?


    Mmm, I love the sound of rain in the morning.


    Jay thought, but kept his eyes closed, still tucked away inside his sleeping bag and not wanting to remember where he was—what he was.


    Without leaving thefortable warmth, or even sticking his head out of the swag, he quietly pulled summoned small strips of meat from his inventory and began to chew.


    Hmm, this a good start to getting breakfast in bed. But it can always be improved. First I’ll need a grand double bed, filled with the perreton wolf tails… ah, but I’ll need silverware and tes, too. A butler will be easy enough, as I can just use skeletons, but I’ll need a room first… in a building. He thought, swallowing juicy piece of meat.


    … But why stop at a building? I don’t see why I can’t have an entire castle. If I get strong enough to stand against the mage hunters, I don’t have to hide. There would really be nothing to stop me. I suppose I should take a lesson from the savagends dungeon and create an underground castle though, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have a small tower or two on top, which will let me wake up in the early morning sunrise. Besides, I don’t want to live in a sticky, humid darkness like Hegatha.


    Over night, the rain had slowed to a sprinkle, still lightly tapping on the bone-te roof. Some of the fog started to reappear, but it was still nowhere near as thick as it was.


    [1260 Exp]


    A notification greeted Jay when he slowly opened his eyes. But thendscape caught his attention, the heavy deluge of rain caused some changes.


    What the… He thought.


    ‘Land’ scape was not urate. Blue was standing in water going up to its rib cage, acting like there were no problems at all. It slightly disappointed Jay as it didn’t warn him about the rising water.


    Perhaps Blue didn’t see it as a threat. The bone tform Jay slept on was high, closer to the roof and about 6 feet above the water, so Jay was still a few storms away from being drowned.


    “Well this changes things.” Jay said, sitting up in his sleeping bag. “I guess now I have my own ind… Shit. The ind. Asra.”


    Yesterday, Jay had marched the skeletons away from the shoreline and into the fog, so if it was up to Blue’s ribs here, then Asra, Hegatha and the entire ind would be underwater.


    (Blue, find and save Asra… Red…) Jay ordered, then paused.


    “Red and Sweeper are still with her.”


    He quickly used the host skill, seeing through the eyes of Red. The world turned to ck and white, but was mostly dark.


    Inside the rotting shack, Red’s skull tilted to the side, watching over the noon-leather nket which slowly raised and fell.


    Huh? No water? Jay thought. It wasn’t what he expected at all. Asra was tucked away inside the noon-leather nket, sleeping soundly. There was no flooding, even though the ind was downhill from Jay.


    Asra was impossibly safe.


    (Blue, return to me. False rm.) Jay ordered, and ended the host skill.


    “Maybe it’s a magic barrier or something to block the water? I’ll need to get closer to investigate. In the meantime, I have some amber spheres to gather.” Jay said, and nced down from the tform into the water, and found… nothing. His bone crucible had floated off.


    “Fuck. You gotta be kidding me.”


    He frowned, shook his head, and tucked himself back inside his swag. “I did enough today. I think that’s enough. Asra’s fine—goodnight.” He said, and closed his eyes for a few minutes longer.


    Yet, as if the answer his thoughts, a skeleton sloshed through the water, an amber sphere gripped between its boney fingers.


    Jay opened his eyes and watched from his toasty sleeping spot. The skeleton stopped next to some swamp grasses that barely peaked above the water and a tree trunk, then dropped the sphere next to them before zipping away through the flooding waters again.


    “Ah, found you.” Jay said, smiling. His eyes narrowed, then he pointed at the crucible and issued somemands.


    (Blue, drag the crucible back over to me. Don’t let any amber sphere’s fall out.)


    Jay left his bedding, ready to try this day over again while Blue went over and began to pull the heavy crucible over.


    Jay looked around from his tform, wondering how he would get back to Asra without getting wet, how he would get past whatever barrier Hegatha had that stopped water from flooding the ind. Of course, the existence of a barrier was purely assumption, but Jay didn’t see any other way. <novelsnext></novelsnext>


    The solution to reach them is simple, I’ll just have the skeletons carry me over on my throne. Ah, but the water will get deeper as we approach the swamp ind. As for the bone bridge, it’s probably underwater by now? Jay thought.


    He could still sense Blue’s sub-skeletons guarding the bridge from bone-eating eels, so thankfully it hadn’t been washed away. The bone bridge itself was only made about half a foot above the water, and after walking further away from the swamp yesterday, Jay guessed he was another two feet higher, while the flooding water here was about three-feet high.


    So… if we get down to the shoreline, the floodwater will be about five to six feet high. Jay thought, scratching his chin.


    If they carry me above their heads, I think we can make it work, it’ll just suck… but stepping foot into the water is not an option.


    Jay remembered the swarms of leeches that left every hole and darkened pit during the feeding frenzy yesterday. Every morsel of flesh and every drop of blood was like a beacon calling thousands of these blood suckers from their burrows. He would not dare to even dip his boot near the shadowy waters.


    Yet, before calling the skeletons back from hunting to assist him, he heard a quiet voice. Something whispering from his feet.


    “Recalibration…plete. Assessing damage…”


    “Huh?”


    Jay jumped back. He quickly stashed his swag in his inventory, thinking that something had crawled into it.


    At his feet, all that was left was his rectangr-bone sleeping spot, the pile of bones under him, and his backpack.


    Nope, not taking any chances, he thought.


    The helminth sensed Jay’s tension and its slender skull appeared, perched on his shoulder as a shimmer of ghostly green, ready to defend its master from whatever it was.


    (Dark report.) Jay ordered, and stepped onto the very edge of the tform, cing one hand onto a beam supports to stop himself from falling off the side.


    The voice came from his bag again, continuing to whisper.


    “Appendage growth discontinued—emergency recycling initiated. Parameters—lost. Laws—lost. Hostpact—lost. Internal ledger—lost. Routines—lost. Subroutines—lost. essing istion use… Error—lost. Initiating rehabilitation… Initiating damage assessment.”


    (Dark, hurry the fuck up ande open my bag.)


    “… Damage assessmentplete. 7% core functions remaining.”


    “Core functions?” Jay whispered, raising a brow—he didn’t expect that whatever was in the bag was listening, much less that it would reply to him.


    “Core functions remaining: Language modeling. Memory management. Mana sync. Mana cycling. Mana growth factors. Residue dissimtion. Master bonding key ess—error—key missing... error. Error. Key regeneration protocol activated.”


    Jay slowly took a breath in, not willing to say another word as his bag may respond again and say some other weird things.


    Dark finally appeared, pushing through the water which was up to its shoulders. It climbed the tform, getting its body out of the water, but before it reached Jay, it paused for a moment—it received an order.


    (Remove all that stuff from your bones.)


    After wading through the waters all night, the skeleton had picked up a stray passengers. Bits of swamp grasses, moss, reeds and slime all clung to its bones like little streamers.


    There was no way Jay would let Dark approach his sleeping spot, lest he get an infestation of swamp lice, flesh-eating spores, or whatever else may be living here.


    Dark began to clean itself, sliding its own daggers across its bones to cut away the debris while the helminth watched the bag, its transluscent slender skull glowing visibly. Jay patted it and watched the bag too.


    “Just what have you brought me…” he whispered to his ethereal parasite, his eyes narrowing on the bag—the only item inside was one that didn’t store inside his inventory.


    There’s more to Vdore’s little desk ornament than I thought.