The first thing to do, obviously, was look over the Boon options. Both of these looked like spells from popular games, and on close inspection, they were about what I'd expected. Soul Jar would let me reroute my soul through another object, the more magical the better, and then possess people through it. If I managed to take over another person's body, their soul would get shunted into the Jar.
To me, the best part of this Boon was that the soul would be trapped, allowing me to question them or find some other way to leverage their body. One of the differences between this and some other interpretations of the spell was that if I got the body killed, we wouldn't just trade places, leaving them dead. I'd get dragged back to my Phylactery, while the person would be stuck in the Soul Jar. It was a strong ability, even if it was very different from what I'd been doing so far. It would certainly allow me to find out more true names, and even create items that would function with Nomantic Call.
The next option was one I was very excited for, though. In D&D, Clone was one of the most ridiculous spells out there, basically letting you give yourself video game lives if you had the cash and flesh to spare. The lich version didn't disappoint, even if it was a bit different.
Clone as a Boon was a bit more limited. First of all, every Clone I had would reduce the maximum amount of Mentum my soul could store, since a bit of my consciousness would need to be stored in each of them to prevent them from degrading. Additionally, I won't be able to animate them since, again, my consciousness would be stored inside, meaning they'd technically already be animated, even if they weren't active. The third limitation was obvious, but important nonetheless. Every Clone I made would require the same energy investment as the body I was currently using. That meant that stronger bodies required more of my maximum Mentum to hold them together. In the case of simple Antigo bodies like this one, I wouldn’t need very much, since these were basically just large corpses with an abnormally high Necrosis content. For the fleshy body I’d been using before, though, I would need a lot more. Not only was the energy density much higher than that of a normal body, but there were multiple energy types that needed to be held together in harmony. They were mostly tamed by the Mentum used in the creation of the body, but there would need to be some upkeep.
I grabbed Clone and started experimenting right away. First, I left the Antigo body that I’d been piloting to get a look at my Phylactery, and then I started work on Reconstituting myself a body. I was somewhat familiar with the process by now, and Delinear Sight let me basically treat it like a paint-by-number game, so it didn’t take too long for the undead form of my old body to stand before me. I was sucked into it right away, which I now knew wasn’t just a weird quirk of the Boon, but was rather the body pulling my consciousness into it so that it wouldn’t “dustify” like it did when I returned to my Phylactery.
Before moving on, I waited for my energy to refill, noting how much faster it was with Mentum Generator. Next, I started working with the new Clone Boon, and felt a bit of my being flow forwards, coalescing into a rough shape inside the Delinear Sight schematic of myself. Finally, a body started to form around it, impeccably replicating my own.
I repeated the process once more, then felt around at my Mentum pool, feeling that it was, indeed, a noticeable amount smaller than before. Luckily, it seemed that my Mentum Generator included those lopped-off bits of my soul as a part of my energy total, since it was working a little bit faster than before.
The next thing I wanted to try out was my Sympathetic Bonding. Forming a new bond between them, I found that the Spatium-Necrosis mix that the Clones held was fighting me. With a bit of Mentum expenditure, I was able to convince the energy to accept the bond and meld it into themselves. The bond that was forming was thicker than before, and the knot that I had to make was awfully chunky, but it got the job done.
Once my work was complete, I dissolved my current body and zipped into one of the Clones. I could immediately sense that the bond was slightly weaker than the ones that the Twinscales had, but I also felt stronger, tougher, and just overall better. It even felt like my energy density had increased, but I knew that wasn’t true. It was more like there were two of me overlaid in one spot. It might have felt like there was more energy, but my energy efficiency wouldn’t go up, since there was also more matter.
Binding my Clones together like this was an interesting concept, and would certainly make me powerful, but I would need to make sure that not all of them were bound together. While having the toughness of 5 of myself would be awesome, if I faced something that could kill me anyways, I’d want to return to a body as quickly as possible. With this in mind, I created an extra Clone for good measure and turned my attention to the next thing on my list.
I was finally going to work on Spatium Manipulation, and I wouldn’t stop until I’d reached its peak and ascended to level 5. Well, I wouldn’t unless I was in danger or Azrael needed me to do something for her. Or if I thought of a good theme for floors 9 to 16, or a good boss monster for floor 8. Ooh, I also had that one Gila Hulk– oh, nevermind, he’s dead. Just gonna clean that up real quick... Well, I still had that wolf corpse.
