Today the book on Necromancy Mest ordered for me came through. I spent most of the day reading, and I managed to finish the book. The book itself is written very simply and straightforward, which makes sense as it was written to teach people necromancy. The problem is I can’t wrap my head around any of it.

When I tried to raise a zombie, using a rat corpse, I couldn’t get my mana into the right shape no matter how hard I tried. My mind just kind of went numb, as if I was struggling to even comprehend the magic I ’m trying to use, which I am. Even doing it very deliberately and slowly yielded no results.

I asked Mest about it and he sighed in disappointment before he explained what was going on. He said that when I asked about necromancy he decided to run a minor experiment, basically to see if I could learn necromancy in the first place. See healing magic and necromancy are anathema to each other, having any kind of ability with healing magic makes it all but impossible to use necromancy, and vice versa. Though necromancers do have access to their own necrotic healing, but that slowly turns the person it is used on undead.

However, Necromancy is based on dungeons, or more specifically the way dungeons create and control creatures. What happens when a necromancer makes an undead is a tiny piece of their soul, much smaller than one a dungeon uses, enters the corpse and functions as a catalyst for a soul to reincarnate into the body. This forms a connection between the necromancer and undead allowing a much cruder form of control than what a dungeon enjoys, because while that connection lets the necromancer physically control an undead it won’t make them want to serve the necromancer.

Back to the topic at hand. Mest was wondering if my status as a dungeon would let me overcome my healing magic when it came to learning necromancy, he didn’t tell me about it because he was worried my knowledge would somehow skew the results.

That probably means none of the ents are going to be able to learn necromancy then, all of them are innately talented at healing magic because that was the way I made them. And I highly doubt anyone in Par ’s tribe will have the magical capability to learn something as difficult as Necromancy using just a book, maybe if they had a proper teacher then sure, but not from a book.

Mest won’t learn because he doesn’t want the side effects of constantly shaving small parts of your soul off, and Tiddol already knows a bit of healing magic. Thes and Par are magically illiterate, while both Talus and Willow rely way too much on intention to really learn necromancy. It is supposedly a very theory-heavy field of magic, intention only helps a small bit.

It wasn’t a total waste. I did learn a bit about general magic theory, I ’m not sure how exactly that will help but I’m sure it will. Or at least I hope it will.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.