While he knew the wraiths were a necessity, researching the spell wasn’t what Norman wanted to spend time on. The research part was fine, it was the experimenting on his people that bothered him. But it was done now. This would allow him to focus his efforts elsewhere.
There were many things he wanted to accomplish with his magic, but the most pressing was figuring out the issue with using undead blood. It was something that had plagued him for far too long and he wanted an answer.
While it didn’t stop him from using his magic to its full potential, it necessitated that he constantly returned to his living form to make that happen. Norman didn’t mind being alive, there were certain advantages to that state. But being undead brought about its own special advantages that Norman would like to spend more time experiencing and researching.
He looked at the magically imbued knife on his table. It had been provided to Norman at his request. Although if anyone suspected Norman had asked for it, not for self-defense, but to kill himself, they may have not been as enthusiastic about its construction.
“Straight to the heart, then pull it out. How hard could that be,” he muttered to himself as he gathered the courage to perform the action.
He was certain he could get Eugene to kill him if he asked, but Norman didn’t want to burden anyone else with this responsibility. With a deep intake of breath, Norman snatched the knife off the table and set the point to where his heart was. Before he could second-guess himself, he thrust the blade into his chest.
The pain was excruciating. Almost made worse by the fact he knew it was coming. But he gritted his teeth and yanked the blade out with a spray of arterial blood. Good, at least he hadn’t missed, that would have been embarrassing.
He swayed on his feet and fell over as his blood pumped out of his body. Soon his vision started to blur and go dark. It took far longer to die than he would have liked. The last thing he thought before his vision faded completely was that he should have asked someone else to do this.
When Norman woke up, he was lying on the floor. He glanced at the hourglass off to the side and saw that less than five minutes had passed since he stabbed himself.
He stood up from the floor and inspected his body. The hole was gone and his skin showed no signs of the wound, only the grey cast marking him as undead.
Norman smiled and went over to his clothes that he had placed on a nearby chair. He had done the deed naked. No point ruining a perfectly good set of clothes if he didn’t need to. His goal was to remain undead until he resolved the issue with the blood. Whether or not the world would see fit to allow that remained to be seen. But he would give it his best attempt.
The first thing he did after getting dressed was go through all of his spells in his undead form, using first his living blood, then his undead blood. He wanted to see which ones worked and which ones didn’t.
It was no surprise when Norman found that all of his basic spells like Bone Armor and Orb of Decay worked with either substance fine. It seemed like only when he got to the more advanced spells, that used magic circles, did the undead blood not work properly.
Originally, he had hoped it was only the Revival spell that was affected. But it seemed that was too much to hope for.
Was it something with the way magic circles changed spells that affected the components that could be used? Not the end of the world if it was, but certainly annoying. He suspected the cause and solution were going to be tied together no matter what he discovered. Which should make his efforts a bit easier. Now if he could only figure out what that solution was.
Norman first tried inverting the circles as he had with the exclusion zones. When that didn’t have any effect, he moved on to rotating the symbols. He started by moving the orientation a hundred and eighty degrees from their original positions.
He hadn’t expected that change to do anything so he wasn’t all that surprised when the spell didn’t work. He only tested it because it was an easy thing to rule out.
From there he played with changing the symbol layouts so they ran backward. His thought process was that undeath was the reverse of life. So maybe it also had to work in reverse.
He quickly lost track of time as he experimented. It was only when Eugene popped in that he stopped.
“Boss, you need to take a break and get cleaned up,” Eugene stated from the entry to the testing room.
“Huh… oh, yeah, just give me a few more hours. I’m almost done.”
“You said that a few hours ago. You’ve been at this for a week straight without food or rest.” Eugene walked up and hoisted Norman away from his desk.
Norman had just enough time to stuff a few of his notes into one of his pouches before Eugene dragged him out of the room.
“I can walk on my own,” he grumbled and Eugene put him down, but the man blocked the hallway back toward the testing room.
After smoothing out his rumpled clothes, Norman headed to his room to do as Eugene suggested.
As Norman passed the mirror in his room, he stopped to look at himself. He winced at the state of his body. It had decayed quite a bit during his extended experimentation session. With a sigh, he reached into his pouch on the nearby bed and pulled out one of his potions. One of the hastily grabbed note sheets stuck to his hand and he had to shake it off. It fell to the floor as he unstoppered the bottle and sucked down the healing contents within.
He watched in the mirror as his skin started to heal and reknit itself. Norman always found the act of healing to be very mesmerizing. As he was watching this, his eyes caught the sheet of notes reflected in the mirror. It had landed on the floor with the spell diagram face up.
