The duo approached the first stall in sight, looking through the displayed wares together. There were small enchanted trinkets laid out on display, flasks filled with unknown substances, a small selection of lesser and common soul gems of different creatures, sets of bones and even a whole preserved corpse and other miscellaneous fleshy pieces stored in embalming fluid.

There was a young man with tied back blonde hair sitting down behind it, smoking on a pipe and flanked by a heavily cloaked undead servant. He took a cursory glance at the approaching Mortimer and Melissa but dismissed them when he saw how young they were.

Mortimer had his interest piqued by a dried out green-skinned troll corpse propped up on a stand. It was above two and a half meters tall, a slim body with long and ungainly limbs, three-toed feet and powerful clawed hands.

He pointed towards it and asked the vendor. "What's the price on that?"

"Ten common essences." he said plainly, not even turning his head to look at him.

A single common soul essence was worth five lesser ones, so the troll corpse cost fifty lesser essences or two hundred and fifty petty soul essences.

While it was an exorbitant amount for him, it didn't seem too overpriced all things considered. Perfectly preserved corpses sold for the highest prices and the troll was a rare monster in the first place. They were solitary and long-lived creatures, some of them even end up developing into greater soul monsters with age.

Melissa wrinkled her nose. "Such a disgusting thing, who would want it around them?"

The vendor shrugged and hit his pipe. "Some people have odd tastes, especially underground folk."

Melissa browsed through the pile of books and pulled out thick a herbology tome, holding it up for the vendor to see.

“How much for this?”

“Ten lesser essences.” he took a glance at the book before returning to toking his pipe.

She left its price on the table before turning her attention back to the tome and shuffling through its pages. “It’s quite extensive, there’s plenty of things I have no knowledge about in here.”

Mortimer shook his head and walked off, he didn’t have anything to pay with, window shopping was too frustrating. Melissa spotted him leaving and followed after him, holding the thick tome with both hands to her chest.

“Wait up, I’m going back too.”

Melissa and Mortimer were in front of the staircase leading down into the Black Ruins Catacombs. Small droplets were trickling down his face while he was looking up at the cloudy sky.

“I wanted to make a trip to Crowshire order some custom armor for my skeleton, but the weather’s terrible.”

He sighed, even if it was just a drizzle right now, it would most likely be pouring when he returned.

Melissa chuckled. “It's just some water, what’s the big deal?”

“The big deal is, it might wash off the resin from my skeleton, I don’t have any left to touch it up.”

“Oh, that shouldn’t be that bad as long as you dry it off when you come back, you’re worrying for no reason. I made that stuff, it shouldn't be so crappy…I hope.”

Mortimer blinked. “You wanna come with me?”

She looked up at the sky before shaking her head. “I don’t want my hair to get wet, or my spider, plus I don’t like that town, it’s too depressing.”

He pointed down the stairs towards the catacombs. “Isn’t living in there more depressing?”

She puffed her cheeks out and rebuked him. “At least nobody tosses their shit out into the street in the catacombs and it’s much quieter and peaceful.”

“Fine, you have a point there.” he shook his head and turned to leave. “I’ll be going then, see you later.”

Melissa snatched him by his arm just as he turned around, putting on a sweet smile. “Can you pick up a few things for me?”

“No.” he pulled his arm back and frowned at her. “I’m not your chore boy.”

Her smile disappeared and was instead replaced with a piercing glare. “I’ll pay you one essence, that should be worth your time.”

Mortimer pondered for a moment before nodding, a soul essence was enough for him to attempt another enchantment. “Alright, what do you need?”

She pulled a lesser soul essence from her pouch, it was clear colored and glowing dimly. Mortimer stuffed it in his pocket, then took out a small booklet and stubby graphite pen from his satchel.

Mortimer turned away to shield the booklet from the water with his body, then opened it on an empty page and looked up at her. “Go on.”

She had a mischievous grin on her face while barraging Mortimer with alchemy ingredient names.

“Creep clusters, lavender, nightshade, taproots, jazbay grapes, deathbells and fly amaritas, that should be everything you can buy locally.”

Mortimer hastily scribbled down every name mentioned by her, his writing fast and accurate due to his extensive training in engraving. “Slow down, what quantity for each and what shops should I go look for them in?”

“Quantity? Just buy everything you can find, and all of the shops. They’re nothing too expensive, I need enough for a few months at least, it’s fine if they’re dried too.”

Melissa unhooked a cloth pouch from her waist and tossed it at him. Mortimer heard the clink of metal when he caught it in his hands, raising an eyebrow at Melissa.

“You want me to haul kilograms of ingredients back here through the rain? Your money really doesn’t come easy.”

The only reason he didn’t immediately refuse her was that his skeleton would do most of the carrying, but it would still slow down his pace.

“Don’t take too long, I need them today.” she gestured him goodbye then walked down the stairs and into the catacombs, followed in by her patchy furred spider minion.

