Leaving the village with my goblins, golems, and the new addition to our squad, Jared the Priest, we set down the river to reach Prady, the nearest Terian town.

We, of course, weren’t going to enter it, as this first mission was a scouting mission like I said before.

And we were going to just go around the outskirts of Prady, and her villages, and observe how her people were doing.

How severe were the oppression of minorities? Were there roaming bands of vagabonds going around and burning down villages? Were there any people that seemed like they’d be willing to change who they swore their allegiance to?

Of course, we couldn’t do all this in a single mission. We needed to do multiple missions over the course of a few weeks, staying in the forests and shadows while we observed the people of Prady.

And, if we ever needed a to get close to a village, or a group of people, Gob was the person for the job!

Assuming that there wasn’t much risk involved of course.

I don’t know how, but Gob has a few skills about stealth, and extending his hearing.

He is also quite fast even though he is only a G rank goblin, but alone he isn’t really enough to scout out all our potential collaborators and enemies.

“And not like I can give him a class to make him more effective...” I lamented.

As far as I was concerned, while he might be a spy sent here by Gram, which would make sense due to the nature of his skills, I was going to give him the benefit of the doubt for now, like I had done with Grok, and might even give him a class after I gained some divinity.

Though, he is probably not going to become my first priest either which is a shame—but one I can deal with.

After walking for a few hours, the day turned into night, and we set up camp in an area Jared recommended.

Though, he also told me that he had been to Prady only a few times throughout his life, and he hadn’t gone there in the past year due to reasons I probably don’t have to say.

So, his memory of its surroundings was a bit blurry to say the least, but he still told me that he should be able to keep us safe and deep in the forest, where hunters and normal people wouldn’t go to normally.

I wished he was more knowledgeable about the area we were going to... but it also made sense as he was a citizen of a whole another country than the one, we were going to.

And, beggars can’t be choosers, so I had to make do with him.

After the tents were set up, and we set up the night guards to help in detecting any threats and guarding the camp in addition to my 10 golems, I left the camp for a bit to hunt down some game to replace my rotting muscles and bones with new ones.

And perhaps even make a small undead.

I wasn’t sure how I wanted to use my undead made out of lesser souls actually.

I wanted to use them in any and all ways I could—to fight, to defend, to build, to act as beasts of burden, and to scout.

But each of those missions that my lesser souls did have some degree of danger to them, which I was more concerned about than any other “normal” necromancer would be as I was planning on putting a literal piece of my soul into all of my undead.

In the future, when I figured out how to stop the souls of the dead from escaping their bodies, I was probably going to start making quite a lot of normal undead, but I’d never truly stop using lesser souls.

But I wasn’t sure how exactly to use my lesser souls due to the threats that came with using them in any type of mission really.

Losing a bit of my soul was going to suck, no matter how many bits it was teared into.

So, I wanted to, preferably, keep a lot of strong lesser souls around each other, and send them on missions together.

But, no matter what type of mission I sent my lesser souls to, if one of them died, and another lesser soul or my main body wasn’t near to them, they would be basically stuck in a rotting body, waiting to be destroyed by the ambient mana or my enemies who figured out how to destroy a part of my soul.

Until I launched a rescue mission that is—assuming I had the people or lesser souls to send on a rescue mission.

And most importantly—I needed mind power to control all of my lesser souls.

My ability to control multiple lesser souls hasn’t been an issue so far, but no matter how many eyes, ears, mouths, arms, legs, hands, feet, brains, and the thousands of things I am forgetting to mention I possess, there is only a single will that controls them all.

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And that is mine.

Currently, I bear no mental burden from the 50 golems I am controlling, and I feel like I will get better at controlling my lesser souls as I increase my stats and skills, but there still is the fact that I need to personally control them.

Each and every one of them.

And when I have not a few hundred, but a few thousand undead, controlling them will become increasingly difficult, if not impossible outright, and no matter how hard I try, my lesser souls will just make mistakes in battle, in scouting, or just in building new houses for my people.

And, controlling, and relying, on a tide of flesh and bones that I couldn’t even control effectively was... going to be hard.

“...Haah... I just hope I don’t accidentally end up stabbing a child with a lesser soul out of nowhere... then I’d be properly fucked.” I muttered, and continued on my hunt.

After a few hours, I had hunted 3 G rank animals, which was enough to fully replace my muscles, and had gotten 180 exp from all of them, bringing my total exp to 200.

And after a bit of contemplation, I decided to bring back the good muscles and bones to use them in some experimentations.

And I had gotten their brains too, of course, and had gained an additional 100 intelligence and wisdom from the 3 brains combined.

