Chương 101: Some Warnings Exist for a Reason

Once the Dungeon Guardian finally stopped moving, the party discovered that killing an ancient monster was only the beginning of the work. Mellia immediately organized everyone around the enormous remains, assigning each person something useful before exhaustion convinced them to simply abandon everything underground. Kart handled the largest bones with help from his guardian construct, dragging ribs, sections of spine, and pieces of the shattered skull away from the center of the passage.

Even damaged, several pieces were large enough that transporting them would require multiple trips. According to Mellia, monster bones from something that old could still fetch a respectable price. Craftsmen might turn them into weapon handles, armor reinforcement, alchemical containers, or whatever other strange equipment people invented after deciding ordinary metal was apparently too boring. Sieghart had stopped questioning the creativity of craftsmen years ago.

If someone could look at a gigantic undead panther skeleton and immediately think about making boots from it, there was probably a market somewhere willing to reward that particular kind of imagination. The pieces that still carried flesh were treated very differently. Mellia told Sieghart to burn every trace until absolutely nothing remained, since tissue reconstructed by a developing dungeon could remain contaminated with unstable mana even after the guardian itself stopped functioning.

"You want all of it gone?"

"All of it."

"That sounds suspiciously like the sort of instruction people give right before something horrible happens when you ignore it." Mellia gave him a tired look that required no explanation after everything they had survived underground. If there was even a small possibility that the remaining flesh might regenerate, none of them wanted to discover it while carrying the bones outside.

"Exactly." Sieghart accepted that answer and began working. Concentrated flames crawled across torn muscles and strips of half-regenerated skin, steadily reducing everything organic to blackened residue before he increased the heat again and burned even that residue into fine gray ash. The smell was terrible enough that Hernan complained from the other side of the chamber, although he made no attempt to trade jobs.

Sieghart decided that enduring complaints was preferable to carrying pieces of ancient spine larger than his entire body. While the others worked, Sieghart eventually returned to the place where the corrupted core had shattered. Most fragments had lost their glow completely, leaving irregular dark-red pieces scattered among dust, broken ribs, and debris from the final attacks.

"What about these?" Mellia glanced toward the fragments while tightening one of the carrying straps around a bundle of smaller bones. Her expression made it clear that the pieces interested her considerably less than the remains everyone had already started sorting for transport.

"Worthless." Sieghart picked up one piece between two fingers. It looked similar to red crystal now that the internal light had vanished, although faint traces of something still moved beneath the cracked surface whenever he focused carefully upon it.

"Because it broke?"

"Mostly. A core loses nearly all crafting value once the internal structure collapses. Corrupted ones are different anyway. Guild orders say we destroy every corrupted core we find, whether it belongs to a monster or anything else." Sieghart looked from Mellia to the fragment resting between his fingers, unexpectedly bothered by how casually she had mentioned the rule. Mira had warned him before, but nobody had ever told him that Lunar Arc maintained an actual standing order about corrupted cores.

"Every corrupted core?"

"Yes." The information was new enough that Sieghart almost asked several questions immediately, particularly since nobody had bothered mentioning the rule during his previous lessons. Apparently, corrupted cores were dangerous enough to destroy on sight, yet not important enough to explain properly to him. He considered pushing for details, but Mellia had already returned to organizing the bones, and the answer probably would have been some variation of dangerous, forbidden, or extremely dangerous and forbidden.

Those descriptions were useful, but they rarely explained the mechanism involved. For the moment, Sieghart let the matter go. There were several tons of monster remains between them and the surface, everyone was exhausted, and standing underground discussing guild regulations seemed like an efficient way to make the day feel even longer. The next several hours disappeared into repetitive work.

Kart and his construct hauled the heaviest pieces, Hernan assembled temporary carrying frames from his rings, Lucia and Mellia kept everything organized despite looking nearly as tired as everyone else. Sieghart alternated between burning contaminated tissue and using Wind Magic to help move lighter bones. It was not glamorous work, but after nearly becoming food for an unfinished Dungeon Guardian, carrying ribs toward daylight felt unusually peaceful.

During one return trip, everyone moved ahead of him while arguing about whether the guardian's skull should be sold whole or divided into smaller pieces. Sieghart remained behind for several seconds, staring toward the scattered fragments of the corrupted core. He knew exactly what Mira had told him about corrupted cores, and he now knew Lunar Arc ordered its members to destroy them immediately.

Those were two excellent reasons to leave the fragments where they were, which made his next decision difficult to defend. Sieghart raised one hand and created a faint current of air. The smallest core fragments trembled, lifted silently from the ground, then drifted toward him beneath several pieces of ordinary debris so that anyone glancing backward would see nothing unusual. He opened his backpack just enough for the fragments to slip inside before closing it again.

