Hi all, my name is Ian Meyer, seventeen. I work as a test subject for a great lich in the forests of the Zirkonia Empire’s Capital, Crimson.

I have been employed for about four days now. Thrown in the middle of the forest without even the strength to walk, I was hopeless before my very kind and helpful employer took me in.

My employer is a good person. We talk frequently, probably because we are the only ones who can talk. Moreover, the employer helps me increase my stats as well. It is impossible for stats to be increased without working hard, after all.

Nutrition, training, all of it was important. I couldn’t raise it a lot, but going to 4 or 5 from zero was not very difficult.

Every time I died, my stats went down by half. Whenever I had reached 4 on any stat, it went back down to 2, but something strange happened when I was at five.

It either went to 2 or 3 randomly.

“I am sure of it, your stats are ‘halved’ every single time,” said the Lich.

I was tied to the ground, and three of my limbs were on his table. Blood filled the floor of the cave, blood so old and of so many people that a strange kind of scarlet mushroom had started growing everywhere.

It was not the most ‘ideal’ work environment, some might even say this was employee abuse, but I found it many times better than being in a coffin underground.

“I-I see…” I muttered.

“SHUT UP!” The lich suddenly stomped on my face with his feet. He smacked my face in, but since he was all bones, it barely hurt.

Right, this was also part of my employment. I had to shut up, the job of a lab rat was difficult. The lich blew over at any moment so the times I could talk back were few, but they were a lot more than in the coffin.

There was no salary, but did one really need it if they won’t die?

After the Lich was done, he stepped back and sighed.

“The Window only displays whole numbers, so it goes to the closest one. Now think of it, you can halve 1 forever, but you will only get close to zero and never at zero, that is why you don’t die even when the Window shows all your stats at 0.”

I nodded to myself.

“Why aren’t you saying anything?”

Oh.

“Yes sir. I understand now, thank you.”

The lich smiled, satisfied. “Now give me your eye.”

“M-my eyes sir…?”

“Eye. Just one.”

My hands quaked at his words—hand, right. I looked at the lich with fear, and his bony face only wore a smile. I could only see his teeth and there were no muscles, but he smiled in his heart… there was no heart either.

Anyway, he was smiling.

He just wanted an eye, that was nothing much. All of it would come back the next time I die anyway. My stats were pretty high for now.

I reached my only remaining hand to my face and started pulling my eye out.

“Ooh, I want to see all your magic circuits. We have to figure out how you are doing this.”

I tried to pull my eye out, but only screams left me. I was too scared to do it.

Sighing, the Lich stepped up and pulled my eye out on his own. He put it in his own hollow eye sockets and laughed.

“Haha, look, I can see again! Hah!”

That was usually how my days went.

Inside the cave in the middle of the forest, a deep cave which had been cut into rooms through bone bars. A desk made of bones, more piles of bones of god knows which person and from when.

My employer and the CEO of this research institute was a lonely being, so he talked to me now and then.

“You are a very important being to me. If I can figure out your skill, we can all become immortal.”

He was looking for immortality, apparently.

Some days, he would tell me stories of the past.

“When I was still a human, I found a tome of necromancy skills. A spell book.”

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“You have been in this business since your human days, sir?”

“Haha, business? No, I learned that the spells would only work on someone who died. It was a skill to raise yourself as an undead if you died, so it was pretty stupid. No one can use it.”

“Then how…?”

“Oh, I was researching and suddenly became a lich. Since I am a monster and not a human, I can do whatever the fuck I want.”

Suddenly became a Lich?

I was very confused by those words. I was sure anyone would be. It was like saying one would become a crab-man if they ate too much crab.

Of course, when I questioned it.

“SHUT UP! SHUT THE FUCK! UP!”

He would blow up on me. The Lich would randomly remove his frustration on me by hitting me with an ax, poisoning me, or making me swallow some strange explosive, but oh well.

Being the only employee of a startup was difficult. I had to wear many hats.

It wasn’t just the past, the Lich also taught me common sense when he wanted to. Common sense of this world, I mean.

“When you want apples, just grab them.”

“What about money sir?”

“Beat up the shopkeeper. Everyone does that.”

“Really? Do you even know anyone—”

“SHUT UP!”

He also taught me to read and write for no reason. As someone summoned from another world, I could communicate in any language of this world, but reading and writing were different.

We had started learning the basics at the Crimson Castle, and the Lich gladly helped me continue.

The Lich didn’t stop at just reading and writing, he also taught me some things about battle.

“Dying so much will make your mind that of a monster.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes. I wonder how your body truly keeps up.”

