When Emil stepped back outside of the dungeon, it was still dark. He wasn’t quite sure about the exact time, but he guessed that it was currently around midnight. Meaning that he had arrived just after it had become completely dark, so he had been in there for quite a while. The half-soul still in his hands, Emil began to float up into the air. He went higher than the trees of the surrounding forest, and then began to fly back in the direction of the town and his camp.

When Emil had flown from the camp to the dungeon, his mind had been worried about how the meeting with Alterum would go. But as he flew back, his thoughts felt much clearer. So out of curiosity, he tried to gauge the actual distance between the dungeon and the town.

“Let’s see, when I left the camp it was around late afternoon. I got here not too long after the sun fully set, and dusk comes at a pretty early time during winter. So as a ghost, it only took me a few hours of flying. Compared to when I first left the dungeon on foot…” Emil thought aloud.

He had walked for a couple of hours out of the dungeon and then fell asleep. After that, he walked for a while longer. Emil had then found the spot where he had stayed during those two weeks alone in the wilderness. Once that period was over, he continued to walk for several hours while following the river. Until finally, the town came into his sight. Emil had done most of the walking at a fairly average pace, he believed. So if he had to estimate the total amount of time he spent on the move…

“So fifty miles between them, give or take? Or maybe it’s more like sixty, or even seventy? Hmm, at the very least, I’m pretty sure it’s less than one hundred.” A thought then occurred to him.

“Oh. Well, I guess I can now say that I couldn’t even make it a full hundred miles on this journey without dying, right? Yay me,” he sarcastically said to himself.

But knowing the distance and time he spent traveling was important. If nothing else, whenever he next looked at a map of the Kingdom of Mendac, he’d now have a rough estimate of where the dungeon was located within the Second South region. Having that reference point would be needed when he made the journey to find Alterum’s tooth.

A few hours later, Emil made his descent down toward his encampment. As expected, it was still the middle of the night with quite a while left to go before dawn. During the flight, the moon had become covered by clouds, and now a light snowfall had begun. As Emil neared the ground, Theo reacted in the same as before. It dug itself out from the ground, and momentarily stared at him before it looked around in confusion.

Emil touched its shell. Now would be the best time to possess its body and return to his corpse. The hospital likely wouldn’t have as many workers at night. So it should be easier for him to reach his body if there fewer people who could discover the undead insectoid.

Once again, as he made contact with its physical body, his thoughts could not reach Theo’s. That foggy separation from before was still there. But now Emil understood it for what it really was. Theo fully belonged to the Upper Plane, while he was part of the Haze.

When he possessed someone, he effectively was just hijacking their body to cross that gap and be part of the Upper Plane again. So if he were to now possess Theo’s form, it should allow him to cross over the fog that separated him from his undead. There was no time to waste.

His spectral hand phased through the outer shell, and went into its body. He reached for its core, the undead fake heart. Within it, Emil could feel the power of unholy fire he had imbued it with. As he had done for Maynard, he began to enter the body to take it over for himself.

“Mas…ter? Mas..ter!” Theo cried out. It was in the middle of this process that their minds were finally able to fully reconnect. Emil could once again sense his creation’s undying loyalty to him. And in turn, the undead creature could sense his own intentions and what he currently planned to do.

When Emil had taken over the body of Maynard, he needed to actively control and suppress the captain’s soul. And even then, he was eventually forced out of possessing him anyway. But for Theo, the opposite was true. The undead understood what his desire was, and it was more than willing to entirely give up control of its body to its master.

The next moment, Emil felt the cold, snowy breeze. But it was nothing compared to the icy chill that he could now feel from within. Inside him, there was a slow pulse from the undead heart. But more importantly, once again, Emil could feel the ambient Mana surrounding him. That feeling of emptiness he had felt as a ghost was now filled as he took a second to enjoy being able to sense Mana again.

After that was done, he began to test how this insectoid body felt. He flexed his spindly legs, trying to get used to Theo’s body. For one thing, something he hadn’t really thought about was how everything seemed… bigger.

