Nope, no transitions at all, just going from a desolate plains to a rocky hill country. The change is so abrupt that some hills have a cliff facing the plains, as if something had cut the hill in half. Maybe the lack of transitions is the result of those Titanic beasts in the distance? I didn’t particularly pay attention to such detail.

Anyway, this new area seemed perfect, not just for avoiding the damn parasites, but for facing a certain racist wizard when he shows up. Well, I thought it was perfect. I may have made a slight mistake when identifying the biome. What looked like a bunch of hills, if a little regular, wasn’t.

Okay, they are hills, if a little artificial. The problem is that artificial part. See, while they had filled in and abandoned the hills near the titan plains, that wasn’t the case for anything past those few. This area was a mind bogglingly enormous collection of burial mounds.

How did I figure this out? Well, the first “cave” I found had a bunch of skeletons and grave goods in it. I, of course, retreated and tried the next to the same result. In fact, I tried over seven caves before I was willing to admit this to myself.

As for why I stopped looking for an empty cave? I was attacked. The skeletons didn’t like me looking in on them, but in the end, they didn’t care as long as I didn’t try to take anything. Then a mummy showed up and they were more than just a mindless guard.

So it cursed me. Don’t worry, I got better. It was less “curse of the mummy” and more “roleplaying debuff”. The solution turned out to also be easy to figure out, but we can get back to that as the mummy wasn’t satisfied with just cursing me. They attacked me as well!

So while I was dealing with my joints feeling gummed up and my reaction speed slowed, a disk of sickly green, black flame sliced towards me. I attempted to dodge, but there seemed to be a mild tracking effect applied to it and combined with the curse, all I could do was block it.

The results of which shocked us both. For me, the fact the spell acted more like a solid blade instead of fire was quite strange. For the mummy? Well, the fact my forearms could block the disk instead of just having it slice through them was quite unexpected. Not to say the attack didn’t hurt!

The nega-flame disc cut both my forearms, leaving a wound about half an inch deep. Worse, the flame was cursed to prevent regeneration. So, with me already being a bit low on aqua goo, this stopped my healing factor in its tracks.

Good thing the mummy focused on spells to the point of discounting physical attacks. Though it helped that within its burial chambers, the thing was mostly immune to mortal weapons. That meant when my claws scythed through the mummy’s arm mid-cast, it wasn’t ready to lose the hand.

While my goo wasn’t magical, my psionic power had at least some interoperability with magic. Oh, and being distracted mid-cast isn’t exactly healthy for you, believe it or not. Anyway, the mummy dropped the spell and the growing fire was sucked into the undead’s arms. Then moments later, they flared out of the being’s eyes, before it slumped over dead.

After that, I cleared up the skeletal attendants. They hadn’t been hostile, but better safe than sorry. I needed a place to stay and this mummy’s lair was going to be that place, so clearing a few mindless skeletons was just part and parcel with claiming the area.

Oh, and that curse? Not a very effective one as it crumbles moments after the mummy died. The undead mage apparently didn’t care what happened after it was gone and such a curse was quite cheap to cast. Not that I paid attention to such things, I had a tomb to raid!

Gold, gems, and magical trinkets are scattered all over the room. That scattering was less a result of the mummy being messy and more an after effect of the fight. Either way, I was a bit shocked by the amount of wealth this one hill represented and what it might mean for the rest of the area. Not that I thought extracting this wealth would be easy.

A giant city of mages is just a stone’s throw that-a-way and yet a mummy I could beat had this much treasure? Either gold wasn’t worth as much as I thought or something was up. And Gold? It is worth even more than I thought! They used the stuff as the most basic form of magical energy for enchanting things. Sure, you can use specialized components like a morning glory harvest during an eclipse or the heart of a dragon, but they can use gold as a substitute for almost anything. Even if the efficiency might not be the best.

Suffice it to say, these tombs weren’t without protection. I only survived my little dalliance with tomb raiding because I hadn’t intended it. That was enough though as I only needed one cave to set things up. Though it certainly helped that after a bit of work, I realized my claws can slice through stone.

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Except this seemed all too easy! How could I possibly have a peaceful time carving out a little murder cave to trap a mage in? Of course, that wasn’t going to happen! After all, not only did I need water and food, but the neighbors weren’t going to let me rest.

I didn’t know it, but with the local undead, it is sort of a tradition to constantly attempt to conquer a better burial mound. Better in this case meaning ones that were closer to the center of the region, so at least I didn’t seem to be in some sort of prized location or anything. While not the worst, it wasn’t even in the middle of the outermost mounds.

