On the subject of souls, I must admit my fascination. For centuries, they have remained an enigma, both in their nature and specific qualities, but I believe I hold the key to unprecedented discoveries.

Previous research indicates that, when undead rise, they inherit a part of the soul of the body’s previous owner. This incomplete soul deteriorates with the amount of time between death and reanimation. Additionally, it does not contain any memories, barring extremely rare cases. What it does contain is the nature of the previous individual, which makes a pig behave like a pig and a human behave like a human. This excludes cases of soul infusion, of course.

However, I have recently had the chance to meaningfully interact with the servants of a different necromancer, a circumstance we are often barred from due to enemies in between us. To my surprise, after continuous observation, I realized that that necromancer’s undead behaved differently compared to my own!

In light of this revelation, I theorize that when brought back to this world, the souls are warped by the nature of their summoner. If this is true, it could bring about a revolution in our studies and the way we think about souls!

- An excerpt from ‘Undead Souls and their Relation to the Summoner’ by Ozborne the Cursed

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On his way out of Pilpen, the first thing Jerry did was fetch his friends. Boboar and Foxy waited in the bushes outside the village, quickly running up to Jerry the very moment they saw him. Their relief was palpable—they could sense that Jerry was safe, but they still worried about him.

“Hey there, guys.” Jerry smiled as they carefully rubbed against him. He would have scratched them behind the ears if they had any.

Afterward, it was time to fetch the bandit corpses. They were right where he left them, completely untouched by the forest animals, which was a relief. Instead of reanimating the three bandits on the spot, Jerry chose to take them to his new tower so he could experiment with leisure.

Boboar, being the superbly good boy that he was, helped carry the bodies, and so they simply walked to the abandoned guard tower.

Clocks were luxury items meant for the merchants and kingdom officials who had to fit many obligations into their day. This goes to say that Pilpen, being the small village that it was, had no clocks, and while the villagers were vaguely aware of how long an hour was, they simply used the term to describe a period of time which was neither too short nor too long. It also helped them feel cultured, a feeling they very much enjoyed.

In other words, the exact time it took to arrive at the tower was unknown, but Jerry, who also didn’t have a clock, thought it could be said to be vaguely close to an hour. A figure waved at them from the tower’s front.

“Hey!” Derek shouted as soon as they closed in. “You got here quickly. It’s only been an hour!”

He had offered to help, and Jerry had sent him ahead with a cart of tools, not wanting to burden the man with corpse-keeping.

“I told you it would be fast. Boboar is a really good boy.”

“Takes after his master.” The large, tanned man bent down to take a better look at the skeletons. “Hey little fellows. You’re not at all disturbing like Murdock makes you out to be. You’re a fox, and you must be the double boar Jerry mentioned?”

“They can’t speak,” Jerry said with a laugh.

“They’re magic. For all I know, they can sing and dance the chak-tak-tak.”

“Maybe in the future. Allow me to make the introductions—guys, this is Derek, our new friend. Derek, this is Foxy, and this is Boboar. He’s a combination of two boar skeletons into one.” Jerry’s chest stuck out in pride. “I spent all summer working on this guy. He’s a double boar, hence Boboar.”

“I see,” the hunter said. He was a hardened man, unaffected by the skeletons and the rotting corpses they carried. He pointed behind him. “Should we get to housekeeping?”

The abandoned guard tower was placed atop a rocky hill close to the top of the mountain, giving it good visibility over this part of the mountainside. The only strategic drawback was that the ridge’s spine stood a few hundred feet behind the tower, hiding whatever was behind it from view, but there was probably a reason why the tower had been placed here instead of there.

The building itself resembled a gray, three-storied brick. The walls were vertical, with only the occasional narrow window and certainly no balconies, while the building’s shape was rectangular to a fault. The roof was surrounded by battlements, allowing the inhabitants to shoot from cover in the event of an attack. However, there was no wall to be seen.

As the tower was built on rocky terrain, there were no plants attempting a hostile takeover, and mice had also left it alone—probably. It had been abandoned last autumn, and all leftover food should have long been consumed by critters.

What did exist, however, was tons of dust. Possible structural instability, too, but there wasn’t much Jerry could do about that unless he magicked an engineer into existence.

Staring at the massive building, the necromancer realized that he’d thoroughly underestimated the monumental undertaking that would be cleaning this place. Even though he knew the art of letting time pass, wiping the floor for days on end would hardly be pleasant.

“Man, am I glad to be a necromancer,” he said, placing his hands at his waist. “Take a step back, Derek. Oh, and you might want to look away. I’m about to make some skeletons.”

“Please.” Derek snorted. “I’ve seen worse. You wouldn’t believe how messy childbirth can be.”

“All right. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

He’d planned to slowly experiment with the bodies, but dirty problems called for dirty solutions. Raising his hands, he reached for his magic, grasping the invisible darkness that was his soul. Then, with a mental push, he forced it out of him and into the corpses.

Into one of the corpses, actually; the one that Boboar had penetrated in the abdomen with his tusks. The spine and ribcage were still intact, thankfully.

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Jerry had never worked with human bodies before, and the sheer amount of energy it took to reanimate them was staggering; a far cry from even Boboar. As soon as he felt something click in the body, he stopped. Derek raised a brow. “What’s supposed to—”

Gore was a core part of any hunter’s life. Derek hadn’t batted an eye at the skeletal animals or the bandit corpses. When the skeleton ripped its way out of the flesh, however, he turned around and almost emptied his stomach right then and there.

“Holy fucking hell!” he shouted hoarsely. “What the fuck, Jerry!”