It felt like something drew his gaze to that sheet of paper. Then he realized what it was. His magical intuition was kicking up a fuss. It said the spell would work.
The reason he was here was quickly forgotten as he turned away from the mirror to locate the page on the floor. His eyes soon landed on the discarded note. But when he looked at it, the feeling had vanished.
“What the hell?”
A bit manic, he rushed over and picked up the page, turning it every which way to try and see what his intuition had picked up on. But nothing was happening. Then he looked into the mirror again, while holding the page up. And boom, it was back.
He glanced around his room until he spotted something to write with. Clearing a spot on his small side table, Norman copied the spell on the backside of the sheet, using the faint lines that could be seen through the paper.
When he was done, he had his answer. The spell symbols had to be mirrored to work with undead blood.
It was such a stupidly simple solution. How had he not realized this sooner?
With newfound drive, Norman rushed out of his room, only to run head-first into Eugene.
“That was the quickest bath ever. Should we contact Guinness World Records for you?”
“I just had a breakthrough, I need to go test it out.” Norman tried to squeeze past Eugene, but the man didn’t budge.
“I don’t hear alarm bells blaring in the distance, I think this breakthrough can wait thirty minutes while you clean up and have some food.”
“I don’t need food,” Norman started to argue but Eugene leaned in and quietly spoke to him.
“Boss, you need to keep up appearances. You look like shit.”
That rather blunt statement got Norman to pause. Then he remembered seeing himself in the mirror and winced. Even after the healing, he looked wrung out and filthy. Eugene was right.
“Ok, yeah. I see your point. Thanks.”
Eugene nodded. “Anytime, Boss.”
Norman hustled back into his room, took off his filthy clothes, and headed for the bathroom.
He didn’t just take a quick bath, Norman luxuriated in it for a good forty minutes. It was his first time experiencing a bath as an undead. There was something uniquely wonderful about the experience that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
Maybe it was the fact that he could submerge himself and not have to worry about running out of air. Or the pressure of the water that could be felt despite the decrease in sensitivity of his skin? Or maybe a combination of those and other factors.
Either way, it was wonderful. And when he finally got out, he felt clean and refreshed. His old clothes had been removed from the room, likely by Stewart or Jacob, and a clean set had been put in their place.
After getting dressed, Norman stopped to have a meal. With the cook being back, it was an experience as well. Somehow the flavors were even bolder and more nuanced in his undead state than they were in his living one. He didn’t understand how that worked but he was certainly glad for it. Norman wondered if he should ask the man to start incorporating certain deadly substances into the meals to see how they tasted.
After the meal was complete, Norman finally headed back down to the testing chamber. He wasted no time drawing out the new mirrored spell circles. His intuition said it would work, so he quickly retried one of the test animal corpses and placed it into the circle before he fed the spell his undead blood that had been dried down and crystalized. The black substance looked like someone had taken the night sky and distilled it into a bottle.
The spell activated and once it was complete, he had an undead animal roaming about the chamber looking highly confused.
Norman couldn’t help but dance in joy at his success. Another piece of the magical puzzle was now in place.
He quickly repeated the tests on the rest of his spells. They all worked exactly as they had before, except now they worked using undead blood. Turning the symbols slightly also produced the same effects as they did on the non-mirrored versions.
Wanting to be as thorough as possible, Norman tried reversing the symbols on the non-magic circle spells that had worked with both blood types.
Those produced some… odd results.
The Bone Wall spell created some MC. Echer type of monstrosity that looped amongst itself in seemingly impossible ways. Thankfully it was still an inanimate object. After that, he decided not to test it out on the Bone Armor. He did continue testing it on his other spells though.
Orb of Decay seemed like a safe bet. Instead of the sickly green-colored skulls, he ended up with an off-white colored one. Of course, he couldn’t just leave it there. He needed to see what effect it had.
He retrieved one of the small rodents from the storage and set the cage it was in inside a prepared barrier circle.
Norman had improved his safety measures when working with unknown magic since his last near-death experience. It turned out to be a good idea.
The orb exploded against the cage, emitting an eerie white light that reminded Norman of what souls looked like when it was sucked into his spell forms to revive people. Instead of dissipating almost immediately, as it did with his normal Orb of Decay, the foggy light seemed to be drawn into the screaming critter.
Soon there was a cracking sound, and Norman saw the creature's back heave and bulge. All of its muscles seemed to distend and grow as the creature doubled, then tripled in size, breaking the walls of the cage it had been contained inside.
