As he slept, Emil fitfully rolled around. In his dreams, he was confronted by his dead teammates. They had no bodies, but their faces loomed over and encircled him. They did nothing, said nothing, but always watched him. But one by one, their skin peeled off and hair fell out. Their muscle melted from their heads and splatted against the ground. Their eyes were the last things to fall off, leaving only bloody skulls.

But even as the eyeballs hit the ground, their gazes continued to stare at him. Emil woke up several times throughout that night. Each time, he knew he had been experiencing a nightmare, but was never able to recall any of the details.

The following morning, Emil started off that day with some stretches before eating breakfast. After that, he immediately went to work. If he could help it, he wanted to spend as much time as possible training today. Only stopping to replenish his Mana and using that as his break while waiting for conversion to finish, was his plan.

For his goals, Emil had two that he wanted to tackle. First, he wanted to see just what other kinds of spells he could pull off with Negative Magic. Then after that, seeing which of his other powers he could try out. Emil wanted to attempt to use them all at least once while he was out here.

He knew that two weeks was nowhere enough time to actually level any of them up, even if he focused all of his attention on just one. But at least he could become familiar with them and understand their capabilities. Ready for a productive day, Emil stepped outside the cave and went right to it.

After quite a bit of trial and error, Emil managed to cast two new spells with Negative Magic. Of this pair, one was still a work in progress, while the other was rather simple. For the latter, it was one that he decided to name Negative Touch.

In concept, he enveloped his hand in a layer of negative energy, then he could impart that energy to whatever he touched. While the idea in of itself was basic, the effectiveness was actually quite impressive. He had tested this spell on a boulder, and left an inch-deep indent of his hand in its surface. If that was what it was able to do against stone, he hoped he would never have to see what it could do to a person’s body.

But as for the second spell, it was a projectile like Negative Void. In fact, that spell was actually the basis for this one. But rather than let it remain spherical, he wanted to compress it down and force it into an arc shape. Emil’s hope for this was that rather than get bigger in every direction, any size increase would happen longways.

Though every time he cast it, whenever the arc hit any object, it reverted back into a sphere. It would take some time, but he figured he could eventually get the spell to behave the way he wanted it to. But as of right now, his Mana Level had gone down to 110/200. So before he moved on, it was time to replenish that back to full and take a break.

‘Okay, now what do I want to try next?’ Emil asked himself. Negative Magic had been easy for him to grasp. Even though it was a unique kind of elemental force, it was still similar enough to what he had already been used to as a Mage. As for the rest, however, the same thing could not be said. Emil thought about all the different insects he had already killed.

‘Hmm, might as well go for Undead Creation. I have plenty of bug bodies to practice on, after all.’ And even if the magic went awry in any way, at least the undead he created would only be an insect. After all, the ability name was ‘creation’ not control. So at least a tiny monster would be easy enough for him to destroy if need be.

Emil walked over to a rotten log and flipped it over. There, as he had last left them, was a small pile of dead test subjects. He grabbed one of the bugs and set it aside, away from the rest. It was just a brown roach, barely the size of his pinky nail.

“Alrighty, here goes something,” Emil mumbled to himself. While leaving one finger in contact with the bug, he closed his eyes. He took a small bit of Mana, and guided it through his soul and into his hand. From there, he had it leave from his finger and pushed into the bug’s corpse. He focused as much Mana as he safely could. For too much might cause such a tiny thing to just explode from the power.

-2 Mana

But when Emil reopened his eyes, the bug seemed just lifeless as before. He should have figured that he wouldn’t get it right on his first try. There had to be something else to it then, something that he was missing. After all, if just putting Mana into a dead body was enough, then anyone could create undead.

Placing his chin against his hand, he tried to think. The answer existed, he just had to find it. Emil thought back to Alterum, a being that was physically just a skeleton. But it had moved just as well as any creature that still had muscles to contract and tissue connecting its bones.

‘Wait, that’s right! Its bones, there was some kind of thread connecting them all together! If I had to guess, that’s what let it moves. That thread acts as a magical substitute for what it would otherwise have needed. No, if anything…’ Emil looked down at his own body. From his brain, signals were sent down with the nerves. Then when those signals reached his muscles, they allowed him to move.

But what if the muscles were removed, and it was hypothetically possible to move with just the brain and nerves alone? Would that not actually be effective, by cutting out the delay from the muscles responding? With magic, it could become even more efficient. Because rather than a physical connection, it would be an one made through a spiritual level. As such, there would be practically no lag time to speak of between command and exectution.

Emil tried to imagine it in his mind, shaping his Mana into a single string. With the Mana already inside the roach’s body, he guided the string through it. He had it attach to its head, go down through the center into its wings, and then back into each of its legs. When that was done, Emil began to concentrate. He wanted to make it move through his willpower alone, to use his magic to command it to walk around.

One leg twitched, then another. One by one, he could get each part to move individually. Now it was simply a matter of getting it all to work together. But the question became, was this really the way he was supposed to do it? To Emil, it still felt off, like he was still missing something critical.

After all, what he had done just now didn’t make the roach undead. It was basically a puppet, one whose strings could be pulled by his will. But each movement would have to be manually controlled by him. Perhaps the string was one part of the equation, but there was another that he still lacked.

When it came to turning something into an undead creature, the only reference he had for that transformation was himself and Alterum’s own. And both times, it had relied on the power derived from the deaths of others. So maybe, just maybe, Emil could manipulate that source. Instead of absorbing it to convert into Mana, he could pour some of it directly into the roach and then cast the spell.

Emil stood up, and held the roach in his enclosed hand. He would need to find another insect nest, though he figured he had already cleared all the ones immediately surrounding to his shelter. But it likely wouldn’t take him long to find enough if he walked a little further out.

When Emil did find one, he went to work on killing them all. But where before he had immesarly absorbed their death energy, this time he left it alone and allowed it to build up. By the time he killed the last one, a small cloud had appeared above them. Emil touched it, and shuddered. He had already done several times, but had never let it reach a point of forming into the cloud. As such, this was the first time it revealed the last moments of the all the bugs.

Multiple images entered his mind at once, all playing the similar things at the same time. Their home being ripped out of the earth by a giant, the scale of which was too large for an insect mind to fully comprehend. But even though they knew they were in danger and attempted to flee, they were all smushed and killed.

When he pulled back, he felt strange. Through the eyes of a bug, the world had looked completely grey and different. But even so, for a moment he was those bugs, and had effectively experienced being killed by himself. To call that a weird sensation and feeling would have been an understatement.

But for now, he tried to ignore and push aside their final memories. Emil placed down his experimental roach, and tried to control the cloud of death energy. All he wanted for now was a small piece, just enough to use as a first attempt. He pulled off a chunk and pushed it into the roach.

Emil imagined his undead as something like a puppet, but one capable of moving on its own to some degree. But even with autonomous movement, it would lack a true will of its own, and instead follow his. Its entire physical body would be a shell, nothing more than a medium to let it interact with the world. The death energy would be an imitation of a soul. Then the strings of Mana would be what connected the two. While the rest of the Mana in its body would act as its fuel, substituting any need for food, water, and air.

When the last of the death energy was absorbed into the bug, Emil moved back a little. At first, its body failed to move, and once again he began to wonder what he could have missed. But then, the roach’s entire body started to shake and convulse. Its legs twitched rapidly in the air.

Without any manual input from him, the roached flipped over from its back and onto its stomach. Then there, in a part of his mind, there was a presence. One that could not speak or truly think on its own, but remained connected to him. And through that inherent conection, Emil could sense that it was waiting for his first command.

This was no longer just a dead roach. Now, it was his first undead servant.