Through an oracle, that was how you pick up requests. That was how everyone picked up requests. This little mirror device seemed to have ingrained itself into every aspect of life within the city, or at least within this district.
There was an adventurers ‘forum’ that you could navigate via your license and you could accept requests or go on missions to the dungeons using that as your guide. It was weird, like a consistently updating book, and it was extremely useful.
I liked the market listings. It would list the going price for monster parts and the current market value for common treasures as well. It also listed rumors about bandits and dangerouse areas deep within the underbelly of the city.
There were a lot of forgotten sites within Asrin City, and while the Asrin Tree was responsible for fifty-three dungeon subspace dungeons, there were a lot more ancient ruins and magical hotspots that were called dungeons in their own right and offered quite a bit of treasure.
Grunder had dropped me off in an abandoned cavern, not ten miles from this district, and that place seemed like it had been abandoned for millennia. It wasn’t strange to hear about an old wizard’s workshop or an ancient noble home that had decent stealth enchantments being discovered now and then, particularly within down-side.
Man-made dungeons were more common than the Asrin Tree Dungeons, but the subspaces the Asrin Tree made were an unending mine of resources while man-made dungeons would be cleared out sooner or later.
I went back to the inn, half-absorbed in forums, trying to calculate the best places to raid and the quickest way to make cash.
The current best market within my skillset was probably the Graveyard Dungeon, the one Kael had told me about. It was one of the subspaces routinely used for war by Asrin City and contained countless undead.
The bodies there had died ages ago and routinely turned into powerful undead over the years. There were even necromancers who made their home within the dungeon, liches, and vampire lords who ruled over their own section of land.
But I wouldn’t last a second against those guys. No, the main thing I wanted were zombies, plain and simple. Necromancy and golem creation were very related schools of magic in theory. Both involved tethering spirits from the astral realm and both involved animation matrixes of some sort, but they differed in medium.
While golems were made with mana-conductive parts that came from nonliving materials, necromancy used corpses. All living things had mana, and once they died, they still had the ability to hold and conduct mana. And that mana conductivity correlated directly with the longevity of the corpse and how long they had lived before death.
That was why the biomancied skeletons at the inn had been so weak and stupid. While they were still more mana-conductive than wood, rock, or metal, it was a far cry from an actual corpse. The bone had been made, and while it might have been living tissue for a certain period of time, it was no person and lacked the years of life that would have aged it with mana.
I remember I had to burn my mother’s corpse before the necromancer’s guild could try and pry it from me back in the Woven Forest.
I immediately started scrolling through the forums, trying to figure out the layout of the Graveyard Dungeon.
The longer an undead stayed undead, the higher the chances of them growing in power. Marinate a skeleton in mana for a couple of thousand years and you’d get a lich eventually, and gods knew I couldn’t win near those things.
I eventually found myself back in bed in my hotel room, eyes glued to my oracle for quite some time.
I couldn’t help it. This thing was like an endless book full of words, most of them meaningless, true. But words nonetheless. I spent the rest of the afternoon just eating up the information like a brain-deprived zombie.
I was mainly browsing Adventurer’s Advent, which was the name of the adventurer’s guild’s forum, and it was chock-full of information.
Mostly gossip, but there was a lot you could learn from gossip.
MantledMan
-There are fewer monsters than usual in that old Lich’s Castle, the one in sector 43. I think most of the undead have scattered, even the low-level ones. It’s completely dry out here.
SwordedDwarf
-Yeah, I was there earlier too. That place was packed with Death Knights a few weeks ago. The whole sector was high silver or low gold, but there’s almost nothing there right now.
ZomElf
-Treasures?
SwordedDwarf
-Nah, they got cleared out last week. I’m pretty sure the gold rankers took everything of value along with them anyway. Even the unenchanted swords.
ZomElf
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
-Greedy fucks
MantledMan
-Cool it guy. That lich killed like thirty-three silvers, and it would probably be more if not for those gold rankers.
ZomElf
-You getting carried by goldies or did a zombie eat your brain? Gold rankers make hundreds of thousands, if not millions per year. They didn’t need to clean the place that thoroughly. I could understand keeping all the magical treasures and artifacts but unenchanted swords? That’s like eight hundred dollars and they just take it all? Not some of it, not most of it, but all of it? That’s fucking greedy man.
MantledMan
-understand*
ZomElf
-I hope your mother dies tragically.
MantledMan
-What’s wrong with you?
ZomElf
-Nothing, just getting ready to hex some annoying fuckers. How’s your mom doing by the way?
MantledMan
-I’m a cleric dude.
ZomElf
-But your mom isn’t.
MantledMan
-Currently praying for you bro.
ZomElf
-Pray for your mom
MantledMan
-May the Lord of Light be with you
ZomElf
-Fuck off
I still didn’t understand these devices. I knew they had been around for a few years and had already cemented themselves into popular culture but these forums seemed so… mean at times.
