Bobby sat down in front of the rats and took the little pickle jar from them. “Mcgunkin can you get me a bowl of water from the kitchen please?”

Then he opened the jar slowly in front of the curious and slightly reverent stares of the group of rats. When the lid came off an intense and slightly off brine smell permeated the air. “Pwah, that's strong, how long has he been in here again?”

Rho Dent scratched her head, “About a hundred years?”

Bobby whistled as Mcgunkin came back into the room with a bowl of water. Then he carefully fished the rat corpse out with two fingers and dunked it into the water a couple of times. The corpse was remarkably well preserved, all the hair was still there, so were the eyes and tail, there was even a small patch where no fur grew that showed green tinted skin and a tattoo of a little cubecorp logo. The ferret has one of these logos, I wonder if there is any relation between their obvious intelligence and cubecorp. Bobby was beginning to feel curious about what his past employers got up to in secret.

“Well I can resurrect him, but that green tinge isn’t going away for quite a while.” Bobby found it slightly ironic that the first undead he would create that actually resembled a zombie would be this small rat.

Then he took a deep breath, slightly coughing at the smell in the air, before opening his third eye. The first thing he needed to do was locate the ghost of the rat, so he looked around the room. After a bit of searching he realised there was one extra rat in the group, having cleverly hidden itself in the location he would likely look last.

Rho Dent and the others looked slightly confused as Bobby reached down and grabbed something invisible from beside them. Then Bobby lined up the ghostly rat with its tiny body and called forth the knowledge he needed from the dark recesses of his mind.

It came far easier this time because he had already almost completely absorbed it. However compared to the other memories in his head, it felt a bit unnatural as it wasn’t actually a memory he had made himself, the body of the necromancer in it felt wrong and so did the environment. But when he called back the memory he could imagine himself in the shoes of the person who made it and it was really disorienting.

Anyway the Samsaran Cycle was what he needed to perform now, and he thought he could do a bit of a better job this time. Bobby put his hands on the slightly sticky rat and began feeling the imprints of the soul.

They were small, but his dexterity had significantly improved since the last time he had brought something back from the dead, and that extra control made the whole process just that bit easier.

He sketched his magic through the muscles and tendons, finding the whole process a lot faster due to the corpse being intact, the magic seemed to want to reinforce and connect to the still present structures, although he didn’t skip any steps even though he felt like he might be able to, dead flesh after all was not very strong.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Once he finished the muscles, nerves and tendons, Bobby was left with the issue of magic, the small rat had a tiny skull in comparison with Michaela, although due to its much smaller body it would also use far less, even then Bobby had an idea.

The living body had a complex respiratory system that was used to transport oxygen and get rid of carbon dioxide, but what if one replicated that system with magic? Would the undead respiratory system still transport oxygen or would it transport something akin to what it was made of?

He carefully began the work of restructuring the lungs, recreating all the vocal cords at the same time, these rats talked after all. Then he connected the diaphragm to the lungs and directed the magical capillaries to transport whatever they carried straight into the bones to be radiated out to the rest of the muscles and organs.

He briefly considered trying to recreate the whole respiratory system, but the old capillaries seemed to have deteriorated quite a lot and what he had done with Michaela seemed to have worked quite well.

Bobby gave the system a once over upon completion, but he didn’t seem to have made any obvious mistakes, it looked fine. On the off chance the lungs still worked how they used to then nothing would happen as the blood had long since decomposed enough to be unable to carry oxygen.

[Dexterity 15 → 16]

[Perception 16 → 17]

The next stage in the process was the Chains of Awareness, he pushed his perception into the soul of the rat and began reinforcing the tether it had with its body that kept it around. For some reason this tether kept all the souls he had seen bound to staying near their bodies after death.

Bobby wondered what would happen if the body was completely destroyed like in cremation, would this break this tether? If so, what would happen to the soul? Was there an afterlife it would travel to? It would definitely be an interesting thing to experiment with at some point.

As he continued reinforcing the tether, he pushed through from the soul back into the real world. The shift was strange as when he left the soul space it was like he had always been in the real world, but there was nothing to look back at, no evidence of where he had come from other than a tether that seemed to fade away.

After reinforcing the tether completely, he then proceeded to bind it to the bones. The rat's skeleton was tiny and brittle, but the magic flowing through it would reinforce it, in fact it was already stronger than it had been when he started.

Having finished the process he took a step back and waited for the rat to awaken. In his pocket his fingers were crossed. There seemed to be a minute where nothing happened, but then his third eye observed the tiny eddies of magic naturally in the air begin to pull towards the rat's mouth.

The eddies travelled down the rats throat before entering the magical lungs and being concentrated into the bones. The concentration seemed to accumulate until suddenly it pushed into the muscles and the rat spasmed.

Unlike Michaela the rat seemed to regain its senses far far quicker, in fact it didn’t even go into panic, it just lay still for a second and then rolled over and looked up at him.

“How am I alive?” It asked in flawed, but perfectly legible english.

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