Bobby left the mausoleum, taking Rho Dent out from his pocket and giving her to Michaela, who held the rat awkwardly in her skeletal hands. Then he addressed his group, “I’m going to do some experimentation with the dead, but if you guys want to help out then could you crack open another mausoleum and get the slabs off all the coffin spaces.”

There were some nods and people began to make themselves busy, while Bobby set off to look around the graveyard. He might not be able to find the ghost of the long dead human to get the aetheric imprints from, but he could find a similarly built ghost and use them as a reference. He was confident that with his newly unlocked anatomical knowledge he could adapt the imprints from another human.

Bobby found a taller ghost quite quickly, ironically sitting leisurely beside one of the smallest graves in the graveyard. Not wanting to waste magic on making the ghost coherent, he just picked it up and took it with him back to the mausoleum.

when he returned, the others were next door straining on the slab door, it was a pretty hands on effort and Bobby hoped it would keep them busy while he did more resurrections, after all it would be pretty boring waiting around for a few hours while your friend had an awkwardly long staring contest with a long dead person.

Reaching the skeleton, he pushed the soul into place. There was a great resistance at first, presumably because it wasn’t the soul that belonged to that body, but Bobby eventually managed to get the ghost into place and sort of freeze with his soul manipulation abilities.

Then he began on the Samsaran Cycle, it was slow work as first like usual, but he found himself beginning to get into a rhythm after a while, even the slight miss match in body shape didn’t slow him too much as his mind was telling him where everything should be.

He decided with this skeleton as it would basically be a vegetable, there was no point really creating a voice box, although he did create a basic magic lung as he was not going to have the magic capacity to recharge a whole army yet. Some parts of the skeleton he simplified, giving it a mobility that would be average to a human adult, but not really going much beyond. These were probably going to be expendable so he needed to focus on quantity not quality. Although quantity is a type of quality I guess.

[Dexterity 16 → 17]

[Perception 17 → 18]

Bobby finally finished the samsaran cycle and checked his status to see how much magic the simplified version had taken him.

Roadkill Necromancer - Human[Bobby]

Magic[90] Soul[105]

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Magic Capacity

11

Magic Density

10

Regeneration

11

Perception

18

Dexterity

17

Warning: If soul drops below 80 death will occur

He had figured out his total capacity was just ten times the Magic Capacity stat, which meant the max was one hundred and ten Magic points right now. The last time he had done the Samsaran Cycle on a person it had taken about thirty, which meant that he only needed to spend 20 magic on a more basic skeleton.

Next Bobby began the second half of the procedure, firstly banishing the ghost from the skeletons body, this part was close enough to the one he used in making a thrall that he could guess why someone wouldn’t bother naming it, although he didn’t know the name of that procedure either, but it didn’t matter as it was all in his head.

Bobby carefully went into his soul space and tore off a tiny bit from the edge, wincing at the painful deja vu sensation involved that never seemed to fade, then he used a tiny amount of magic to tether the tiny soul fragment to the skeleton and surrounded it with a cloud of magic to accelerate the formation of whatever simple insect like mind would keep the skeleton moving.

[Regeneration 11 → 12]

This used up about five magic and five souls in total, which was a similar amount to making a thrall, but all in all required no death of a living human. Bobby ran the maths in his head and figured out he could perfectly make about five of these thralls today, which would be a good start to his army. That number would hopefully steadily increase over time.

Bobby sat back and waited for the thrall to awaken. However to his surprise it didn’t. Eventually after ten minutes it was still lying on the ground as prone as the day it had died. When his patience eventually began to run thin he realised something and felt like hitting himself for being such an idiot.

“Stand up!” He ordered it in a loud and very exaggerated authoritarian voice.

The skeleton, still being in the alcove, suddenly began to move, raising its head and banging it on the ceiling of its little nook. It seemed to continuously struggle to sit up in the space, despite the impossibility of such an action.

Bobby sighed and gave another order, “Get out of the alcove and stand up.”

That seemed to do the trick and it slid out and stood up to its full height, towering over him a bit. Wow I really have succeeded, and I don’t need to feel guilty at all about sending them to charge into a spray of bullets because they definitely don’t have a soul… yet.

Asking his new nameless minion to follow him, he left the mausoleum, seeing the others in the process of heaving out pieces of broken slab from inside the next building. He stretched out his hands and cracked his head to the side. Now I just need to repeat that four more times.

+++++