Darkness consumed my vision before thousands of lights appeared overhead, spanning out in a distance that was nearly unlimited gaps spreading between them that only allowed the emptiness of nothing. Time stretched for eternity as I watched in forced silence for words could not be forced out in this dead emptiness. My body flew past a cluster of planets before I realized that I was in space, and I felt a bit of hope that I was going home already. Maybe I had done enough that Death thought to give me another chance at my life, or maybe I had failed him and this was all over. Many ideas flashed through my mind, wondering if I’d keep the magic I had learned from the previous world, and if I did, did that mean that others have been able to learn to harness magic this whole time?
A world came into focus in front of me as I passed by a large blue sun, it wasn’t the first planet that I passed but this one I somehow recognized. Mother’s Tear, the planet that I’ve been stuck on after I left my own was very blue, it wasn’t just the waters themselves that created the blue on the planet but large areas of land as well. That feeling of hope, and joy died in that instant and I looked on to the world as if it was an ex-girlfriend I didn’t wish to see again.
The land suddenly lit aflame, the blue of the land pulling back as blackened barren lands replaced them, mountains coming from the earth blooming like flowers from the surface and spilling out lava. As I got closer to the world mighty beasts were making their way from under the surface of the lava, they were hundreds of feet in height carrying with them large platforms on their backs chained to the same platforms. The platforms housed castles made out of black twisting metal that shot up into spires, with white robed men and women looking out from the rooms. Cascading from their backs were wings made of pure white, they were all crowned with golden horns circling their heads, and their eyes matched in color.
“Angels.” I muttered under my breath as the giant creature stepped past me when I noticed something. My body floated up again, it seemed to be against my will but showed me exactly what I had noticed. War was raging when the angels showed themselves, thousands of demons were burning down the villages of humans still locked in their struggles when the angels had reached them.
The humans cheered as angels were known in their religions, but their cries soon turned to that of terror as the angels purified the land with a white blinding fire that consumed the land beneath them. Floating near one of the angels that seemed to be some sort of nobility I heard her as she whispered with disdain, “Your heroes banished us to the earth for twenty thousand years to clip our wings, and you expected us to help?”
Spell formations were already shattered from the war that went on between the demons, and humans, both sides had heavy losses as well so against the unexpected wrath of the angels both fell silent. Another force rose up during the chaos, beasts of every kind joined in attacking at the massive creatures that held the angels castles but they were too disorganized to do anything of significance.
Twenty years is when this will befall the world with its current course, angels will rise from the earth once their imprisonment ended. My body started to float up again as I saw the people, and animals start to speed up to blinding speeds as time started to move faster. The whole world was in my view again, blackness spreading like a plague before a white city, visible from where I was, was built in its center. Once that little bit of white showed up reds started to blossom over the land as quickly as the black had consumed it.
“The land will be cleansed with fire, purified under its holy flames, only then shall it be able to be reborn. When the first plants grew on this reborn empire lived on only by the angels that wiped out everything deemed unworthy they grew red affected by the bloods of billions that the angel’s empire was built upon.” A sweet voice filled my mind, it was light and like a whisper but had a deep power behind it.
The universe around me seemed to crack like an egg, splintering patterns going down every edge of my vision until there was nothing but light, then even the light was gone as I stayed in this eternity of darkness. The darkness was shattered like the universe before it as my eyes snapped open, finding me laying in the snow breathing a deep breath and coughing soon after as snow had found its way into my lungs.
Tutorial was quickly at my side, “What happened, you weren’t dead or unconscious but your body was unresponsive.”
“I.. guess I’m an official oracle now.” I tried to force a smile on my face but I couldn’t even do that to reassure myself as my body sat there shaking in the snow. My mind was trying to go through the scenes that were placed before me previously, and found that there was much more information on this world in my head then there was before. The rules of necromancy, how to break the limits of the undead species, and how my skeletal body was created.
I did the best I could to cope with this new information, and formulate a plan as what to do next in the upcoming days. My current situation called for a fight with a necromancer to strengthen my faces with numbers. I sacrificed that for quality in the first batch, knowing that I could have gotten a lot more soldiers if I had used my necromancy to split up the souls and create inferior bodies like a lot of my colleagues apparently do to fill their numbers.
