Chris was in a wagon.

That wagon was on a road.

The wagon was being driven by Velona.

Velona was on the wagon.

Chris was on the wagon.

He was panicking.

Chris had begun to feel drowsy late last night and, having been used to sleeping he went to bed. Yet when he had awoken he had felt no better. This had been strange but what could he do about it. It was only when he went to rebuild his broken test railgun that he discovered the issue.

His mana was not regenerating.

He had dismissed it over the past days as him having a bigger reserve and it taking longer to fill back up, because it had been filling up. Now he knew where tha mana was coming from. His reserves had been refilling from the energy his body was using to move and support him. He had known he ran on magic yet hadn't thought where it came from.

Chris was laying down in the wagon grimacing at the fatigue lacing his body.

The usual source of mana came from food broken down in the body, mages ate a horrific amount of food. Or other sugar based substances like honey.

He was stupid for not having thought of this, he did not eat any more. Therefore he did not replenish his reserves. He had been running on low now for days, he had started to lose energy to support his body, this left him sluggish and foggy in the mind.

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His first thought had been to eat some food, a simple solution to a seemingly simple problem.

When he had placed food in his mouth it had tasted bland, tasteless, but he had choked it down. No more than five minutes later he had been retching on the floor as his body spasmed. He had been putting it off, testing what made his changed body tick. He looked inside of it and found that most of his organs located near his stomach were missing.

This made sense he had blown up his stomach, but since he regenerated he had assumed he had been fixed both inside and out. He was wrong.

Chris had tried honey and sugar water, they had stayed down longer but had still been thrown up before any real digestion could take place. He quite simply had no real stomach, just a small organ that could store a very small amount of… something. This had no exit and secreted no fluids, he knew instinctively that food was not the answer.

When he had willed his body to fix itself his mind and magic had run autonomously with his simple direction to ‘fix him’, ‘make him whole’, ‘Save Him’.

Normal undead simply absorbed mana from their surroundings, this created a chill in the air and meant they took a long time to refill their bodys. He had asked Velona how she regained mana, she had answered that she could do a more extreme version of mana draw, it would chill the area to sub zero temperature for hundreds of meters, it was surprising how much mana you could draw for the surroundings.

Chris had tried to absorb energy from his surroundings but couldn't understand how this worked. He just ended up using power to drop the temperature, not gaining it.

Hence what he was lying in a waggon with a ton of gold and sinking feeling in his chest.

He had wanted to deny it, but his memories of what he would probably be circulated in his head.

He had exhausted every other option trying to restore his mana.

In a last ditch attempt to bypass his theory he had Velona charge up an amulet with mana and then he tried to absorb it. He had grasped the mana in the gem and succeeded in drawing a bit into himself. He had felt it enter his body and that area began to heat up, his usual cold flesh warmed almost to the point of burning before the energy was consumed by his icy mana.

It had indeed given him some mana but it would be so slow to absorb, it was not enough to sustain his body. Even now he was taking in a small trickle, just to buy him extra time.

His last hope was a wild guess and a conclusion drawn between his weird stomach and Velonas foreign mana. One was made to process the other.

This hypothesis had been strengthened when he examined the organ and found strange chemical substances he could not identify lining the inside of the small stomach.

This let him draw one last hope, he rasped out his last guess.

“Blood”