CHAPTER 37 - COUNT YOUR WINNINGS

There were a lot of stones on the blanket in front of me. First thing I wanted to do was to count them and divide them out into groups. I also checked out my existing stones:

Magical Stones

Point 1: Black Stone (Tier 3) - Control Undead

Point 2: Black Stone (Tier 2) - Animate Dead

Point 3: Black Stone (Tier 2) - Drain Life

Point 4: X

Point 5: X

Spare Stones

Black: Heal Undead (Tier 2), Nightvision, Darkness, Augment Undead, Control Undead, Shadow Walk, Harm

Green: Entangle (Tier 2), Entangle

Clear: Will (Tier 2), Strength (Tier 2), Agility (Tier 2)

On top of that, I checked the hoard of crystals from the day’s labor. I had sixty-seven of the things, all told. Twelve of them were clear, and the other fifty-five were black. I couldn’t help but feel excited as I looked at them all. I badly wanted to hit at least tier four in one power. That would open up another spot for a new stone.

I still wasn’t sure which stone I would put in. Augment Undead was useful, but so was Agility. Overall, though, I expected I would socket Will next. That would boost my ability to cast Drain Life more often, and if there was anything going to keep me alive longer, it was probably that spell. My hand went to the spot just under my ribs where I’d been stabbed. It wasn’t even tender anymore, but the echo of pain still lingered in my memory. Without that spell, I’d have died out there.

Identifying all of those stones meant yanking one first, unfortunately. Which one? Taking out the tier three stone made no sense, so that was off the table. If I yanked the animate spell, I’d lose my skeletons. If I yanked the Drain Life spell and it broke, I was totally screwed, though. Of the two, I could afford to lose Animate a lot more, so that’s the one I gently pulled free. It appeared in my hand, and the skeleton I’d brought with me into the garage collapsed in a heap of bones.

I grimaced. The one at the back door was probably in pieces, too. “Rosie, go mind the house, okay? Stand in the kitchen and make a lot of noise if anything comes into the house.”

The zombie walked off, leaving me with just Guildenstern and Hope as guards. That would hopefully be enough to keep me safe for the time being. There were plenty of bones out in the graveyard to Animate once I was all done identifying everything, so I’d be okay.

One by one, I socketed the clear stones. Thankfully, none of them shattered on removal. Of the twelve new stones, I ended up with two Strength, two Will, three Agility, two Stamina, two Intellect, and one Charisma. This was interesting stuff, now that I had time to sit and think about it. I was never what you’d call an avid gamer, growing up, but I’d played some D&D with friends in high school, and a few computer RPGs. I knew the lingo, and these crystals matched up pretty solidly with the stats you usually saw in games.

Why was that? I could only guess. Maybe the stats were just obvious. Like, there were only so many key factors that went into determining the capabilities of a person, so the crystals happened to be named the same thing as the games? That could be. Or maybe there was more to it than that.

I remembered the writing on the cemetery gates, how it held back the undead. That was magic, and it predated the Event, probably by hundreds of years. Maybe longer—the cemetery was only a couple hundred years old, but the inscriptions had likely been used on many other graveyards for much longer.

What if this wasn’t the first time magic had come to my world? Maybe bits of magic like those gate inscriptions and the game stats were lingering vestiges of another Event like the one I was living through. If it happened a thousand years ago, it would have been much less catastrophic. After all, there were no firearms or electric lights, back then. No cars or airplanes, either.

I had no way to tell which was true, but the idea gave me hope. If this was something that came and went in cycles, that humanity had faced and survived before, even if it was ages ago, it was much more likely we could do the same thing again.

The new find put me up to four Will stones—well, a tier two and two tier ones, anyway. I merged the tier one stones for all the stats, and then merged the Will crystals into a tier three. That was looking like a prime candidate for my next power, all right.

“Okay, clear ones done, now I need to go over the black stones,” I told Hope. She yipped in reply.

This was the really exciting part, because these were the stones that would enhance my combat power the most. I carefully socketed each one in turn, and then slowly got myself a running tally of what everything was, plunking the stones down into one pile for each spell.

One by one, new spells came into my hands. I found crystals for Fear, Health to Mana, Protection from Undead, Contagion, and Curse. I’d half wondered if I had already found all the spells the black stones granted, but apparently not. Some seemed to be rarer than others. As I went along, there were a lot of Animate Dead crystals, and a fair number of Control Undead as well. Both my professor and I had gotten those spells right away, fighting zombies in the classroom, and it apparently wasn’t by accident.

The new spells were interesting.

Health to Mana looked positively broken. It would convert some of my vitality into mana, which would let me cast more spells. When coupled with my Drain Life spell, this looked positively abusable. At tier one, maybe not so much; but if I could get it ranked, that might be awesome later on. Unfortunately it seemed to be rare.

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Protection from Undead appeared to be much like the writing on the graveyard gates. I’d inscribe a series of runes on something, empower the runes, and then enemy undead wouldn’t be able to pass by. Super useful, but highly specific, too. I figured that one would be sitting in my pocket a while. Fear was likewise a limited use spell. It would make a number of enemies flee me. Lower ranked ones, for the most part, but it had a reduced chance to work on same tier or higher tier monsters as well. Personally, I’d rather blast them with a Drain than chase them off—too much chance they’d come back again when I wasn’t ready, later.

The last two new spells were both of the same variety. Contagion cast a disease spell which could move from one target to another. It reduced their stats—all of them, from the looks of it—by a small amount. If they touched someone else, the debuff would spread. Curse was also a debuff, but it was single target, and did damage over time. Every few seconds the Curse would cause more harm. It looked like it did more damage than a same-tier Drain Life, but of course it lacked the healing aspect.

