This has been progressing quite fast in comparison to my other projects. I can already control a good portion of the horn, I also figured out why it's so resistant to control. It's because each layer needs progressively more mana to take control over, I normally wouldn’t be able to do this considering the almost exponential mana cost. But by combining the layers, I’m able to lower the cost of the next layer by a quaint amount but said amount has gotten bigger the more layers deep I go so at some point I’ll be saving upwards of 300 mana.

I’m also noticing that the horn was filled with the rabbit's mana, and I’m willing to bet that the rabbit had spent its entire life putting mana into there to reinforce his horn. I wonder if that's why they kill each other. To speed up the process of reinforcing a single bone throughout their entire lives.

Taking this opportunity to not have to hyper focus on one task I start to observe the new area around me. First I consider how far I’ve traveled from my original spot, I must be only like an hour away from where I first woke up. ‘Wish I could say that I’ve explored more of my surroundings, at most I’ve traveled in a kind of oblong shape for an hour and a half in some directions but less than 20 minutes from my starting point in others.’ I’ll need to start exploring more so that I don’t kill everything in this area that would be a bad idea.

Then my attention goes to looking towards the trees, like I said earlier the trees seem largely like trees from my old world with the only difference being how close different tree species are to each other. But now that I’m looking just that little bit closer I can see some faint differences, the trees in my old world didn’t have much special about them but these trees here, are almost glowing with mana, once you start looking for it. I can see faint lines of mana traveling from the base of the tree far into the ground getting fainter and lighter but still there. I can see mana being pulled in amounts that I doubt I’ll ever be able to compare to, all the way from the very depths of the earth into the tree joining the collective mana of the tree.

Then I noticed a similarity between the horn and the tree. They both have layers of mana that get denser and more pure as they keep going. Does this give them some sort of benefit? There has to be if every tree here has the same thing happening. ‘Next question does this happen naturally or do they have to make it happen?’ Suddenly I didn’t feel so safe being surrounded by trees who could possibly be intelligent, but if it naturally happens why isn’t my mana doing it? Do I not have enough mana to cause the effect, ‘No I have way more mana than the rabbit what's different then?’

Darn I’m going to have to find another rabbit or something and watch it to see if they have some special method that they're keeping away from me. But in the meantime I keep looking at my surroundings, taking in the atmosphere and pure air that separates my experiences in both lives in the sheer quality of the air even if I don’t have lungs I can feel the difference.

Looking up towards the sky I can see that the dawn has passed and only 4 hour remain before noon. I can see the blue skies covered in incredibly low clouds, ‘Why does that seem important?’ As my mind came to a lurching halt at my question, and for the first time my lack of all my memories was coming to bite me, I kept trying to make sense of why the clouds being low was so important to me, and what that meant.. As the hours dragged on my mind kept coming to a brick wall of just nothingness, ‘I obviously am not making any progress here, so let's start over. What do I know?’ I know that the clouds are abnormally low, I know that I’ve seen very few birds, and that I’m a long long way from any civilized population.. I can’t think of what that means but I still have to explore this place better and maybe I’ll be able to find out if those are even connected.

I shake my head from looping back and forth and go back to focusing on the horn, finding that I’ve been making good progress so far in fact I’ve almost made it to the very center of the tootsie pop as it were.. So I can remember the name of some random candy but not the fact that clouds form over islands!.... Did I just hear that right? Clouds form over islands, that explains that I guess, doesn’t that mean that I’m never going to be able to get off this island? I might go insane from the lack of human contact.. “Hehe.” A chuckle can mean many things, a person being happy that the thing they wanted to happen has occurred. But in this case in a forest on an island in the absolute middle of nowhere a crab-human-skeleton let out a single chuckle and he knew that this was good.

‘Who am I kidding? I hated people in my last life, now I can avoid any interaction with them for a good long while.’ At least till the reincarnated people come to this world, then I might have issues. I don’t know why and I can tell that this one isn’t going to fall into my lap like the first time I tried to remember something, might be wrong but I’d rather spend my time figuring how I’m going to spend the rest of my unlife because as far as I can tell undead don’t die from natural causes like hunger, exposure, or even drowning. I don’t think I’m gonna be aging either when I can replace almost any part of my body.