Nobody had been watching, which somehow made the suspicious maneuver feel even more ridiculous, as though he had carefully deceived an audience that had never existed. There was no point pretending otherwise: he was being reckless, and he knew it. Yet knowing that did not make the unanswered questions disappear, nor did it make him more comfortable accepting rules whose reasons everyone seemed strangely unwilling to explain.

Sieghart had spent too much of his life accepting incomplete explanations from adults who supposedly knew better. Sometimes they had been correct, sometimes they had been wrong, and sometimes they had deliberately hidden information because they preferred him obedient rather than informed. Mira was different from his parents, and Sieghart trusted her considerably more than most people.

That did not mean he intended to build his entire understanding of magic around the assumption that every warning she gave him should remain unquestioned forever. If corrupted cores were dangerous, he wanted to understand why. If absorbing one caused something specific, he wanted to know what happened. Perhaps that was arrogance, but relying entirely upon secondhand warnings felt dangerous in a different way.

By the time the last useful remains reached the surface, evening had already begun settling across the hills surrounding Bellhaven. Fresh air felt almost unnatural after so many hours breathing dust, smoke, monster stench, and the unpleasant humidity of underground passages. Mellia looked toward the darkening sky before finally declaring that returning immediately would be stupid.

Everyone was exhausted, Lucia had nearly emptied her reserves, and traveling through unfamiliar territory at night after fighting a Dungeon Guardian offered no meaningful advantage. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"We camp here. We leave after sunrise and head straight back to Lunar Arc." Nobody argued with the decision, because even Hernan looked ready to collapse where he stood. The idea of walking for several more hours in darkness sounded considerably worse than spending one additional night beside a mine they had already cleared. The decision transformed the group almost immediately.

Once tents were raised and the valuable monster parts were stacked nearby, the tense discipline that had carried them through the mine disappeared beneath tired laughter, loud conversation, and rapidly disappearing travel rations. Hernan began exaggerating how close one of his spears had come to destroying the core by itself. Kart corrected him with exactly three words, Lucia laughed hard enough to nearly choke on dried meat, and Mellia stopped pretending she was too responsible to enjoy herself.

Sieghart sat with them long enough to eat. Their celebration was hardly impressive by normal standards, consisting mostly of stale bread, dried meat, water, and increasingly dramatic retellings of events everyone present had personally witnessed several hours earlier. Apparently surviving something terrible changed the experience considerably once there was enough distance between danger and memory.

Even the moments that had nearly killed them became material for jokes when everyone responsible for remembering them was still alive. Sieghart even laughed once when Lucia imitated Hernan's expression after the guardian ignored his first attack, which immediately caused Hernan to insist that his face had displayed tactical concentration rather than the obvious fear everyone else had witnessed. Eventually, Sieghart decided he had spent enough time pretending his attention was on the conversation.

The broken core fragments inside his backpack had remained at the edge of his thoughts since leaving the mine, making genuine relaxation almost impossible.

"I'm going to sleep." Hernan stared at him as if Sieghart had announced plans to return underground and challenge another guardian alone. Apparently going to bed before the celebration ended was more suspicious to him than any magical decision made during the mission.

"Already?"

"I nearly got eaten by a dead cat the size of a house."

"That happened to all of us." Mellia watched him for another moment before simply waving him toward the tents. She looked exhausted enough that she probably intended to follow soon, although Lucia and Hernan appeared determined to continue talking until their voices failed.

"Go. We'll keep the noise down." Sieghart doubted that last part, but he nodded anyway before entering his tent. Nobody questioned him further, and the conversation outside resumed almost immediately, giving him exactly the privacy he had been hoping to obtain. He closed the flap, sat on his bedroll, and listened to the others for several seconds. Their voices remained loud enough that nobody would notice anything unless he somehow managed to make a corrupted monster core explode inside the tent.

The possibility deserved more consideration than Sieghart wanted to admit, particularly because nearly every dangerous magical experiment began with him believing he understood enough to remain in control. This time, he knew almost nothing about what he intended to touch. He opened his backpack carefully and removed the fragments one at a time. They rested beneath his spare clothes, completely dark except for tiny red threads visible inside the largest pieces when he turned them toward the weak magical light.

Nothing about them looked particularly threatening, which Sieghart considered an extremely poor reason to trust them. The guardian itself had looked half-dead, half-finished, and barely capable of standing until it started demolishing entire sections of the mine. He arranged the fragments across a folded cloth and stared at them. Two separate warnings should have been enough for anyone sensible.

Sieghart understood that perfectly, yet the fact that nobody had explained what actually happened only made his curiosity worse, especially after years spent discovering magical rules through experimentation. Sieghart extended one hand over the fragments and focused upon the familiar sensation he normally used when absorbing mana from monster cores. He told himself he would stop immediately if anything felt wrong, despite recognizing how weak that promise sounded. At least this one is already broken.

