Chương 38: Wild Soul

A full week had passed in the frozen valley, and a new routine settled over the village. Jack was standing at the window of his balcony, looking down at the settlement. Even though it was far, he could barely see a group of heavily coated men was pulling a wooden handcart up the path from the old mine. The cart was loaded with dark chunks of coal. Because of the airtight, pitch-sealed doors the Night Shift had installed in the mine tunnels a week ago.

Human miners were finally able to enter the mine safely upto a safe point marked by Jack. Small-scale mining had officially started. The village now had a steady supply of standard fuel to keep the communal furnaces burning bright. But heat, as Jack was painfully realizing, could not be eaten. Jack turned away from the balcony and sat down at his desk. He opened the village supply ledgers, his expression grim. The massive pile of grain he had bought from Merchant Gary was disappearing at a terrifying rate.

When you had an entire village of desperate, hard-working people who had been starving for months, food vanished much faster than the standard winter suggested. They were eating into their reserves too quickly. Jack thought about the greenhouse his skeletons and the villagers had built. It was a complete success. But it was just one small building. A single greenhouse could only provide a few fresh vegetables to ward off sickness, it could not provide staple calories to feed over forty people.

To actually feed the fief, Jack knew he needed at least five more greenhouses. But building them was completely impossible. To trap the sunlight and keep the cold out, a greenhouse required clear glass panes. They had barely managed to salvage enough unbroken glass from the castle to build the first one. Making fresh glass required specialized sand, massive kilns, and highly skilled glassblowers—none of which existed in this impoverished territory. A knock on the door pulled Jack from his dark thoughts.

"Come in," Jack called out. Giles stepped into the room. He looked shaken.

"My Lord," Giles said, pulling off his wool cap.

"The woodcutters came back from the woods early today. They dropped their axes and ran back to the palisade. They refuse to go back out." Jack frowned, leaning forward on his desk.

"Why?"

"My Lord. They found a carcass," Giles replied, his voice tight with anxiety.

"A dead mountain hound. It looked like it had been in a fight with something bigger, but the important part is that it was far below the snowline. It was barely a mile from the village gates." Jack's heart sank.

"Did they see any live ones?" Jack asked.

"A few fast shadows were moving in the deep trees, they said. It is just the scouts of the main packs," Giles explained, running a rough hand over his beard.

"The men have lived in these mountains their whole lives. They know exactly how this starts. The beasts are starving up in the high peaks, and they are moving down to the valley looking for meat. In just a few weeks, the entire valley will be crawling with them. The men have decided they will not go out into the woods alone anymore." Jack nodded slowly. He could not blame them. Regular peasants with wood-axes were just fresh meat to a desperate predator.

"Tell the men they do not have to work alone," Jack ordered firmly.

"From now on, no one leaves the gates without an escort. Assign two guards armed with Barnaby's new boar spears to every woodcutting detail. And double the watch on the palisade walls at night."

"Yes, My Lord," Giles said, visibly relieved that Jack was taking the threat seriously. He bowed respectfully and quickly left the room to organize the guards. Jack sat alone in the quiet study. His Grey Core was painfully close to breaking through to the Iron Core. But a magical breakthrough wouldn't matter if his current military strategy was flawed.

His original plan for the Beast Tide had been very simple: let the human militia kill the first wave of beasts, use his necromancy to raise the dead animal corpses, and send them charging back into the forest to fight their own packmates. But Jack's grandfather's diary had warned him that animals possessed a 'Wild Soul' that violently resisted magical control. He needed to know if his grandfather was right. He wanted to test it. Jack stood up, grabbed his cane, and left his study.

He walked down the stone corridor and told Karen not to disturb him for the rest of the afternoon. Then, he locked his bedroom door and descended the hidden trapdoor into the crypts. He bypassed the Night Shift and walked straight over to a tall skeleton leaning against a stone pillar. It was Bones, one of his original and most reliable retainers.

"Put on your armour," Jack commanded mentally.

"You are coming with me." Jack and the disguised skeleton left the castle through the hidden cellar chute. They walked silently down the mountain path, bypassing the busy village entirely, and headed straight into the southern woods where Giles's men had been working. The forest was incredibly cold and entirely silent. After walking for nearly twenty minutes, Jack spotted a patch of trampled snow near the base of a tree. Lying in the snow was the carcass of a wild mountain hound.