Equipment was taken off of the army that was around me leaving me with various extras to test out the other skills that I have neglected in my time with bear. Due to bear I now had experience in battle, my reactions were much sharper able to grasp a situation before most of the plain monsters around me. Sitting there with crystals that were in the Witch’s bags, they seemed to leak mana to an extent that using my astral sight covered them in a thick fog. Not knowing what they were used for, I just used them as materials for my experimenting melting them down with was surprisingly a high amount of mana.
Elements were something that Bear had taught me, how to turn your mana reserves into the different elements that were around you, it gave me something to fall back on should necromancy ever fail me. I had created a mold that I crafted from stones using earth magic, since my actual skill at making molds was lacking it was just in the shape of a staff. Not worrying about the results as there were hundreds of these crystals at my disposal, and even more metal objects to melt down, luckily most was made from bronze.
Taking the impurities out of the bronze, I added the green glowing liquid to the melted bronze that looked like glowing orange magma, letting my magic stay upon the liquid to keep it at temperature as I pulled sand from the ground around me. The stone mold was added to the center with a hard crystal wrapping around the outside of the whole mold, I’d be using this later if the process is successful. Grabbing at the magic that encased the melted metal, and crystal within it I poured it quickly into the mold from which a sudden crack was heard. When it stopped glowing, I removed the mold to find it was cracked down its center leaving me with a ruined pole.
Experimenting for the rest of the day I ended up only successfully crafting two poles from the bronze that I had melted for the first pole. Overestimating the amount of metal I would need for one was my first problem, lower the heat that I was using to melt the alloy, and I had to find stone that could withstand the heat. After all three of those conditions were fulfilled I ended up with a very strange looking poll. Not knowing what was wrong with my cast at first, I looked to a bronze tea cup beside me, studying it before the answer clicked. “Sanding, and polishing the damn thing.”
Gathering sand through earth magic again, I sifted through them for the finest sand out of the piles of sand that was in the air, breaking apart others so that they fit my needs. Using a mixture of wind magic, and earth I started to sand the pole the high speed air pressure moving with grains of sand, going from courser sand to more fine sand until it was almost reflective. Combining salt, flour and vinegar, all things found in the elven packs, I created a polish for my staves using the last of the light of the second day to polish it.
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As the night hit, something urged me that I wasn’t done yet and I gathered rope from the packs of the elves, I had found goat milk and smelling a white powder I found it to be baking soda from the Witches. Adding milk, and vinegar into a pan heating it before adding the vinegar making the milk separate. Using a strainer found with the witches, I separated everything grabbing the curds into my hand and moulding the slimy stuff in my palm before throwing it into the pan with a pinch of baking soda, then water, bringing it to a boil. Grabbing a thin rope I started to bind it tightly with the thin rope around the center of the poles almost as if I was possessed by my creation, adding the glue to the rope to make it easier to stay. My hand gripped at the pole adding a generous amount of mana, the pole starting to vibrate almost violently threatening to shatter under the power.
I wondered if strength of the bronze pole, or flexibility was needed to add more power from magic into it, somehow I knew the crystals were the only reason why I could add so much magic. This was the end, I knew that the it was done but something was missing from the weapons and I modified the magic inside of them turning one into wind type energy, and the other into terror magic, which I thought was appropriate. Just one thing was needed, “Wind Carver, and the Fear Bringer.”
The staves started to violently vibrate with power once again, the two coppers started to burn with a bright green, and a ghastly grey warping the color of the copper into about the same as their aura, but faded. As the magic slowly faded away from the two weapons before I set them down, they were beautiful in their simplicity. A menu appears the moment I thought that they were finally done.
Congratulations!Two magic weapons have been created, naming your weapons will drain your mana by 50% would you like to continue to name them?
Sadly it didn’t tell me the benefits, but I clicked yes immediately, watching my mana slowly drop down to fifty percent then continued downwards. “Why is my mana still falling?”
The Sprite came over to me, Tutorial sitting at my shoulder, “Both weapons cost fifty percent of your mana, why are you confused?”
