Oliver remembered dying, or more accurately he knew he definitely died, and remembered the exact moment before his body was shredded to atoms. But that equated to pretty much the same thing.
His family had run out of food in the middle of winter. Fearing the worst, Oliver decided to go search for anyone who might've been of any help. He'd thought himself lucky when he stumbled across the home of a sorcerer in a relatively nearby village. Alas, the sorcerer didn't appreciate Oliver repeatedly asking her to conjure food out of, well anything really, and refusing to accept that she wasn't knowledgeable enough in biology for such a feat. But she was Oliver's, and his family's, only hope of lasting through the winter, so he didn't give up.
Eventually, Oliver had bothered her too much. Already starving, missing fingers and toes from the cold, and absolutely miserable, Oliver was going to die. His family would be dead before he'd make it back. The sorcerer decided to kill two birds with one stone, by getting rid of her daily annoyance, and giving Oliver an instant and painless death. Oliver's own meager mana supply was nowhere enough to protect himself from the sudden attack.
The next thing Oliver knew was confusion. It was almost like sensory overload, but without senses. The feeling of constant shifting and change everywhere was faint, and yet he could feel nothing else than the seemingly infinite amount of individual things around him, in him. It was a constant itch all over his nonexistent body.
It lasted for God knows how many lifetimes, as Oliver himself definitely had no clue. If this was the afterlife, the promised heaven, he didn't want it.
Then in an instant, just as quickly as he had died, Oliver could see again. He smelled the fresh air, heard various quiet sounds around him, felt the ground under his feet... And something was definitely off. Oliver had become a large—or at least so he felt—black bird.
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Evelyn was ready to attack the crow in a moments notice, since everything they had encountered in the tower so far, had been hostile. But the crow made no movement to attack, deciding to peacefully observe the group instead.
"...Are we going to attack it?" Evelyn eventually asked.
"It doesn't seem to be doing anything, so no?" Audrey said. The crow tilted its head curiously, and then it jumped infront of the symbol carved in the wall.
"Hah, it looks like it's reading the text!" Audrey said. Michelle stared at him for a moment, before looking back at the crow, which was following the text with its eyes, after which it closed its eyes. Even Evelyn, with her nearly non existent ability to sense mana, could feel the crow shaping its own to the shape of the symbol connected to a second symbol with a thin line, though nothing happened. The crow had no tattoo.
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I had gone back to designing more runes, and placing them across the third floor, only slightly focusing on the group. They had killed the 2nd floor insects a tad too easily, so easily that it was barely even worth mentioning. Because of that, I decided to make a huge stone golem with an army of various animals in the center of the third floor, right where I was planning on placing the stairs to the fourth floor. It definitely shouldn't be an easy fight.
My work on new runes was interrupted when I noticed that the group had come across the oddly intelligent crow. Soon after that, the crow showed its ability to use magic, and then Testy decided to show her tattoo to the crow, by creating some water in her palm with the tattoo. But that wasn't important. The important thing was that the crow could shape its magic better than many of the humans in the village could. I could definitely use that to make a bunch of cool magic using creatures, and the crow would be the first. Coming to a decision, I covered the birds wings in carbon spheres. Next step was to try and teach it more runes.
It didn't take too long for the crow to accidentally realize it could do the same things as the humans could. Soon after that, I had a crow that liked to throw snow at everything, by making water with a rune, and then blasting it away with its own magic as it simultaneously froze it with the ice rune. It was fun to watch as it annoyed the hell out of the group, and froze all the insects the group happened across. It turned out that bugs just kinda fall asleep when it gets too cold, or maybe the snow blocked their oxygen supply, which was probably really easy since the huge insects could only barely survive off the oxygen in the air.
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With the crow's help, the group found the rest of the runes on the second floor, relatively quickly. After stumbling across a few runes for the second or third time, they decided to make their way to the third floor. I was rather happy I'd already finished it. I was happy with the single open area filled with all kinds of odd life, and the absolute behemoth of a stone golem in the center of the floor. I would have fun controlling it, though I seriously needed to start work on the fourth floor.
