The state of my kingdom disappointed Cordelia, and she was doing a shoddy job of hiding her disappointment. She had been keen to relive the glory days of her empire, but my meagre horde was what she got. The system didn't even call us a proper kingdom; it labelled us as a clan. We couldn't call ourselves a kingdom until we met several far off requirements.

Kingdoms were built up gradually over successive generations. They started from humble beginnings before growing to loftier heights. I would like to have a word with my predecessor because as far as I could tell, they had done nothing at all to advance the zombie nation. As soon as I opened the kingdom interface, I saw that none of the starting missions were complete.

Perhaps the objectives reset when I took the crown, but some things should have been retained. Cordelia assured me that technological growth, at the very least, persisted between rulers. I couldn’t help but groan when I saw that the previous leader of my people hadn’t even discovered fire.

Objective: As a primitive clan, you have a long journey ahead of you. In order to progress, it is time to pull yourselves out of the stone age. Here are several key technologies to start with:

Technologies (0/3)

• Discover Fire

• Discover Stone Tools V

• Discover Tribal Huts

To discover a technology, you need to appoint an [Elder] to your council, open the technology tree and select a technology to research.

Reward

10 Innovation, Access to Bronze age technologies.

“Ti Chien! A stone age tribe. Tykosia fell a thousand years ago, and we had iron golems and crop hybridisation.” Cordelia laughed.

“Bad?” Hans asked. As our clan elder, technology was his problem to deal with.

“Oh, it’s simply dreadful. We moved past the age of ages a long time ago. My grandson Jack is an airship mechanic, and dear Alexi can shoot the pinkie off a [Death Knight] from a kilometre with a runelock rifle.” She said. Cordelia referred to her descendants collectively as her grandchildren.

My ghostly advisor had served as Tykosia’s grand [Chancellor], a position of great power. The job I offered her wasn’t quite so prestigious. The primitive equivalent was a clan’s [Messenger], and she was not happy with what she described as a significant demotion. Another complaint she raised was that my zombie kingdom was racist. Cordelia wasn’t a zombie, so the system cut her effective charisma in my council in half. Just having her in the clan pushed us right to the edge of our [Neural Limit], whatever that was.

Clan Council

Position

Councillor

Primary Attribute

Current Mission

Resources

Scout

Ghost

19 Dexterity

Lay of the Land

0 Information

Warchief

Abs

22 Strength

Create Warband

0 Power

Crafter

Bob

18 Vitality

Storage Hut

0 Wealth

Shaman

Pecs

6 Wisdom

Dream Quest

0 Faith

Elder

Hans

7 Intelligence

Stone Age

0 Innovation

Messenger

Cordelia

35 Charisma (18 Effective)

First Contact

0 Influence

The entire clan had retreated into the cave while the council planned our next moves. It was uncomfortably crowded, despite the size of the cave. I was probably going to spend most of my time underground now, because Cordelia remembered that most divination magic could not penetrate underground. She was almost as eager to avoid coming face to face with an [Enforcer] as I was.

My grumpy old teacher’s insights were invaluable, but she could be hard to put up with sometimes. Our council had been sitting in a circle for an hour, but most of the conversation so far had been Cordelia complaining. “All I have to do is make contact with another group. It would be laughably easy if I could wander more than a few metres away from my Verdam flask.” She said.

“Work with Ghost.” I clicked. “She needs explore and find things. She can carry you.”

“Why three?” Ghost asked in that dusty voice of hers. Since she started wearing Voulos’ old spellbook, her vocabulary had improved, but she still loved pointless questions.

“Because that’s what box says.” I said.

“Why do what box say?” She asked.

“Because clan needs to evolve. Don’t start this again.”

“Why?”

“No, not answering." I said, and swivelled on my neck to face our [Elder]. "Hans, what research first?” I asked. Ghost tried to continue annoying me, but I ignored her.