After I reached the camp, I started my experimentation by first trying to make a skeleton that used the bare minimum amount of muscles.

After I had more time to tinker around with the undead in the dungeon back home, I was going to see if I could throw out the muscles, and only rely on bones and mana, but for now, they were necessary.

Spending maybe 10 minutes or less, I made a viable Quadro-pedal undead that could lift its own weight—but not much more.

It could move, and run to a certain extent, but that was it.

Then I replaced the normal muscles on the undead with organ tissue—as I wasn’t sure if the magic in this world was strong enough to break the laws of biology and allow me to use a liver to swing a sword, but I soon understood it wasn’t.

A shame... but also makes sense.

Then I started giving the “skeletal” undead I had created features that you wouldn’t see on a normal animal.

Like feet made of horns, limbs coming out of its neck—weird stuff like that.

Some of my experiments had actual purposes, as I was curious if I could replace the feet of some undead with blades—assuming they were at least Quadro-pedal as I assumed it’d be quite hard to do that for a bi-pedal being.

And I did other experiments to just know if they could be done.

And, with enough determination, muscles, and bones, anything seemed possible!

...Assuming the weight of the extra stuff you put on the undeads’ necks didn’t break them of course.

“I wonder if I could make a flying undead...” I asked myself.

I mean, I had a pretty great mana wing design that could generate enough lift to keep my souls afloat, so, I should be able to come up with a design that can keep an undead monster in the air too, right?

Though... I will need to either use small birds for it, or just have stupidly large wings that no normal animal could have—but that was doable.

But sadly, as I started carving the bones I had left over to make them more aero-dynamic and lighter—the sun came up.

I ended up just putting all the extra stuff I had into a pouch, and gave it to one of the golems... leaving behind the unneeded organs like the heart and such.

The pouch carried by one of my golems had quite a bit of bones and muscles, and even some fur and horns, so I should be able to continue my experimentations at a later date.

But as we will reach our first village, or Prady itself, in 3-4 hours, I better leave it for later.

As everyone woke up, and left their tents, they were pleasantly surprised to not be assaulted by the smell of rotten flesh first thing in the morning—or at least I assumed so as I would be pleasantly surprised if I were in their shoes.

After having a quick breakfast, we cleared the camp site from our tents, and any other thing that may cause people to realise someone had camped here, and set off to see our first villages.

And after a few hours, I was looking at a high stone wall from a forest.

“So, that’s Prady?” I asked Jared, who nodded.

The town of Prady was situated right next to the main river that ran through the land like Lublin, but apparently the thing that gave the town its name, the crimson hot water springs, were located in an eastern village that consisted mostly of Fox-men with a population a bit over Lublin’s.

It was a village build on the mountains, and, while I would like to see those crimson hot water springs, Fox-men were not really my target demographic to convert into my followers.

Not to say that they weren’t having a shitty time, they probably were, but probably not as much as some of the other villages.

“Start guiding us to the other villages.” I told Jarek as we returned to where we left the goblins, and he nodded.

As far as Jarek knew, Prady had 20 or so villages that ranged from small settlements with 30-50 people to large villages that numbered near the population of Lublin.

So, we were going to have to spend a lot of time observing the villages near the forests of Prady, and seeing how they fared.

I hoped that I could just send people to do this job, but... I didn’t trust the goblins’ ability to do proper scouting.

Well—at least 2 of them had the ability to do proper scouting, and lead their peers, but they just happened to be the 2 people whose loyalty I wasn’t sure of, so I was going to have to wait until Ojciec Lasu brought those corpses I asked for, and turn them into undead to have a reliable source of information and scouting... and make some bird undead too while I was at it!

“...That’s curious...” I muttered, looking at a small group of people setting camp up in the middle of the forest.

Though, calling them “small” really didn’t do any justice to them as there was at least 15 of them here.

And from the looks of it, they were a mixed group with people from 4 of the 5 races that lived in the “north”.

There were some familiar Elk-men, some Fox-men who I had only caught glimpses of, and 2 new races, Bear-men and Hare/Rabbit-men.

After observing the small group for a bit, I retreated into the woods, and we were guided for away from the small group of campers, who were pretty heavily armed, and went a bit deeper into the forest to talk about them.

“Jarek, are those people bandits?” I asked Jarek, not wanting to beat around the bush.

“I believe so, Lord William. But they seem... pretty friendly, at least to each other.

“It is as if the happenings in the entire country are just unfounded rumours, and they are a testament to that.” Jarek said, and I thought about how to deal with the bandits.

I mean, I could very, and I mean it, very easily just ignore them, as they were really of no concern to us—unless they had an E rank amongst them which I doubted.

Or... we could initiate talks with them.