There were also a few cursed strings of emails being passed around from one reader to another a few years back, along with recorded cases of people being hexed through the forums.
They had fixed that, apparently. Anti-divination and anti-hex enchantments had been weaved into the central spirit servers, whatever that meant.
But I resolved to keep my mouth shut regardless. I couldn’t go down getting cursed by an angry man on a forum, that was just unacceptable.
After about ten hours of scrolling, mainly through anything that had to do with the Graveyard dungeon and the type of monsters it would spawn, I finally turned off my oracle and let myself rest in my seat.
There was a lot I would need to account for. I had the spells for the dungeon, but I would also need the strength and the mana. I was used to fighting, having grown up in the Woven Forest, but I was more used to running and hiding.
I wish I were a mage warrior forged through abandonment and strength. But no, I was a hermit and a hider. I’d once been trapped in a tunnel with a giant spider. I’d been trapped in a small cave with the damn thing and it had kept trying to eat me.
I eventually waited until the bastard starved out. I knew water creation spells and quick decay spells, for the poop. And I was a decent enough alchemist to know how to make longbread. It was annoying flavorless longbread, but a small nibble would fill me up for the entire day and that was what I was after.
Anyway, the point was that I would survive the dungeon, but I wasn’t sure if I could turn a big enough profit on the whole thing. That was another idea entirely.
I sighed and watched the skeleton enter the room with a bit of a noticeable wobble.
I scowled.
What garbage necromancy.
It wasn’t the material or the level of the spell that annoyed me, but rather the execution.
I mean, I get it. You use cheap materials and contract cheap spirits.
Okay.
But this spell matrix was absolute garbage. Why make every spirit responsible for maintaining their bond with their bodies? You could have summoned one powerful spirit who could then take up that part of the spell and free the skeletons’ spirits for higher-level cognition.
Sure it’d come at a higher mana cost, but if the skeletons were more intelligent, tasks would be done way faster, meaning you could afford to function with fewer skeletons, meaning you’d have more mana.
But since their spirits were busy bearing the mental weight of the spell, they were doing a fraction of the work they could have been.
Spellcraft should revolve around purpose and efficiency, and this setup served neither.
The skeleton that was unknowingly receiving my viscous judgment, handed me a note.
‘There is one day left in your room, sir. If you wish to extend your stay, please let us know at the front desk. If this will be the last day of your stay please leave the room empty of all your possession within twenty-four hours.
Thank You.’
Underneath the card was the inn’s insignia and logo.
I looked at the skeleton and nodded.
One more day huh? I think I could do one more day. The Graveyard Dungeon was a few districts away from, right next to [[District 109]] or as the natives called it, Necrotopolis.
Being the closest official district to the Graveyard Dungeon, it had gathered an immense amount of necromancers and undead. You’d find centuries-old liches and ancient zombie mages calling the place home, as well as a large number of adventurers. It was a hub of knowledge and death mana, but the most important resources there were the bodies.
The dungeon seemed to have a nearly endless amount of mana-saturated bodies and high-quality undead. A decent necromancer could take a corpse from the Graveyard Dungeon and turn it into a Death Knight, a Speed Zombie, or some other type of combat-capable minion.
Necromancey was the most controversial form of magic, even more so than biomancey, but, the market for the undead was huge. The Slevinlors were one of the latest members of the High Families and they had gotten that status through necromancy. Non-sentient undead workers and fighters supplied numerous industries with Asrin City, but they weren’t fully accepted yet.
The churches hated necromancers and, even with the pressure of the mayor, had refused to change their doctrine to allow them any sense of acceptance. That was why they were located down-side and far away from the surface where the churches didn’t really hold any power. Not that it was illegal for them to go there, just that business would be very bad for a necromancer at top-side.
I still didn’t know much about the area surrounding the Graveyard Dungeon, but it was unimportant for the most part. Districts that were based near dungeons faced heavy regulation and policing, from both the Adventurer’s Guild and the Asrin City police.
There was no Celestial Order Patrol there though. Thankfully.
The Patrol was more of a specialized task force from what I had gathered, and I had waited out my time under their jurisdiction as quietly as possible.
But I’d seen the local police, at least the ones here at 87. They were competent and fairly diverse as well. Asrin City’s government was powerful and each district held a bit of power within the larger governing body, but they were only one of six major factions within the city.
All of them had some sort of policing force, the Patrol, for example, served the churches and had the highest authority with anything and everything to do with gods, angels, devils, and demons. All celestial affairs went through them.
Adventuring districts would have Rangers and Guild Guards all over the place. They were the arteries from which the blood of commerce flowed for some regions. In fact, the adventurers guild here was only as big as it was because this area was close to the center of all the dungeons within down-side and had direct root trains to the city itself.
In other words, [[district 87]] served as both the biomancy hub of the city and the center of the Adventurer's Guild within down-side.
I pulled out my oracle, still such a weird device, and started scrolling through the forums. I was going to be out of here by the end of tomorrow, and I needed to plan out my route.