Chapter 86: Chapter 85

Chapter 85

Riven couldn’t help but be impressed with what Allie had built here.

Hundreds of sentient undead walked, talked, bartered, built and laughed with one another as Allie and Mara took him on a grand tour of the tower. The skyscraper’s walls had been knocked down in some areas, terraformed in others, and in some places had been kept up. A mix and mash of steel, bone, death mana, and even sometimes sinewy muscle created various parts of the structure with a huge spiral staircase in the center leading up and down that’d obviously not been there to begin with. Shops selling various wares were set up, living quarters had been spaced out, and training areas or food courts were available. It was all quite homey with a friendly feel to the environment.

Most of the undead were ghouls, more humanoid and put together than the mutated ones Riven had seen in hell. Then again there were also more bone-type or skeletal undead too, like the ‘Skresh’ friends Vin and Nin Allie had described earlier. There was even one enormous and sentient flesh golem, lacking any skin, with huge rippling muscles applying metal armor directly into his body,. They mostly bowed or waved or even had a word of praise thrown Allie’s way whenever she and Mara passed them by with the escort of four heavily armored death knights following. Occasionally the tower's occupants would give Riven a curious look, but no one said much about it otherwise.

“You created all this? It’s like an undead city!” Riven said with awe while staring around, smiling slightly when he saw a ghoul man flirtatiously bragging about exploits he obviously hadn’t achieved with a ghoul woman in a dark corner, while they drank some kind of… slime?

“Mara, Nin and Vin all helped. I couldn’t have ever done it without them.” Allie beamed back, a wide smile on her face as she clasped her hands together behind her back. She motioned over to the enormous spiral staircase made of bone and made a gesture to proceed up to the next level, letting a group of five robed skresh talking about magical theory bypass her on their way down to the first floor. “And to be fair, the bone garden does a lot of the work for us. Once we set it up, which was a hard feat mind you, all we have to do is supply it with the proper materials and it’ll create new undead.”

“Yeah you’ve mentioned the bone garden before, but how exactly does it work?”

Allie opened her mouth to reply, but thought better of it and nudged Mara who came to stand next to her. “You’re the real mastermind behind that one. Go ahead and tell him.”

The stitched beauty grinned, and if she could have blushed Riven thought she would have just by the way her posture shifted to an uncomfortable pride or bashfulness. “Well, it took a lot of time - but my master in my old life told me how to make them before I…”

There was a pause, and Riven’s right eyebrow raised in confusion. “Is something the matter?”

Mara seemed to stumble over her words while she muttered, and then she shook her head - pushing her raven hair out to the side while her pale eyes shifted back to him. “I just can’t remember exactly how it happened. One day I was with my old master, a necromancer on another world, and then something… a long time ago, something happened to him. To me. Then I remember waking up in Chalgathi’s trials and Allie was pulling me out of a crypt.”

Riven’s features turned grim. Allie and he had spoken a small amount of the time they had experienced in their versions of Chalgathi’s rites and the tutorials afterwards. It hadn’t taken much of a genius to figure that one out after he’d seen the soul-stitched items she had, but they still hadn’t gone into details with so much already buzzing about their heads due to their reunion. Either way it had initially come as a real surprise that both of them had been in the same starter trials and not even known about it until now.

Quickly he wiped the grim look off his face and proceeded with a polite smile, pushing thoughts of Chalgathi out of his head. “Well I don’t mean to dig into your past if that makes you uncomfortable, you can skip that part.”

Mara slowly nodded, seeming troubled, but blinked rapidly and returned to the issue of the bone garden. “Well, I learned how to create one from my old master a long time ago. I didn’t have the proper amount of mana to do it by myself, but Allie is quite the font of power and we were able to use her as a conduit to create the structure. Bone gardens can systematically raise up new undead by drawing in souls from the void, or the shadow realms, or really any of the outer realms that have free-floating souls that want a body. Or they can use fragments of an old soul to create new ones if the soul shards are incomplete. Souls instinctively look for bodies, so the bone garden acts like a beacon and is able to fuse the soul with the material if there is enough compatibility. Most people here are ghouls because the bone garden was able to identify those forms as the most compatible with the settings I laid out-”

“You can create ‘settings’ with a bone garden?” Riven cut in curiously, folding his arms in confusion.