It didn’t stop there though. The animal's hide split down its back, exposing the muscle and bone beneath. The black blood flowing out of the wound told Norman the creature was no longer alive though. The black blood seemed to crust over, forming black chitin-like ridges along the creature's back as it flowed out from the wound.
In the end, the rat-sized critter had transformed to be about the size of a Rottweiler. If only it looked as friendly as a rotty. If there was indeed a hell, this thing could certainly be described as a hellhound.
It stared at Norman with beady black eyes that made him shiver. It wasn’t the color of the eyes that made him shiver, but the intelligence behind the gaze that made Norman unsettled. Erring on the side of caution, Norman called in Lohr and Nolix just in case he needed them to help him deal with the creature.
They both stepped inside the room. The creature flicked its gaze to both guards before returning to stare at Norman.
“Bloody hell! What is that monstrosity?” Lohr demanded, his eyes going wide as they settled on the creature trapped within the magical barrier.
Nolix didn’t say anything, instead pointing his spear in the creature’s direction.
“It’s the result of an experiment. It should be fine, but I wanted to be safe.”
Lohr grunted. “We got this, Boss.”
After a bit, the mana keeping the barrier active faded away. The creature seemed to understand this as it slowly trotted out from the circle. It approached Norman, completely ignoring the two Death Knights that had weapons pointed its way. It circled Norman, sniffing at him while producing a low growl in its throat.
Norman remained still as the creature did its thing. It didn’t feel like the creature meant any harm. Soon it sat next to Norman and pushed its oversized head into Norman’s leg, making a mewling growl. Norman wasn’t sure what it wanted.
“I think it wants you to pet it,” Nolix said in surprise.
The creature gave out another one of those mewling growls and bumped him again. Tentatively, Norman reached down and stroked the thing's head. It started rumbling quietly.
“Holy, shit, this is awesome!” Norman exclaimed, really getting into the petting of the undead monstrosity. “I think, I’ll call you Princess.”
He could hear both of his guards groan at the name but Princess seemed happy with it as she let out a contented-sounding mewling. At least Norman assumed it was contentment since Princess wasn’t ripping him apart. Petting Princess seemed to fill a hole Norman never knew he had.
Norman had never had a pet before. It seemed perfectly reasonable for his first pet to be a corrupted abomination.
While he knew the wraiths were a necessity, researching the spell wasn’t what Norman wanted to spend time on. The research part was fine, it was the experimenting on his people that bothered him. But it was done now. This would allow him to focus his efforts elsewhere.
There were many things he wanted to accomplish with his magic, but the most pressing was figuring out the issue with using undead blood. It was something that had plagued him for far too long and he wanted an answer.
While it didn’t stop him from using his magic to its full potential, it necessitated that he constantly returned to his living form to make that happen. Norman didn’t mind being alive, there were certain advantages to that state. But being undead brought about its own special advantages that Norman would like to spend more time experiencing and researching.
He looked at the magically imbued knife on his table. It had been provided to Norman at his request. Although if anyone suspected Norman had asked for it, not for self-defense, but to kill himself, they may have not been as enthusiastic about its construction.
“Straight to the heart, then pull it out. How hard could that be,” he muttered to himself as he gathered the courage to perform the action.
He was certain he could get Eugene to kill him if he asked, but Norman didn’t want to burden anyone else with this responsibility. With a deep intake of breath, Norman snatched the knife off the table and set the point to where his heart was. Before he could second-guess himself, he thrust the blade into his chest.
The pain was excruciating. Almost made worse by the fact he knew it was coming. But he gritted his teeth and yanked the blade out with a spray of arterial blood. Good, at least he hadn’t missed, that would have been embarrassing.
He swayed on his feet and fell over as his blood pumped out of his body. Soon his vision started to blur and go dark. It took far longer to die than he would have liked. The last thing he thought before his vision faded completely was that he should have asked someone else to do this.
When Norman woke up, he was lying on the floor. He glanced at the hourglass off to the side and saw that less than five minutes had passed since he stabbed himself.
He stood up from the floor and inspected his body. The hole was gone and his skin showed no signs of the wound, only the grey cast marking him as undead.
Norman smiled and went over to his clothes that he had placed on a nearby chair. He had done the deed naked. No point ruining a perfectly good set of clothes if he didn’t need to. His goal was to remain undead until he resolved the issue with the blood. Whether or not the world would see fit to allow that remained to be seen. But he would give it his best attempt.
The first thing he did after getting dressed was go through all of his spells in his undead form, using first his living blood, then his undead blood. He wanted to see which ones worked and which ones didn’t.