Each council member was in charge of one pillar of my kingdom, and each of them had access to a distinct subsystem to manage that aspect of the realm. One such pillar was the technology subsystem under Hans. It called itself a technology tree, but it looked more like a bush to me. We could only see a couple of technologies ahead, so maybe once it grew a bit it would look like an actual tree. I had a feeling we wouldn’t be building any airboats any time soon unless I somehow kidnapped Cordelia’s grandson.

Our access was similarly limited to all the subsystems. The restrictions on the information subsystem disappointed me in particular, because it was restricted to just scouting until it developed. According to Cordelia, it would later include a full-blown spy system, with kidnapping, assassinations and torture! She spoke of it with barely concealed disdain, but it sounded fun to me.

When Cordelia launched into a moan about our lack of writing supplies, I took the chance to ask Pecs to soak another charisma potion into my brain folds. Pecs had taken over as my courier since I uncovered his [Hurl Zombie] ability. The range it had was ludicrous, and so he had become part of my emergency escape plan. We nearly lost Bob when we were testing its limit. The image of her spinning through the air was etched into my mind and made me laugh each time I remembered it.

I fought off a giggle and regained my focus as the potion took effect. We were almost out of charisma potions, but at an important meeting like this, I couldn’t afford to drop beneath the second threshold. I needed to take charge of the situation and start giving out orders. That was what kings did, right?

Ghost’s task was simple enough. The intelligence subsystem included a map to play with, but it wasn’t filled in. Her first mission was to mark three points of interest on the map. I could only guess what the system considered interesting. I remembered crossing a babbling brook the previous day filled with skeletal fish; one had bitten Bob’s little toe-off when we waded through the shallows. I thought the [Bonefish] were interesting enough, so I sent Ghost out that way.

The missions assigned to Bob and Abs were more problematic. Bob was tasked with building a storage hut, and Abs needed to train and equip a primitive warband. However, the hut required the [Tribal Hut] technology, and the warband needed us to discover [Stone Tools V] to make spears. Hans couldn’t research both at once, so I needed to choose which to go for first.

The storage hut only helped save space and stopped food from going bad. I didn’t mind dumping the miscellaneous junk we had into an unorganised pile. Having a place to keep brains fresh would be nice, but we didn't actually need to eat so it wasn't a high priority. After some consideration, I decided that equipping my horde was more important.

We had a rough plan for dealing with the angel if it turned up. Abs would grab it, then Bob would oversee the rest of the bomber zombies as they gave their lives to kill it with explosions. If the result of the battle was uncertain, Pecs was to throw me to Ghost, who would then try to escape while carrying me. I was a little uneasy trusting Ghost with my escape, but she was the fastest zombie we had.

I wasn’t sure where a bunch of fodder zombies holding spears fit into this brilliant battle plan but having the primitive weapons wouldn’t hurt our chances. Hans selected [Stone Tools I], and got to work chopping at the technology tree that looked more like a bush. Even this first branch was supposed to take us over a hundred days to complete, but the system threw us a bone. It gave us a modifier called “Behind the Times” that reduced the time to completion to just fourteen days.

Patience was not a strong suit of mine, and so it delighted me when a shortcut presented itself. When Voulos was alive, he had always carried a mango and a fruit knife in his satchel. The mango we took off his corpse curiously showed no signs of decay, but that wasn’t what excited me.

Hans was a quite meticulous zombie, and before getting to work on his mission took it on himself to organise our scattered piles of miscellaneous junk. When he laid his hand on Voulos’s fruit knife, he received a new system notification that called itself an event. When I asked him to read it out, he did one better and shared it with me.

Event: You have found an advanced tool. Do you wish to study [Steel Knife] to hasten your studies of Stone Tools?

Yes

95% chance to complete [Stone Tools I], [Stone Tools II], [Stone Tools III, [Stone Tools IV], and [Stone Tools V] in under 1 day, 5% chance to destroy [Steel Knife].

No

You continue to research [Stone Tools I] normally.

