Kneeling hastily beside Vlad, Lirael placed a hand on his forehead and channelled her mana into him to replenish his reserves and stabilize him. Ordinarily, this would be impossible as the body would reject the foreign mana, but Thralls and their masters were exceptions to the rule. This was because the process of Enthrallment involved implanting a control shard in the body of the subject. This would synchronize the mana of both the parties involved, allowing them to share mana as well as use shards that would normally affect only themselves on each other.

In fact, this connection made the Thralls feel like they shared the same roots, or were just an extension of their master’s body. The influence of this feeling on their blank, immature minds left them unswervingly loyal to their owners.

A soft red glow suffused the Thrall’s body as her Blood Manipulation shard and Blood Source shards kicked in, stanching his bleeding and replenishing what he had lost. The Bloodskull Gate opened beside them as the three floating skulls opened their mouths and a cataract of illusory blood gushed out. Sand and Igor stepped out of the portal, summoned by their mistress’ call.

Taking stock of the situation swiftly, Igor wasted no words and immediately got to work. His four arms moved swiftly and precisely as they pushed Vlad’s intestines back into him and pinched the edges of the wound together. The red glow around Vlad grew brighter as Lirael used her link to him to share the effects of her Undead Marrow shard with him. Flesh knit together, vessels mended, broken bones shifted as they snapped into position and healed. Yet, despite his body’s return to a perfect condition, his breathing was still laboured, his dark skin still dyed a dull grey by the pallor of death.

“Boy, your shard. Use it!”

Lirael’s exhortation set Sand into motion. Kneeling beside the unconscious Thrall, he used his knife to score a shallow wound above his weakly beating heart and placed his hand on it. As his palm contacted the blood, a strong suction emerged from it, affecting the poison in Vlad’s veins. Sand’s eyes blazed with ghostly green flames. In his Aura Sight, the poison was a wispy grey mist that contaminated the scarlet Aura of Vlad's blood. He wasn’t surprised by its presence. When fighting an undead, any wound received would be a poisonous one.

Using his Phlebotomy shard, Sand drew the toxins into his own body, his Undead Marrow shard deriving the nutrients greedily to grow. Unfortunately, as he hadn’t broken through to the Green stage, his body was incapable of housing a Tier 3 shard and as such the promotion of the shard was forcefully aborted. The backlash caused a trickle of black blood to run down his nose and from the corners of his eyes.

Suddenly, he felt a delicate palm pressing up against his back. His heart thumped hard within his chest as wisps of violet mana emerged out of the shard within. Sand’s eyes widened. ‘The link lets her share her mana with me,’ he surmised with rising dread. ‘If she can give me mana, she can take it back.’

The violet mana expanded within him, rapidly degrading down the spectrum as it grew less dense and merged with his own. His mana caught a leaf-green tint, indicating his smooth promotion. Reactivating his Phlebotomy shard, Sand renewed his efforts to draw the corpse poison out of Vlad. As a peak Tier 5 beast, the centipede’s venom was extremely potent and easily pushed his Undead Marrow shard into Tier 3. A dark brilliance spilled out of Sand’s bones and blood, dyeing his muscles and flesh a metallic black. Uncharacteristically, there was no pain this time, only a comfortable itchy numbness that suffused each inch of his flesh as it was transformed by the shard.

When the last of the poison disappeared into his shard, a third of his muscles had been transformed. Under Sand’s control, his biceps, forearms, thighs, calves, abdominals, and the muscles of his back had been given priority during the transformation, maximizing its effectiveness. He felt stronger and more flexible. It wasn’t to the level of a Tier 1 Strength shard, but despite his young body, he was now on par with an average human adult male in terms of strength.

Taking his palm away from Vlad’s chest, Sand stood and took a step back. The pall of death had lifted off the Thrall and his complexion was swiftly returning to normal. The only visible marks of his close brush with death were a silvery scar across his stomach – an addition to the numerous others scattered across his body – and the loss of the large portion of his muscle mass which had been consumed to heal him.