It was no surprise when Norman found that all of his basic spells like Bone Armor and Orb of Decay worked with either substance fine. It seemed like only when he got to the more advanced spells, that used magic circles, did the undead blood not work properly.
Originally, he had hoped it was only the Revival spell that was affected. But it seemed that was too much to hope for.
Was it something with the way magic circles changed spells that affected the components that could be used? Not the end of the world if it was, but certainly annoying. He suspected the cause and solution were going to be tied together no matter what he discovered. Which should make his efforts a bit easier. Now if he could only figure out what that solution was.
Norman first tried inverting the circles as he had with the exclusion zones. When that didn’t have any effect, he moved on to rotating the symbols. He started by moving the orientation a hundred and eighty degrees from their original positions.
He hadn’t expected that change to do anything so he wasn’t all that surprised when the spell didn’t work. He only tested it because it was an easy thing to rule out.
From there he played with changing the symbol layouts so they ran backward. His thought process was that undeath was the reverse of life. So maybe it also had to work in reverse.
He quickly lost track of time as he experimented. It was only when Eugene popped in that he stopped.
“Boss, you need to take a break and get cleaned up,” Eugene stated from the entry to the testing room.
“Huh… oh, yeah, just give me a few more hours. I’m almost done.”
“You said that a few hours ago. You’ve been at this for a week straight without food or rest.” Eugene walked up and hoisted Norman away from his desk.
Norman had just enough time to stuff a few of his notes into one of his pouches before Eugene dragged him out of the room.
“I can walk on my own,” he grumbled and Eugene put him down, but the man blocked the hallway back toward the testing room.
After smoothing out his rumpled clothes, Norman headed to his room to do as Eugene suggested.
As Norman passed the mirror in his room, he stopped to look at himself. He winced at the state of his body. It had decayed quite a bit during his extended experimentation session. With a sigh, he reached into his pouch on the nearby bed and pulled out one of his potions. One of the hastily grabbed note sheets stuck to his hand and he had to shake it off. It fell to the floor as he unstoppered the bottle and sucked down the healing contents within.
He watched in the mirror as his skin started to heal and reknit itself. Norman always found the act of healing to be very mesmerizing. As he was watching this, his eyes caught the sheet of notes reflected in the mirror. It had landed on the floor with the spell diagram face up.
It felt like something drew his gaze to that sheet of paper. Then he realized what it was. His magical intuition was kicking up a fuss. It said the spell would work.
The reason he was here was quickly forgotten as he turned away from the mirror to locate the page on the floor. His eyes soon landed on the discarded note. But when he looked at it, the feeling had vanished.
“What the hell?”
A bit manic, he rushed over and picked up the page, turning it every which way to try and see what his intuition had picked up on. But nothing was happening. Then he looked into the mirror again, while holding the page up. And boom, it was back.
He glanced around his room until he spotted something to write with. Clearing a spot on his small side table, Norman copied the spell on the backside of the sheet, using the faint lines that could be seen through the paper.
When he was done, he had his answer. The spell symbols had to be mirrored to work with undead blood.
It was such a stupidly simple solution. How had he not realized this sooner?
With newfound drive, Norman rushed out of his room, only to run head-first into Eugene.
“That was the quickest bath ever. Should we contact Guinness World Records for you?”
“I just had a breakthrough, I need to go test it out.” Norman tried to squeeze past Eugene, but the man didn’t budge.
“I don’t hear alarm bells blaring in the distance, I think this breakthrough can wait thirty minutes while you clean up and have some food.”
“I don’t need food,” Norman started to argue but Eugene leaned in and quietly spoke to him.
“Boss, you need to keep up appearances. You look like shit.”
That rather blunt statement got Norman to pause. Then he remembered seeing himself in the mirror and winced. Even after the healing, he looked wrung out and filthy. Eugene was right.
“Ok, yeah. I see your point. Thanks.”
Eugene nodded. “Anytime, Boss.”
Norman hustled back into his room, took off his filthy clothes, and headed for the bathroom.
He didn’t just take a quick bath, Norman luxuriated in it for a good forty minutes. It was his first time experiencing a bath as an undead. There was something uniquely wonderful about the experience that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
Maybe it was the fact that he could submerge himself and not have to worry about running out of air. Or the pressure of the water that could be felt despite the decrease in sensitivity of his skin? Or maybe a combination of those and other factors.
Either way, it was wonderful. And when he finally got out, he felt clean and refreshed. His old clothes had been removed from the room, likely by Stewart or Jacob, and a clean set had been put in their place.