Mara brightened, obviously eager to talk on the subject and her excitement on the ‘science’ behind it began to show through. “Oh yes! For example, I could set the bone garden to spawn less sentient undead - like the types we use for minions. We can draw in more powerful souls or souls with different affinities, souls that have… Ah, that can get a bit boring. But the short version is yes, you can essentially tell the bone garden what to look for and what types of bodies to create. As long as you have the proper materials, proper know-how, and proper soul affinity, you can create all sorts of undead.”

“Why not just create really strong minion types and be done with this war then?”

“Well, in theory you could under the right conditions. But there are a couple problems with that. First, stronger undead require stronger, rarer souls with higher affinities for that body. Second, those kinds of souls take longer to find and in the meantime the bone garden isn’t harvesting any other souls. Third, you still have to subjugate the created creature. If you set the bone garden to create a monstrosity you can’t control, it may destroy the bone garden and simply eat you because most of the non-sentient undead are ravenous by instinct. Fourth, we would still need materials and materials are in high demand. There’s even a market upstairs that focuses on selling or buying body modifications like the flesh golem you saw earlier was doing, but most body modifications aren’t metal. Instead, they’re usually body parts stripped off of other creatures or even other undead.”

“Or plants.” Allie cut in.

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Mara rolled her pale, dead eyes. “That has only happened once, and I have no idea how he did it. Anyways, there’s an entire list of reasons why that isn’t really possible right now due to practical purposes. Those were only 4 reasons, but there are many more. The bone garden can definitely supply us with sentient undead, or feral ones using soul shards we can use as minions, but everything comes at a cost and we can’t just snap our fingers to say ‘hey create a giant bone dragon that I get to use as a pet’ or something to that effect. It just doesn’t work that way. Our queen also asked me about this the first time I offered to create the bone garden.”

“Queen?”

Mara shot Allie a look, and Riven’s little sister DID go bright red with a flush. Apparently vampires still had that ability, whereas ghouls - or at least Mara, probably did not.

Riven’s grin was slightly mocking as he stared at the silently brooding girl in front of him. “Queen?”

“Oh shut up!” Allie said with a humph, stomping up the stairs while Mara began to laugh. “I was NOT the one to come up with that title! That’s just what everyone is calling me, ok!?”

“I see.” Riven gave an amused chuckle and followed Allie up the stairs with Mara beside him. He shot the ghoul a sideways glance. “So… all of these undead really are newborns then? Does that come with any problems, like orienting them to their new lives or dealing with repressed memories of their past lives? Or are they like little kids?”

“Not all of them have past lives.” Mara corrected with a hum and a raised pointer finger while they walked. “Those are… the most problematic. Yes, they are essentially children and yes, it’s a burden on the rest of us in the immediate timeline - but they'll be of use when they grow older. We actually have a kind of daycare for those ones, it’s on floor 5, and we basically have to treat them like toddlers while educating them with teachers we’ve assigned. Most however are either brought in from the void or are created from fragments of old and splintered souls, these ones do often have glimpses of their past life from time to time - but aren’t nearly as incompetent. They still feel like they’re new people, but many describe it like occasionally experiencing a dream or fragments of a dream. They usually don’t feel connected to these old memories or emotions, rather like they’re watching a theater performance.”

“There are also a couple others who the system allows to traverse worlds, but only in select circumstances.” Allie butt in again, glancing over her shoulder and slowing down to keep pace with the other two behind her. “Very specific criteria have to be met.”

At this, Riven blinked and gazed up through the hole in the middle of the tower that the skyscraper’s main staircase was centered around. Far, far above them was the roof, and it’d take a while to get there no doubt. “Two questions, first - how tall is this tower? And second, what the hell do you mean other undead are traveling here from other worlds?”

“I can’t remember how tall the tower originally was, but it’s rapidly grown in both height and width. We’ve added a couple floors and it’s still adding new ones, I think we have 42 now?” Mara murmured with a scrunched nose.

“43 as of yesterday.” Allie stated proudly. “It’s not a living building, but it has the potential to be one eventually. Right now the bone garden is continuing to terraform and that’s why there’s such a transition.”