Dropping the mental tomfoolery I return my attention once again to the horn, to find that my mana has been losing ground while I was distracted for quite a few minutes. I guess that's what I get for not focusing.. Getting back to where I was previously I had to maintain my focus the entire time lest the mana inside push my mana away. ‘This is pointing out a major flaw of mine, I’m evidently not very good at focusing.’ And as much as I wanna fight that statement I know that when I was sitting for two weeks straight doesn’t count because I could stop focusing and my mana would still stay there the entire time.

But I’m nothing if not persistent and annoying myself by proving myself wrong is right up my alley.. Gods let this end someday! I’ve been looking at this horn for the last two hours and even with 100% of my mental energy I just can’t do anything to that last layer. I had tried to just give up and use what I currently had but every time I’ve tried that the bone which is currently mostly liquid suddenly decides to go back to being solid and in the shape of a spiral horn with zero lag between me stopping and it reverting back.

You know what, I can’t deal with this anymore, I could have gone and done something over the past two hours, now I can handle slow progress I can even handle progress that I have to fight tooth and nail for every step of the way. But I can’t handle something that's completely immune to all of my attempts at doing the thing in question. I guess that answers the question if it was lack of control or lack of mana, it was lack of mana the whole time.

Thinking this I drop the horn giving up till I have way more mana. ‘I’m going to do this again and I’m going to have so much mana that it instantly gives away to my will.’ In the future that is, not right now I’ve already been running in circles for too long. I’ll need more bones to make up for lost time. And so my next great hunt began, I already could see the faint outlines of another squirrel peeking into my view distance. And like the little missile crab that I am, I shoot off towards the little bugger hoping that he liked being alive for the extra 4 hours that I wasted.

As i’m traveling I start to take notice of how my extra weight affects me, I can already tell that I’d have some issues with a foe who was significantly faster than me, like anybody would have an easy time with that type of opponent, but the point still stands that even using my bone manipulation I’m noticeably slower than earlier and I’m also not even close to being used to having eight legs then the four smaller ones that are currently tucked under me. The squirrel is only 12 minutes away, I can definitely get there but I also would rather be used to my body then to take damage even if the only place that would result in me losing anything would be damage to my head.

Needs beget wants, I start to slow down, making more careful movements trying to pay more attention to how my body is moving and how I need to move it. ‘I truly can’t state enough how much I miss my old body, I need to get the bones together to make that thing pronto.’ Alas no such luck as finding a perfectly good pone pit in the middle of the woods.. No? No deus ex machina here? Fine I’ll carry on with trying to get used to manning my little crab mech body. ‘Kind of wanting a crab mech now. I’ll have to keep that in mind for the future.’

As I get closer to the squirrel I try to take notice of any flaws in my movement now versus like 20

minutes ago, I will admit that me slowing down wasn’t the only reason the time it took to get here was a little delayed. As many things in my new life I notice some issues, this time with my movements in general, they all kinda just happen for no reason, as one might expect from a body with no muscle mass to speak of. But the bones themselves don’t need joints, I know this because as I was trying to get better at using my body I wondered why I was having so much trouble with this. I came to an interesting thing, none of my limbs even had joints. My legs looked like they had joints but I have no cartilage to make joints so they don’t really exist, so much as I can feel my mana forcing my limbs to move and act like there are joints.

So I did take like four extra or so minutes to figure a way to make joints, the only method I could figure was to make little ball and socket joints, but unlike a normal socket like that I could make the ball bigger than the entry hole without affecting my range of movement all that much. At first I didn’t notice a big difference but the longer I was moving the more it just made sense now that my mana wasn’t doing all the work I was able to actually understand how to use my body. Even if the body in question doesn’t use joints in nature, like the ones I’m making use of now. I can’t argue with the results.

I still kept walking as I went over what had happened but now it's time for a bit of a combat test run, lets see if I really improved at all. So I looked to see what the squirrel was doing, this

squirrels fur was much better at breaking up its shape than the others of its kind, it had very short hair that was pure brown. ‘Okay is there any rhyme or reason to the fur color and lengths these animals have? I’m starting to think that this entire island is radioactive or something and making the genes in these animals just go haywire..’ As my mind kept going over that idea I honestly couldn’t say that there was evidence, but I also couldn’t say that there wasn’t evidence somewhere on the island.