Sometimes he even taught me magic.

He said he wanted to know how new information would change me. He even planned to teach me magic down the line to ensure my skill worked—and hopefully to replicate it.

He used the same book that he told me about when he started teaching me. A tome that taught an undead skill upon death. It seemed we were both of the same idea.

This kind of skill might just work for me.

The Lich’s favorite time was when he talked philosophy though. From how everything was absurd, to how we were all abandoned by gods.

“There is a panacea for all of life’s problems.”

“What is it, sir?”

“SHUT UP!”

My day continued like that. Stuck in the cave, sometimes talking, sometimes donating my body parts. I did get food and water now and then, but it was in the form of livestock and murky water from god knows where. If the lich did not want to fetch water, he just made me drink the blood of the livestock.

It wasn’t bad. The place was big too.

I did notice something. In the deeper, darker part of the cave was a section separated by a boulder. One was not allowed to even look over there.

In the beginning, I could barely see in the dark. But as I died and died and eventually two or three weeks passed, it seemed my eyes adapted and I could see deeper inside.

My workplace routine continued for a while.

I had given up on life.

Humans had buried me without mercy, my classmates did not come to find me. If they had, they might get buried too. The gods too, quite literally asked for my death.

In all this, the Lich was the kindest person I had met. We could chat too, and he fed me instead of driving me underground.

This was better than going outside.

It was an ok life. I didn’t sign up for any of this, but I genuinely felt that my situation was the best possible outcome.

That all changed one day.

The Lich returned to the cave from an excursion, having kidnapped some more livestock from the nearby farming village. But instead of getting to work, he paced around the cave nervously.

“Why are those bastards here… why are those imperial knights here… they are scouring the forest.”

Every time he went out.

“Shit. Shit. Shit. There are also paladins… I can’t even escape. I am so close… I will be caught if I try to run.”

The Lich returned more stressed than ever. He strangely did not even touch any of his test subjects, neither me nor the animals he had fetched.

The cave was filled with the frantic lich’s rambles and the cries of the livestock.

A week or so passed like that.

The lich sat next to my binds and spoke a lot. The rest of the time, he would spend behind the boulder in the depths of the cave.

I could start seeing there a little now. There seemed to be two strange figures, growling and groaning. One small and one tall. They reminded me of the ghouls and zombies I had seen on TV.

“Do you know why I work so hard?” asked the Lich. “It’s because my wife and my daughter were killed before their time. I was a farmer too, in a place far from Zirkonia. A hailstorm ruined every corp, but miraculously my field survived.”

The lich looked at me. He seemed to be crying.

“They branded my family worshippers of the devil and decided to attack us.”

His voice was very strange. Even though he had no throat, I could always hear the lich.

“Like a coward… I hid in my house. I put them in the closet or under the bed, and hid myself in the cellar no one knew about… I was a coward, a bastard, a rat that saved his own skin.”

Today, he seemed to be wailing.

“They found my wife and daughter in moments, of course, they did. Both of them were beaten to near death. Even as their backs were seared with hot iron and their teeth were smashed in with stones, they never told the villagers where I was.”

When I was underground, struggling to get out, I had prayed to god to help me. Any god, from my world or from this one.

“And I clasped my mouth, hiding in that cellar.”

It looked like the Lich too, was buried in his own coffin.

“The villagers left them for dead. It was another miracle that I escaped and took their limp bodies with me. They hadn’t died, not just yet, faint as it was, they were breathing.”

The Lich turned to me. For the first time, he was not looking at an experiment, a tool. He was looking at the person in me.

At Ian Meyer. Someone who I, too, had forgotten.

“I did everything to get them back, in the process I even turned into a Lich. It helped me, I turned my wife and daughter into mindless ghouls as I continued looking for a way…”

He grabbed my neck.

His bony fingers wrapped around my throat, pressing against my body.

Suddenly, his grip tightened and he started choking me.

“Not even from death, I merely wished to heal them. Yet why? Why does a stupid, spineless bastard like you get to revive? Why not my daughter? Why not my wife?”

I was used to being mauled by an ax or cut in pieces, but choking was a death I could never get over.

Tears spilled from my eyes as memories of being underground surfaced.

Suddenly, the strength wrapped around my neck loosened.

The lich sighed.

“What’s the point? I have tried many times after all.”

With those words, the Lich stood up. He looked around the cave and picked up his books and papers.

“That day, my wife and daughter did not tell the villagers where I was. Today, it’s my turn.”

The Lich left the cave.

A day passed.

And another.

He never returned.