He had yet to regain consciousness but his breath was even and his heartbeat strong. It was only a matter of time till he woke. Though, he would be in no state to fight when he did. It would take a few weeks of recuperation and constant use of his Strength shard to regain what had been lost.

With a sigh of relief, Lirael waved her hand and her Gate swept over his prone form, transferring him into her Dungeon. Turning to Sand, she said, “Good job on the healing. You’ll have your reward sooner than you think.”

Sand didn’t try to be artificial and decline. “Thank you, mistress,” he said with a bow.

Nodding, she turned to Igor and instructed, “There’s an undead corpse that way. Take him to it and have him absorb its venom. There’s enough mana permeated within it to let him promote again. Protect him.”

“Yesss,” acknowledged Igor with a hiss. “And you, mistresss?”

Lirael turned her gaze to the distance where her senses told her a great evil was brewing. Her eyes narrowed, “Me? I have a score to settle.”

The dying screams of the undead shattered the silence of the stone forest. The skeletons of the Bone Monsters lost their gloss, the muscles of the Wights sloughed off their bodies, the blood of the Zombies dried in their veins, the Ghouls felt their organs withering within themselves – the entirety of their essence flowing out of them and into the pale white hands attached to their bodies. As the undead crumbled to dust, the now softly glowing arms dropped onto the ground, integrated into it and converged towards the heart of the forest.

Silence flowed outwards from the centre like an expanding puddle as the closest undead were the first to die.

Guided by her Seismic Sense, Lirael approached the pseudo-Lich with steady steps as she followed the path of the pale hands under the ground. In her Aura sight, the Aura of the disembodied hands linked up into white streams that gathered towards her foe, accumulating into a glowing white dome in the distance.

There was a difference in how beasts and the sentient races formed their Dungeons. The sentient races, upon reaching the peak of the Violet stage, used their shards to seed a Dungeon and then slowly developed it. Tier 5 beasts on the other hand occupied a territory and established absolute dominance over it. Then they suffused it with their mana, all the while fending off the challenges of other Tier 5 beasts. If they managed to successfully defend their position for a few hundred years, then Tier 5 space and time shards would gradually condense within their bodies, combining with the shards already there to form a Dungeon.

As the dark spires of stone surrounding her grew sparse and opened into a clearing, Lirael winced as the dense white Aura within washed out her vision. Shutting her Aura sight and observing through only her eyes, she finally understood why her ancestor had given the area the poetic label of Bone Garden.

Moonlight curtained down through an opening in the thick layer of miasma overhead, lending a silver cast to the entire region. Chains of pale white arms with the palm of one hand grabbing onto the end of the next twined around the scattered spires of dark rock like vines. Pairs of intertwined arms grew out of the ground, their palms resembling flowers as they interlocked in various degrees. The distribution of the ‘flowers’ grew denser as one moved inwards, forming a gleaming carpet of silver under the moonlight. The very centre of the clearing was occupied by five gigantic palms that grew straight out of the ground, cupped and joined together to form a ‘bud’.

Lirael could feel rhythmic pulses of power emanating from the interior of the bud in tandem with a faint heartbeat that reached her ears. She could feel the fine hairs at the back of her neck rising as a huge sense of crisis oppressed her heart until she felt short of breath. Something incredibly alien was being bred within that bud. Something incredibly powerful. Something she wasn’t sure she could win against. It was the condensation of all the death that permeated the entire stone forest. The fruit of extreme evil.

An achromatic shockwave rippled out of Lirael as her Domain proliferated throughout the area, halting at the edge of the clearing where it crashed against the pseudo-Lich’s Domain. The sense of oppression vanished immediately and only a bit of the crippling fear remained. Having collected all the shards and materials required to form her Dungeon on her own, Lirael’s battle experience was much richer than her peers who had their resources handed to them. Yet, she hadn’t clashed with an evenly matched opponent after the creation of her Embryonic Dungeon. Unlike her previous battle with the Revenant, this would truly be a fight with her life on the line. She would be lying if she claimed that she wasn’t nervous.