Ugh, I’m getting sidetracked. Should I work on all of this stuff first, to get it off my mind, or try to focus just on grinding? Actually, better idea, I’ll compromise. I’ll let myself work on another project every time I level the Skill. That’ll let me get over the mental fatigue from using the Skill.
Speaking of…
Seif Ambrose
Spatial Lich 3
Phylactery 5 (Max)
* Undead Possession 8
* Reconstitution 6
* Incorporate Phylactery 6
* Mental Shield 0
* Mentum Generator 5
* Clone 1
Necrosis Manipulation 5 (Max)
* Deadsight 7
* Animate Necrosis 8
* Shape Necrosis 5
* Create Undead 9
* Necrotic Restoration 4
* Construct Consciousness 8
Domain of Undeath 5 (Max)
* Spread Undeath 9
* Mold Terrain 10
* Transmute 5
* Omnipresence 5
* Omniscience 4
* Empowered Control 4
Spatium Manipulation 3
* Delinear Sight 5
* Stitching 3
* Folding 1
* Available Boon (Notions, Splitting)
Calling 5 (Max)
* Taglock 6
* Nomantic Call 5
* Bondsight 7
* Alter Bond 5
* Sympathetic Bonding 2
* Call Through Space 0
Enhancements: Willpower x2, Available Enhancement (Reinforcement, Willpower)
Named Belongings: Caerbalope, Antigo, Arachnomicon
Honestly? It had kinda been a long time coming. Stitching and Folding were way behind in terms of levels, of course, but I used Delinear Sight constantly. It had become a part of my daily life, looking around and knowing the exact weights and sizes of everything in my surroundings, even seeing the threads of reality within them if I looked close enough.
Knowing that I'd leveled up myself as well, I snatched up an additional Willpower Enhancement, but held off on adding any named creatures to my list, since I'd most likely want to use that for a boss in the future.
In terms of the actual Boons on offer, they were once again some of the most complex and hard to understand things I’d seen out of any of my Skills. By now, I had a bit more experience with the way this Skill worked, so I could understand things that fell under Stitching a little bit better.
It seemed that all of the Boons that this Skill offered were things that I could probably do on my own with a lot of hard work and creativity, but it cut out all the dangerous trial and error I’d need to get a working ability out of the process.
Notions would pretty much allow me to make my own threads of reality. I already kinda did something like that when I used Folding to make wormholes, but these ones would be much more real, able to interact and carry mass like normal strands. I would be able to increase the density of reality in an area in a manner other than simply strengthening the threads that were already in place with Mentum, which meant that I'd actually be able to, in a way, create mass.
Splitting was also cool. It would let me take an object and put it in two places at the same time. For example, I could decide that a rock was not just in the place that it was at the time, but also five feet away. When I canceled the ability, I would be able to decide which reality was true, thus teleporting the object. The main drawback of the Boon, other than the high energy cost, was that the object would be extremely vulnerable while split, like the opposite of my Sympathetic Bonding, since it would be a single object exposed to force from two locations. And no, I would not be able to bond the object to itself, since it was still one thing.
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Splitting would be immediately cool, but I could already teleport things, even if it would take a bit longer and be less combat-friendly. Notions, on the other hand, would be a completely new addition to my abilities. I took that one and immediately tried it out, making use of the information-high that always came with picking up new Boons from this Skill.
This one was actually pretty obvious to use, even without the clarity from the Boon. All I needed to do was mentally stitch a thread of Spatium between the weft and warp that Delinear Sight clearly showed to me, then reinforce it with a stable coating of Mentum. In a way, it was like the inverse of creating bonds, where I would create it primarily with mental energy and reinforce it with Spatium.
I continued to thread the strand I was creating through the ones that were already present, folding it over itself again and again. When I'd layered it so thick and tight that it looked almost like a square, I stopped to look at it. As expected, it was stable, and I reached to tap it with my hand. There was some very, very slight resistance, but I hadn't managed to make an actual physical object. Doing so would require much more Spatium than this attempt, and I would also need to apply an "identity" to my Mentum, which would also prove difficult, since much of my focus was focused on the threading itself.
Anyways, since I'd gotten a level increase, I could do something else, right? Abusing my own rules is so fun, I can see why my players always loved it so much. Maybe I should have given them better items and thrown tarrasques at them a little less.
