When I woke back up at the shrine, I found myself surrounded by zombies. In perfect synchronisation, they pointed at me, then emitted a single, "Ha ha."

I bet dupliKatie had been practising her control over them for precisely that moment. With a huff, I got back up and made my way to the throne room, ignoring the spectating blighted husks. "Was that necessary?" I complained at her.

"Nope," she answered happily. "So, how many levels of heat resistance do you think you need to be able to actually use your new skill?"

That was unfair! If my wings could abuse physics so blatantly, why couldn't my fire breath? Still, given the instadeath, 'surviving' it probably counted as an achievement, and my enhanced resistance focus would count as a third, so I could evolve it to heat nullification. I just needed to commit suicide with my flame breath repeatedly. At least the patch of wall I'd aimed at looked scorched, so I did actually have some power available, and wasn't just breathing out warm air.

"Well?" asked my zombie twin.

"I currently have it at level twelve, and can probably take it to thirty. That should be enough to not immediately die."

"At least until you enhance it."

"Or enhancing it might give me an asbestos throat. You never know."

"Nice how you can keep such optimism after everything that's happened to you. Now, get a move on. You have at least eighteen suicides to get through!"

With another huff, I turned back to the wall and gave it another dose of flame.

Heat resistance advanced to level 13

And so continued the next half hour or so, at least from my perspective. In real time, I spent over a day dying repeatedly. The blunt damage tolerance boosts had reminded me I really should get other damage tolerances if possible; I'd been in two minds about it because it risked preventing me from suicide by throat slitting, but the only time I'd actually wanted to slit my throat recently I hadn't been able to for bondage reasons. It wouldn't be a great loss.

Cutting and stabbing myself immediately granted me piercing and cutting damage tolerance skills, and thanks to my enhanced resistance focus, I could evolve them with no achievements required. My procedure became wake up, stab or cut myself repeatedly, then breathe flame straight up into the air until death. I didn't even bother to stand up first.

Evolution conditions met: Heat resistance ranks up to heat nullification

Fire is one of the more common elements of magic, and is used by mages and monsters alike, but magic isn't required to create excessive heat. Maybe an adventure will take you to a desert, or a lava filled dungeon. You have survived the fiery breath of an adult draco rubrum, as well as major internal burns carbonising important parts of your body. For these achievements, you have earned this upgrade from resistance to nullification. This skill greatly increases the upper end of the temperature range in which you can comfortably operate, and shields you from dangerously high temperatures.

Evolution conditions met: Piercing damage tolerance ranks up to piercing damage resistance

Spears, poniards, arrows, or even a club with a nail in it, plenty of weapons work by concentrating a force onto a small spot, piercing into their target. This skill will make your body harder to pierce.

Evolution conditions met: Cutting damage tolerance ranks up to cutting damage resistance

Swords, axes, chakrams or scythes, plenty of weapons work by concentrating a large force into a sharp edge. This skill will make your body harder to cut.

Evolution conditions met: Curse resistance ranks up to curse nullification

Not all magical attacks aim to deliver raw damage. Sleep, weakness or paralysis are common effects. Having quickly recovered from the sleep and paralysis magics of a powerful mage, you have earned this upgrade from resistance to nullification. This skill will offer significant aid towards rejecting the negative effects of curses, and will alert you when you are afflicted with a curse.

My sword of paralysis, which had previously only levelled curse resistance to twelve, had given me one more level, either from the quantity of attacks I'd made against myself, or from my enhanced resistance focus. That took it to twenty and gave me a new evolution. My physical damage resistances capped at twenty, with no achievements to evolve them further. As for heat nullification, even capped at thirty, I could only breathe flame for five seconds before suffering fatal burns.

That wasn't as harsh a limit as it seemed; even if I was completely immune, I couldn't do much better. It consumed mana at such a rate that five seconds drained it by more than half.

That had been a seriously productive day of training. Alas, none of it would actually help against the tree. Or even against the carnes multiformis, aside from them needing to stab a little harder with their spears. Maybe I should fly into things some more to boost my blunt resistance?

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Deciding that I'd done enough training for now, and I was overdue some revenge against the slimes, I finally stood back up and made my way back towards the throne room. I made it three steps before my brain unhelpfully informed me something was out of place, without telling me what.

Peering around the room, it took me far too long to spot the problem. My corpses were gone! There should be more than two dozen, yet I hadn't seen a single one the whole time I'd been training. Shrine rooms cleaned up around themselves, but had never, in my experience, removed full corpses.

...The blighted husks that inhabited this floor had entered the shrine room to do the 'ha ha' thing. Under dupliKatie's control, the shrine didn't consider them a threat. A suspicion formed.