That meant I didn’t even see a single vampire. Oh, and speaking of vampires, this was the reason they dropped me off on the side they did. While there was nothing official, they saw this as the undead quadrant. So, if they had released the racist mage too close, well, not everyone lives in the city.

Anyway, the first signs of trouble was a trickle of skeletons. I handled them easy enough. Yes, their bones had been reinforced with magic, but these were the lowest of minions. So my claws, which as mentioned can cut through stone, made quick work of them.

Except, this trickle of skeletons is not because someone was being stupid. Rather, each small group of them represents a different interested party. At least they were polite enough to wait for me to get back to the cave after grabbing some water from a nearby spring.

Refreshed, but unprepared, I faced the first challenger looking to claim my mound. A common ghoul followed by a small horde of zombies and skeletons. This could have, should have, been dangerous. The ghoul’s paralyzing touch would spell doom for any mortal, which is exactly why it was attempting to take my mound. Without that, the ghoul was a subpar fighter compared to other similarly ranked undead.

Good thing my aqua colored goo is apparently immune to whatever it is about a ghoul that causes that to happen. Though I didn’t know what was up at first when I fought it. It seemed like such a simple fight as the ghoul appeared to want to win by dealing a thousand cuts. So, while the cursed wound from the nega-fire disk was causing me more than enough pain. The ghoul’s shallow slashes could be ignored.

Oh, and the ghoul turned out to be kind of stupid, even by the standards of other similar level undead. It took half the fight for it to even realize that no; I wasn’t going to freeze up. And by then, it was hurt while I had mostly healed any wound it had scored. Still took me a hot second to kill it. Once the damned thing gave up trying to paralyze me, it focused on avoiding my attacks and trying to line up some powerful strikes.

Try being the operative word. At this point, I wasn’t some kind of a combat genius, but I knew enough to get out of the way. So yeah, we danced around a bit until my small strikes managed to add up enough that the damn thing missed a dodge and I managed to put a claw through its throat. Not that the throat is a particularly vital location on an undead, but the spine behind it was still important. And with a hole in it, the ghoul lost control of most of its body and allowed me to finish hacking off its head.

Messy work, but thankfully there wasn’t all that much blood to deal with. Though I guess that if the thing did have blood, the fight would have ended sooner. Not that I can complain since I am transcending such things as well. I guess at least my aqua goo was more photogenic than undead gore.

Anyway, after that I face a never ending conga line of undead looking to take my cave. Mummies, skeleton knights, furred zombies, orphaned vampire thralls, and of course more ghouls showed up one after another for a good half a day or so. Each one came with a small gang of minions and the absolute belief that all the others had just been weaklings and they would be the one to kill me.

They couldn’t. Except for the mummy spellcaster who I originally took this cave from, none of them were even able leave a lasting mark. Though even the magic burns on my arms had started to vanish by the time things calmed down.

Not that I had only been fighting during this period. In-between fights, I put my claws to good use. While there certainly wasn’t enough time to dig out entire new rooms. I was more than able to make a number of novel adjustments to what I had to work with.

Though that wasn’t much. There’s an entrance hallway that did this loop thing? Like, whoever dug it, started with a straight tunnel with a slight upward slope and then suddenly a sideways loop with a steeper upward slant. After that, the tunnel returned to straight though this time angles downward, placing the rooms at about ground level as far as I could tell. My guess was that they meant for this to prevent water from getting into the burial chamber.

While there are some undead that love being waterlogged, mummies aren’t one of them. Though the loop might also be used to prevent light from filtering out of the cave at night. Anyway, that tunnel connected to a handful of rooms.

Then there was the entrance hall, a simple enough room chamber. The place is mostly empty, though there are some carvings on the walls, and in one corner there is a stone vase filled with stone flowers. Which while interesting, are completely mundane as even from a distance, you could tell the flowers were carved from stone instead of grown that way.

Then there were three rooms branching off from the entrance hall. To either side are rooms for minion storage, blank squares of space for the skeletons to stand around in until needed. Straight ahead, though, was a different story.

The third room off the entrance had a proper door and was designed to mimic a throne room, if a good bit smaller than any noble would stand for. This was where the mummy had been hanging out, a real fancy place. Carvings in the wall depicting some sort of victory by the former owner. The roof has glowing gems embedded into it. And of course they made the throne of gold, because why not?