Chapter 2: Undeath
Damien woke up with a start, sucking in a deep breath. The only issue was, instead of breathing in air, he got a massive mouthful of dirt. He saw darkness everywhere still and an uncomfortable amount of pressure crushing down on him on every inch of his body, preventing him from moving anywhere.
Was he still dead? Was this how death felt? Constant darkness, cold, and crushing pressure?
Pretty damn depressing.
No, Damien came to realize very soon, he was just buried underground. He felt cold everywhere around his body, but it felt oddly comfortable, strangely natural. The only source of warmth he felt was around his chest where the black monster core pressed down on him.
Oddly, it seemed the mages had the decency to bury Damien, and at least he had this going for him. He thought maybe they would have chopped him up and stuffed him into test tubes for some black magic experiment, but that was not the case.
He remembered that he had been sacrificed for something, but for what exactly? Not his body parts, it seemed, nor his soul, so what?
No, thinking about that now was pointless. What mattered was that he was alive.
Damien needed to spend his brainpower making sure he stayed alive.
At first, he worried about suffocating because of the dirt packed into his mouth and nose, but he felt surprisingly fine. He just held his breath, and he felt like he could hold it in forever.
That was when something bright and blue flickered in Damien's vision, and to his surprise, he could immediately recognize it as something akin to a video game status screen. He had played enough video games to know a user interface when he saw one, and he had read enough generic system novels to know one when he saw one.
<<<Status Screen>>>
Name: Damien Yaotlachinol Wang
EXP (Extraction Points): 0/100
Class: Unassigned
Race: Zombie
Level: 1
Stats:
STR: 5
-Strength. A measure of raw physical power. The higher this stat is, the more power the host's musculature can output.
AGI:6
-Agility. The higher this stat is, the host becomes more coordinated and obtains faster reflexes. The combination of both allows for the host to more effectively utilize their physical strength for movement and speed.
VIT: 7
-Vitality. A measure of durability. The higher this stat is, the more durable the host's skin, bones, organs, and musculature becomes.
MGI: 2
-Magical energy. A measure of total magical energy. The higher this stat, the greater the amount of mana the host can store within their spirit roots.
ATT: 1
-Attunement. A measure of how many spells and familiars the host can attune to themselves. The higher this stat, the greater the host's ability to prepare spells and familiars becomes.
LCK: 1
-Luck. A measure of how much the host is able to defy fate. Not to be confused with an ordinary sense of luck, this stat does not make the host 'lucky' in a conventional sense but allows them to defy causality warping effects, manipulations of space and time, and prophecies revolving around them.
Passives:
Undead Body
-Rank: N/A
-Effects:
The host now possesses an undead body. They do not need to eat, drink, sleep, or breathe. Their physical stamina is for all intents and purposes infinite. No vital organs are required to function aside from the brain, but even then, the destruction of the brain only renders the host unconscious. They may be fully restored if their brain is healed.
Undead Mind
-Rank: N/A
-Effects:
The host now possesses an undead mind. All strong emotions become muted and all innate human revulsions to gore and death are eliminated. In addition, the longer the host goes without consuming flesh, the more their mind will deteriorate into mindlessness dominated by hunger.
Skills:
Infectious Bite
-Rank: E
By biting a creature, the host may induce an infectious disease into them that transforms them into the weak undead known as a Husk. Will not work on beings of a sufficient power level.
Attuned Spells: None
>>>
Cool, thought Damien, his initial incredible surprise at this sudden turn of events quickly muting.
But now how the hell was he going to get out of his grave? Nothing about his system seemingly gave him a way out. His stats were not high enough to dig him out, not when every part of his body was buried.
Damien struggled with all his might, but he could not exert any force, and it was not like he could just stay here either.
From what he could figure out, the Rift had not collapsed yet, even with the boss monster hunted down. This meant that the Rift was classified wrong. It was classed as grade 5, but that number only described the strength of the strongest monster within and how large it was.
Rifts were much more complicated than that.
