Thinking back it was like this with the danger stones too, now I just happened to be in a danger box. I can do this. Back then they glowed with immediate danger all the time, now I have two data points to draw from. First and foremost I am relatively sure that my walls are not alive, sentient, and simply sparing me out of ignorance or apathy. Wait, am I really sure of that? There’s that weird interaction they have with my field, almost like blood flowing into and through flesh, circulating throughout my field as a whole. It’s possible that they are flesh in a manner of speaking, but rather than being a hostile monster, they may just be my flesh. As such I hypothesize that my prior lack of a manna field is what saved me from the imminent danger that I sensed previously. Seeing the stone like texture of my walls I wonder if those were similar, they looked like fragmented rock when broken, I’d think that if they were scales there’d at least be some bloodied flesh in them, unless it was just a shedding, but then why would it be dangerous?
OK, I need to test this; I have a skeleton start punching the wall, carefully tracking the flow of black gas. I see the minor fractures the skeleton suffers in its hands, but such hardly takes any black gas to heal, though it’s a shame that I don’t get any of the clear gas in turn for healing their injuries. There’s something else too though, there’s the wall itself. It seems to flex incredibly slightly with every hit. Is that, force distribution? No, somehow it seems to be distributing the force across not just that wall but all the walls. In a massive labyrinth that would be insurmountably deadly. Ut oh, I watch as the rippling force seems to resonate and build across my walls into a gentle hum. Now, I’m no expert, but building resonating hums tend to be bad where I come from, so with haste I pull the top wall panel down and watch with relief as the building resonance seems to subside.
OK, maybe all the walls is not the best turtling mechanism after all, but I think I can speculate from this. The hum seemed to grow a bit with every strike, but t didn’t seem to be building when not being hit, so danger wall possibility number one is that wall resonance should I be attacked, another test shows that is attacked from within or without, an entrance must be present or a resonance will build within the walls and do… something. To be perfectly honest I have no intention of testing what that something is since I’d have to do so in proximity to my crystal or at least my field. I had already tested and found that walls outside of my field seem intangible to skeleton punches, but oddly the resonance built even though my field fills only half of the large skeleton pit we’ve built. A few skeleton blows later I confirm that the gas seeping in and out of my walls seems to have flowed through connected walls even outside my field, so theoretically I could have an elaborate labyrinth of walls which aren’t even within my own personal field of influence and share the benefit of this greater reinforced defensive structure with a third party.
With a keen eye on my field I notice something else in this last test though, a cost. It seems the exchange of gasses between my field and walls is not so equal as I thought, or at least it isn’t when the wall is being hit, even without resonance, and another test shows this holds with resonance, it seems that the walls take in black gas in order to retain structural integrity and resistance in the face of an attack. This, I don’t know if this is heartening or frightening. On the one hand whatever gas they hold in them may be small, but over this many walls I probably already have a few points of field in it, with a massive maze it would be more than a few points even without access to my field, but my field scales exponentially with level, whereas the static cost of walls and my few tests seems to show the cumulative wall holdings as a simpler linear growth. At least barring exponential size expansions, which seeing the growth of my field from that prior test in field saturation, I have to begrudgingly accept is likely an option. The fire breathing bear however has be quite content with a slow quiet bear-free growth. In the instance in which a labyrinth is not arbitrarily huge however, that means the draw for defense would primarily rely upon my field to sustain, seeing as that scales exponentially with levels it’s only right to assume some attacks scale exponentially too, which would mean that tanking a single hit could hypothetically wipe out my field entirely, and perhaps even produce instantaneous resonance bad stuff at the same time. That would certainly qualify as a reason to be danger stone level danger.
It did not however answer all of my questions, the danger stones were fragmented, my walls aren’t even nicked. I’m not going to risk resonance, but there’s one more test I can do. I try controlling my field to keep black gas from entering it and see the drain from it similarly tappers off. This seems to keep them in a solid tangible state, but without being fed, can they be broken? I let the skeleton start hitting one of the upper walls before I suddenly notice that if the entire wall system shares damage, than that means that I’m trying to destroy the floor beneath my not feet at the same time as the ceiling above my not head and the walls to my spherical sides all at once. I’d shiver in fright if I had the anatomy for it, but instead I’ll settle for calling off the skeleton.
