Watching my first skeleton minion do the Moonwalk before switching to a robot dance, I decided to finish off its performance with a round of tap dancing. Listening to rhythmic clacking, it was somewhat soothing, since the only other noise in the stuffy hall was a annoying creaking noise from above me. Staring at the dark, stone ceiling and the small amount of powdery dust periodically falling into my hall, I felt a little more motivated to get the hell out of this place. The thought of hundreds of tons of stone crashing down on me was not a pleasant thought.

A quick thought to my first minion, visualizing what I wanted the skeleton summon to do, returned it to standing in a slouch, waiting for my next command. It hadn't taken me too long to figure out how to give it commands, thanks to all the video games on Earth. It was like a mix of real time strategy mixed in with third person RPG and thought sharing. The skeleton summon had also come with a lot of actions and capabilities preinstalled, being able to move around and do most basic actions like swing something around if I needed it to. I couldn't help but think of it as having some kind of low level AI, though in this case it was a lot more complicated that that, since it had to deal with manipulating souls. At least that was what my wizard level memories told me.

What was a soul? Ancient magic research had pretty much established it was a metaphysical summation of a person's core individuality, personality, and memories, all held together by mana and affixed to one's biological existence. What was mana? It was the energy that fueled magic, which essentially was the opposite of the natural laws of the world. Amazingly enough, every living thing in this world had mana, and those that had souls especially required mana to survive. Of course, mana existed everywhere, including in the air, almost like oxygen.

Summoning a temporary skeleton was a low level, necromancy spell that only involved me powering the spell with mana and borrowing a nearby, recently deceased creature's soul as its core. The spell or magic program essentially cleansed the soul of its personality and memory, leaving it only with the individual essence or the hardware of the soul and installing it in a new body derived from skeletons of dead creatures. Wiping my bony forehead of its nonexistent sweat, I immediately felt some regret for having delved into my memories about wizard level theories of magic. I had a feeling that if I wanted to, I could probably spend a couple hundred years going around and around explaining magic.

Of course, all this meant there were higher level spells that involved manipulating souls, something that I really did not want to get involved with but had no choice to due my circumstances of being sealed on the throne. Also, it meant that there were living creatures nearby. I hoped it was a colony of mice or even just cockroaches, but remembering the soul size and strength needed to summon a skeleton, I knew I was out of luck. That made my next step more important.

After familiarizing myself with the simplest of higher tier spells that I currently had access to, I cast on the summoned skeleton, crossing my phalanges for luck. Almost immediately, I felt something separate from inside me and become a part of the skeleton. It was bizarre, as at first, it felt like I was in some kind of weird VR game as I moved the skeleton’s right hand in front of its face. However, a little bit later, I was literally in two places, looking at myself from two different perspectives. “Fuck, this is confusing as hell.” There was two of me in two different bodies. One was the low tier summoned skeleton, and the other was a graying skeleton, sitting on a large metallic throne with a black and white flame burning in its chest. Stroking my lich jaw in thought, I was kind of disappointed at how ragged and pathetic my lich self looked, especially with the holy spear impaling me. Most of the high tier, dragon skin robe that I was wearing had literally been shredded or burnt away, leaving nothing but rags. Even most of the bling on my lich self had been melted and deformed, leaving me with looking like I had some weird bone disease.

Lamenting about my appearance distracted me for a bit, but eventually I decided to get moving with what I had to do. Literally being in two places at once was better than trying to just guide a summoned creature. Usually, no self respecting higher undead would parasitize a summoned skeleton, but my circumstances kind of left me limited in my choices. According to Lichopedia, resulted in the caster’s soul temporarily merging with the target’s soul, taking control of the target both in body and soul. Unfortunately, that meant that the target’s memories, personality, and preferences all had a good chance of influencing the caster. I was too new this whole thing to risk messing with a soul of a higher tier summon, since most of them were born bat shit crazy and with hatred towards all living things. Trying to parasitize their soul had a chance of driving me temporarily crazy as well. That was not something I cared for too much.

Moving my summoned skeleton self gingerly through the bones and refuse covering the hall’s floor, I felt a little weird. There was this weird urge to dance. Remembering how much I sucked at dancing, I was glad that I had let the ‘mindless’ summoned skeleton only mess with a few dance routines. The frequent desire of wanting to Moonwalk across the hall felt kind of annoying, but it was something I could ignore for the most part. I thought about arming myself, but most of the weapons and armor had rusted or broken down to a significant degree, that they didn't look like they would be of much use. Even the exquisite amors and weapons of the former heroes crumbled or broke when I tried picking them up. So, with no other option, my lich self waved goodbye to my summoned skeleton self as I bravely entered the dark hallway leading away from the hall, leaving my lich self forlornly sitting in the throne room staring at the torches again.