After getting dressed, Norman stopped to have a meal. With the cook being back, it was an experience as well. Somehow the flavors were even bolder and more nuanced in his undead state than they were in his living one. He didn’t understand how that worked but he was certainly glad for it. Norman wondered if he should ask the man to start incorporating certain deadly substances into the meals to see how they tasted.
After the meal was complete, Norman finally headed back down to the testing chamber. He wasted no time drawing out the new mirrored spell circles. His intuition said it would work, so he quickly retried one of the test animal corpses and placed it into the circle before he fed the spell his undead blood that had been dried down and crystalized. The black substance looked like someone had taken the night sky and distilled it into a bottle.
The spell activated and once it was complete, he had an undead animal roaming about the chamber looking highly confused.
Norman couldn’t help but dance in joy at his success. Another piece of the magical puzzle was now in place.
He quickly repeated the tests on the rest of his spells. They all worked exactly as they had before, except now they worked using undead blood. Turning the symbols slightly also produced the same effects as they did on the non-mirrored versions.
Wanting to be as thorough as possible, Norman tried reversing the symbols on the non-magic circle spells that had worked with both blood types.
Those produced some… odd results.
The Bone Wall spell created some MC. Echer type of monstrosity that looped amongst itself in seemingly impossible ways. Thankfully it was still an inanimate object. After that, he decided not to test it out on the Bone Armor. He did continue testing it on his other spells though.
Orb of Decay seemed like a safe bet. Instead of the sickly green-colored skulls, he ended up with an off-white colored one. Of course, he couldn’t just leave it there. He needed to see what effect it had.
He retrieved one of the small rodents from the storage and set the cage it was in inside a prepared barrier circle.
Norman had improved his safety measures when working with unknown magic since his last near-death experience. It turned out to be a good idea.
The orb exploded against the cage, emitting an eerie white light that reminded Norman of what souls looked like when it was sucked into his spell forms to revive people. Instead of dissipating almost immediately, as it did with his normal Orb of Decay, the foggy light seemed to be drawn into the screaming critter.
Soon there was a cracking sound, and Norman saw the creature's back heave and bulge. All of its muscles seemed to distend and grow as the creature doubled, then tripled in size, breaking the walls of the cage it had been contained inside.
It didn’t stop there though. The animal's hide split down its back, exposing the muscle and bone beneath. The black blood flowing out of the wound told Norman the creature was no longer alive though. The black blood seemed to crust over, forming black chitin-like ridges along the creature's back as it flowed out from the wound.
In the end, the rat-sized critter had transformed to be about the size of a Rottweiler. If only it looked as friendly as a rotty. If there was indeed a hell, this thing could certainly be described as a hellhound.
It stared at Norman with beady black eyes that made him shiver. It wasn’t the color of the eyes that made him shiver, but the intelligence behind the gaze that made Norman unsettled. Erring on the side of caution, Norman called in Lohr and Nolix just in case he needed them to help him deal with the creature.
They both stepped inside the room. The creature flicked its gaze to both guards before returning to stare at Norman.
“Bloody hell! What is that monstrosity?” Lohr demanded, his eyes going wide as they settled on the creature trapped within the magical barrier.
Nolix didn’t say anything, instead pointing his spear in the creature’s direction.
“It’s the result of an experiment. It should be fine, but I wanted to be safe.”
Lohr grunted. “We got this, Boss.”
After a bit, the mana keeping the barrier active faded away. The creature seemed to understand this as it slowly trotted out from the circle. It approached Norman, completely ignoring the two Death Knights that had weapons pointed its way. It circled Norman, sniffing at him while producing a low growl in its throat.
Norman remained still as the creature did its thing. It didn’t feel like the creature meant any harm. Soon it sat next to Norman and pushed its oversized head into Norman’s leg, making a mewling growl. Norman wasn’t sure what it wanted.
“I think it wants you to pet it,” Nolix said in surprise.
The creature gave out another one of those mewling growls and bumped him again. Tentatively, Norman reached down and stroked the thing's head. It started rumbling quietly.
“Holy, shit, this is awesome!” Norman exclaimed, really getting into the petting of the undead monstrosity. “I think, I’ll call you Princess.”
He could hear both of his guards groan at the name but Princess seemed happy with it as she let out a contented-sounding mewling. At least Norman assumed it was contentment since Princess wasn’t ripping him apart. Petting Princess seemed to fill a hole Norman never knew he had.
Norman had never had a pet before. It seemed perfectly reasonable for his first pet to be a corrupted abomination.