OK, new plan, learn better field control. I try focusing all my mind on it and find that at least without outside attack and the stress of being potentially eaten, it’s somewhat easier. I slowly work at controlling the major flows, than work on more minor ones, making a wisp that a skeleton was going to inhale do a loop de loop before entering the skeleton after all. I make another swirl and a third do a figure eight. I’m not sure what practical utility this has, maybe there is one, but for the moment the best I can do with that is delay the rate at which it enters things and people or the rate at which it eats them. Stretching out my control I try to feel the walls themselves at the edge of my field. It’s weird because controlling my field isn’t actually a tactile sense; rather it’s just willing it to act. I wonder humorlessly to myself, did I get reincarnated into another world with the psychic power to manipulate thin streams of invisible gasses that nobody else can see and that I have trouble even proving exist. Am I a quack?
No, no, mind, get back on topic, walls. Can the gas in them be controlled? They’re connected to my field and constantly exchanging gasses with them, if I can control the flow through my field it’s possible. I try to pull the gas back out to make them intangible, which does next to nothing. I say next to nothing because while the wall in question seems to have lost some gas, it hasn’t lost all its gas. Repeating the punching experiment I find it fragmenting slightly, a few scratches, grains falling loose. Oddly it doesn’t heal until I allow the gas to flow normally again, at which point the dust raises up to rejoin the wall, probably costing a bit more energy, but saving me some for the moment. What I’ve seen from them so far implies that these walls have purely defensive functions, for one to have caved inwards the controller would need to think that their powers would best be rationed elsewhere, and there would need to be some kind of attack.
I wonder. Running the same test again but this time punching a wall that does not have its flow cut, I note that the wall that can be damaged still shares the damage of the others, so it seems abandoned walls can still be used as part of the greater defensive structure in the case of an attack. That just leaves me with one question. While I cannot pull my field completely from the walls, I can in fact detach the walls themselves independently from the greater structure, like when I opened or closed the top of this room. Doing so causes the gas within to quickly divert to surrounding walls and leaves the section to regain its ethereal state. A simple test shows that this is probably a function added to allow ease of expansion as the intangible wall can be pushed out away from me through the dirt to expand a corridor, leaving my field to digest the dirt prior to contacting the new, now further back, wall, ideally with several new walls to help support the tunnel’s expanded size. So if you need the gas, why not just recall the panels themselves to be close to your core but not strictly in your field? Testing it I find they can extend approximately one field diameter from the closest edge of the field or greater wall structure, so it wouldn’t be hard to prevent them from exerting consumption. My proximity to the danger stones sparks a hint of worry in me as I notice the implications, when my field flowed back into my damaged wall it restored itself, that nearby patch of danger stones, its owner probably intends to reclaim it.
New routine, once a day a skeleton will go down and peer around the corner to make sure the danger stones are still danger stones and not danger walls. Yes, that’s a good plan, my field is allot larger now, if I were to use it to tunnel I’d be leaving a path large enough to drive a truck down, it would decidedly not be subtle. Would I be able to cross through the surface? I begin moving the walls to create a shielding around our beloved mostly-filled sinkhole in the hopes of not destroying it as I have the skeletal scaffold rebuild to slowly ease me up towards the surface.
Ouch, nope, bad, pain! My field reaches out of the walls into the sky, it’s surface tension making it look like I’m a child blowing aura bubbles into the sky, and just like with that simile I see my aura being physically ripped and shredded by a passing breeze, sundered from my control. Quickly I have myself lowered. OK, so manna fields grow when they reach saturation and begin eroding the world around them, but they fare vary poorly in non-stagnant matter. A part of me wonders if it might have retained integrity better if it was expanding out into that turbulent airflow rather than passively recovering strength in a stagnant shape, but the very thought of subjecting myself to being ripped apart, and angry fire breathing bears, both at once has me instantly dismiss the experiment.
So then does that mean that my expanding manna field trapped within a rigid and unyielding rectangular prism would not be dangerous? I’m honestly not sure, I have two theories. One is that the field will cause a strain on the walls, and the walls will absorb the field to resist that strain, which will cause my field to simply stop growing when it hits the edge of all walls without being able to expand further. The second theory is that it results in the same scale of bad stuff as resonance probably brings. Nope to the nope, not testing that, no way.
With some reluctance I leave the last wall inwards leaving a small gap, only big enough for worms, not that that last wall is even anchored onto my greater structure, theoretically a giant fire breathing bear could just pick it up and toss it out of the way. Johnathon reenacts a sigh of dismay frustration and begrudging acceptance on my behalf. I didn’t actually ask him to, but we do speak through souls so he probably knew I needed that. Thanks buddy.