‘Bah got to stop going into my head so much.’ Getting back to the.. Where'd it go? Oh dear am I losing my mind already? ‘Nope I know the squirrel is most likely inside one of the trees near here considering that it's getting darker and no self respecting animal without night vision would willingly stay out when the suns protective yet damaging rays start disappearing.’ I won’t say no to killing this thing while it’s sleeping.. Wonder why that other squirrel was out so late, that does give credit to the idea that all the animals here even ones of the same species are somehow all distinct in what traits they have, some diernal others nocturnal, long hair short hair, and any other combination I can think of all of those seem randomized for some reason.

While it's great that my internal monologuing has progressed to this point I can see where my little squirrel friend has gone. Good thing I didn’t check the trees all that would have done is alert him to the fact that I exist. What I saw was the squirrel peeking its head out from under a hidey hole, most likely made by the squirrel, then looking around. Dashing out grabbing some nuts then going into a tree. Some minutes later it would emerge from the same hole in the ground. Do the same song and dance but this time it would dart into a different tree. I started to think that the best option would be to wait near the hole but the before that I faintly noticed the tops of the squirrels ears poking out over the hole in the tree. It was listening to see if anything was moving before it started going towards the hole in the ground.

Well you're a little paranoid ain’t ya? Can’t claim to not understand that brother, there was a giant snake up that way if you didn’t know. ‘Well that's enough talking to the food even if only inside my head.’ And now do I charge in and just hope the little thing doesn’t have some hidey holes or do I wait till he dashes out near my tree then try grabbing him then. The second one is making a lot more sense to me, especially because there's no way I believe that this paranoid bugger doesn’t have an escape tunnel, after all it can dig so it really doesn’t have a reason why it wouldn’t make one.

And once again I find myself, standing rather than sitting, perfectly still like skeletons tend to do and with nothing but time till my target either goes to bed or runs near me so that I can get him then. I open my profile

Name: N/A

Race: lowest undead Lv1, Single body part (Head) variant, HP 100/100, LF120/400, MP 500/500: +20 per second, U.MP 60/60

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Str 12(+4)

Con 17(+5)

Wis 20(+6)

Int 20(+6)

Dex 12(+4)

Cha 11(+1)

Free points: 0

Abilities: Life detection*2-7/20, Observe-15/???, Bad aura-9/???, Bone Manipulation*2-7/100, Mana manipulation-30/???, Undead healing*2-4/20, Mana craft-19/50, Life force manipulation-15/??. Undead energy-7/10, Mask of unlife-???/???, Meditation*2-6/10, Split mind-7/????, Form manipulation-4/30.

Limitations/Traits:

Undeath- You have no normal negatives of being undead, although you find your strength, speed, and mana abilities increased during the night and day,

Undead- You have no stamina, you have no need to sleep, and any desire to do so is magickly influenced,

Hunger for life- Your body has no life in it, you must take this life from somewhere lest your unlife ends.

Head variant undead- You have forgone the use of your body in search of some greater goal, your mental abilities are more powerful, easier to upgrade and you gain new mental abilities far easier, your mana pool is now larger and is much more responsive to your wishes than before. You still have no body of your own, but you can make limbs to use, this has removed the negatives of this trait. You now have a body, but because of extensive modification to the form, there will be no negatives for now.

Mana Blessed- Somehow you have gained the attention of mana itself, your mana has gained increased awarness, and mental abilities are exponentially more powerful and easier to use.

You have unlocked a skill normally only available for high ranked undead, it allows you to heal from damage.

Life force user- Now that you have such fine control of your mana your life force is now completely under your control.

Blessed by representative of undeath mana- You were blessed by the origin of all undead mana, you find mana of the same or similar type are much easier to use and when ever a being less to or equal to in strength to the representative tries to see your status/ affect your mind they will be unable to do so. You also gain access to higher level undead abilities sooner, they are much stronger that they should be at your level.

As an undead blessed by pure undeath mana all limits on having stats vs. not having stats. Are removed as long as it was caused by your being undead, and your stats are slightly higher.

Life force cultivation- you have compressed your life force into a higher purity than an undead would normally have access to, this has made it so that you are quite capable of using your life force to heal and strengthen others. You now have a bonus to how fast you heal, how effective your Con, Str, Dex, Int, and Wis are and will be able to heal even as an undead due to your blessing from a representative of undeath.

Bone purifier- Your bones had a natural inclination for earth mana, you have removed that, leaving your mana to be able to freely move through and outside of your body. You will find a bonus to Con, and that now you can fit far more energies inside of yourself. You also will have a far easier time doing this again if you so choose. Your Str and Dex also get a bonus.

