Chương 16: Interior decorating

People say that aesthetics matter. To an extent, they're right. If you look good, you feel good, and it changes how you perceive the world. When it comes to magic under the all-powerful IMPS, they really matter. Mana is reactive and sensitive to its environment, so setting the right vibe is important. I dropped the bags of rats I'd collected from the hovel and my rucksack, then shoved the door to my shed closed with a hip. My cloak went onto its nail, and Puggy attacked my leg.

"Dammit, dog," I muttered, picking him up and patting him on his head. His bony tail wagged frantically as he tried to chew on my gauntletted hands. I put him down and broke off a finger for him to chew on. Common Bone Dust 144kg Uncommon Bone Dust 4. 2kg Ancient Bone Dust 167. 9kg I finally had enough material to turn this shack into a proper lair for a necromancer. It was time to redecorate. I started at the far end of the room, opposite the door. There was no true cultivation on this world.

IMPS had many verses where young masters strutted about causing trouble, but Nadrack wasn't one of those. Feng Shui didn't matter here, but the principles were still useful for creating an environment in which mana would naturally attune itself to the concept of death. The Torch of Everflame was attached to my left shoulder, bone growing out to hold it in place. I was done with sitting in the dark all night. Common Bone Dust flowed out of the pouch and began to hover in the air where the workstation would be.

Crouching down, I worked my hands across the floating powder, using Bone Shaping to condense it into a solid form. The legs of the table were shaped like long femurs, and the edge of the top was ridged like ribs pushed together. The dog was watching me, still gnawing on my finger bone, but he was eyeing the new bone table legs like a living pug would look at roast chicken, the little fires where his eyes should be focused and unflickering.

Skulls were carefully shaped at the corners and the bottom of the legs, and then I solidified the surface. It was eight feet long, and waist-high on me. More dust flowed out, forming a socket for the bottom of the torch in the centre of the desk, near the far wall, but not so close that the flame might scorch the wood. It wouldn't be staying there for long anyway, but for now, it made the next phase easier. I ran my hands up the walls, dust flowing beneath them, creating bone sculptures of, well, more bones.

In case it wasn't apparent, I was going for a theme. Ribs, arms, and leering skull faces seemed to spread across the wood like melting ice revealing what was trapped inside. Once all the walls were covered in a webwork of skeletal mosaics, I turned to the gaps at the ends of the workstation. I'd left a foot-wide space at either side for a reason. I had loot to store, things that I didn't want to carry around, or be visible in the event Bork's mum decided to poke her head around the door.

Glancing at the bone-art covering the walls, I figured she'd be unlikely to notice finer details like highly illegal magical tomes, but I'd learned many lifetimes ago that it was better to be safe than sorry. Giant skulls. That would work. Hollow, with bone doors that I could leave sealed so they'd just look like more necrotic artwork. They would be a perfect blend of form and function, gothic art and handy storage space in one. They ended up looking like a goth's idea of a totem pole.

Two-foot-tall skulls, stretched like a bad prop from an Indiana Jones movie, were stacked on top of each other and fixed to the bone that had melded to the wall behind them. With a touch of my finger, I broke the seal on the top skull on the right and placed the tomes I'd stolen within it, along with most of the gold I'd made from trading or taken from the crypt. The alchemical ingredients went into the next one down, and in the bottom one, I placed the potions and the summoning reagents for Bork.

The alchemy set I'd taken was placed on the table, set out so that the alembics and pestles were organised in order of how often they'd be used. Training Bork in alchemy was likely to be a chore, but it would be useful for him to develop the craft. He would learn patience, care and be able to produce valuable items for sale. The first time he burnt his eyebrows off would also teach him to pay attention to my instructions.

With the walls suitably grim, I could already see the ambient mana slowly shifting its affinity, motes of blue and green fading to purple, grey and black. I sat down cross-legged in the centre of the room, the table on my left, and dredged through old memories for the patterns I needed. Dust swirled around me and settled into arcs and whorls on the floor. The central space was six feet long and three feet wide.

I kept it clear because that was where we'd be putting corpses for reanimation once Bork needed to create more advanced undead minions. Around it, I laid out the whorls, arcs, and esoteric runes that would create a combined reanimation and summoning circle. Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. Once I'd shaped all the dust back into a solid form, I stood back and continued to smile. Not that I had any choice when it came to my facial expression.

No food, no booze, no sex, no scowling at people who pissed me off. This life was going to suck. It would still be better than the three centuries I spent as a vampire lord's favourite animated teddy bear. I snapped my fingers, and the familiar comfort of a cigar appeared between my teeth. I made a stool with the last of my Common Bone Dust, three legs embossed with trios of skulls at the knee joints on the legs and sat down at my worktable. Time for the fun stuff.