OK, with the walls roughly figured out it’s time for some sweet nothings. No, not flirting, I mean nihility of course. One of my biggest takeaways from that last fight is that it pays to keep a store of black gas handy in other forms, be they gravesoil or unbound walls, perhaps even these new death crystal things if I’m very careful to buy the as soon as my field hits full. That makes me nervous though so for now we’ll be doing gravesoil.
Well, nihility can wait just a bit more because I’ve found the use of gravesoil. I mean, not really the use, but a thing that it can do. Well, in truth I didn’t, Johnathon and some of the others did, they wanted to try burying the remains of the fallen in it, and I noticed the oddity in my field, the corpse was no longer offputting black gas like usual, in fact the gravesoil wasn’t either, instead the black gas from both was going into the body which was slowly degrading into yet more gravesoil. Considering we were getting ready to hunker down for a long wait, and considering that gravesoil produces more black gas per volume than the bones, we agree that they can all be buried in what will soon become a growing mound of gravesoil.
I enter nihility while the crystal remains within my line of sight, and every time the field fills to perhaps twenty manna, Johnathon begins jumping and waving, then I get distracted and start making more gravesoil before lapsing into nihility again. It’s… strangely peaceful, quiet, I know Johnathon is speaking with them through the soul bond, I know they’re breathing in black gas and breathing out white gas, but nobody moves, it’s just a pile of corpses and a crystal in a box that’s slowly filing with dirt one skeletal handful at a time. Like a quiet cemetery where the dead peacefully rest. I chuckle to myself at the notion. I haven’t really been keeping track of time, but no moment truly lasts forever, and there it is, something new, or perhaps in a sense old and familiar.
[Congratulations on reaching level 4]
[Detecting you have maintained a rigid schedule in accordance with careful planning.]
[You have gained the ability Regiment]
I don’t know if it’s easier to uncover the use for these as I go or if I’m just on a lucky streak, but this one seems straightforward too, I was just thinking about when I’d next create gravesoil and an option appeared to schedule it in advance. I’m not quite sure I’d call this automation, but it certainly seems convenient.
Looking around it seems I’m not the only one, it seems many of the skeletons have now advanced, all but perhaps ten of them. I check with Johnathon first and it seems he has reached level eighty nine, perhaps his next evolution will come at one hundred? I’ve already leveled up a few times, so he should be able to advance again when the time comes. Why are they growing so fast though, all they’re doing I lazing about and chatting with each other casually. Well, why am I leveling up? It’s manna, I gain manna and I level up with it, but they don’t gain manna, instead they gain, I focus on the black gas. Field manna, so it’s still a type of manna, and drinking in manna lets you level up. They leveled up when they killed stuff because splinters of the soul motes of things they killed entered their own soul motes, but they regularly breath in my field manna. At first I thought they were converting it into regular manna, but that may not be the case, maybe it’s like plants and animals, maybe they breath in black gas and I breath in white gas, and we each exhale what the other needs. From the context of system labels it sounds like these gasses may be manna itself, which I probably should have noted down some time ago, I’m just still uncertain about declaring things to be magic. Johnathon doesn’t seem to have a problem with it, but to me it’s an unexplored field that I know nothing about when I’ve grown so used to understanding so much that happens around me in day to day life. Why do we exhale manna though?
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
My mind rejects the notion that their soul motes with my crystal together form a perpetual motion machine. I mean the growth of my core easily outpaces the growth of their soul motes, so theoretically I’d have to continue sacrificing my own level ups in order to create more undeads to complete the cycle, but theoretically everything is pointing towards perpetual motion machine, which I decidedly dislike. Maxwell would throw a fit, or was that Watt? Bunny tails in the midday sun, I wish I had the internet. I’ve been away from it too long, I used to joke that I might die without it, but now I’m probably dead, so prophecy fulfilled I guess. I tried roping Johnathon into a political debate once, but it was like I was arguing with myself, he refused to fight back and sternly reject my arguments unless I gave him a good reason, but then I had to make a counterpoint to my own statement at which point he still wouldn’t fight me. This is why you argue with strangers, strangers are never agreeable, or they are, but not to that extent.
