Chapter 1: awakening
A black blacker than nothing is what here is I can't tell if this is the place you are sent after death or before it.
Consciousness snapped back into place along with sight followed by muted feeling to the rest of my body 'Where am I, what is this place'
The surroundings are nothing but plains of rotting soil infested with an unknowable amount of bugs and mould with bolder stones jutting out everywhere. With the only notable feature is a monolith of a hand-shaped bolder.
[Ding!]
'Hu'
[Welcome traveller from another world! To the world of Aphis where with the help of skills and techniques you endlessly ascend in strength and become a God or more, to get started say status if you want to know more focus on what and if you have enough causality it shall be explained to you, Good luck!]
'What? Staus?'
[Species: undead (discarded)
Name:_________ level: 1/5 (exp: 0/3)
MP: 1/1 HP: 5/5 SP: infinity/infinity
Strength: 0.3 (for each point of Strength is 10 kilograms of force)
Endurance: 0.5 (for each point of endurance is 10 HP and SP, increases physical resistance)
Agility: 0.1 (for each point of Agility is 2 meters per second)
Dexterity: 0.1 (increases your ability to perform technical skills)
Intelligence: 0.5 ( 1 point of intelligence equals 2 MP and increases skills speed and ability)
Wisdom: 0.5 (1 point of wisdom gives 1 MP regeneration every 10 minutes, increases mental skill control)
Charisma: 0.1 (increases liveability and leadership skills)
Skills
[Unrestricted body (level: 1/100) ]
'Hu, what? Undead..' the thing I so wanted to ignore to just push to the back of my mind, with the rotting flesh tubes that would have once been called arms in the bottom of my eyes view that are practically sagging out of their sockets,
The panic that was so desperately being superseded seeps through my body as every fibre of my being tensed as what felt like my entire nerve system was crushed in excruciating pain.
[YOU HAVE DIED]
Death again and just as quickly back to die again, death after death after death after death it continues.
________________________________________
It took like a hundred deaths but I feel like my understanding of this place is okay... for now, but I figured out what this place is called and what it's for the ceaseless plains a land of the dead if a person has been exposed to enough necrotic energy to get resurrected or have enough resentment end up here and any undead that dies here can resurrect endlessly.
Although this comes to the type of undead I am, a Discarded is the result of someone resurrecting a skeleton using a whole corpse so along with the skeleton everything else is resurrected, but as the name implies is discarded here.
Here I am a now skeleton-les undead although an upside to this is innately having the[Unrestricted body]skill that most undead have to learn, having the skill lets you bring out 100% of the body's potential, and luckily for me that includes control.
No, that's not exactly right it's more like it maximizes the speed I learn to control my body, so it's time to figure out how to move this meat sack of mine.
________________________________________
It seems time has no meaning to this place it just wants you to keep moving, so that's what I've been working on, and after what felt like days of blood, sweat, and tears well mostly just blood, pain, and deaths I've done it.
Using a spider as a reference I figured out how to push blood around my body with oxygen to increase the pressure in that area so my muscles don't crush my nerves every time I use them, but it took just as long to find a way to move that isn't worming across the ground.
So taking inspiration from sloths I tried to move like them and it worked surprisingly well being able to get to the hand-shaped rock 100 meters away and then back in like 5 minutes.
However, something surprising happened both my Agility and Dexterity increased during this process along with the level of Unrestricted body going up to 13 with a notification like this.
[Mana flows through you Dexterity +0.1]
So I've come up with a theory, my technique of using my blood to pressurize my body was also imbuing it with mana and since it counts this as a form of bodily control it went towards increasing Dexterity.
Now both my Dexterity and Agility are firmly in the single-digest.
[Species: undead (discarded)
Name:_________ level: 1/5 (exp: 0/3)
MP: 1/1 HP: 5/5 SP: infinity/infinity
Strength: 0.3
Endurance: 0.5
Agility: 1.1
Dexterity: 1.4
Intelligence: 0.5
Wisdom: 0.5
Charisma: 0.1
Skills
[Unrestricted body (level: 13/100) ]
Having nothing else to do I have given myself the task of seeing just how much I can increase my stats without leaving up,
So start the process of contorting my body to find its limits without it breaking down.
Seconds stretch to minutes, hours then days stretching my boy till death comes to take me again.
[Dexterity +0.1]
Over and over contorting my flesh till they tear and death takes me.
[Agility and Dexterity +0.1]
Pressing into impossible shapes despite the pain.
[Agility, Endurance, Dexterity +0.1]
If contorting isn't enough to get it to the max then I will strike the rocks until my skin starts to tear.
[Agility, Endurance, Dexterity +0.2]
Yet even this isn't enough, no! I will do this no matter what it takes. Unwilling I go on striking the rock till my arms are nothing but mulch, until.
Cold stale air fills me as blood seeps from almost every pore of my rotting body, pulled back my arm till every muscle is practically folded into themselves, and then all at once the tension is released.
My arm rockets forward and against the stone in front of me fingers first, instantly they splatter against it followed by my hand before stopping, muted the pain would be enough to knock out a normal adult but I last long enough to see this meter-tall rock crack.
[Agility, Endurance, Strength +0.3 Dexterity +0.1]
[Dexterity has reached its limit for your level of existence for your stage of existence]