…Naaah, they deserved it.
The thing that was most immediately bothering me was the lack of a boss on the 8th floor. I did have a couple of ideas, but I didn't know which one would work the best. 2 Twinscales in a trenchcoat was probably out, but what about a giant man-lizard? Ooh, I could give him super regeneration and a cool backstory. Maybe he's a mad scientist who lost his arm in the war and– wait, nope, that's The Lizard from Spiderman.
Super regeneration was a pretty good idea, though. Maybe I could give him my Necrotic Restoration Boon?
I could also try to make a land dragon. It would make sense with the landscape, especially if I could incorporate stone, gold, and gems into its body. Ohh, that was a good idea. Then, the final reward for the floor could be its hoard, and I could hide the exit to the next floor at the end of its den.
The idea was good enough for me, so I Created a bunch of Twinscales bodies, though they weren't really Twinscales since they were unlinked. I then tore their bodies apart, making sure the scales and bones were separated based on the locations they'd come from. After that, I started constructing a rough design with my Delinear Sight, making sure that the dragon I was imagining would look brutal and deadly. It needed to be large enough to fit my entire body in its maw, of course, and to crush me flat in a single stomp.
In the end, my schematic was over 16 feet tall, a good height for a boss monster such as this.
The first step to making my schematic into reality was to bleach the scales and "melt" the bones into the sizes and shapes I was after. Once that was done, I started arranging them together like puzzle pieces, inserting tendons in the required locations. Necrosis would help make up for some of my mistakes, but the more efficient I could make the initial design, the stronger the final creature would be. Luckily, I only need to place bones, muscles, and skin. If I'd had to worry about organs, I probably would have failed at this completely.
Eventually, the skeleton was complete, and I started folding muscles into its frame until I felt that it looked tough, muscular, and proud enough. Its head was somewhere between cobra and lion, and its upper body was heavily muscled, making it look like a professional bodybuilder. Its legs were closer to those of a big cat, though, and its tail was ellipsoid to the point where it was nearly flat, like it had been caught in a hydraulic press. In other words, it was pretty close to dragon-shaped. Time to see if that holds up once I've put the scales on.
I pulled out sheet upon sheet of the translucent-white scales, wrapping them around the body of my new beast, then layering more until I ran out and the creation looked like a mummy. I took a moment to smooth out the creases and more evenly distribute the scales, then looked it over again. It was missing something, I just knew it.
Ahhh, right, eyeballs. Ooh, actually, spines first.
I drew over more bone and attached plates to the land dragon's spine, each one at least the size of my torso.
Alright, now eyes, then I could decorate to make it fit in better with the floor. I didn't want to use normal eyes, but I also didn't want this boss to have the weird compound eyes that the Caerbalopes had. My first idea was to just leave the eyes empty, but when I gouged out an Antigo's eyes to see if that would work it completely lost its vision.
My next idea was much more successful. My Wisps were basically just balls of energy but could see anyways, so maybe I could get them to act as eyeballs? With that idea in mind, I formed a pair of Wisps but didn’t Animate them, so they remained inert. I slotted them into the eye sockets of my current creation, hoping that would be enough. Even if it didn’t, and my creature was completely blind, it would still look epic as schnizz.
The next step I took was to Transmute the spines across my dragon’s back into gold. Transmute didn’t work on living creatures, sure, but this thing wasn’t alive and never had been. Currently, it was matter constructed out of pure energy, and it was sorta organic, but not enough for anything other than a slight resistance from the Boon. I also Transmuted just the edges of its scales into stone, just enough to give them a gray hue and increase their durability somewhat, but not to make them inflexible.
I admired my creature for a moment, but then paused. It was still missing something. I hadn’t incorporated rubies or emeralds into the design, and it didn’t have any horns, either, which I felt was a must.
I pulled a bit of stone towards myself with Mold Terrain, shaping it into a sphere of the correct size and then Transmuting it into ruby. The gem that formed was impeccably pure, and I slotted it into the right eye socket of my beast before repeating the process with the left one. The inert Wisps were easily coaxed into the gems, pure energy as they were, and soon my creation seemed to be glaring down at me with its solid red eyes. Still, no horns though.