So I’ve been feeding my massive army of undead monsters a limitless supply of experience rich super soldier fluid under the ground as our army grows awaiting the eventual day we break free to terrorize the surface, or whatever autocratic butt faces normally do with undead legions. That earns a chuckle from me, perhaps my body’s still there and I just can’t hear the chuckle escape my lips.
Poking at Johnathon’s stash of useful garbage I see there are three new looking long black cloaks each complete with a broach of a cloaked figure holding his cloak tightly around him. When I have one of the skeletons try one on I notice that I can’t even tell it’s a skeleton under there. Johnathon guesses it might be magic, but we don’t really know. My black gas doesn’t like them, or maybe it does, it tries digesting the robe, pushing out allot of colorless gas as if they were the bugs I kill in my field, but it feels like it would be a waste to just digest a perfectly good pair of magical cloaks. Yes, a pair, the test one no longer functioned when we pulled it back out. Oddly if a skeleton is wearing one than not only will the cloak not be digested, but neither will anything held under it. This is useful so I give one to Johnathon and let a skeleton hold onto the other one until we find someone who should get it.
Speak of the devil and he shall appear before you bathed in flickering hell flames and demanding you forfeit your soul, or however that long-form quote was meant to go. I think the original was lost but a bit of dramatic flair is never wasted. As it happens our new magical cloak skeleton has been found, namely because we now have our first skeletal mage, everybody clap! OK, now I feel like a real tin pot dictator with everybody monotonously clapping on command, let’s try never to do that again. They seem to pick up on my shame because they stop. I’m even more ashamed to notice that I had forced our new mage to clap for himself, but I think it would be somehow worse to throw away the mage’s celebration just because of my own feelings. Instead I opt to telepathically bask it in some praise and ask it what it can now do.
Thus followed three days of trial and error. It seems skeleton mages, or at least this skeletal mage, can animate precisely two of the skeleton corpses that sit in my field. Doing so costs me one base field manna per pupated skeleton, and they are pupated, no soul motes, no life to call their own. Our mage has to guide their every action. I admit, I’m feeling more than a bit disappointed about this, but our new skeleton mage seems thrilled, and really loves puppeteering them around. I don’t really want to crush his enthusiasm and dreams so I leave him to experiment on his own. Johnathon tells me our new mage’s name is Vance, not a bad name. It’s strangely heartwarming to see them grow. They certainly don’t act like an army of evil right out of a necromantic horror flick, they act like children in a sandbox. Well sometimes they do, most of the time they just lie there like the dead, I feel a bit guilty about that, but it’s helped us lay low and Johnathon agrees that that’s likely the best course of action with a giant alien world out there.
Sometimes we discuss if we could send someone out there to scout it out, to figure out what’s out there. It would certainly make me feel better to know that there’s not a level 5000 lordling overhead that hates undeads and loves nothing more than smashing pretty crystals into the ground. On the other hand I might feel a whole lot worse knowing there is.
Years pass quietly, or at least I assume they have because I now have eight soul motes. Johnathon has reached level 100. We should be celebrating, we should be cheering, or clapping, no, not clapping, I forgot. In any case though we should at least be happy, dip it in jelly and fry it in lard. Johnathon is back to having the notification that he cannot advance until I do. None of the others are even close to his level, and I have somewhat of a theory about why. When I was teaching Johnathon he would breath in more black gas when he was learning and thinking and growing, but he would not exhale more white gas, with my perpetual motion idea, which I still hate, I have an idea of what might be happening. When you work hard and think allot and study and strive to improve yourself through practice, it seems like your soul mote draws in more gas, I mean, manna. Drawing in extra manna faster nourishes your soul mote allowing it to grow faster and bigger soul mote seems to mean higher level.
What I don’t understand though is why level limits even exist. Johnathon is his own skeleton, his own man, he should be able to make his own decisions and grow when he wants to grow, but it seems he can’t, and it’s because of me. This frustrates me because there’s not allot I can do about it. Sure, I could start shoveling matter into my field to speed up my own leveling process, but I’ve leveled up twice, how many times will I need to? For his part Johnathon is pretty zen about it. He says that I’m worrying over nothing and that he’s just glad to be with us. His soul is giving off a cute feeling of a happy child with a loving family who doesn’t want to have to grow up and just likes everything as it is. Deng turnipmustard, I can’t say anything to that, fine, I’ll let it go.
