“I’m a formless servant that needs a meat suit. You are a resource storage capable of manufacturing whatever you know with the right materials,” he concedes. “You made this body for me. Check your Logs,” he chuckles, reaching over and placing pieces of the sugared dough on a small plate, standing up and leaning over to set it on my side of the table.
“Bet,” I say, setting my utensils flat across my bowl so I can focus on reading.
Oh, shit. He’s right. I made a body for him when he spawned in my void. I hear myself making sounds of haughty offense. Fuck Face snorts.
“Did I make you look like Preset 1 or is this what you look like?” I ask.
He’s more Average Joe than Average Joe. At least he had a haircut and specialised gear. This guy has tunic shirt and pants. Well, they’re linen, not burlap, but still.
“I’m actually more healthy than I was when I was alive,” he says quietly, making me feel like a dick. “Shitty cultivators can really fuck up an area, you know?”
I grunt, picking up my chopsticks and bowl, and grabbing one of the fried doughs as a palate cleanser.
[Vengeful Ghost Sect Breathing Technique]
[-5 Karma Loss]
[3 -Resentment Gained]
[Ghost Pot (+100/-218)]
[3 x218 -Resentment Gained]
[Karma +5 x218 Gained]
[20 x100 +Resentment Gained]
[Karma +50 x100 Gained]
[Resentment: +4000/-1324]
[HP: 95,794,51]
[Current Karma: 95,613,592/107,275,977]
[Current Condensed Qi: 1,831,227/23,900,355][Current Qi: 1,905,620/957,945,100]
“That’s one successful meditation,” Fuck Face sets down his chopsticks, his dishes clean. “Finish eating. When you wake up and leave, don’t forget to take me with you. You can either feed me the Regard you earn or you can have me out doing tasks and developing by absorbing essence and ambient Regard.” Wiping his mouth clean, he leans back in his chair, gaze unfocused as he gestures for me to keep eating.
Logs say he’s thinking of how to figure out where the tombs and mausoleums are. They’re supposed to be there to encourage grave-robbing. There are a few graves, regular holes in the ground where bodies were dropped before the graves were refilled. I can dig up a few to earn Resentment, -- negative Regard. Which is what this guild is built on. I joined a guild of powerful people who took the easy way. I feel like I should be offended by how well the description fits me... -- but there are treasures in the stone structures.
There’s almost a ranking system. Unmarked graves are treasures of Resentment. Graves marked with simple wood are so so. Stone markers have a chance to have training materials. Tombs and mausoleums? Vaults of treasure. If you can find one that hasn’t been looted already.
Intrusive thoughts giggle, -- me or Silent Howl or who? -- and I wonder how many times Resentment farmers find their competition, kill them, then leave their bodies forgotten in a vault to farm. Feedback loop?
[Vengeful Ghost Sect Breathing Technique]
[-5 Karma Loss]
[3 -Resentment Gained]
[Ghost Pot (+100/-218)]
[3 x218 -Resentment Gained]
[Karma +5 x218 Gained]
[20 x100 +Resentment Gained]
[Karma +50 x100 Gained]
[Resentment: +6000/-1981]
[HP: 9,579,451]
[Current Condensed Qi: 1,831,227/23,904,919][Current Qi: 1,905,620/957,945,100]
[Current Karma: 95,619,677/107,275,977]
“Why do I feel refreshed?” I snap, disgusted that I feel better while thinking about something so fucked up.
“You just gained an insight,” Fuck Face mutters around a fried dough he’s nibbling on. “The more you learn, the more efficient you can become, the faster you can advance,” he says before grunting and tuning out again.
“Huh,” I pick at my lip as I go through my Storage changes.
I’ve got more than 100 spirits working for me, but I can only gain Regard from 100 at a time. Resentment? I can trap 500 spirits to feed on their resentment. It’s like candy versus a proper meal, but for my spirit? Then what was --.
Qi is physical, Karma is spiritual. So I’ve been improving myself physically and spiritually, but helping spirits really is more intensive than harming them? But harming them makes your karma go down. So... How am I balancing this? I don’t want to jinx myself, but it’s kinda fucked if helping one person counters fucking over a few.
“What happens when you gain resentment without being able to --. Curses,” I snap my fingers as I realize that you don’t fuck over the little guy because the building up resentment fucks you for them. “Karma. Right. Okay. I can get on board with this,” I say, nodding as I understand just a little bit more on how cultivators can be raging assholes, wiping out entire towns, and then only losing their ability to cultivate. “Or me.”
“Yeah, some people run into you,” he snorts, standing up from the empty table. When’d I finish. “Come on. Wake up. You’ll wake from your meditation, but you still need to eat and sleep properly. The stuff you do here is for your mind and spirit. Inspiration, if you will.
“We’ll head out into the graveyard when you wake up from your actual sleep.” He claps me on the back then leisurely strolls off, hands in his pockets.
