Chương 37: Inheritance

Jack was sitting in his high-backed chair, the afternoon light was illuminating the room through the window. He turned the first parchment page of his grandfather's journal. The handwriting was neat and careful, but the words themselves were heavy with a century of guilt.

"If you are reading this, then you are a Frost-Grip," the journal began." And you have found the secret that I was too weak to destroy."

"My name is Alistair Frost-Grip. I was born with a core, but thanks to the blood of my mother, my mana was tied to the wind, not to the grave. I was a wind Mage. When I discovered this, I wept with pure relief. It meant I did not have to carry the family curse." Jack leaned forward, reading the faded ink carefully.

"We were not always a minor, impoverished house banished to this miserable valley," Alistair had written." Three hundred years ago, the Frost-Grip family ruled one of the major parts of the continent. We were absolute masters of the Grey Arts. We commanded armies that did not need to sleep or eat."

"But the Holy Church grew in power. They declared the Grey Arts to be heretical, an insult to the natural order of the gods. They launched a massive crusade against our family. Our armies were burned to ash by the enemy Mages. Our lands were seized. The surviving members of our bloodline were hunted down, stripped of their titles, and pushed to the absolute northern edge of the continent, left here to slowly freeze to death." Jack stopped reading for a moment. He looked up, staring at his blank bedroom wall.

Suddenly, a lot of things made sense. Old Miller had mentioned that the mages from the Holy Church had stopped coming north to help them thin out the wild beasts. To the villagers, it was a tragedy. To Jack, he now realized it was an absolute blessing. If a Holy Church mage ever came to this valley and saw his skeletal Night Shift hauling pine logs, they would execute him on the spot. Jack looked back down at the book. Alistair went on to explain his deep shame.

When his own father had died, Alistair had went into the lowest levels of the crypts to burn the perfectly preserved bodies of their most powerful and loyal ancestor mages. He was supposed to destroy the evidence to protect the remaining family. But he couldn't bring himself to do it. Jack's eyes widened slightly. Down there in the dark, behind walls, was an arsenal of preserved, high-tier mages just waiting to be claimed. But as Jack eagerly turned the page, he hit a massive roadblock.

The next section was titled: The Law of Permission.

"A necromancer cannot simply snap their fingers and raise whoever they wish," Alistair wrote, detailing the core mechanics of the magic." Mana is an invasive force. A human body, even a dead one, will naturally resist foreign mana trying to enter it. To raise an intelligent species, two hard rules must be followed."

"First, a weak mage cannot force their will upon a strong soul. The target must have a lower core level than the necromancer, or possess no core at all. Second, and most importantly, the necromancer needs Permission. The dead must allow the mana to enter. This is usually gained through a sworn oath made during the target's life, or through an immensely deep emotional bond of absolute loyalty."

"Permission," Jack whispered to himself. He finally understood why his magic had been working so flawlessly. He hadn't been raising random corpses. When he first went down into the crypts, he had raised the bones of the ancient castle guards. In life, those men had sworn a literal oath to serve the Frost-Grip family until the end of time. That oath acted as an open door, a permanent "Permission" for Jack's mana to enter their remains.

If Jack walked into a graveyard in a random city and tried to raise a dead peasant who had no connection to him, the corpse would violently resist his magic. He turned the page again, looking for the power scaling. He needed to know exactly what his current limits were. Instead of a simple list, Alistair had written a detailed observation of how a Necromancer's soul evolved, broken down by the core stages. The entry level was the Grey Core, the first tier. Alistair described it as a fragile, flickering spark.

A mage at this stage could control a few dozen humans who possessed no magic cores, provided they had Permission. However, the true weakness of the Grey Core was the natural world. Alistair noted that animals do not make oaths. They do not understand human concepts of loyalty. Therefore, beasts possess a 'Wild Soul.' Their instincts violently reject a necromancer's mental commands.

A Grey Core mage attempting to control a wild beast would find it almost impossible to keep the creature from turning feral and attacking everything in sight. Jack felt a cold knot form in his stomach. His entire plan for the Beast Tide had relied on a simple idea: wait for the militia to kill the first wave of beasts, raise the dead beasts, and use them to fight the rest of the pack. But according to his grandfather, a Grey Core was simply too weak to suppress a beast's wild soul easily.

If he tried to raise a dead beast right now, it would likely ignore his commands and start attacking his own villagers. Jack read on, desperate for a solution. The next stage was the Iron Core. At the second tier, the mana solidified into an unyielding foundation. Alistair's notes became highly specific here. A necromancer was strictly bound by the capacity of their soul. An Iron Core mage could simultaneously control a maximum of three Grey Core undead and two Iron Core undead.

Furthermore, the sheer density of an Iron Core allowed the mage to force a corpse with intact flesh and vocal cords to speak, though doing so drained immense amounts of energy. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Beyond that lay the Bronze, Silver, and Gold cores. With each stage, the capacity for control expanded mathematically. A Bronze Core could command nine Grey Core undead or three Iron Core undead or two Bronze Core undead at a time.

A Silver Core possessed enough pure mana to actually return fragments of the undead's original consciousness back to them, allowing the dead to think and make tactical decisions without the mage directing their every step. A Gold Core could create highly intelligent undead mages giving them their consciousness back for much longer periods. Below the Gold Core description, there was a final heading: Transcendental. But the neat handwriting suddenly became messy and erratic.

Alistair simply wrote that there were six levels beyond Gold, but he refused to document them. The methods required to bridge the gap past the Gold Core, he claimed, were too vile. Jack slowly closed the leather cover of the book. The diary was a massive treasure. It gave him a clear understanding of the rules governing his power. But it also presented a serious problem. The Beast Tide was coming.