"Okay, own up. How many brains did you eat?" I asked as I entered the room.

"Would you believe me if I said none?"

"No."

"Good, because that was a flagrant lie. It wasn't like you were using them."

I gave her a flick on the forehead. "And the rest of the corpses?"

"Made more blighted husks out of them. Their spawn rate is too slow, and I want my army back. I've only just hit fifty."

"That actually works without brains?"

"Yup. It's not as if zombies use them. Mostly. Obviously I do."

"Wait, does that mean they can fly?"

"Alas not. I'd hoped so, but once you die the physics breakage stops, so however hard they flap, nothing happens."

That doesn't change the fact that there's however-many winged zombies with my face shambling around, a thought that left me struggling not to burst into laughter.

"I can tell you don't really care," said the zombie, despite my struggles to keep a straight face.

"Hah. Maybe not. Actually, you can even have a few more, if you want. I've evolved disease nullification to disease immunity, and before I face that damn tree again, it would be helpful to train it a bit more."

"Of course," she said with a predatory smile. "I'd be more than happy to."

And so my grinding continued. In another sense of the word, this time; at least training disease resistance was considerably more fun than training heat resistance. To start with, anyway. DupliKatie only managed to get me another couple of levels via her usual intimate methods. She simply wasn't as leaky as the more damaged husks, leaving me needing more drastic measures to boost my immunity any higher.

"You want me to lick that?" I asked my zombie twin incredulously.

"Yup."

"And you deliberately found a zombie with an oozing sore by there, I assume?"

"No comment."

My zombie twin had brought in one of the zombies she'd made from my recent corpses, the burns around the mouth giving the face an even darker horror feel than the usual husks, made even worse by the neat incision that ran around the full circumference of the top of the head. The wings were still mobile, if not functional, letting me see close up how they folded and flapped. It was more than enough information to rework my armour to accommodate them.

But first, doing my best not to gag, I licked up the black fluid oozing from a sore that crossed its breast.

Disease immunity advanced to level 34

My tongue burnt. My mouth and throat burnt. My stomach burnt. Everything burnt, and I felt it spreading. For the first time in a while, I'd had a dose of blight bigger than I could fight off. I coughed and spluttered as my throat dried. My lips cracked and began to ooze more of the black pus.

Disease immunity showed me the degradation in exquisite detail. While the seeds from the tree below—the guidance—co-opted nerves, muscles and blood vessels, the blight contaminated my mana. Apparently I had some sort of mana circulatory system, far too fine for sense mana to spot.

Sense mana advanced to level 9

Although watching the blight invade it helped.

"Whu..." I tried, my voice cracking as badly as my lips, sending me into a coughing fit and spraying the floor with suspiciously dark blood. Sheesh, things had got this bad in minutes? And there I was, wondering why the blight seemed weaker than the guidance. It was just that dupliKatie, being in such good condition, simply wasn't very infectious. At least in relative terms. I knew from skill feedback that merely being in the same room as her would have instantly doomed me without my resistance skills.

What even was that black stuff? I was developing sores of my own, leaking it from places other than my lips, and I could see that in each case the pus leaked from a location where a mana vein approached the surface. The fluids were corrupted mana? I reached out to touch one, only for the room to spin around me, the sudden dizziness dropping me to my knees. I made a raspy, choked noise that probably wanted to be a laugh, but by this point, it was getting rather hard to tell.

"Sorry, but I'm ending this now," came a voice from above, and the room started spinning rather more literally. The last thing I saw, looking up from ground level, was my own headless body toppling forward into a pool of black filth of its own making.

Disease immunity advanced to level 35

Back in the catacombs' shrine room, I shuddered. Were there any normal bacterial or viral infections here? The guidance was spread by plant seeds, and the blight was corrupted mana. I think whatever I picked up from eating the spider flesh had been viral, according to my skill evolution messages. Well, whatever. However unpleasant that had been, it had got me two levels of disease immunity, despite my already high level.

I skipped back to the throne room, ready for round two.

"You look awfully happy, considering I just beheaded you," commented my zombie twin.

"Two levels of disease immunity from that!" I exclaimed. "Let's go again!"

She sighed. "There's a reason we didn't rush resistance training using the blight, remember? First the dragon, and now this... You're starting to take far too many risks."

"It's fine. You can always behead me again before I zombiefy."

She sighed again, harder. "If I wasn't getting all the brains from this, I'd try to slap some sense into you, but as it is..."

She left the sentence dangling, but the zombie walking up to me and presenting an oozing arm said what she hadn't. I licked up the black ooze, disease immunity once again informing me I was doomed before I'd even swallowed it.

Disease immunity advanced to level 36