I squint at the floating text as if it's written in some obscure hieroglyphics, not plain English. The letters swim and blur at the edges of my vision. Have they always been this... vibrant?
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[Side Quest - Completed]
Get one skill to Level 10
Rewards:
1 Skill Upgrade Token
1 Tutorial Difficulty Change Token
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How long...had I been awake?
The text just...floats there... smug.
And I stare at it, blinking slowly, struggling to process what I'm seeing through the throbbing pain that's taken residence behind my eyes.
It's like someone's driven a hot nail into the back of my skull and is now leisurely hammering it deeper with each heartbeat. My head feels like it's been blended into a slushie and poured back in wrong. Thoughts jitter, jump, scatter across the inside of my skull like loose teeth rattling in a box.
I need to clear my head before I start...
The symphony of cellular machinery keeps singing in my ears—the shuffling of proteins folding and unfolding. After all, Flesh Perception doesn't just show—it sings, grinds, whispers. Even with my head fogged, I can still hear the mitotic chorus tuning its violins.
It is... beyond beauty. I want...no I NEED MORE, but I try to tune it out... for a little bit.
I let myself fall back onto the soft tissue underneath me, which responds to my weight by wiggling and attempting to bite at my armor.
It always does that, so I ignore it.
Above me, the sky stretches wide and deep and blue like a blue sky that's also blue.
I try to focus on it—on "normal" vision—but even that feels like yanking a chain embedded in my cortex. The zoom-out from the micro-level hurts. I feel it grind in the base of my skull like old metal scraping bone.
It's also beautiful, I guess. The sky.
But it's still so loud...
I lift my hand and hold it in front of my eyes. It's covered in bone—like a glove of ivory, molded to my will. I clench my fist and the structure responds perfectly, no lag, no creaking. The bone flexes as if it belongs there, sliding and shifting with the ease of cartilage.
Strips of thin, almost threadlike muscle weave through small holes along the back of my hand, coiling down my forearm like red ribbons. The way they move—tightening with each twitch of the fingers—it's elegant.
I don't…
I don't remember deciding on this design.
But I suppose it's better than the flesh whip.
Then there's that pressure again. Right behind my eyes. Still pulsing. Like a whisper. Like a warning.
I ignore it.
I lower my gaze and see the treetops stretching like a sea of green . I see individual leaves shuddering in the wind and catching the light like fragments of broken mirrors.
How can I call this? Eagle sight? Or something adjacent. A bit lame sounding but it was a fun project. I've basically increased the density of photoreceptor cells, modified the shape of my corneas, added a reflective layer behind my retinas similar to a cat's tapetum lucidum. I've even developed something akin to a raptor's third eyelid—a membrane that can sweep across my eye to protect it while still allowing a degree of vision.
At least I think that's how it works. I'm working from half-remembered textbook knowledge, and there are NO FUCKING BIRDS around to study.
Just like there are no insects, annoyingly.
Where are The Fucking Bugs, huh? I want to dissect their biology, their neural nets, their organs. But no, all I find are mammals and humanoids. Again and again.
Everything is skin, fur, bone, and more skin.
It's been so repetitive I think I haven't even left this "mountain peak" in days.
Maybe.
Hard to tell.
Everything's starting to blur at the edges again...
Finally—I glance down beneath myself.
I'm lounging atop it: a mound roughly twenty meters tall, shaped somewhere between a cone and a lopsided ziggurat. Its base spans perhaps thirty meters across, sloping unevenly toward the center.
A hill of flesh. A hill of corpses.
It breathes—not with lungs, but with pressure. Like swamp gas trapped beneath a wetland, pockets of force rise and collapse in slow waves, causing portions of the mound to swell, then sink.
Skin folds over skin, fusing into meat that was never meant to touch. Troll limbs jut out at unnatural angles, some still twitching with posthumous nerve spasms. Wolf ribs jut outward like the spines of some impossible sea urchin, gleaming white where they haven't been stained by the dark fluids that occasionally ooze from the seams where different creatures have been fused together. Troll hide, remarkably resilient even in death, serves as connective tissue in places, stretched taut over frameworks of mismatched bones.
Hundreds of bodies are layered beneath me, stacked in rings of death, thickening as they climb toward the center. The outermost corpses are fresh, some still warm, their blood leaking into the shallow crevices between bodies. Deeper layers are older, bloated or caved in, their insides reduced to a stew. The weight from above forces liquefied rot to ooze through cracks between bone and muscle, rising like crude oil from fractured bedrock. The liquid shimmers under the twin suns, every color and none at all.
And in the folds—eyes. Dozens of them. Embedded, exposed, staring. Unblinking. Some still moist. Still lucid. Still seeing.
It smells like copper and wet mushrooms.
I can't say it's beautiful.
But I don't hate it either.
The graveyard idea didn't work out in the long run. I thought it'd be cleaner. More dignified. But I got tired of digging a troll corpse out every time I needed a femur or a half-decent intestine.
So I thought of something else. Something a tad more practical.
And it's warm. Which is a plus.
My thought process scrambles as another wave of agony crashes through my skull. I feel it building—pressure against the inside of my cranium, like ANOTHER FUCKING VESSEL IS TRYING TO BURST. But this time, for once, I don't push through it.
I grit my teeth and cut the tethers.
Just like that, the strings leading to my beloved undead snap loose. For the first time in... however long it's been—I stop the flow of mana.
Voluntarily!
That's the only thing I've gotten good at. Not the "control" or "spellcasting" or whatever the hell normal "mages" do.
My Mana Perception is improving though, so I feel like a blind man learning the shape of a city by tripping on every stair.
Still, I should be able to move mana by now, right? Shape it, guide it or something?
But... nothing. I prod it and it just sloshes around like soup in a cracked bowl.
Am I... stupid? No. No no no. Down in the pit with that thought. Deep, dark pit. That's where we keep that one.
I'll figure something out. Eventually. Maybe.
The mana stops pouring out of me, and the souls lose their grip on the corpses they were unwillingly glued to. Parts of my creation go still as the animating force withdraws. I don't bother regathering the soul mist; it will float upward on its own. That's why I'm staying here on top of the hill, to collect it when it rises.
The pressure in my chest evaporates like steam.
It's like angels massaging my heart. Like a thousand tiny hands releasing their grip all at once. Like breathing pure oxygen after drowning. The relief is so profound it's almost euphoric—a rush that makes my vision swim and my thoughts crystallize for one perfect, fleeting moment.
I honestly contemplate falling asleep right this moment.
How... pathetic.
Basking in the absence of pain is simply... celebrating mediocrity. What kind of necromancer gets high off not using their power? A failure of one, that's who.
I grab another soul from the well, flick it down into the meatpile. It sticks like chewed gum, wriggling into some corpse with a lurch and a twitch. Instantly, my mana starts bleeding again.
Good.
I'll sleep soon. What's a few more minutes of agony?
Now…
What was I doing?