He realized immediately that this was perhaps the weakest justification he had ever used before doing something obviously dangerous, which was impressive considering several of his childhood experiments had involved combining unknown magical effects near farm equipment. For several seconds, nothing happened, and relief mixed strangely with disappointment.

Sieghart almost withdrew his hand and accepted that the shattered core no longer contained anything useful, which would have transformed his disobedience into nothing more than wasted curiosity. Then the fragments reacted, and faint crimson light returned beneath their fractured surfaces. Thin threads of energy moved toward the edges of every piece, gathering in the direction of his hand as though the broken core had recognized exactly what he wanted. Sieghart froze with his fingers still extended.

He could stop now, close the backpack, destroy the fragments tomorrow, and tell himself that confirming they remained active had been enough information for one reckless experiment. Instead, curiosity won by the smallest possible margin. Sieghart focused more strongly on the same pulling sensation he used with ordinary monster cores, deliberately inviting the corrupted energy to respond rather than merely observing what it did.

The first strand entered his palm, and cold spread through his arm without producing actual pain. Ordinary monster cores felt energetic and almost weightless during absorption, while this energy carried a strange heaviness that seemed to settle somewhere deeper than muscle. The remaining fragments activated together before Sieghart could reconsider.

Dark-red light rushed from every piece, crossed the short distance toward his hand, and disappeared into his body while the crystal structures rapidly fractured into smaller and smaller pieces. Less than ten seconds later, every fragment had become reddish-gray dust. Sieghart remained completely still, searching his body for pain, corruption, nausea, uncontrolled mana, or any other immediate sign that his experiment had become a terrible idea.

Nothing happened at first, and the absence of immediate consequences almost convinced Sieghart that the warning had been exaggerated. That comforting possibility lasted only a moment before translucent letters appeared in front of his eyes and the System delivered its answer. Experience increased by 1000 points. Level increased from 10 to 11. You have gained 10 Free Status Points. Sieghart stared at the notification while his initial concern briefly disappeared beneath surprise.

A broken core that Mellia had considered completely worthless had still contained enough usable essence to grant exactly one thousand personal experience. A second notification replaced the first before he could decide whether that discovery made his decision clever or merely lucky. The wording immediately pushed his attention away from the experience reward and toward something considerably more difficult to interpret. A fundamental magical affinity has awakened.

You have unlocked: Necromancy Necromancy Path Discovered: Undead Creation New Technique Acquired: Zombification — Level 1 The spell forces a sufficiently intact dead body to resume limited activity under magical control. +3 Resistance per level. Three Resistance per level was absurdly useful, especially for a spell he could potentially train repeatedly.

Sieghart would normally have started calculating targets, mana costs, duration, range, and the fastest safe method for gaining levels before the notification had even disappeared. This time, he remained motionless because the System had given him more than technical knowledge. Like other forms of magic, the spell carried an instinctive understanding of the emotional state needed to make the mana properly assume its intended shape. Fire answered easily to aggression, heat, and the desire to burn.

White Magic responded when he genuinely wanted to protect, reinforce, or heal someone. Necromancy demanded something considerably more disturbing than either of those familiar emotional foundations. Zombification wanted an almost endless refusal to accept death. The caster needed to look at a corpse and reject the fact that it had stopped moving, reject decomposition, reject separation, and desperately desire for that ending to become meaningless.

It was not ordinary grief, because grief still acknowledged what had happened. It was not sadness either, because sadness could eventually fade. The magic demanded rejection strong enough to insist that death itself had made an unacceptable decision. Sieghart's stomach tightened as the requirement became clearer, because he already possessed exactly the kind of feeling the spell wanted. He had buried it beneath training, revenge, investigation, and years of forcing himself to continue moving forward.

The spell did not activate on its own, yet the knowledge behind it seemed to recognize something inside him immediately. It reached toward memories he normally avoided, connecting its emotional requirement to the strongest example his mind could possibly provide. The destroyed farm returned first, followed by smoke, broken earth, and the terrible emptiness left after the explosion. Then came memories of two people who had taken him in when his own parents had treated him like a disappointment.

His grandfather and grandmother appeared in his thoughts with painful clarity, not as corpses but as they had been before everything ended. Sieghart remembered meals, books, farm work, arguments, quiet evenings, and the simple certainty that he had once possessed somewhere safe. Then another thought formed, unwanted and immediate: he knew where they had been buried.

His hands began trembling before he even understood why, while the newly acquired magical knowledge quietly supplied possibilities he had never allowed himself to imagine. If enough of their bodies remained, Zombification could probably make them move again. The spell would not restore true life, and its knowledge never promised anything resembling resurrection, yet those distinctions suddenly felt less comforting than they should have.