This, Damien knew because his major at Tintagel was in the Seeker's Department which focused on studying monsters, magical plants, Rifts, and the nature of the mystical dimension that was the Underbelow.
Rifts were classed not only by their grades but also by their spatial category and elimination factor.
Spatial categories were divided into Sprawl or Portal classifications.
Sprawl type Rifts directly took over space in the world, often hijacking pre-existing natural environments and making them magical.
Portal type Rifts, on the other hand, were self-contained pocket spaces linked via an access point such as a portal, hence the name.
Elimination factors determined how a Rift was supported and what needed to be targeted to destroy it.
A Monster type elimination meant that there was a beast in the Rift sustaining its existence and destroying it would collapse it.
All Rifts were given initial investigations by the Court of Keys, the premiere magical authority in the western hemisphere, and they gave out initial reports that determined the Rift's information, though exact details had to be hashed out by Delvers exploring it.
Damien had believed from the initial court report that this Rift was a Dimension space with a Monster elimination factor, meaning it was its own pocket dimension with a boss monster sustaining it.
But since the Rift had not collapsed yet, that meant that its elimination factor was not a Monster type. Which left two more possibilities.
The Condition elimination factor. Rifts that had these required a certain 'condition' to be met to cause its decay and collapse, and these could vary from needing to kill specific monsters to arranging a puzzle or solving a riddle or what not.
And finally, the Boundary elimination factor. This applied to Rifts that were stabilized by certain environmental markers such as pillars of magically charged rock or mana crystals or any other manner of landmark. Demolishing all of them would cause the Rift to collapse upon itself.
Because the Rift was still active, Damien guessed that its elimination factor was either Condition or Boundary based, but again, that knowledge did not help if he could not get out of his grave.
It was not like Damien could just wait this out either and let another group of Delvers come in and break down the Rift either.
Because if the Rift collapsed with him still inside of it, he could either die or get transported to the depths of the Underbelow from where he would have very few ways to get back to civilization.
Even if Damien was found, he would get either disintegrated for being an undead monster or turned into the Court for being an Anomaly, a term meant for those that possessed powers that had no classification under any known magic system. Unfortunately, the Court was not known for its high regard for ethics, especially for non-humans, and likely, Damien would probably be sentenced to eternal life as a lab rat.
So, then, Damien's options were to
1. Die as the Rift collapsed on top of him.
2. Die as Delvers destroyed him as an undead monster
Or
3. Spend an eternity getting dissected
None of these sounded great to Damien, but it really did seem like there was no way out unless something dug him out.
'Hey you, you're finally awake,' came a woman's voice ringing inside of Damien's head. It was a voice brimming with energy, one that had evidently gotten quite tired of waiting for Damien to wake up from the slumber of death.
'Who is this?' asked Damien.
'You're holding me so tightly and yet you act like you don't know me? Please, a lady's pride can only take so much.'
Damien wondered what this voice was talking about until he realized what he was hugging –
'Oh, you're the core?' Damien knew that beast cores could sometimes possess the will of the monsters they belonged to.
A normal core was just an ingot of magical energy 'painted' in the essence of the original monster. Raw material that Artificers could process into mana crystals or enchantments related to the monster.
However, a core with a shard of the monster's soul still intact within it was far more valuable because it was still 'alive' in a sense. One could use the soul shard within to resummon the monster and bind it as a familiar, form a contract with it, process its soul into a golem, absorb the soul and gain a powerful spell related to it, and so on and so forth: the possibilities were incredibly varied.
Damien realized that in some small shred of luck, his Geass had prevented Lance and his posse from checking the contents of the core, or otherwise they would definitely not have given such a valuable thing to Damien.
'Yes, I am stuck in this stuffy orb right now, but I can do much, much more,' said the voice. 'It seems to me that you are in quite some trouble. You need to get out of here, don't you?'
'Well, that sure would be helpful,' said Damien.
'Then how about you and I form a contract right here!' said the voice excitedly. 'Then I, Zara, the greatest genie known to man, woman, and monster, can shovel you right out!"
Weekly Power Status
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