The girl in front of me, sat on the edge of the pool, soaking her feet in the metallic liquid, stirring it like a stew in a cauldron. The previously still reflection of the ceiling above was slowly being pulled toward the direction of the girl as the metal reacted to her presence by being pulled toward the undead.

"Are you sure this is safe for me?" Touching the surface of the Spiritpool I felt that the liquid inside was far heavier than water if that made sense. I also didn't feel that someone like me should even touch the liquid inside the Spiritpool and Kia wanted me to take a dip in it.

"Ehhh... it should be, as long as you stay on the very edge and keep the liquid mana below your neck." The girl replied while she covered the back of her neck from my eyes and pressed her elbows against her tiny chest turning into a tiny marble ball.

I climbed up on the foot-wide wall which kept the Spiritpool from spilling everywhere with my spare shirts wrapped loosely around me, figuring out both me and Kia would enjoy a bit of privacy when we would get out.

I experimentally dipped my foot in the pool, what Kia called liquid mana was pleasantly warm and caused my body to feel energised. I plunged my foot into the dense silver and instantly felt that my body began to pulse with strange energy.

"Kia, what's happening?" I turned toward the necromancer as the silver began to stick to my body.

"Oh, interesting."

"K-Kia!?" The girl's eyes turned into shining stars as I struggled to free myself from the Spiritpool's grasp. I knew I shouldn't have listened to her!

"I guess your body's capacity for mana is higher than your magical abilities would suggest. I wonder if that's because you live in an environment with frequent exposure to massive amounts of mana... I guess that would explain the mutations," Why is she using words I don't understand but feel like she is insulting me? "I wonder how your body will react now."

"Should I be scared, though?" I asked after giving my last attempt at freeing myself.

"Unlike... grumble, grumble... humans and other races I had seen, your fluffy race has a funny way of dealing with mana saturation." The girl covered her body as much as her slender arms allowed her to as she slithered into the liquid silver and sat down on my lap with her back arched forward. *Purr*

The strange human purred like a nekos as I began to scratch at the thick rock growing out of her body. Her body was visibly stiff as she waited for the rock to fall off, I guess I should talk to her a bit to pass some time.

"Kia, you seemed to not like your race why is that?"

"Mmmm?" The human hiding her neck turned around, forgetting to move her arms as she stared confused at me.

"You grumbled when you mentioned humans but aren't you a human"

"I'm not an annoying human." Piercing the pleasant warmth of the silver around me, a whip of cold hit me where mine and Kia's skin met seemingly as a punishment.

"Ohh, now the Guardian calling you an elder makes more sense. What is your race then?"

"..."

"Kia?"

"I don't want to speak about my race with you." The pale girl suddenly turned around and smashed her head into my chest before grabbing my tail and resting it on her lap.

"Awwaaa!"

"Next question." Looking down the girl had most of her body underneath the silver water, resting on top of me. She seemed to be enjoying the bath as she closed her eyes and waited for me to speak again. Around me, I felt the current brush against my bare skin as it funneled the liquid silver toward the girl who looked more alive than ever before.

"How did you met Iris?"

"I created her," The progressively more nekos-like girl opened her golden eye upon hearing the undead's name. "I found her in front of my house. Well not really, I had to leave my inner sanctum and walk all the way to the second floor to find her." How big is her house even though she is complaining about having to walk?

"Why was she in your house, was she stealing something?"

"I don't know. Once she said that she was a slave to the humans I found her among but they didn't look particularly powerful." The girl purred her reply as I felt the black rock become a little bit spongy and easier to pull off.

"Is that why you don't like humans?" My question caused the girl to frown at me with one eye.

"No, it is the right of every being to be able to exercise its power to its natural conclusion of dominance, under an assumption that the person exercising his or her power will provide the thrall with purpose. Failing to provide a thrall with sufficient purpose should be and will be considered an act of extreme neglect and unnecessary torture, both are punishable by death." The tired girl spoke with a high and mighty tone while never looking away from my tail which she carefully handled, seemingly intrigued by my fur which remained rather dry even as she dipped it under the surface.

"So you are not angry at the humans for enslaving Iris?"

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

The pale human girl or rather human-looking girl bit her lip as she seemed to consider a question. I can't understand why is it taking Kia so long to answer my question. If elves stole my family I would hate them, easy.