“Told you it was messy.” The necromancer shrugged. “Anyway, Derek, meet Skeleton One. Skeleton One, meet Derek.”

The skeleton clacked its jaw. It was a normal human skeleton, no bits missing, despite its gruesome death.

Contrary to what one might expect, the skeleton didn’t look threatening. It stood there aimlessly, as if simply chilling, and looked around with the curiosity of a newborn. Its perfectly round skull even made it look cute, at least in Jerry’s eyes.

Derek seemed mortified, probably due to the bits and pieces of flesh still clinging to the skeleton, as well as the copious amount of blood and gore.

Does necromancy make me immune to disgust? Jerry wondered before quickly deciding he didn’t care much.

“Ah, there’s a problem,” he realized. “There is no water source nearby. Our friend will need to walk all the way to the stream.”

“Please,” Derek spoke weakly. He was pale but already better than before. “But not in the village’s stream, unless you want Murdock to come here with a pitchfork and a holy book. There is another stream in the forest, closer to here, in that direction.” He pointed south. “It should be half an hour away, give or take.”

“Give or take what?” Jerry asked, inspecting his new creation.

“An hour. How would I know?”

Boboar and Foxy had also approached the skeleton, fascinated by their new bony friend. They sniffed it and looked it over, while the skeleton also looked at them with curiosity. It developed a mind of its own far faster than the animals had, apparently. An interesting observation.

“All right.” Jerry sighed. “Skeleton One, go wash in the stream over there. Make sure to scrub all the flesh off you. In fact, scrub yourself to the bone.”

Derek facepalmed.

“Meanwhile, I’ll raise the other two as zombies. They’re messier in the long run, but cleaner in the short run. They can always be skeletonized when the job is done.”

“Do you intend to have them clean the tower?” Derek asked curiously, to which Jerry nodded. “Fascinating,” murmured the hunter.

Raising his arms again, Jerry made a corpse into a zombie, which took more magic power than a skeleton. A day in the forest hadn’t let it decompose much, making the walking dead seem like a walking living, if one looked from very far away and in the dark.

The most noticeable difference was the head, which was not attached to the rest of the body and only remained in place due to gravity and Jerry placing it there when the zombie was up. Foxy had torn its neck apart during the fight. Again, the animals approached to inspect the new arrival, but it simply stayed in place unmoving. Its soul seemed far less advanced than the previous undead.

Was it due to being a zombie, or was there some other reason? An interesting question to pursue.

As for the third and final corpse, it was the one that Boboar had stomped to death. Its torso was completely destroyed, along with the spine beneath, making it unsuitable for reanimation as a zombie, contrary to Jerry’s plan.

Here, Jerry had to take drastic measures. He first animated the bones, making them exit the body, much to Derek’s horror. Then, he de-animated them before using a set of gloves that Derek had brought to mess with the bone structure. When he was done, he reanimated the skeleton.

It stood up, and it was really quite short. Jerry had been forced to remove the middle part of its spine, crafting a skeleton that was only legs, shoulders, arms, and a head attached on top. It would be comical if it wasn’t visceral.

Okay, maybe it was still quite funny.

He couldn’t repair the headless zombie the same way, unfortunately, as that would require turning it into a skeleton.

Just like the zombie, this skeleton showed no hints of intelligence. It simply stayed there unmoving, waiting for Jerry’s commands. This refuted the previous theory—zombies being unintelligent—and raised many new questions. Was the soul’s strength a product of luck? Was it related to the body’s previous owner? How did these souls come to be, in the first place? What even was a soul?

All interesting questions, and all needed further research. However, the chores came first.

“All right, Shorty, you go wash in the stream over there. Rub yourself clean,” Jerry ordered, to which the skeleton clacked in obedience and took off. “And you, Headless, grab a broom and get to work. Our tower won’t clean itself!”

The zombie saluted, which made its head drop off. After a fit of massive disorientation, it placed its head under an armpit, grabbed a broom from Derek’s cart with the other hand, and stumbled away towards the tower, tripping and falling at least two times.

“I have to admit,” Derek said, “that undead are much less intimidating than I thought.”

“They are, aren’t they? I get the distinct impression that they don’t have to be goofy like this, but…I don’t know. I kinda like it. They remind me of me.”

“So we should expect them to go on a walk and return next year?” Both men laughed. “Actually,” Derek, continued “what happens if the skeletons don’t find the stream? My directions were pretty rough.”

“Then we’ll have a series of very annoyed villages on our tail,” Jerry said. “I have the feeling they’ll just keep walking until they find water. Maybe they really will return next year. How funny would it be if they walked all the way to the Narrow Sea, took a quick dip, and then walked right back?”

“For us, very. For the villages on the way—that would be scared twice —not so much.”

“Oh, well. I’ll give better commands next time.”

After a bit of bantering, the two grabbed a broom each from Derek’s cart and got to cleaning. Boboar and Foxy also volunteered to help; thankfully, Derek had brought enough tools for everyone to work with. The man could certainly see ahead—unlike Headless, who exhibited an uncanny inability to walk.

As soon as they entered the tower, they found the zombie rolling on the ground behind the entrance, looking for his head. With his elementary intelligence, the coordination required was outright hellish.

Jerry didn’t hold it against the zombie; with time, he would grow smarter and used to his disability. Probably. He picked the head up and returned it to Headless, receiving a stare of gratification, which turned into abject horror when the zombie once again dropped the head.

Sighing, they left Headless looking for his head and started cleaning. The two skeletons also returned after about an hour, all squeaky clean and ready to help. However, the amount of work to be done was still mind-boggling. This would be a long, long day.