“What do people normally make Servant Familiars do?” I ask. He’s gaining a lot of positive karma and seems so much more chill than not even an hour ago.
“You’ve been meditating for three days, on several different things, and usually they just work you into making them a profit or menial labor.”
The blank look he gives me. It takes me so long to realize that I know what people do to Familiars because I started at that level, and then forgot. Yeah. I earned that look.
I didn’t have skills, but they forced me to develope the ones they wanted. Then they invested in the materials, reinforced certain behaviors, and won for a good long while. They didn’t form an empire, but they got their investment back, a few patents, I’m sure, and they haven’t been wiped off of my roster.
Wimble Sunrise still exists. Seven Moons still exists. Thousand Valleys still exists.
Huh.
Why the fuck does Wimble Sunrise still exist?
“Some of your credit went to Wimble Sunrise,” Fuck Face says, idly chewing on his nails. “You didn’t manage to disconnect yourself properly. People just think they can’t control you completely. You’re still part of them, but you do solo work. That’s before people stopped thinking you were actually sentient, which is hilarious,” he snickers.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“How the fook do you know what people think about me?”
“Gossiping with the other spirits,” he says, giving a light snort.
I want to refute him, to brilliantly point out he didn’t have time. But~ I’ve been down for a few days and I don’t think the dead sleep. That’s, like, a big thing, right? Like, the cultivators can meditate and shiz, but the dead don’t sleep. So, he coulda...? Just the food alone took up a lot of my attention. I’ve just been vibing. Imagine how much I could accomplish if I --.
I transfer to my void.
I’m hungry.
“I’m going to go eat and go to bed,” I sit up, do a big stretch, then move to my house.
I set up a meagre replica of my imaginary tea party feast. Dumpling soup, veggies, -- pickled, raw, sautéed, -- rice, a bit of the cooked fish I’d made on auto, and some of my hot tea. I get to just sit and enjoy my food despite my hunger. I still eat alot, but it’s at a sedate conscious pace. Unless I just tuned out and calmed down after I got hungry.
After I finish eating I clean up and head to the Soak, relaxing in the fragrant, steaming waters. I use a cup to sip the waters versus just my hands, -- I’m classy although it doesn’t feel right to drink from a drinking bowl with my pinky out, -- and just let the medicine do its work. I feel a little full, but instead of having to spin I get to feel instant relief as I release the stored up essence and material back into my bank. I wonder if that counts as composting...
I’m conscientious as fuck, boi!
Positive regard, positive karma, growing knowledge, and now I’m no slouch in the kitchen? I’m doing too much. Tch! If I was interested in having children I might try conquering that mountain, but I’m not sure if I’ll even be able to deal with my new roommate, so I’ll beg off for now.
“Go to sleep!”
I need to get birds or something. A breeze through the trees. Not noisy bugs. I’m already over my own bullshit. I’m pretty sure he’s in the burrows, and I can hear his shout all the way over my lake? This is some bullshit...
My snores wake me up. How am I snoring? I don’t have a septum, right? I breathe through hidden spots all around my body, -- placed symmetrically. I’m not a freak, and I’m beautiful, despite what people keep saying. I know this because they keep wanting to touch me. I’m a wimble, not your puppy, assholes! -- so how and why the snoring?
I groan dramatically as I stretch, remember that Fuck Face was interrupting my decompression time, and crank up the groan to obnoxious droning. I don’t get a response so I push even harder to make more noise, and a dragon eel head comes sailing through the doorway, bouncing around as I recoil with memories of nightmares of waking up with a decapitated animal in my bed after hearing about a scene in a movie.
The jokes about it not being too different from waking up after your period starts in the middle of the night can’t do justice to the fact that you’ve been stewing in rotten animal juices for hours, the fleas or ticks that might be on the head, the hair that might be shedding everywhere, just knowing someone was in your room while you slept, and what if this wasn’t the worst thing they did --?
“Calm down! Gods!”
I come to perched on the edge of the headboard the world a kaleidoscope of colors and swirls of space indigo, miasma and essence that shifts and pulses. I’m panting, everything stirred in a light breeze as Fuck Face sits down on the floor next to the bed, the eel head held in one hand, his head resting in his other hand.
“I didn’t know you would react like that. I’m sorry. That wasn’t my intention. I was just trying to make some fish head soup with the things I could find around your void, and you were trying to be obnoxious, so I thought I’d respond in kind,” he says slowly. When he finishes talking he looks up to stare at me, eyes pinched with dark circles. “I don’t want to rush you, but I will remind you that you’ve soaked in corpses for some time, and woken up to snack on them, so I’m not sure what this is.
“We need to get you back out into the graveyard as soon as possible. There should be an instruction guide on corpse preparation somewhere. I need you to prepare this body.” He stands up, looking all kinds of bruised. Did he catch something or are the poisons killing him? “I’m rotting. That’s why you need to get the corpse preparation manual. I’m not alive. I’m a spirit bound to a corpse that hasn’t been prepared, and it’s starting to rot.”