“Your menus should be more descriptive, that was a bit misleading.” Suddenly realizing that I would be without mana, I immediately started my breathing exercises not wanting to drop down to zero, even if I only have a few points to myself. As my mana dropped below a hundred my body felt heavy, feeling as though I was several feet deep in oil. Mana stopped at around twenty before starting to rise quickly, a feeling of my relief spread over me as I smiled to myself.
The two staves on the ground seemed to have more presence as my mana stopped dropping, feeling as if they had more weight to them. The wind picked up around one staff, as the other started to howl a bit signaling to me that they were full of power. Standing up to grip at one of them, I was planning on using them like one would a baseball bat but it seemed that during my creation I thought that the grip was needed in the center. Thinking about the length of the staff, I think it was the better option of the two since I’m sure the bronze would have bent if I used it like that.
After finishing that project, I taught one of the smarter elves how to use the bronze with the molds, creating around six different molds meant for multiple uses one of them being a sword. The sanding process would be done by me since the undead seemed to have a problem with magic, though I created a forge to supplement the need for fire magic. Creating, or finding some high grain stones might work for the project but I had only used sandpaper before, and combination I made with sand, and wind was currently the only alternative that seemed reliable at the moment because of its speed.
Iron was another monster all together, I knew that iron couldn’t be casted like the bronze but I didn’t know how to actually turn iron into a sword. The bronze and aluminium of my childhood created many small projects with my tiny forge in the backyard created from a wheel well that I got from a car repair place for free, the crucible was one of the hardest things to convince my mother to get me. This had gotten me into hours of arguments afterwards as my mother didn’t know that I’d need to have glowing hot metals around me to actually use my forge. My father sadly took her side when he found out that all of his sandpaper was going missing to my projects as well so I had to stop only after three months of creating things in my backyard.
If my parents had known that this training in the backyard would be used in my next life as a necromancer I wonder if I would have been able to continue my projects. The thoughts of my parents suddenly made me grimace as I was sitting there, wishing that I had contacted them sometime in the past year. It was far too late for regrets though, as it usually is since you never miss what you have until it is gone.
Something moved beside me as I tried to identify the other items inside the Witch’s bags, many of it seemed to be scattered nothings that might hold some superstitious rather than magical meaning to these people. Turning away from the herbs in my hands the elven woman with feathers for hair opened her eyes stretching before looking to me, a hint of recollection went through her eyes as our eyes met each other. Then before it could register she suddenly screamed out, covering herself with the pelt that draped across her body.
“Clothes now!” She ordered, the two feral elves immediately went and grabbed clothes that they had snatched off one of the scouts. She took the clothes, a flash of light filled the area as she blinded all the males but Mr. Fly, who was currently chasing the sprite around. Apparently this was a great offensive measure, as they all stood there for moments rubbing their eyes in pain that seared through their eyes.
When I could finally see, the woman stood in front of me wearing the clothes from the scout though she had to cut the sides to fit her hips into the clothing. She had very accusing eyes settled on me, “What.. did you do while I was asleep?”
“Asleep? You were just born.”
“What do you mean just born? Is this some sort of game?”
“Fine, if you don’t think that you were just born then where were you before you went to sleep? Do you remember anything before you woke up at all?” I was a little dissatisfied with the creation of her. There were very few undead that I had created and it seemed as though she couldn’t be controlled so she was as good as the feral ones.
She stood there, thinking for a very long time before shaking her head, “Now that you mention it, it does seem as though my memory up until now is lacking.” Her accusing eyes went back to me, furious, “What sort of magic is this?” She demanded.
“Necromancy, that’s what I created your body out of.”
She seemed to take my words hard as she sat down in the snow, looking at her own body and confirming that there was indeed still a large amount of necromatic energy swarming around her body. Also surprisingly the energy was being devoured by her, giving her a feeling of being satisfied which it was impossible to suppress her kind’s constant hunger. “What.. is your name if I may? It seems I owe you my life.”
“My name? Ah yes, I have to name myself again now that I am no longer a skeleton.” Her confusion at that made me smile a bit. “Call me..” I thought momentarily, then found the name fitting for the war that was happening soon, “Call me Lucifer.”