Mara nodded. “Yes, well anyways - what Allie is talking about concerning other worlds is that undead under a combat level of 4 without any advanced skill sets or ties to what Elysium considers ‘major factions’ across the multiverse can come here through a 1 way pilgrimage. Did you see that system notification concerning a holy crusade against the undead? It should have been city-wide.”n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

Riven slowly nodded. “Yeah I saw it, I was a target.”

“As we all were.” Mara motioned at the dozens of undead playing cards on the floor they were passing now. “The crusade was enabled because of two things. The first was our bone garden, the second was the holy book Prophet found. It gives the system a scenario to work with and oh does the system love its scenarios…”

“I don’t understand. Why would these things cause a system quest to target us?”

Mara raised an eyebrow. “Because the system drives conflict in order to fuel growth. The system is designed to create stronger, talented individuals by fueling them with the deaths of weaker individuals. Some think this is a system with the goal to create gods or god-like immortals, while others believe it is for the system’s own amusement. Other theories from my old world state there is no real rhyme or reason and it just exists as a fundamental law, like gravity. Regardless, there are certain scenarios that the system often focuses on and uses to further its agenda of conflict - and sometimes, though certainly not always, these scenarios are focused around the charisma stat.”

Now Mara had Riven’s attention, but she didn’t seem to notice when he perked up. He’d been wondering how he’d go about life with a slowly building negative charisma, and it appeared she as about to give him some much needed insight on the matter.

She held up her hands and motioned about her. “All of us, we are oriented towards negative charisma. About half of the undead races as a general rule of thumb acquire negative charisma for each level gained. Some races don’t gain negative charisma as a rule of thumb, but feel more attracted towards those with negative charisma and repulsed by those with positive charisma. Most demons, blood elves, drow, vampires, certain species of orc, and a couple other races are oriented towards negative charisma, so the more negative charisma you have the more these types of races will like you. Meanwhile the humans, high elves, dwarves, gnomes, fairy folk, angels, and others are focused on positive charisma. These races will be able to go into the negative charisma, but doing so will cause others of their kind to instinctively dislike them - especially upon first impressions. So why would they? And some naturally acquire positive charisma per level gain - namely angels. Negative and positive charismas reject one another when races meet, those with negative charisma feel uneasy, afraid, or disgusted around those with positive charisma and vice versa. This leads to distrust, and eventually it leads to natural conflict between races with negative and positive charisma orientations on a far greater scale than what is normal otherwise. That is why demons and undead are often hated by humans and angels, almost as a universal rule of thumb across the cosmos, even though realistically there are friendships between angels and demons in some corners of the multiverse. That’s just very rare, and in order for this to happen it takes unique situations where those individuals make an effort to throw aside their differences and work very hard to overcome the stigma their charismas set.”

Mara let out a huff, taking a breather from the explanation while continuing to pump her legs. “Long story short, as soon as we started building an undead faction here in close proximity to a holy oriented human faction, it meant an easy opportunity for conflict. Prophet was likely given the choice on whether or not to pursue this quest for war and extermination when we started building our forces, with bonuses given to the crusaders by the system for our deaths. When he accepted the quest - we in turn got our own leveraging. We got the unique function ‘Pilgrimage’ added to our bone garden, allowing our small bone garden to allow weaker, unaffiliated other-world undead travelers to join us for a new start at life using 1-way tickets to this world of Panu. It is unlikely Prophet knew this would happen though, otherwise I'm not sure he'd have taken the offer. Regardless, the holy crusaders outnumber us by a lot and are absorbing dozens of other human groups in the northern end of the city even despite our victories. They’re likely going to make a push to reclaim territory soon.”

“We also got a quest to ‘survive’ for the next 6 months, which doesn’t seem promising.” Allie grumbled in irritation. “It’s like the system is expecting us to lose even though we’re currently winning this war.”

“I never received those ones, I only got the quest saying I was a target.” Riven stated flatly.

“Likely because you hadn’t joined our faction yet.” Allie shot back with a shrug. “No idea honestly, but that’s the only thing that makes sense. Everyone else here got it.”