“Oh, ew!” I hop out of bed, patting my cheeks in an effort to wake up and shed my heebie-jeebies. He wasn’t wrong. “That’s much worse than waking up to fermenting animal stink soaking into all your shit.” I Will the space clean before transferring us back outside. “So big stone structures?” I ask, looking around to see we’re less than 10 feet away from a stone sarcophagus. “Where do those rank?”
Fuck Face shuffles over, -- holding the eel head like a bouquet. I think he forgot he was holding it. I am a bit extra sometimes. I’m gonna have to read my Logs to find out what all I got up to. -- places one hand on the top of the sarcophagus, launches it like a frisbee, pops his eyes wide open, and stops. Dead.
Heh.
...
“Well?” Fuck your dramatic pause. “What’s in the box? ‘Cophagus. Whatever,” I say while waving for him to get on with it.
He hesitantly stumbles back, all locked limbs and wide-eyes. When he sits away from the sarcophagus holding the eel head like a teddy-bear, I hunker down and dip into the Logs, ‘cause I already got my daily mind-fuck, thank you.
There’s a loose body, some manuscripts, -- winning! -- and he’s terrified by how strong he is now.
“Bitch! You get stronger by absorbing essence? What the fuck did you think you were doing when you tasted the rainbow?!” I snap, standing up and storming to what might have been an emptied and recycled sarcophagus.
It looks like someone tried to hide in the sarcophagus and just... fell asleep? Op! Nevermind. I see the crushed throat now. Oh~! Not crushed. Something ripped their head off and put it back. But it looks like they were just sleeping. Why do they still have their shit?
“Dude was filtering in my bedroom through my fireworks episode after telling me to leave him out so he can absorb essence to reinforce his spirit, then is all like, ‘oh, no! How so stronk?’ Tch! Dumbass...”
I grab up the manuals, and they’re a breathing technique, -- a quick flip through and it’s a cycling technique to move Qi to strengthen your core, which in turn strengthens your spirit? So that you can absorb ambient Resentment. How the fuck is that just breathing? -- another breathing technique, -- same thing. Dude’s got duplicates, no wonder they left his shit, -- and --. I thumb through a total of four of the same fucking manual, although there are notes and different images on some of them, they’re still generally the same breathing manual.
One is just to reinforce the spirit, supposedly. One is to help develope the Ghost Pot, but it’s the same fucking breathing technique. One can supposedly increase Resentment absorption, -- it’s the same fucking breathing technique! -- but it claims it can help you add spirits to your Ghost Pot.
“Different levels of the same basic technique, jackass,” Fuck Face snaps. “Everyone developes differently. Some people unlock one aspect before another, but they’ll unlock more when they keep practicing.”
“Okay, and where are your cousins, Fuck Face?” I ask while broadly gesturing around to indicate the lack of shambling corpses.
“You successfully got a servant, so you’re untouchable. Unless someone orders them to attack you, and we’re all masterless down here,” Fuck Face gives me his best customer Service smile.
“So I can order you to attack people?” I ask. I’m my own battlepet, ♪ but I’ve unlocked a second slot...? ♪
I know I look smarmy as fuck as he explains that I can order him to do something, but then, if he doesn’t want to do it, he doesn’t have to do it in a way that makes sense. I want him to attack someone he doesn’t want to? He can play fight all day. I probably can tell him to not talk to them so he can’t plot with them against me, but I get it. I’ve done it.
Use me like a plow...? I bulldoze your shit. How am I supposed to know if I’m damaging your produce?
“None of those are corpse maintenance,” he points out, gathering the crude shirt bag and the body, still holding that fucking eel head. When I bank everything he looks at his empty hands and then spins around in confusion.
“Storage bug,” I remind him.
“Right,” he says, giving me a quick nod. When his chest keeps heaving, his fists clenched, I realize that he’s probably panicking for some reason.
“What’s wrong?” I ask him.
“That body was fresh,” he says, eyes darting around. But it was mummified. “I can feed on essence. Some others need specific kinds of items to progress. Hearts, livers, living or dead. Blood.”
“So this person got nommed on when they were hiding, but you don’t think it was from another masterless servant?”
[Vengeful Ghost Sect Breathing Technique]
[-5 Karma Loss]
[3 -Resentment Gained]
[Ghost Pot (+100/-218)]
[3 x218 -Resentment Gained]
[Karma +5 x218 Gained]
[20 x100 +Resentment Gained]
[Karma +50 x100 Gained]
[Resentment: +8000/-2638]
[HP: 9,579,451]
[Current Condensed Qi: 1831227/23906440]
[Current Qi: 1905620/957945100]
[Current Karma: 95625762/107275977]
“Dude!” I throw my hands up, head back as I look around. “I was just taking a deep breath! How the fuck am I supposed to get my thoughts in order when that shit keeps popping up! Fucking distracting...”