Taking a deep breath, she steeled her resolve. The reason she had come here was to hunt this particular undead and harvest its Tier 5 control shard. She needed it to get her spice industry up and running. She hadn't expected its promotion from a Revenant to a Lich in the hundred years since her ancestor had observed it and recorded its information on his map. If she gave up at this juncture and tried searching for another, more suitable target, there was a very real risk that she would run out of time before her family ordered her return. But, if she managed to successfully defeat it… Suffice it to say that she wouldn't want for resources until she became a Dungeon Mage.

As though agitated by her determination, the massive palms that constituted the ‘bud’ trembled and slowly began to open outwards. Silver moonlight speared through the gaps within the fingers and pierced the darkness within. It illuminated the form of a ten-metre-tall infant curled up in the foetal position, sleeping peacefully with its back turned to her. Its skin was a papery white – the same colour as the disembodied arms in the garden.

Under her vigilant gaze, the gigantic infant stirred in its slumber and rolled around to face her. Maybe ‘face’ was the wrong term, for the front of its hairless head was indistinguishable from the back: No eyes, no nose, no lips… just a blank stretch of pale, featureless skin.

Suddenly, large gashes opened horizontally on the upper and lower parts of its face. The upper gash widened to reveal a single eye with a noxious yellow iris and serpentine pupil set in dark sclera. The lower gash split into a wide grin that showed row after row of serrated teeth reminiscent of a shark. Scarlet blood trickled down the corners of its mouth and eye, forming a sharp contrast against its pale, nearly colourless skin. As though following its cue, eyes and mouths opened on all the palms in the clearing; all of them turning to face Lirael in eerie unison.

The evil infant chuckled and the other mouths took up the refrain, forming an uncanny chorus of infantile laughter that sent waves of nausea crashing down on Lirael. Clapping her hands over her ears, she staggered as she struggled to keep her dinner down. Capitalizing on the opportunity, the infant sent a wave of the pale arms swarming towards her, its laughter growing louder and louder until it seemed like it would shake the very world.

Gritting her teeth, Lirael powered through the pain and the nausea long enough to summon her Gate and open a large portal to her Dungeon. An incandescent stream of caustic ash jetted out of the portal, followed closely by a gaping maw attached to a sinuous body crafted from the darkest obsidian. Cracks riddled the body of the stone serpent that emerged from Bloodskull Dungeon with orange magma flowing through them like veins. Molten rock dripped out of the corners of its mouth as it inundated the oncoming tide of pale appendages with clouds of burning ash.

It was Lirael’s final Core Spirit; and also, the very first to take shape. It was the only one mature enough to participate in a fight on her behalf.

Magma Basilisks spent most of their lives sleeping in the hearts of volcanoes, absorbing the magma to grow. But whenever they woke, disaster would follow as the volcano would erupt violently, spewing fire and ash into the sky. Modeled after the Magma Basilisk she had obtained her Pyroclastic Flow shard from, her Core Spirit was a portable natural disaster.

The infant wailed in dismay as a large chunk of its resources was burnt to ash, the sound much more potent than its erstwhile chuckles. Yet, the fiery serpent’s assault was relentless, the spirit unaffected by the sound-based attack due its lack of ears. There was no strategy, no tricks. Just a simple, mutually destructive competition between Dungeon and Dungeon. The nauseating smell of charred flesh mixed with the stench of brimstone and Lirael finally lost the battle against her stomach, throwing up the entirety of its contents and dry-heaving afterwards.

Within Bloodskull, the central pit erupted, the ground cracked, and the snowy peaks avalanched as the edges of the Dungeon contracted along with the loss of the mana composing it as Lirael remained locked in a contest of strength with the pseudo-Lich.

With a final blood-curdling wail that sent her to her knees clutching her head, the infant lost the battle and its form was swallowed up by the burning ash.