Jack's core had been throbbing with intense heat lately, a sign that all his hard work building the village walls had pushed his Grey Core to the absolute limit. He was right on the edge of breaking through to the Iron Core. Jack paused, a frown creeping onto his face." Isn't it a bit too sudden, though?" he thought to himself. From the inherited memories, he knew that breaking through to the next core stage usually required years of experience. He was standing at the edge of it after roughly two months."

Whatever," Jack decided, shaking his head." Maybe it is just because I have been completely draining and overusing my powers to build a village every single night." But until he actually broke through, he was stuck at the Grey Core stage. Which meant he couldn't just rely on a massive army of dead beasts to effortlessly defeat the Beast Tide. His magic had limits. Jack grabbed his cane and stood up. He hid the book safely at the very bottom of his wooden clothing trunk, under a pile of coats.

He couldn't sit here worrying about magic all day.

He had a fief to run, and human engineering to check on. He left his room and walked down the mountain path toward the old Frost-Grip coal mine. The afternoon sky was gray and heavy with impending snow. Near the entrance to the mine tunnel, Jack found Giles and four of his carpenters. They were standing around two wooden carts.

"Lord Jack," Giles called out, bowing his head respectfully as Jack approached. Jack looked at the carts. Resting on them were four massive, incredibly thick wooden doors. The edges of the doors were heavily coated in black, sticky pine pitch, and the frames were lined with thick strips of boiled leather.

"The airtight doors," Jack noted, a genuine smile touching his face. Weeks ago, Jack had asked Giles to build these.

"I must deeply apologize for the delay, My Lord," Giles said, wiping sawdust from his coat.

"Building the Winter Cabins, digging the trench, and assembling the gatehouse took every able-bodied man we had. I only had time to finish four of these doors over the past few days. The frames are of pine, and the tar will create a perfect seal against the rock walls."

"Do not apologize, Giles," Jack said, inspecting the heavy iron hinges Barnaby had forged for them.

"You and your men have worked miracles this month. Four doors are more than enough to start expanding the safe zones." The main tunnel of the coal mine was currently clear of the deadly gas because Jack's skeletons had dug a vertical ventilation shaft. The fire burning at the bottom of the shaft created a draft that constantly pulled fresh air into the mountain. But the side branches of the mine were still completely filled with stagnant, toxic gas.

"How will we install them, Lord Jack?" one of the younger carpenters asked nervously, looking into the dark, intimidating mouth of the mine.

"If we walk into the side tunnels to hang the frames, the bad air will suffocate us before we can even hammer the first nail properly."

"You will leave the doors right here," Jack instructed calmly.

"Return to the village and get your hot evening meals. My private mages will handle the installation tonight. They possess techniques to hold their breath for extraordinary amounts of time." Giles nodded, fully accustomed to the mysterious capabilities of Jack's hidden retainers by now.

"As you command, My Lord. We will leave the wedges and heavy mallets on the carts." The carpenters happily abandoned the heavy loads and hurried down the path toward the warm Great Hall. Jack returned to the castle as the sun set. He ate a quiet meal in his room, locked his door, and sat in his high-backed chair. As the village fell entirely silent, Jack closed his eyes and pushed his mind down into the crypts. He connected to the fifteen skeletons of his Night Shift. The familiar pressure settled over his brain.

"Awake," Jack commanded. He marched the fifteen skeletons out of the crypts to the mine entrance. Through their empty eye sockets, Jack looked at the four heavy wooden doors sitting on the carts.

"Grab them. Two to a door. Carry them inside." The skeletons hoisted the massive wooden doors onto their bony shoulders. They went into the dark, sprawling tunnel of the coal mine. They didn't need torches to see, and more importantly, they didn't need oxygen. Jack guided them half a mile deep into the mountain, following the main tunnel until they reached the first major side-branch. The air here was entirely still.

A human taking a single breath in this side-tunnel would collapse within seconds from the toxic gas. The skeletons felt nothing.

"Set the frame against the rock. Drive the wedges in tight." The skeletons worked in perfect unison. They lifted the wooden frame into the opening of the side tunnel. Four other skeletons raised the iron mallets Giles had left behind and began smashing the wooden wedges into the gaps between the frame and the uneven stone walls. Bang. Bang. Bang. The echoes rang loudly through the empty mine, but no one in the village below could hear it.

Once the frame was brutally wedged into place, the skeletons pushed the heavy door shut and secured the iron latch. The pine pitch and leather strips pressed tightly against the frame, creating a near-perfect airtight seal. Jack immediately felt the change in the air currents through the skeletons. Because the draft from the ventilation shaft could no longer blow freely past this side-branch, the pressure shifted.

The fresh air was now being forced into the smaller, unsealed cracks and pushing the trapped toxic gas out. By tomorrow, a whole new section of the mine would be safe for human miners to enter. Jack commanded them to move deeper into the mountain and install the remaining three doors at the next junctions.

As he was sitting in his chair, maintaining the complex mental link and directing fifteen individual units to perform heavy carpentry in the pitch black, Jack felt a profound, burning heat building in the center of his chest. His Grey Core was throbbing violently, pulsing with an intense, demanding energy. He was pushing his soul to its absolute limits every single night. The breakthrough to the Iron Core was so close he could almost taste it.

He just needed one final push to shatter the ceiling of his current power. And with the Beast Tide drawing closer every day, Jack knew he was going to need that power very soon.