the Spatium Manipulation Boons, and a headache slowly built inside me. Again, I didn’t have a brain, so this was less of a mental thing and more of my soul struggling to contain the information before me. Images flickered across my mind, and it began to burn as the simplest possible explanation of these Boons manifested in my mind. The skeleton frame I inhabited quaked from the strain, and my Phylactery shuddered.
Stitching. Stitching was a lot of things. It is an alteration in the crossover between the weave and the weft. Stitching can fix tears, move or remove material, and completely alter the overall design of something. An experienced tailor can completely reshape, redesign, or replace any part of the fabric they choose to devote their attention to.
An experienced spatial stitcher could do the same with reality itself.
Next was Banding. Rubber was a simple thing. If you were to take a rubber band and pull it apart, its size would not change, yet it would be longer. An individual who walked across a large strip of rubber could find it stretched and pulled in many different directions, altering their course and the distance they traveled, without really changing anything at all. Banding was the twisting of reality, plain and simple.
Those who practiced the art of spatial banding, the world is simply a strip of putty to be pulled apart, squished together, and molded into something entirely different.
My bones smoked, and my soul fled from them as my Phylactery rocked violently, losing its ability to hover in place and falling. I lost consciousness long before it hit the ground.