Visage of life, Johnathon’s new skill, he looks just like a living person now, a young man. Well, I say a young man, but he looks like he’s probably in his twenties, perhaps it’s a father’s bias? I say he still looks cute and innocent, but a little less nasty without all the missing flesh and putrefaction. He has untrimmed stubble and oily hair, we don’t have much, or perhaps even anything to groom with down here, but his smile reaches his eyes, childish curiosity still there after all these years, and he’s a hard working kid, never one to give up on a task. I’m proud of how he’s turned out, and while I haven’t spent the time to raise them all myself, I hope the others can live as well as he does, I hope their smiles also reach their eyes when, or perhaps if, they ever gain eyes for those smiles to twinkle in.
I gradually relax and time continues to slip past us again, perhaps even faster now that I can just schedule my field to produce things when it gets full. I set it to produce death crystals, they are dodecahedrons with a dark crystalline surface like polished onyx. Their function is similarly simple to discern, as soon as the first is created my field begins feeding into it alongside my children until it has absorbed one base manna unit of black manna. It seems they can in fact be broken, quite easily in fact, but that their function remains unaffected. Unlike my gravesoil but quite like my walls, they do not seem to produce any black manna in turn, but they do respond to my will when I try to pull the black manna out so long as they’re in my field.
Hmm, I think I will split it and do half each, half of my excess black gas will go to gravesoil and half to death crystals, after all the almost half a cubic meter of dirt we have doesn’t do much to fill the room. Ah quiet Nihility. I’m almost wishing for new stimuli, almost, but I think I’m happy with my new family in our quiet stifled cave, Maybe someday we’ll look back on these days and miss them. It certainly is a simple lifestyle, mostly free of stress and worries. Even the danger stones remain broken. Maybe I’ll regret all the Nihility, maybe I’ll wish I had truly lived more, spoken and engaged with all of them more; but I’m not sure. Could I stay sane that way? Would it be healthy psychologically? Would I grow weary of it all faster? Perhaps it was just the habit I’d learned in the darkness of the void, or perhaps the void had changed me. Logically speaking there’s no way I wasn’t effected by that experience. Humans will generally go insane within days, or perhaps a week of sensory deprivation.
It’s hard to really be sure how much time passed in the void given that there was no way to track it, but I had genuinely experienced many many cycles of thoughts each more self destructive than the last, cycles that I could not reasonably say resemble sanity in the slightest. Perhaps I’m not sane, perhaps I never was after that. I want to entertain the notion that this is a hallucination, but I reject that idea pretty quickly. I had watched my thoughts circling in and constricting around one another, I could say with certainty that this is not what I’d hallucinate if I were to hallucinate. This all begged the question, was I special, were there others like me? How did they bear it? What state are they in? Would they still be able to function? What races would they be born as? Would they just be like that one kid at the far end of town who was born a screaming convulsing mess who’s parents eventually had his life support unplugged after four years and many specialists when they knew there was no help they could give?
It was a morbid thought. I feel Johnathon’s soul brushing up against mine, sending warmth and assurances. Slowly the knot of tension, confusion, and distress that I didn’t know I had began to unwind. If there are more like me… If there really are, I think I pity them, and if they pity me I think I can accept that, but, but I hope, sincerely from my heart assuming I still have one at all, that they’ve made a place for themselves in this world. I hope that they too can find these quiet moments, that they can start a family and watch their children grow. I hope that they can work through whatever mechanism they used to cope, and I hope that they aren’t too broken, that they can still love, that they can still care, that they can still see the beauty of this world without peering through a disorienting fog of madness.
Nihility takes me. I don’t think I can sleep, not anymore, but the quiet of nonexistence is beginning to feel close. It used to be a chore, an effort, a thing I had to work at and improve upon. Now that I’m no longer worrying about a buildup of black manna, now that I’m no longer worrying about the dangers stone underfoot, now that I’m no longer worrying that my children will be unable to learn on their own, somehow it feels easy.
[Congratulations on reaching level 5]
[Detecting you have closely watched and guarded those under you trying to keep them alive]
[You have gained the ability Linked]
Nothing happened, not the level, that happened, but Linked, I was starting to get used to these explaining themselves for me, but I have no clue what to do, so I wait, and I watch, quietly observing my field. It doesn’t take too long to notice what’s happening, though I feel like an idiot for not noticing immediately. I’m no longer getting clear manna from any of the skeletons or even Johnathon. I ask him about it, but he says he didn’t notice any difference aside from a new pattern emerging on my crystal.