Form modifier- You have modified the base nature of your body, this normally wouldn’t provide any noticeable changes other than in height and other things of that nature. But you took it one step above the norm by modifying small details to make the body more efficient, by modifying your form you can increase or decrease the bonuses to most of your abilities, earning bonuses to your future modification attempts and you can now with enough time and patience replicate purely physical traits, after observing an animal for long enough.

‘So that’s a real treat ain't it?’ I was awarded yet again for messing around and now I wonder how else I can make this body, my next body, heck I might go full lich here and have a warehouse full of different bodies for different tasks, that's kind of creepy to think about, that in the future I might be able to just say no to being even the smallest bit inconvenienced by death. And hop into a different body.

What could make my body more efficient, there's only so much I can do with bone, I need either a different material to use to complement bone, or I need to start replacing my current material with something better so that I don’t have to worry so much… Hol'up isn’t there something really obvious that could make this whole thing easier? I need cartilage and that won’t, hopefully, change my race enough that I rank up because I can still game this system and get a few more ability score increases.

I just need to kill this little.. ‘Oh and would you look at that, speak of the devil and all.’ I had to stop myself from continuing to think as my body tensed and waited for just the right moment, the squirrel would never think that a skeleton crab was waiting to decapitate it as soon as he lowered his head to sniff the ground, most likely if I would be too slow to react the thing would have smelled me, and the general smell of death that I know I must be wafting around. But I wasn’t too slow and as the squirrel started making the connection that something wasn’t adding up I was already closing my claw around his neck, severing clean through without even letting the squirrel realize that it had died.

I then had to deal with my ravenous want to devour the squirrels life force, ‘I need this one in as good a condition as I can, so that I can see about some cartilage’ for my future world domination I added mentaly but without saying it, as much sense as that doesn’t make considering I have like eight me’s in here at the moment. Then I start to inspect the dead squirrel, coming to a decision to move to the side and lift my body over the squirrel, letting my four scalpels have open access to the body below me.

Then I realize that I have no idea how to skin an animal, I’ve been leaving boneless husks full of meat everywhere I go without even really considering what that would mean if I suddenly needed to skin something. ‘Darn me and not planning ahead.’ I still needed to get at least a cursory look at this squirrels cartilage even if everything else is badly damaged. So I started cutting and cutting till I had a mangled scene out of a horror movie, a body roughly separated into different piles, bones on one, and skin and fat, another, muscle in another just in case.

I sat there looking at the carnage and came to a decision. ‘Need some way to wash up, I won’t be able to sneak up on things if I smell like blood.’ Then started observing the bones and more importantly the cartilage, trying to see exactly how it worked, how it was connected and even how it compared to bone connecting it. Soon an hour had passed and my brain was being filled with more information than I’d like to admit about the cartilage of a single squirrel.. Because yes at some point I gave up on building my power instantaneously and absorbed the LF and took the bones. Then started making my way onward towards my next study partner. Hovering ball of liquified bone following along.

I would think that an island would have water on it, at least a little, but I’ve been walking around for the better part of two hours. And at this point being covered in blood is more trouble than I think I’d have ever thought possible, I almost want to slap my naive two hour younger self for thinking that being covered in blood would make the monsters on this island less interested in me, but I can’t do that. ‘Why do they keep coming?!’ I mentaly yell as I kill the third rabbit who attempted to swarm me, maybe that squirrel had the right idea with the main base rather than just being a “murder hobo”.. Whatever that means.

I already can tell that some monsters are following me, they might be waiting for me to be injured, or their scavengers waiting to pick up the leftovers from my fights, I can ignore them for now either way considering I’m not going to get hurt by any of th.. I won’t even finish that thought because I started feeling something called foreshadowing. I might not have all my memories but year after year in english classes are just enough for me to get the faintest outline of what it is, and I’d like to avoid yeeting myself because of me being dumb.

As I was thinking I noticed another group of monsters, this time squirrels only two of them I already know they can run circles around me so I leaped off the pile of corpses landing just short of the squirrels then use my bone manipulation so send a spear of bone from the liquified bone ball that is floating over my head, killing the smaller of the two before the fight even started.

Clearly the larger of the two, now one, had some semblance of care and compassion for the fellows of their species because he froze for a split second and leaped onto me throwing me off balance, I had to use my slashing legs to cut into the side of it’s back leg to force it off of me before it could knock me onto my back. ‘Wow you got some muscle don’t you?’ This squirrel might have been only half the size of the “peak squirrel” but clearly it was only the peak of getting to the next level, this squirrel is somewhat like me in that it hasn’t leveled up or even ranked up yet, trying to build a more stable foundation for future levels.