Mortimer watched her walk off quietly before heading off towards a dirt road in the distance, accompanied by his skeleton. The sound of the rain engulfing the desolate ruins.

The town of Crowshire was a few kilometers away from the catacombs and separated by a small forest. It was located geographically on an isolated peninsula that was disconnected from the rest of the mainland, there were no trade routes by land or sea.

The population of the town was a meager five thousand with mostly humans but also a few minorities, it was the biggest town above ground within hundreds of kilometers.

A fair amount of its population were fugitives, outcasts, exiles, deserters and their families that settled down to start a new life in a faraway place. All things considered, it was a wonder it hadn’t devolved into anarchy and there was still some semblance of law and order.

Mortimer was trudging through the dim forest in the direction of the town when he spotted a family of black boars from the corner of his eye, it was a mother trailed by five little piglets drinking from a creek.

“That’s a lesser soul right there.” A struggling expression showed up on his face when he spotted the little black piglets trailing it. Every lesser soul he could get was important to him, he couldn't get stronger without hunting for his own resources to use.

“Can I really murder a mother in front of her children?” he shook his head, then turned to look at his werewolf undead. “If I had to do with my owns hands I couldn’t…but indirectly…”

After hiding his body behind a tree, he willed his werewolf skeleton to crouch down and stealthily approach the boar family busy drinking water. The boar mother suddenly turned around in the direction of the skeleton when he got closer and oinked at her children to get behind her.

Mortimer slapped his forehead, the resin had a strong chemical smell, it couldn’t escape the notice of the boar’s strong nose. “Stealth’s a failure, guess this is one of the resin’s downsides when facing creatures with sensitive noses.”

The gray skeleton leaped out the bushes and landed in front of the guarded mother boar, spooking its children and having them huddle behind their guardian. The mother boar courageously took a stand against the bigger predator to protect its children, it pawed the ground and grunted in threat, preparing to charge.

Its charge was easily sidestepped by it at the last second with uncanny grace, instead making it easier for the undead to disembowel the boar with its sharp claws as it passed by. The little piglets saw their mother fall down and squealed in fright, turning tail to escape without any regard for their siblings. They all split up and ran in different directions of the forest while whining.

Mortimer came out from behind the tree and approached the gutted boar with a downcast expression. He commanded his undead to finish it off with a jab of its claws through its skull, then withdrew a dull crystalline gem from his pouch.

“Am I going to have to fend off revenge attacks from magical piglets in the future? It isn’t impossible for them to find and eat some kind of legendary magical herb.” he snorted and shook his head.

Touching a part of its untainted fur, he chanted under his breath while holding the empty soul gem. A tiny wisp of light was sucked out of the boar’s body while he was chanting the soul trap spell, imprisoning it inside the empty gem. The previously dull soul gem was emitting a faint white glow now that it was filled with a soul.

Lesser Soul Gem: contains beast type lesser soul (black boar adult)

Now that he had extracted it’s raw soul, there were several ways he could process it. If he wanted to make a boar undead and have a shot at obtaining any mastery skills from its soul, he'd had to spend the time to comb through it with a soul scouring spell.

By using the spell, he could browse through the boar’s entire life memories like flipping pages through a book, and selectively keep only the useful mastery experiences and knowledge accumulated over its entire life, erasing everything else that could make it have a will of its own.

It was a lengthy and time-consuming process, especially in the case of processing long-lived creatures that have lifespans of hundreds of years. Proficiency in soul scouring was measured by how fast you could finish processing a soul and the quantity and quality of the extracted masteries. Naturally, you couldn't extract masteries from somebody who spent their entire life sleeping in a cave and never did anything.

A soul’s masteries can be anything that the individual was proficient at while alive, and it doesn't necessarily need to be combat-related. It could be proficiency with a certain kind of weapon or playing a musical instrument, anything that could be considered a skill was able to be extracted from a raw soul and used.

A beginner neophyte like Mortimer would need days to browse through the years of the boar’s lifespan to get an acceptable result, while a master at soul scouring could finish in minutes with a much better result.

While there are masters at soul scouring that could fabricate memories to their benefit to gain the loyalty of intelligent lifelike undead, the fabricated memories will erode over time, there have been many cases of overconfident necromancers having their intelligent undead turn on them when they realized the truth down the line.

It was much safer to turn them into brainless husks of their former selves and preserve only their most important skills.

If the soul was not particularly useful to the necromancer, there was always the second option to refine it into a soul essence. Soul essences were the currency most often used among necromancers, they could be used as fuel for enchanting, or the most common use, to nurture their spirit.

Nurturing the spirit with soul essences to raise it was the most popular method used by necromancers, it was a slow process and took a lot of accumulation every day to see results, it couldn’t be rushed. A neophyte would need to slowly increase it to the value of thirty before they could attempt to step into the realm of a Rank 1 Necromancer.