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The third floor was vastly different from the previous two. For one, Evelyn was happy to see no labyrinth in sight. Instead it was as if she had stepped in a dense Forrest in the middle of the night, as the only light came from a few odd plants and small glowing insects.
"This is... Different," Michelle said as she climbed up the stairs behind Evelyn. Both Audrey and Evelyn were about to agree, when they were interrupted by a branch snapping and the loud thud of something heavy landing on the ground from behind. Turning around, Evelyn saw a giant snake, as wide as she was and many times her length.
Before any of them could properly react, the snake opened its mouth wide, and went for the kill. Then its mouth got filled with snow as the crow defended its pet humans. The crow was smart, especially for a consciousnessess that hadn't been tied to anything much before I gave it its new body. It had even figured out how the runes worked almost the moment it found them... Except that made no sense.
Why would a crow decide to form runes with its magic, and even connect them together before it ever saw what they did. The first time it saw the use of runes was when it met the group, yet it tried to use them before that. It was almost like it could read my writing...
I immediately focused on the crow once more. It was intelligent, and very much so to the point of human intelligence. It seemingly could read, and immediately treated the humans in a non hostile way, as if it had met humans before. It could even be possible that the crow had been like me, someone who was killed by a mushroom—or by other means—only to be reborn as a tiny sphere of a miniscule amount of magic. If that was true, it meant two things. It should be theoretically possible for me to give myself a body, or maybe even bodies if I wanted. And more importantly, after years of being alone, and because the locals didn't understand my writing, I might finally have someone to talk with.
I formed a steel sphere around the crow, and used it to quickly pull the crow away from combat to the currently empty fourth floor. As I released it from the sphere, I made floating text appear in front of it. A single simple question, "Can you read this (nod for yes)?"
The crow nodded in reply.
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"The crow disappeared!" Audrey shouted as the three of them were concentrated on not getting bit by the snake's huge teeth, or bashed to death by its tail. The snake was the most durable thing they had come across in the spire, not counting the walls. Its scales were plated with thick steel, and had some extremely durable black fibers inside them. It could shrug off the stones they shot at it with ease, only receiving a few dents, or cracks showing the black fibers underneath from the incomprehensibly fast projectiles.
"What do you mean 'disappeared'!" Evelyn shouted back as she charged lightning in her hand with one of the new runes they'd discovered on the second floor. The lightning produced usually struck pretty much at random, and was bloody painful. But when she was close to the snake, each of the bright flashes struck the deadly noodle. Unfortunately the snake didn't seem to even notice it. Maybe the metal scales had something to do with it.
"One moment it was there, the next it wasn't!" Audrey replied, as he spewed a bright flame directly at the eyes of the snake, blinding it. "If this keeps up for too long, I'll be out of mana. I'll need a few days to recover my supplies."
"We could buy some fresh fruit or raw meat to recover faster. The powder will more than pay us back for it." Michelle said. She wanted to keep a bit for herself and her students, but she wasn't against trading a bit of money for a few vials of the stuff, especially after seeing how much money Evelyn had made from it. Michelle's thoughts were interrupted when the heavy tail of the snake smashed into her leg from behind, causing her to fall on the ground. The snake immediately pinpointed her location, and prepared to strike with a wide mouth.
Luckily for Michelle, the wide open mouth of the snake was a perfect target in her opinion. Michelle quickly poured much of her mana in the shape of her favorite rune, forming a boulder the size of her head, before blasting it in the snake's mouth. The snake flew backwards for a good dozen steps, dead in an instant.
"So, now that that's over with, should we leave or go search for the crow and new runes?" Michelle asked. They decided to leave the tower. They would definitely need more practice and mana if monsters like the snake would be the norm in the third floor and above. Climbing higher unprepared could absolutely mean the death of them all.