Then I recalled that my Antigos had some pretty gnarly antlers, and called several up to this top floor before canceling their Animation. I Shaped the parts I was after out of their heads, then combined them all into one, the bone-like structures acting like putty in my metaphorical hands. Soon, I had some antlers with accurate proportions for my land dragon. A few more things were missing, though.
First of all, I wanted my boss monster to have some boss-monstery powers. Since it was a land-bound dragon that lived in the mountains, I felt that it would just be proper for it to have Mold Terrain and Transmute, and Delinear Sight too, just to help it use those abilities even better. I also knew that I wanted it to have Necrotic Restoration, or at least have some Wisps attached to it to heal it continually.
The biggest issue there was that I didn’t know how to give a creature more than one Boon through Construct Consciousness. None of my creations thus far had managed it, nor had they been all that intelligent. I needed to fix that for this guy. He needed to be able to use all of those different abilities, fight with intelligence rather than simple primal savagery, and speak too, if I could manage it.
The reason I couldn’t use Construct Consciousness to make actually sapient creatures was that they were just too simple. I couldn’t cram enough information into the rudimentary soul I was crafting to manage it. The size of this creature might help, but what else made up a good soul? I suppose I could categorize it as depth and energy. Depth seemed to come with age in most creatures, and it was something like experience and knowledge. Energy was obvious, but I knew that I wouldn’t just be able to cram power into this problem. If I didn’t have one, I couldn’t have the other. If no energy was produced or expended, then I couldn’t teach the soul anything, but if I wasn’t teaching it enough, then it would simply lose the energy. It was a bit of a conundrum, especially considering that my control over the consciousness decreased as it grew, and once I stopped actively forming the conscience, my power over it was effectively limited to basic communication and control. If depth was the issue, and I wasn’t happy to just wait a hundred years, then I’d have to teach the Consciousness everything I knew, while ensuring that enough energy was passed through to continue developing the soul. With that logic, I could simply bind myself to him for an extended period of time and slowly feed him all the information I needed.
I got cozy in my throne, getting ready for the long haul. Then, instead of simply Animating the creature itself, I created and Animated a new Wisp, then began the process of Constructing its Consciousness. For hours, perhaps even days, a constant stream of information flowed between myself and my new creation, and it slowly grew brighter and brighter, its light becoming less ethereal and fake, and instead more like fire. I taught it everything I thought it would need to know, primarily focusing on Undead Possession, Glyphic, Necrotic Restoration, Mold Terrain, Transmute, Mental Shield, and Delinear Sight. It felt less like a direct transfer of energy and more like a conversation, though. The more it learned, the more it responded, making new connections as its intelligence grew by leaps and bounds. It understood that I was its creator, its purpose, and its location. It had questions, so many questions, like a child that had just realized that something outside of itself existed, but I knew that our time was limited, so I focused on what it would need to know straight away.
Eventually, the energy was abruptly cut off, and I was made aware that I’d managed to power through my Mentum Generator. I got a killer headache, but managed to stay within my body this time around, likely due to a mix between the reinforcement provided by my Sympathetic Bond with the other Clone and Mentum Generator still putting up a valiant effort to restore my energy.
With my head still pounding, I watched as the confused Wisp, which was no longer quite so little, drifted aimlessly for a moment, then zipped towards the body it had been made to inhabit. Blue and purple light seemed to flicker beneath the skin of the dragon, and its ruby eyes and emerald antlers began to glow brighter and brighter, but then it faded as the body grew still.
Concerned, I checked the body and Wisp within over, snorting when I found that they were both somehow asleep. I guess learning that much all at once was too much for a little guy like him.
I got to thinking while waiting for my energy to recover and casting Necrotic Restoration on myself to heal any damage my prior drain might have caused.
“Hmm,” I muttered aloud, “A name. He’s an undead land dragon that lives close to the Earth, with metal along his back, rubies for eyes, and emerald antlers. He’s also basically got earthbending. Hmm, undead, like skeletons, except bones from the earth would be fossils. Fossils are… Me’uban. That alone isn’t quite right though. He’s a dragon, and there’s gold… Dragon in other languages… Drakon, Ormr, Long… Drache? Drachme’Uban? Oh, and drachma is ancient Greek currency, which makes sense as long as nobody knows its silver, and I should be the only person in this world who has even heard the word until now. I shall henceforth refer to you as Drachma’Uban, or Uban for short.”