I hesitated for a moment at the risk of losing our fruit knife but if it could save us nine days of research I was willing to gamble it away; the knife was only a spare blade after all. Hans selected yes, drew out the knife from Voulos’ satchel ready to begin work on his mission.

Cordelia often spoke about the epic quests that she and her descendants had undertaken over the years. When people went about such grand tasks, the system guided them along with a sense of purpose that nudged them in the right direction to keep them on track.

The fruit knife shortcut gave Hans a strong urge to meditate while holding the knife. The urge wasn’t hard to ignore for a determined zombie, and indeed Hans ignored it while he finished tidying up. Mess didn’t bother me, but when we lived with Voulos, it had always been Hans who he ordered to tidy up after his experiments. The habit seemed to have stuck with him. Maybe a storage hut wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

When Hans finally settled down to study the knife, I will admit that I was underwhelmed. He described receiving sporadic visions of stone tools flashing through his mind, but all I saw was him sitting on the floor, staring at the knife. Hans struggled to comprehend the images, but every now and again, he made a breakthrough. Whenever Hans grasped a new concept, he recorded it on the cave walls with a chalky rock that seemed to have appeared from nowhere.

Given his slow progress, Hans was going to take most of the day, even with the shortcut. I got bored watching him, so I had Pecs bring me with him for a walk. He needed to collect ingredients for his [Dream Quest] anyway, and the system guided him to a small patch of colourful mushrooms to complete it. He stood gazing at the pretty colours for a minute, and I had to prompt him to get on with harvesting the mushrooms.

The walk would have been relaxing had Cordelia not insisted on coming along.

“Zed, we need to find those goblins.” She said.

“Tsk Tsk.” I clicked non-committally. Cordelia had decided that we needed to push through her questline first, so that we could evolve our diplomacy to the level she was accustomed to. I had already agreed that Ghost should keep an eye out for the goblins, so I wasn’t sure what she wanted from me. If we were going to share the mountain with the green vermin, we needed to deal with them somehow.

“I’ve been putting together a message of introduction on your behalf, it reads: To the noble and honourable goblin chief, I am Cordelia, the Polyglot of Peace. I come to you today in the spirit of unity to establish a mutually beneficial friendship-” I cut Cordelia off.

“They are goblins. Keep simple, Gompta.”

All Cordelia needed to do was say hello to the little monsters, but she was proposing that she and Ghost stay with them for a couple of weeks to establish trust between our peoples. There was no way I was going to send Ghost away for that long. She was our only level twenty zombie, and I wanted to keep her close in case of emergencies.

I told Cordelia she could stay if she wanted, and I would even lend her a bomber zombie to carry her. She could get on my nerves, but I needed to keep Cordelia happy. As my primary source of information since I killed Voulos, I was more reliant on her than I would have liked. The character system was sometimes hard to wrap my head around, let alone the much larger kingdom system and its six subsystems, some of which had even more subsystems attached. It was system overload.

To blow off steam, and to get away from Cordelia, Hans launched me at a [Storm Crow] roosting in a nearby tree. The little critter gave decent experience when killed, leaving me sitting at one-hundred and fifty-two. I was going to hit level three soon and could almost select my first attribute boost. I had been hoping the cave bats would push me over, but they turned out to be [Vampire Bats]. Undead creatures sadly didn’t give me any experience, and it had been tough finding living creatures to kill in the haunted forest.

A lack of living creatures to feed off was likely why the [Vampire Bats] had moved up the mountain, closer to the goblins. A memory of Rufus eating mango out of Voulos’ hand came to mind, and I wondered if I could tame the bats to fetch blood. [Animal Domestication] was a technology on Hans’ tree after all.

I could already tell that research priorities were going to be a massive headache. Each technology took a long time to finish, and there were loads of things we needed to unlock. Every council member had technologies they needed us to focus on, and they were already arguing about it.