It was a massive, ugly creature, its ribs showing clearly through its matted gray fur. It had likely died of starvation and the freezing cold just a few days ago. Jack stood a few feet away, leaning on his cane. Bones stood silently beside him.

"Alright, grandfather," Jack whispered to himself, his breath pluming in the air.

"Let's see if you were right." Jack focused his mind. He pulled a thread from his Grey Core and pushed it directly into the carcass of the mountain hound. The beast's body violently twitched. With a sickening crunch of joints, the dead hound pushed itself up from the snow. But the moment it stood, Jack felt an agonizing spike of pressure in his head. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. It felt like grabbing a thrashing fish with bare hands.

Unlike his human skeletons, which were empty vessels that accepted his commands perfectly, the beast's mind was a chaotic storm of pure instinct. It did not understand loyalty. It only understood hunger and rage. The undead hound snarled, its dead eyes flashing with unstable magic. It ignored Jack's mental command to sit. Instead, it lunged forward, snapping its jaws directly at Bone's leg.

"Sit down!" Jack commanded, forcing a massive wave of mana into the creature to suppress its instincts. Jack dropped to one knee, grabbing his head as a vicious migraine ripped through his skull. The sheer willpower required to force the beast to obey was staggering. The hound froze in place, its muscles trembling as it fought Jack's control with every ounce of its wild soul. Jack quickly severed the magical link. The undead hound collapsed back into the snow, lifeless once more.

Jack stayed on his knee, panting heavily. Alistair's diary was completely right. The Wild Soul was too chaotic. It took nearly all of his focus just to make one single dead beast sit still. If he tried to raise and control twenty dead beasts in the middle of a chaotic siege, his brain would simply melt from the strain, and the feral beasts would turn around and attack his own villagers. His strategy was not going to work. He could not use the Beast Tide against itself.

Jack slowly stood up, relying heavily on his cane.

"This is a problem," he muttered. He needed heavy hitters to defend the village gates. But human peasants were too weak, and fresh beast corpses were too wild. Jack stared at the dead hound in the snow, his mind racing through the rules of necromancy he had learned. Rule one: Humans resist foreign mana because of their soul-core, unless they swore an oath. Rule two: Beasts resist foreign mana because of their wild, feral instincts. Jack paused. He looked at Bones. Bones had no soul-core, and he had no flesh.

He was just perfect for the job. An idea struck Jack like a bolt of lightning. What if the wild instinct of an animal was tied to its flesh and its recent life? What if he found a beast that had been dead for so long that its feral spirit had completely faded away? Jack turned around and looked back toward the high peaks of the Frost-Grip castle.

When he had first explored the deep storage vaults of his ancestors' crypts after reading his grandfather's diary, he had seen old furniture, rusted armor, and hunting trophies from centuries past. And in the corner of the deepest vault was the massive, perfectly preserved skeleton of an Alpha Winter Wolf.

"Bones," Jack said, a sudden, eager smile breaking across his face.

"We are going back." They hurried back to the castle. Jack left Bones at the entrance of the crypts and took a single candle deep into the storage vaults. He walked past the dusty relics until he found it. On a large wooden display pedestal was the skeleton of the Alpha Winter Wolf. It was gigantic, easily the size of a small horse. Its skull was thick, and its fangs were like curved iron daggers. It was a trophy from an era when the Frost-Grip family hunted monsters for sport.

Because it had been cleaned and preserved by ancient taxidermists, there was not a single scrap of flesh or fur left on it. It was completely bone. Jack stepped up to the pedestal. He placed his hand on the massive skull. He pushed a thread of his Grey Core directly into the marrow of the ancient bones. Because the beast was so massive, the mana drain was intense. It felt like Jack was trying to fill a massive, empty wooden barrel with a small cup.

His core throbbed, aching as he poured nearly half of his total energy reserves into the frame. But there was absolutely no resistance. No wild soul fought back. The feral instincts had vanished centuries ago. The massive skeleton shifted. Slowly, the giant Alpha Wolf stood up. Jack braced himself, ready to cut the connection if it attacked. The skeletal wolf looked down at Jack. It tilted its massive, bony head to the side.

