When Bobby pressed the [Learn] button on his system notification, it had stuffed a bunch of knowledge right into his head, and his brain, feeling overwhelmed with the sudden rush, had pushed it all aside rather than try and process it. So while he had the knowledge in his head it wasn’t intuitively accessible, it was more like a bunch of pages taken from around a hundred random ikea manuals.

He tried to figure out where to start with creating an undead being, but the knowledge that came to him was not really helpful on that front, he didn’t currently need to know how to debone a dragon, or safely tether an unspeakable void creature to a mortal soul.

More and more random seeming things began to bombard his mind until it actually started to make his head hurt. It was like being in a crowded room where everyone was shouting and they all had megaphones. Countless ideas began clamouring for his attention and focus until he had no room left to even hear his own internal monologue.

Alarmed by the overload he reached out for help and suddenly like a soothing blanket, the energy responded, pulling him into some kind of mental space and wiping away all the irrelevant things until there were just a few remaining.

Bobby stared around amazed, he was inside his mind somehow, floating in a void surrounded by countless shards that appeared to be his memories, all connected together into a giant fractured pattern. Randomly surrounding the structure though were around a hundred shards that were completely disconnected from the whole thing. This must be all the knowledge that got forced into my head.

Bobby smiled with relief as the energy tickled at his mind, pulling two particular shards towards him.

The first was a procedure called the Samsaran Cycle and as he focused on it, he could see a memory of someone reading an excerpt from a book:

The body leaves an aetheric imprint of its functionality on the soul, this can be called on in the process of reanimation to create a magical facsimile of all the vital joints, muscles, nerves, tendons, and various sense organs as well as an inefficient system for circulation of magic round the body. Each magical structure requires at least one component of the beings body that was around when it was alive to be tethered to, viable components are listed below:

* Intact body (most effective)

* Skeleton (viable)

* Flesh (viable)

* Nerves (viable)

* Blood (ineffective, but possible)

In the Agthar Peroni System of the Nortus Galaxy Necromancers compete annually to try and convert one body into as many separate undead beings as physically possible, via elaborate butchery and magical skill, the current record is seven at the time of this books publishing.

Accompanying the book excerpt, there was a memory of a wizened necromancer performing the procedure, gently sensing the magical imprints on a soul, recreating them with magic and then anchoring them to a skeleton.

Bobby memorised the procedure, reviewing the literature and practical application until he thought he understood it well enough to perform it. As he focused on it, he noticed connections forming between it and the giant fractured construct of his mind. Then he left his mind space, going back to the real world.

Bobby’s legs slightly ached and he realised he must’ve been standing for a while, Gary had gone back to the van at some point, but Mcgunkin had stayed and was staring at the corpse emptily. He opened his third eye and looked around for the ghost, finding it sort of hovering, the magic seemed to have run out and its eyes had gone back to looking cloudy.

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Gently he grabbed the disembodied soul that was the ghost, pushing it down into the skeleton until they roughly lined up. Then he set to work trying to copy what he had just learned, he began on a shoulder, carefully sensing the shape of the ghost, feeling the imprints of the joints and getting familiar with their structure and functionality, then he began what felt a bit like sketching, shaping his magic into something similar to what used to be there, kind of filling a gap in a way.

He had to begin over twice, but he got the hang of it pretty quickly, once he had begun the process he found it all lead on pretty well, because the various muscles and tendons connected across the torso, and then they were anchored near the same muscles for the other shoulder, after the next shoulder he attached the skull, and, then the lower arms, and the pelvis, and finally the legs.

The most difficult part he found was the small nitty bitty bits like the hands and feet, they had intricacies that meant the tiniest mistake made him need to start over. As he worked he sensed some of the other mental shards in his mind connect, giving him an intuitive sense of the anatomical composition of what he was remaking.

The body was a miraculous machine, and while his repairs seemed functional, they paled in comparison to what they should look like. Hopefully magic can bridge the gap and give this skeleton similar physical capabilities to a human.

He finished all the joints, muscles and tendons, slotting the jaw in as the finale. Next he had to remake the sensory system. Sense was surprisingly important all throughout the body as there are a lot of muscles that are capable of injuring themselves if they were too push to hard, and while his magical constructs seemed quite durable, he didn’t want them to tear themselves apart with first use, this system includes the nerves, and he carefully threaded them into all of the constructs he had already made, weaving them so that they would not get caught in any joints, then came the eyes and the ears, which didn’t turn out to be too difficult, just a bit fiddly.

Bobby took a break for a minute to drink some water and marvel at what he had done so far, then he continued, creating a sort of circulatory system that diffused magic into the bones from the skull, which would act like a battery, storing magic in its hollow cavity. Bobby didn’t bother with some of the body's non vital structures like the vocal cords and other parts like most of the original organs were pointless creating because the skeleton would run on magic, not food. Though he did give the skeleton sort of magical eyelids, in case it ever wanted to just close its eyes and rest.

[Perception 15 → 16]

[Dexterity 12 → 13]

The system acknowledged his efforts so far with a notification, telling him he was indeed going in the right direction. It was finally time to use the second shard of knowledge that his magic had shown him, this had quite the ominous name of the Chains of Awareness.

From what he understood of it, it seemed to artificially strengthen the tether that existed between the body and the soul, far beyond the typical strength of that connection even on a living person, this had the added bonus that it made the resultant being nigh unkillable.

In comparison with the Samsaran Cycle this seemed far easier, though it had a much more intensive magic usage requirement, in fact Bobby wasn’t sure if he had enough magic to complete it, but there didn’t seem to be a consequence to depleting magic, or at least not one big enough for the system to warn him about, so he was happy to give it a try.

He pushed his perception inside the soul, but instead of going into it further like he had always done before, he pushed away, further from the soul, until it zoomed out enough in his vision that he could make out a ghostly tether stretching off into the distance. Using a careful application of magic rewarded by his new point in dexterity, he wove strands of magic into the structure, fortifying it, and as he travelled along it, at some point he left the soul and his perception swam back into reality, still holding the tether that seemed to stretch across to the bones, carefully he secured it in place, anchoring it with magic to each of the bones until he finally reached the skull, the whole system snapping into place in a way that felt almost natural.

Finally with the last of his magic, he pushed as much as he could into the storage place that was the skull cavity. As his magic store emptied his third eye cut out and his control over magic seemed to vanish, the euphoric feeling that came with the energy vanishing, leaving him deadly tired and a bit nervous.

He crossed his fingers and held his breath, hoping the last few hours of effort had been worth it.

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