Still, any new attack spells were something I was very interested in.

There were thirteen Animate Dead stones, twelve Control Undead stones, eight Drain Life stones, five Heal Undead, three Nightvision, three Darkness, three Augment Undead, two Harm, two Shadow Walk, one Health to Mana, one Protection from Undead, one Contagion, and one Curse. I went on a mad merging campaign, piling them all up as best I could. Only one shattered, in all of that—a Darkness spell.

My tier two Animate spell mixed with two more Animate stones to make tier three, and then four more of them to finally hit tier four. I socketed the last ones without any trouble and felt a rush of new power hit me. But I still had seven more of them! I was literally one shy of hitting tier five.

Where was another zombie to kill when I needed one? Shit, did I have to go find another graveyard?

On the plus side, the tier four version of the spell was plenty powerful. I could Animate eight tiers worth of undead now, so that could be eight regular skeletons, four tier two skeleton warriors, or two tier three undead. I’d have to go outside to the piles of bones to see what the tier three options looked like, but I could tell they existed, now that I’d ranked up the spell.

The really good find was the twelve Control Undead stones, though. Because my Control Undead was already tier three—four tier one stones worth—adding twelve more brought me to sixteen, which was enough to merge them all into a single tier five stone. Since I’d already kicked Animate up to tier four, I had an empty slot. I put a Control in there, then added another; that was tier two. I unsocketed that, and did it again, then merged the two tier two stones to get a tier three—which instantly and automatically merged with the other tier three into a tier four.

Then I had to do all of that all over again with the other eight stones. My pulse raced as I added the final ones together. What would happen? A tier five stone should open the last slot, giving me five spells! Would it do more than that? I had no way of knowing.

I merged the final stones together. They melded with the tier four stone and became tier five. Instantly, the fifth Point opened up, unlocking, but that wasn’t all that happened.

A second ring of Points appeared in my mind’s eye, surrounding the inner ring. Only one Point was unlocked, the one just outside the tier five Control Undead. It was like I’d opened up a new ring of socket Points, each one connected with one of the inner Points. A flood of additional information hit my mind at the same time.

I suddenly understood how it all fit together.

As each inner point hit tier five, it would unlock a point on the outer ring. Those, in turn, would open a point on a third ring once ranked up to tier five, and if I ranked up a third ring point to tier five, that would open up a fourth ring. I wasn’t sure if there was a limit, a cap of some kind, or not. It was possible I could eventually slot hundreds of crystals, hundreds of powers.

There were limitations, though. Each outer ring crystal needed to be the same color as the associated inner crystal. Because my tier five stone was black, the outer ring Point I’d opened up also needed to be filled with a black crystal. The ones beyond that would need to be, as well. I could slot multiples of the same spell, and double up, if I wanted—so adding more Animate Dead spells, for example, would increase my maximum army size. But whichever color crystal was slotted into the inner circle determined which color the outer Point had to be.

Now I had six Points open to embed crystals. Control Undead had to be in one of them, since it was my only tier five. I probably couldn’t risk taking that out ever again, because if I did, I’d risk shattering sixteen crystals worth of magic. That would seriously suck. But I needed to carefully consider which spells to add, beyond that, because the colors I chose would have a lot of weight down the road.

I pondered it for a long while, going over a variety of possible configurations, until I finally came up with one I thought would work.

Magical Stones

Point 1: Black Stone (Tier 5) - Control Undead

Point 1, Outer Ring: Black Stone (Tier 3) - Animate Dead (Tier 3)

Point 2: Black Stone (Tier 4) - Animate Dead

Point 3: Black Stone (Tier 4) - Drain Life

Point 4: Clear Stone (Tier 3) - Will

Point 5: Clear Stone (Tier 3) - Agility

Spare Stones

Black: Heal Undead (Tier 3), Heal Undead, Nightvision (Tier 3), Darkness (Tier 3), Augment Undead (Tier 3), Shadow Walk (Tier 2), Shadow Walk, Harm (Tier 2), Harm, Animate Dead (Tier 2), Animate Dead, Drain Life (Tier 2), Health to Mana, Protection from Undead, Contagion, Curse

Green: Entangle (Tier 2), Entangle

Clear: Strength (Tier 3), Agility, Stamina (Tier 2), Intellect (Tier 2), Charisma

It felt like a good combination. The difficult slot was really the new outer ring one, because I had to ponder for a long time which spells to put into play. But having four extra skeletons under my control was a big deal. I’d already demonstrated just how powerful it was to field a large force of minions. With the Will addition, my Drain Life would cast much more often without burning me out, so I had one good offensive spell.

I really wanted to add either Curse or Contagion, too. Either of those would be a welcome addition to my arsenal. But they were tier one, and the spare Animate was tier three. In the end, that helped finalize the decision for me.

Adding Agility instead of something else was also a major question for me, and one I had a feeling I might second-guess the next day. I’d keep on experimenting, for sure. Agility had saved my life more than once, but so had some other spells. Augment might be a better choice there, or Curse. I’d keep my options open and test some variations when I had the chance.

For now, though, it was time to get some well-earned rest. This had been a hell of a long day. I gathered up my loot, carefully moving all the spare stones into a small bag I’d picked up during my scavenging. It was nylon, built tough, and had enough padding to protect them. The stones secured, I went back into the house and upstairs to the bedroom and the welcome mattress waiting for me there.

With Hope curled up on the bed beside me and both zombies waiting just outside the door, I felt secure enough that I drifted off into a deep sleep right away, maybe the first good rest I’d gotten since the Event happened.