I used a little Uncommon Bone Dust to forge a new cloak pin. The polished iron one wasn't susceptible to my pseudo-magic. The simple loop with a sharpened point to pierce through the cloth took only a minute to form, then I brought the cloak over using the dust I'd stuffed into its seams. I sent it back to its peg with a new pin in place and tossed the metal one onto a corner of the desk. Weapons… The gladius, an old and trusted friend, went on the table, and I tapped a finger against my jaw with a clacking sound.

I might as well keep it. It could serve as a spare in the event my new arms were damaged or broken in combat. I'd spent a few decades working with a Viking snatched from the ninth century on Earth; Jarl Hargrim had been a proper villain. Those had been good years. Pillaging and looting our way across a continent to destroy an empire. Hargrim had always said a man can never have enough knives. I touched the blade, and it dissolved into dust, flowing into my pouch.

That was another perk of the Pile of Dust upgrade to Dust to Dust. Any worked bone items could be dissolved into dust and returned to solidity almost instantly. A new gladius took shape, made with Ancient Bone dust this time. It gleamed a faint yellow, like ancient ivory, or as if it had been mixed with a little gold.

In keeping with the motif around me, grinning skulls formed a ring around the guard, and the pommel was formed into a jawless skull, the teeth poking out slightly to the side to help stop the blade from slipping out of my grasp on a recovery. With a finger, I traced out several runes on the blade.

While I had no access to mana, meaning I couldn't empower the glyphs and runes, centuries of study under skilled enchanters had left me well-versed in techniques that would make master de Blovenstein's moustache catch fire if he found out about them. Binding was first, a six-rune engraving far beyond the one Bork had been working with at school. I shaped the tip of one finger down to a hair-fine point, carving the runes as small as possible. It circled around the blade just above the hand guard.

Hardening was next: eight tiny runes with seraps in the middle of both sides of the blade. Sharpness was the last enchantment; six runes near the tip of the blade. Ancient Bone Gladius (Rare) Setting the blade aside, I pulled out more Ancient Bone Dust. Blunt damage was a hateful lover, my greatest friend against both armoured flesh-bods and my own kind, but also my greatest threat. Hargrim had favoured a heavy axe, with a bladed side and a hammer side.

Axes were great for breaking shields, and quite useful against armour as well. But they weren't as useful as a nice, sharp beak. Yellow bone became solid as I worked. The handle was five feet long, far larger for a heavy weapon than most people could reasonably swing, but bone was lighter than wood or steel. The head was three inches wide for the hammer, and I worked to pack the dust together, making it as heavy and dense as possible.

On the opposite side, I formed an eight-inch beak, narrowing down to a hardened tip. Again, I worked as much material into the section as I could to make it suitably weighty. It was still light for its size, but the enchantments could change that. I pulled off a finger and tossed it to Puggy, who was trying to chew on the slender leg of my stool. With a happy jaw-clack, he snatched it up and went back to his corner to nibble at it. One binding and one hardening enchantment were carved into the handle.

At the centre of the head, between the beak and hammer, I inscribed a mass rune. Another hardening enchantment went across both of the weapon's heads, and finally, I inlaid the glyphs for piercing at the tip of the beak. Ancient Bone Warhammer (exquisite) It was better than I'd hoped. Standing, I moved to the middle of the room and spun the weapon in my hands a few times. I'd managed to cram eight kilos of Ancient Bone Dust into it, and it still felt far lighter than a heavy warhammer ought to.

My strength stat was decent enough for my level, but once the mass glyphs were empowered, it would be weighty enough that I'd need to boost my strength. The question in my mind was who I should get to empower the runes. Bork was a novice, talented no doubt, but his mana reserves were still those of a newbie. He didn't have enough mana to make the most of the glyphs I'd carved.

De Blovenstien was an ass, but he had the strength and at least some experience in consciously guiding the process, which would yield a better result than Bork's instinctive method. He also didn't like me, and I'd felt it went slightly beyond the living's natural aversion to ambulatory corpses. There had been something to his tone and dismissiveness that had hinted at a deeper animus against me. So I could either make friends with a giant douchebag, or powerlevel Bork like crazy.

The hammer spun gracefully as I went through various styles, forms and katas to refresh my reflexes for the kinds of movement using a heavy two-handed weapon required. It was an automatic process, a dance ingrained into my subconscious, so my mind wandered as I swept the hammer back and forth. If I tried to get Blovenstein to help me, it might be a challenge, but power-levelling Bork also carried risks.

I'd make sure he always had an edge over his classmates, but he couldn't stand out too much, not until he was ready to abandon school and start out on his own. In a society like this, someone with his talent and inclination for darker arts would always be shunned. Sooner or later, he'd reject them all as a result of their hatred and want to move away from judging eyes.

The door swung open as the beak blurred past the entrance to my shed, and Bork stumbled backwards into the sunlight so he could keep his head attached to his neck. I had completely lost track of the time. Puggy shot past me and jumped onto the boy's chest, clicking his jaws together happily.

"What the hells have you done to my shed? And what's that horrible smell?" he squeaked.