A few months pass and I have an idea what’s going on. The white gas is still emerging from them, but it’s not going to me, not exactly. It’s forming itself into strings connecting each of their soul motes to my crystal. I’ve grown accustomed to laying on the floor these days, now that I have walls Johnathon hasn’t had to hold me for ages, but when he reaches out to that thread of clear manna connects to me, allowing us to be linked. I can pull on the link, drawing it tighter, confining him closer to me, and that puts manna into my core, or I can let it loosen and drag out. This ability is oddly manna intensive, but that’s alright, we have time, manna will come.
A year later, or maybe it was two, I’ve gotten worse at parsing time, but, I cast a glance at the gravesoil and death crystals, yup, two years. A healthily lengthy cable of manna connects me to each of my children, but I don’t think I can bear to do this test with them, not that I’m sure what I’m doing is any better. I create a new skeleton and bind it to me in the same way so that we are linked. Johnathon has a grim and mournful expression, we all do, I can feel it in our soul motes. Even when Johnathon steps out of my manna field I still feel it, because we are linked, as if he were within my field. Then Johnathon punches and the skeleton’s head fragments. I watch as the little soul mote drifts at the end of our link, floating about in the air as if the skeleton were still there. I try pushing black manna into the link, willing it to revive, but it doesn’t. I see the sadness in Johnathon’s eye and try to reassure him, it’s alright, we expected it might be this way.
I pull on the link to reclaim my manna from the bond, but as I do the soul mote is pulled with it. Then the soul mote is within my field and the black manna flows into it giving it new life. I’m thankful, we al are, I think I see a tear in Johnathon’s smiling eyes but I pretend I didn’t. Today is a good day, it seems my children are safe. It seems my children will be safe from now on, even when they venture out into the world. I truly hope that it is a good world, a world where they can find a place to live happily, to experience more than just an empty hole in the ground, overcrowded with siblings and an absentminded father who struggles not to exist.
I’m uncertain how the world will react, will they see the crowd of eager joyous youths that I see, or will they see an army out for blood? Will they survive the world? I’d like to say I was joking about a level 5000 lordling who despises undeads and likes breaking shiny things, but seeing how fast Johnathon leveled up I strongly suspect it’s at least a possibility. This is potentially a whole new world. Sure, maybe it’s only a mile across for all we know having lived under a rock all these years, but the simple truth is there could be anything out there and we wouldn’t know. I hate to ask this of him, but I think Johnathon is most sited to explore the surface world. I think he could look for threats and opportunities, look for a place where my children could try to truly belong.
“…but we belong here with you master.” Johnathon replies. I can tell through the soul bond he has no opposition to scouting, exploring, or even dying for his family, rather he is genuinely contented and happy with this life I’ve given him. He understands the rational, he understands what he’s likely missing out there, but he simply doesn’t care.
“You call this a life? I’ve consigned you all to lay here with me for years on end out of naught but madness and paranoia. We don’t know what’s up there; it could be a grand necropolis full of pretty zombie girls you could spend your life with! It could be a boundless paradise filled with quiet peace where our family would find other families just like ours and coexist in peace sharing ideas and helping each other when we get stuck. It could be a horrid place that we’re not half as far away from as we’d pray we were if we had any sense. You want this? To huddle in a cave devoid of warmth and light, never once seeing the sun? Not that crooked sunbeam, I mean the real sun, brilliant luminescence contrasted across a vast and boundless blue sky with clouds that slowly sail across it like ideas in a wandering mind.”
“Yes.” He replied simply. “Don’t worry master, I will go, I will explore the lands and find interesting ideas, I will find stories, and philosophies, and discoveries to fill your time, to catch your interest, and to bring you joy so you can stay sane. Don’t worry father, I will come back and we will be together as a family.”
Well now I feel like a jerk.
The truth is that I don’t really intend to move, not unless I have to, but even if Johnathon loves this life with all his heart, I know humans, they are varied and different. Maybe it’s unfair to judge undeads by human standards, but I’ve seen it in them, I’ve seen their individuality, their divergence from that pure awed mind they’re all born with into people, individuals with individual wants. I refuse to believe there isn’t a single one who wishes for something more out of life. Am I being stubborn? Am I being selfish?
After a round of discussion we agree that the soul mote tethers are far too short for a long investigation. Even if he found something. We will wait several years more. Time flows unhindered in nihility, unnoticed by me and them both as the dead continue to rest