"I don't like this topic." The girl's guilty gaze shifted back onto my tail as her body stiffened once more. She rested her hand on her legs and silently stared at the deep wounds running down her limbs.

Seeing the girl nervously chewing her long hair, I pulled the girl closer to me and rested my head on her shoulder. I'm only doing this because I don't like seeing people get sad...

"Why is the Guardian Spirit so friendly toward you? I expected him to be a little bit more serious if you know what I mean."

"I'm unsure but it's probably related to my age. Magical beings here seemed to hold age in high regard."

"Why is that?" I don't understand, shouldn't power be the most important thing in a hierarchy?

"I have a theory but it's a draft for now because I lack enough data to confirm my hypothesis," Kia's other eye opened as I sat the lazy mage back up and began to slowly clean away the spongy rocks with a rag I prepared. "It's fun."

"What's so funny?"

"Not knowing stuff. It's exciting to not know what's going to happen tomorrow. Will the big yellow fireball rise from under the horizon and so on? Do you feel this way too?"

I stopped and tapped my cheek with my finger as I thought about Kia's question. I could understand from where she was coming from but the enthusiasm she spoke with was quite bizarre. I would rather know after becoming a shaman if my days would be spent cloud-watching in the hot summer sun occasionally having to stand up to teach younger shamans some stuff before returning to lazing about or will I have to risk my life every day to kill horrors the best warriors in my tribe can't kill.

"Rarely, I would rather my life be nice and ordered and not chaotic."

"So life here is completely chaotic with no order to things?" Kia asked, sounding somewhat sad and slumped her posture again as she seemed to regard my words as one would do with words of experienced hunter.

"I think that life here is a mix of order and chaos." A bit more chaos than order but I don't think telling her that would lighten up the mood.

"Mmmm..." My words seemed to cause the girl to remember something again as she nodded at my words. "You are from here, I mean from the overworld, yes?"

"Yea?" Kia left my lap and stood up in the liquid silver. "Kia?" She put her arms on my knees and leaned closer to me. I wasn't sure how to react as the girl's nose brushed against mine and her brightly glowing eyes filled my vision.

"How do you achieve this balance?"

"It's something that just happened. As you said there are things out of our control and things we do have control over."

"Yes, but I want some things to be orderly and some things chaotic." The girl looked desperate to know the answer to her question, her eyes began to glow brighter and brighter before she collapsed into my arms, causing the liquid silver to slash onto me.

"That's not how the world works, strange rocky h-necromancer." As a response to my words, the girl let out a long tired groan which transformed into a purr as I began to rub her body again.

The mana around us turned dark silver as I slowly pried the layer of dried blood off Kia's body under her request. Everything that had happened to me today did make my brain freeze like the sounds Kia was making now. It was a strange in-between between a yelp and a moan as if she didn't know how to properly express her pain. The worst part was I knew that the girl did let a pain-filled squeal if my hands moved too quickly and I could see that she didn't enjoy the process at all but her quite confused whimpers caused my body to start rubbing my legs together as the heat inside me increased. The girl wasn't even that attractive, she was smaller than me and looked malnourished making her look even smaller. In addition, her body lacked any body hair and her chest was flat although... she was incredibly soft, softer than anything I had ever touched and smoother. Even her chest felt so...

I quickly liftes my hands off her front as I catch myself almost squeezing Kia's breast. She let out a muffled squeal as I lowered my hands and began to go a little bit quicker wanting to leave the silver bath as quickly as possible. "Bite this." Kia instantly bit the rag I offered her as I continued to pry away the rock around her chest where it appeared the thickest.

The dark stain grew in intensity as my hand pried off the sheets of black stone covering Kia's front. I grabbed the rag hanging out of her mouth and gave it a gentle shake causing Kia to let go after I removed the last sheet of black stone from her lower back, finishing my job with a satisfying splash as I threw the large chunk far away from us. Looking at the rag, Kia's surprisingly sharp teeth made their mark very visible on the rag with a mirrored outline of her bite torn into the outer edges of the rag. With the piece of fabric, I gave the pale girl a quick rub removing any black blood oozing out of her wounds which covered her limbs and the entirety of her body.

"Why didn't you clean this with Iris when you had a chance, we would have saved so much time?" I asked as I remembered overhearing the two in the cave where we bathed.