Obviously, he logically understood that it was because Theo's body was smaller and far shorter than he had been. In terms of size, the undead was comparable to a small dog after all. But to him, the difference in perspective was still more than a little jarring. Then there was the matter of sight.

It was only now, as he used Theo’s eyes, that he realized that it didn’t quite ‘see’ the way a human could. Visually, every object looked pixelated and individually hard to make out. Yet, it was when he had his eyes closed that everything actually became clearer.

As a human, he could sense the Mana in all things as a sort of ambient presence. But now, in Theo’s body, that sense was only heightened to the point of being able to make out the world around him from that alone. Like he could tell that there was a rock behind him without even looking, by the way the Mana it contained interacted with the Mana in the air.

But that Mana sense was limited in its range. Past a certain point, its proficiency dropped dramatically until it quickly went back to just a blur of background noise. Yet even despite that limitation, this new sense felt amazing. Within its effective range, Emil could pick out every tiny object and movement within a sphere.

Even underground, he could tell that a small insect was currently digging a tunnel directly under him. He could tell that a gust of wind was about to hit him, from the way the Mana in the air suddenly shifted before it him.

When Emil had recreated Theo with this body, he had no idea that it had resulted in this kind of ability. He should have known about this already as its creator. But he hadn’t, until now at least. And to him, this discovery was equally surprising as it was fascinating. When he had made this new body for Theo with Undead Creation, he did it while using the power of the flame boar. So he assumed that this unexpected result could have been an additional part of that choice.

While thinking about that fiery power, however, he looked inward to learn more. Emil could feel the flames inside Theo’s body, and felt that they could be released at a moment’s notice. Curious about testing a couple of things, he let out a small cone of blue fire. As he did, he felt that a little bit of Mana had gone into the action. But there was no notification from the System for the exact amount he had just spent.

He then attempted to cast a spell with Negative Magic. To his relief, it went off without a hitch as more Mana was spent on creating a small sphere of negative energy. He let the spell dissipate. It was an interesting situation. It was now confirmed that Emil once again had access to all his abilities. But at the same time, he didn’t quite have full access to the System.

If he had to make an educated guess, it might have been because his soul now had Theo’s body as a conduit. And with said conduit, his ghostly form once again could exist in the Upper Plane in a body that had the ability to use magic. However, it seemed that the System still didn’t recognize the possessed Theo as actually being him? That was the best assumption he could think of.

Emil grabbed the mayor’s half-soul and clutched it between his spindly legs. He then parted the shell to release the insectoid wings, and used them to fly into the air. Inside, he could still feel Theo’s presence within the body. With his will, the undead shared all of what it knew about the use of its body. As a result, while Emil flew around for the first time with these wings, he already felt like a complete natural at it.

He kept his eyes open as he flew. The pixelated vision would give him a rough idea o what was in the distance. While the ‘Mana sense’, as he wanted to call it, gave complete knowledge of everything within close proximity.

He then took to the skies, and surveyed the world below him. Away from the cover of the trees, the howling gusts of winter winds only felt stronger. The amount of snow they carried also seemed to only have grown compared to before. Perhaps there was snow storm or even a full-blown blizzard on the way. But in the body of Theo, who had already experienced flying in a vicious storm, remaining steady in the high winds was a breeze.

Thanks to that shared knowledge and the properties of Theo’s body, being able to navigate through the windy knight was easy. To the point where getting from the camp to the hospital took even less time than it had as a ghost. The ease with which he could move in space. The wind lashed against the insectoid exoskeleton, but to Emil, he only felt the exhilaration of being able to fly at such a high speed. But soon, it came to an end. The hospital building was now within sight.

He circled around the building as he made his descent. By this point, it looked all the windows had already been closed. But Emil had already assumed as much with how late and cold it was now. He went to the section that had the room with his body in it. When Emil was close enough, he didn’t even need to look through the window.