Knowing that I was dealing with the squirrel equivalent to me, I forced my body to right itself and to regain my balance. Then without further ado I attempted to strike back in a counter attack, the squirrel clearly wasn’t as hurt as I thought because it doged my strike with my larger claw like it was nothing then slammed its tail into the claw almost ripping it off. This is when the negatives of not using LF to reinforce my body start to spring up, considering that now my main claw is basically no longer useful and my bone ball is currently busy taking all of the bones out of the previous corpses and my newest kill I can’t use those, my only weapons right are my mana constructs, my legs, and my main staby claw, and I don’t have much faith in the last one.

Considering my lack of faith in my remaining claw I still know that using my mana construct with something that can dodge is a bad idea so I leap towards the squirrel. I know it will dodge but if it dodges in the same way it’ll be in the air hence unable to dodge my next attack. It did in fact dodge in the exact same way so I struck it using a mana construct spike into the back of it’s brain.. The squirrel seemed frozen in place for just a moment while the spike started disappearing, as soon as the spike was no longer holding it up the squirrel dropped into the ground face first.

I wanted to let out a breath of air, but was unable to, I was forced to deal with the mental strain of so much planning and trying to keep myself out of the claws of my enemies. I then noticed 3 more blips using my life detection, I started healing my main claw, and started getting ready, by getting more in the center of the corpse of trees dragging the bodies of the newest enemies so that I wouldn’t lose them to any scavengers. Healing my claw took quite a lot of mana 370/500, I don’t think I’ll be able to keep this up for much longer but I don’t want to leave all the bones I’ve gathered so far so I have little choice in standing my ground and waiting for my next opponents, thankfully they are slower than either of the two species that I’ve so far been able to kill so I might be able to regenerate my mana before this fight...

It took more time for them to get close enough for me to see them. But as soon as I did I wanted to roll on the ground laughing but didn’t because that would reveal my slashy weapons that I so liked using for surprise attacks, my mana had regenerated in full making the situation that more funny rather than what I was expecting. My enemies this time were three overly large porcupines that stood at their shoulder about 4 feet tall. ‘Wait how tall am I?’ I stopped looking at my enemies and looked towards myself and noticed that I had actually made this new body about 2.6 feet tall, if my guess about my enemies height is correct that is, because the rabbits and squirrels are very close in height to me now. As well as because that would explain why it’s been taking so much bone to make my parts.

I threw myself to the left feeling something off, I looked and noticed that one of the porcupines was glaring at me, I looked back to where I was standing and noticed a good sized quill stabbed into the ground. ‘Oh so you can shoot them, that makes more sense I just thought I was going to be able to ignore you because you wouldn’t be able to get your quills into me.’ Sorry for underestimating you guys guess I’ll have to take this seriously now won’t I? And with that I started making my way towards them, slower than I would normally go because I wanted to see what would happen if I kept dodging their attacks, would they eventually run out of quills?

And so a fun game of dodge those projectiles began at the expense of three little porcupines. There were a few close calls where the quills scratched the surface of my shell then bounced off one of the innumerable bumps on said shell. But their quills were clearly designed to go into skin and softer material rather than through hard plated bones and so once I was close enough to see what had happened to them after the 13 plus minutes of me dodging around because again why fight if you could wear them out to death, I turned the corner around a tree and found three huffing and puffing porcupines, the largest of the three standing protectively in front of the other two. ‘Ah, now I feel bad for bullying an entire family of porcupines.’ I think for all of three seconds before snapping out of that because they were the ones to attack me and realistically I shouldn’t get blamed for them being bad at choosing fights.

So without further ado I marched over to the biggest one, who let out an interesting noise then tried to slam into me with his upper body and neck. All this did was let my sharp legs have a clear path straight into its jugular dropping the biggest one instantly. Then before the other two could do anything I leaped onto the second largest and stabbed this one in where I assumed the heart would be. Also dropping her instantly, I turned to look for the youngest one only to find air, I turned on my life detection and saw a faint yellow and red light running away.. I want to chase it but have no real reason considering that it’s already getting away from me and it wouldn’t have enough bones to make losing all my current kills worth it. So I let him go hoping that he would live a long good life and that I would never meet him again.