"I-I didn't want Iris to worry about it," As the girl spoke I realised that the black tar wasn't covering up her torso as I saw something move. Looking closer I realised that the girl lacked much of her skin on her mid to upper torso and that on her back I could clearly see into her ribcage and see her lungs work. "She becomes very annoying when I'm hurt and I didn't want her to know the full extent of damages my body sustained."

"You are an undead aren't you." Now everything makes sense. As the girl turned around and placed her hand on my stomach I was hit with an unusual smell, it resembled the way my village Stone Field , a place where we raise a stone when one of us dies, smelled. The smell was flowery sweet mixed with an earthy aroma but as nice as it was my brain screamed at me that the person making it was an undead.

"I am," Kia responded, I saw a little blob of the dark liquid drift towards me before touching my skin. Gasping for air I almost threw Kia off me as I felt her blood burning away my skin before the feeling of being eaten alive suddenly stopped. "Don't tell Iris about it... please." She said as her eyes dimmed slowly from casting something on me before she stood off me.

"I won't." I replied hoping that maybe the not-completely-evil undead would hear me as she disappeared into the spirit pool. "Shit."

The heavier-than-water liquid began to move, causing me to almost be swept away by its weight. Before I knew it I pulled my body out of the Spiritpool and onto the tile-like rock beneath it.

"You finally stopped polluting my pool." I heard the Guardian's voice boom behind me as I noticed that my body was as dry as Shiro's lips on a summer day.

"I-I'm very sorry but she asked me to do this." Without looking up I quickly gave the Guardian a bow, trying to cover up as much of my body as possible.

"Don't even bother, I saw the birth of your entire race and your bodies as appealing as the joy of waiting for the being of the cycle associated with you. I wonder if you are going to be the second race who is going to fail in initiating next cycle." His bored voice was barely loud enough to not drown in the sound of the silver moving faster and faster next to us.

"What?"

"Doesn't matter, I'm forgiving you for desecrating my battery. The goodwill of the outsider is far more valuable than whatever she is going to use... hopefully."

"I-I thank you very much," I bobbed my head up and down like an idiot for most of his speech while I processed the Guardian's words. "Outsider?"

"Mmmm... I guess I can use you for more than I thought. You see she is not from these lands and the most worrying thing is that she hides her aura extremely well. If not for the injury she had sustained from another Guardian's tool there was no way any of us would have suspected she was an undead but even now I can't read her aura well enough to learn anything except that she is very old, unreasonably old," The Guardian spoke to me without taking his eyes off the Spiritpool which began to glow with purple light. "Without wasting time explaining the complex relation we Spirits have with one another, I will let myself simplify the current situation to you. The Outsider stirred up so much discussion between us Guardians that there is little time to do anything else, except think over what her arrival might mean. Seeing how weak her physical vessel is and how well her aura is hidden there is a high chance that the Outsider was kidnapped somehow from her realm by an undead elf using an ancient artifact. The leading theory is that the Outsider was meant to be delivered to the elves for a reward of letting the undead join back into their society. Now you come in, you are to go to the nearest Spiritpools and say that I had managed to not only save the Outsider and heal her but also be accepted into her good graces." The spirit explained, sounding quite pleased by himself.

Scratch the weirdest thing today being Kia's strange noises, this is!

"Don't worry I had already dispatched my lieutenant to investigate by what method the undead elf was able to control the Outsider and to eliminate her afterwards. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to assemble a squad which would work well together but I'm confident in my lieutenant's abilities to kill the elf and the cat. Don't worry after all of this I will send you to the city where the useful section of your population resides."

"I'm sorry, what!?"

"Why can't you be a good tool and-"

The Guardian's words faded into nothingness as black lighting arced between us and a thick fog began to overflow and spilling onto the floor. Looking toward the middle of the pool I saw the liquid mana spinning in circles creating a vortex from which lighting arced in all directions, turning the silver liquid completely black.

I didn't know for how long I stared at the light show around me but eventually, it stopped causing the vortex in the middle to disappear without the sign of Kia anywhere.

*Boom*

I grabbed my ears as I was thrown to the ground by a wall of air hitting me as the uncomfortably still silver pool rushed towards the middle faster than my eyes could process, pulled by some invisible force.

"What is happening?" I don't know if I just screamed or whispered, everything is kinda blurry and, and can someone turn off the annoying hum?