Thanks to Mana-sense, he confirmed that his corpse was no longer on the bed. Which meant that it had most likely been moved over to the hospital’s morgue, probably alongside the mayor’s body. It made sense that it was now over there. But he had still wanted to double-check if it was in the room first, before he entered the building.

He went up to the window, and began to channel Mana. When Emil had created this new body for Theo, he had gained two new abilities, Unholy Fire Magic and Flesh Manipulation. Since that event, Emil had only tried using the unholy flames. But as for the Flesh Manipulation, there was no time like the present when it came to experimentation.

Emil focused the Mana into the pointed end of one of the frontmost insectoid legs. He recalled the sensation he had previously felt when he combined Theo with the undead, and manipulated the shape of its flesh. But unlike before, Emil tried to utilize Alterum’s explanation. Rather than imagining it as a power that formed inside him, he imagined his own self going inward. That somewhere inside his soul, there was a miniature gate that led to a plane corresponding to Flesh Manipulation.

He tried to picture what such a plane could look like, and the mental image came to him easily. Fields of meat with a layer of skin stretched thinly over. Through it, veins and arteries were clearly visible. A constant, rhythmic pulse shook the squishy ground. Mountains of bone reached up towards a sky filled with red clouds that rained down blood. At the base of the mountainous bones, muscle fibers contracted and extended, making the bones slowly move as they flexed. The only noises that could be heard were the creaks of bones, clicks of joints, and rush of blood going through the meaty ground. A sharp metallic smell filled his nose.

In his mind’s eye, he was on the ground level, staring out at the seemingly infinite stretch. He could feel a gust of hot, humid wind on his skin. In front of him were piles of organs like hearts, lungs, and eyeballs. Each one was alive, and connected to the rest through strings of flesh. As Emil stared out, the eyes surrounding his perspective slowly shifted their gazes to stare back at him. The mental image broke off.

The exoskeleton of the leg he had focused on had become a blade. One that had a razor-sharp edge that curved into a point. He had intended to form it into a blade sharp enough to cut through the window. Yet, Emil could just feel that his magic had gone beyond that point, that his spell had turned out far more potent. Something within himself told him that this new leg would be able to cut through much more than just a window.

Knowledge is power. To must, that phrase was just a piece of wisdom. But for those that could use magic, it was a core tenant that acted as the foundation for all things arcane. Alterum had said that just the knowledge of the gates within his soul “isn’t enough.” That he would need to be able to actually sense them directly as well.

Emil hadn’t truly done anything differently from he had used magic before. But just knowing that there was a small gate inside him, and knowing that there existed a plane of flesh, had already enhanced the effect of his magic. And when he had imagined it, it didn’t feel like it was just an internal image. No, it had been far more vivid than any other time he had visualized power before. It had felt real, like he had actually been there. Even now, as the possessed body of Theo faced the brunt of icy winds, Emil could still feel the hot, humid air and hear the pulses of flesh.

If this enhancement was dismissively considered by Alterum as not enough, then what would it be like if Emil could directly feel the gates inside him? Just how much potential did he have, if the restriction from the gods wasn’t there? He wanted to know. He wanted to find out just how much power lay waiting beyond the shackles that tied humanity down.

He used the manipulated leg to cut a hole through the window. Carefully, he grasped onto the cutout section with a few of his other legs. Emil then carried it down onto the grown, where it dropped into the snow with barely a sound. Once that was done, he crawled through the hole and entered the hospital.

Alterum had assured him that if he followed its instructions, then he would be able to reach that desired point. He knew that the undead dragon’s purpose in aiding him was only to further its own goals while making sure Emil could fulfill his end of their contract.

But even if that weren’t the case, he would still want to unlock that potential. The knowledge he had acquired and the extra power it gave felt like a sample to give him a taste of what could be. And now, Emil himself wanted to get his hands on the full course.

Towards that end, he began to navigate his way through the hospital. He had made sure to stay aware of his surroundings, in case a patient or worker suddenly entered his vision or the range of Mana-sense. But he knew it wouldn’t take him too long to find the morgue and reclaim his corpse.