Before she started moaning about writing supplies, Cordelia had been claiming that [Writing] should be our next technology, even before [Fire]. However, Ghost objected in that wonderfully unique way of hers. [Fire] would let our scout construct [Signal Fires], and she asked why Cordelia got to go first. To avoid a headache, I broke up the meeting shortly after that exchange.

The walk had been less relaxing than I hoped, perhaps because I spent half the trip watching the sky for sudden angel attacks. When we returned to the cave, I was still grinding my teeth in anxiety. To get away from the stress of it all, I elected to join Pecs on his dream quest.

As a zombie, I didn’t sleep, and had never had a dream before. This was a rare opportunity for me to see what it was like to see how mortals lived, and one I wasn’t going to miss. Pecs crushed the mushrooms in one massive hand and rubbed the juice into my brain. For a moment, I thought nothing was going to happen, before colours exploded in front of my eyes.

King Zed ‘The Red’

07:42, 25th of Iosi, 1465 3A

Total Level: 2 (Copper)

Levels: Overseer 2

Experience: 152 / 200

Type: Overseer Zombie (C)

Attributes:

Resources:

Dexterity: 6

Stamina: N/A

Strength: 13

Power: N/A

Vitality: 15

Health: 60/60

Wisdom: 5

Willpower: 20/20

Intelligence: 5

Mana: 20/20

Charisma: 10

Soul: 40/40

Decay: 24% (Stage 0)

Affinities: Nether (100%), Poison (50%), Fire (-25%), Holy (-100%)

Titles:

King of the Braindead: Access to Kingdom subsystem.

Red-Handed: +1 Intelligence, sets alignment as evil, hands are permanently dyed red.

Traits:

Made to Serve: +1 Intelligence, +1 Charisma, -1 Wisdom. Gives understanding of system common, and the primary language of its creator (Orcish). Is able to follow simple commands based on the creator's intelligence divided by ten (3 words long). Gives access to a portion of the knowledge contained within the host brain, better preserved brains retain more information.

Flesh Construct: Sustained by nether magic, does not need to eat, drink, sleep or breath. Does not regenerate Health. Does not use Stamina or Might, but instead uses Decay.

Overseer: +2 Charisma.

Not Braindead: +1 Wisdom, +1 Intelligence and +2 Charisma.

Skills:

First skill gained at level 5

Abilities:

Unarmed Strike - Copper - Level 1 (Unavailable):

0% Decay

1 Second Cooldown

Strikes at the target with an unarmed limb for 10 bludgeoning damage.

Dash Attack - Bronze- Level 1 (Restricted):

0% Decay

5 Second Cooldown

Dashes to a target within 3 meters for 18 bludgeoning damage with a chance to push back or knock over the target.

Poisoned Bite - Bronze - Level 2 (Restricted):

0% Decay

5 Second Cooldown

+1 Vitality and Bites the target for 18 piercing damage and a further 16 poison damage over the next 30 seconds.

Enrage Zombie - Bronze - Level 4 (Restricted):

50 Soul

No Cooldown

The user lets out a rage-filled shout at a target zombie to increase its Strength, Dexterity, and Vitality by +5 for 50 seconds.

Overseer’s Aura - Bronze - Level 3 (Restricted):

1 Soul / Second

No Cooldown

+1 Strength to all zombies within 13 meters.

Corpse Explosion - Steel - Level 2 (Restricted):

200 Mana

20 Second Cooldown

Explodes the targeted corpse to deal damage equal to the health it had when alive in a 2m radius. Any corpses in the range of the explosion have a 25% chance to explode as if targeted by this ability.

Attunements (3/0):

Ring of the Jester (Cursed): +2 Charisma but curses the wearer with [Jester’s Curse].

Princess Tiara: +3 Charisma and makes the wearer more attractive to Princes.

Intellect Ring: +1 Intelligence.

Status Effects:

Jester’s Curse: The target is cursed by the jester. The curse can only be lifted by a Sphinx’s laugh.

Team-Killer (354 days remaining): -2 Charisma

Charisma Potion (3 minutes remaining): +1 Charisma.