Then, it stepped off the pedestal, walked over to Jack, and aggressively nudged its heavy skull against Jack's chest, nearly knocking him over. Jack stumbled back, laughing in pure disbelief. It didn't act like a feral predator. Stripped of its wild soul, and completely filled with Jack's mana, it acted exactly like an oversized, slightly clumsy puppet.

"Well," Jack said, patting the cold, hard bone of the creature's neck.

"You are certainly going to be useful. Let's call you Grim." Jack needed to test the creature's combat strength immediately. That night, Jack sat comfortably in his locked bedroom. He sent Grim out through the cellar chute, guiding the massive wolf down the mountain and deep into the woods where the scouts had been spotted. Jack closed his eyes, seeing the dark forest through Grim's empty eye sockets. After a few hours of silent roaming, Grim found them.

A small pack of four living mountain hounds were tearing at the frozen roots of a tree. They caught the scent of old bone and turned, snarling at the massive undead intruder. The four hounds charged.

"Kill them," Jack commanded mentally. Grim just stood there. Jack panicked as the first hound leaped, its jaws snapping at Grim's skeletal leg. Grim didn't react. He didn't flinch, and he didn't fight back. Then, the realization hit Jack like a physical blow. Because Grim had no 'Wild Soul' left, he had absolutely no natural instincts. He didn't know how to defend himself. He didn't know how to hunt. He was just an empty vessel waiting for explicit instructions.

"Bite!" Jack commanded frantically." Bite the one on the left!" Grim's massive jaws snapped shut on the hound's neck, crushing it instantly.

"Turn! Swipe with your right paw!" Jack ordered. It was mentally exhausting. Jack had to manually puppet every single movement of the massive beast. Every step, every bite, every dodge had to be actively commanded through the mental link. Operating the beast was like trying to control a complex, heavy machine with his bare mind. By the time Grim crushed the skull of the fourth and final hound, Jack was gasping for air in his room. His head was pounding with a vicious migraine. His Grey Core was throbbing wildly.

"Return," Jack wheezed mentally. He severed the active combat link, letting Grim simply walk back to the crypts on a basic homing command. Grim was incredibly strong and completely obedient, but Jack realized he could never use the wolf to fight off an entire Beast Tide. If Jack had to manually control every single bite and scratch against hundreds of charging monsters, his brain would melt from the strain in mere minutes. He needed a way to kill the beasts that didn't require his constant magical focus.

The next morning, the village gates opened to a massive surprise. Bones, heavily disguised in his iron armor, was pulling a wooden sled out of the forest. He dragged the sled directly into the center of the village square. Stacked on the sled were the carcasses of the four mountain hounds Grim had killed the night before. The villagers gathered around, staring in absolute awe at the massive amounts of fresh meat and fur. Giles hurried out of the Great Hall, his eyes wide.

He looked at the silent figure of Bones, then up at Jack, who was walking down the path from the castle.

"Lord Jack," Giles said, pointing to the sled.

"Your mages… they went into the woods?"

"They hunted the vanguard scouts last night," Jack said smoothly, leaning on his cane to hide his lingering exhaustion.

"Have the women skin the beasts. The fur will make warm coats, and the meat goes into the communal stew pots tonight." A cheer went up from the villagers. Fresh meat was a luxury they hadn't seen in months. But Jack pulled Giles away from the celebrating crowd, walking toward the newly dug trench that completely surrounded the village's wooden walls.

"The mages cannot fight the main pack for us," Jack said quietly, his expression serious.

"There are too many beasts, and human stamina has limits. If they reach the wooden walls, they will overwhelm us by sheer numbers." Jack tapped his cane against the earth at the bottom of the deep trench.

"We need the terrain to kill them for us," Jack instructed.

"Take the thick leftover branches from the woodcutters. Have Barnaby's apprentices sharpen the ends into points. I want your men to climb down into the trench and bury the blunt ends deep into the earth. Angle the sharpened points straight up." Giles looked down into the wide pit, his eyes widening as the brutality of the trap set in.

"A spike pit," Giles whispered.

"If a charging beast falls into the trench, the weight of its own body will impale it on the stakes."

"Exactly," Jack said flatly.

"We cannot match them blade for claw. So we will let gravity do the fighting. Get to work."