Chapter 37: Inheritance

Jack was sitting in his high-backed chair, the afternoon light was illuminating the room through the window. He turned the first parchment page of his grandfather’s journal.

The handwriting was neat and careful, but the words themselves were heavy with a century of guilt.

“If you are reading this, then you are a Frost-Grip,” the journal began. “And you have found the secret that I was too weak to destroy.”

“My name is Alistair Frost-Grip. I was born with a core, but thanks to the blood of my mother, my mana was tied to the wind, not to the grave. I was a wind Mage. When I discovered this, I wept with pure relief. It meant I did not have to carry the family curse.”

Jack leaned forward, reading the faded ink carefully.

“We were not always a minor, impoverished house banished to this miserable valley,” Alistair had written. “Three hundred years ago, the Frost-Grip family ruled one of the major parts of the continent. We were absolute masters of the Grey Arts. We commanded armies that did not need to sleep or eat.”

“But the Holy Church grew in power. They declared the Grey Arts to be heretical, an insult to the natural order of the gods. They launched a massive crusade against our family. Our armies were burned to ash by the enemy Mages. Our lands were seized. The surviving members of our bloodline were hunted down, stripped of their titles, and pushed to the absolute northern edge of the continent, left here to slowly freeze to death.”

Jack stopped reading for a moment. He looked up, staring at his blank bedroom wall.

Suddenly, a lot of things made sense. Old Miller had mentioned that the mages from the Holy Church had stopped coming north to help them thin out the wild beasts. To the villagers, it was a tragedy. To Jack, he now realized it was an absolute blessing. If a Holy Church mage ever came to this valley and saw his skeletal Night Shift hauling pine logs, they would execute him on the spot.

Jack looked back down at the book. Alistair went on to explain his deep shame. When his own father had died, Alistair had went into the lowest levels of the crypts to burn the perfectly preserved bodies of their most powerful and loyal ancestor mages. He was supposed to destroy the evidence to protect the remaining family. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Jack’s eyes widened slightly. Down there in the dark, behind walls, was an arsenal of preserved, high-tier mages just waiting to be claimed.

But as Jack eagerly turned the page, he hit a massive roadblock.

The next section was titled: The Law of Permission.

“A necromancer cannot simply snap their fingers and raise whoever they wish,” Alistair wrote, detailing the core mechanics of the magic. “Mana is an invasive force. A human body, even a dead one, will naturally resist foreign mana trying to enter it. To raise an intelligent species, two hard rules must be followed.”

“First, a weak mage cannot force their will upon a strong soul. The target must have a lower core level than the necromancer, or possess no core at all. Second, and most importantly, the necromancer needs Permission. The dead must allow the mana to enter. This is usually gained through a sworn oath made during the target’s life, or through an immensely deep emotional bond of absolute loyalty.”

“Permission,” Jack whispered to himself.

He finally understood why his magic had been working so flawlessly. He hadn’t been raising random corpses. When he first went down into the crypts, he had raised the bones of the ancient castle guards. In life, those men had sworn a literal oath to serve the Frost-Grip family until the end of time. That oath acted as an open door, a permanent “Permission” for Jack’s mana to enter their remains.

If Jack walked into a graveyard in a random city and tried to raise a dead peasant who had no connection to him, the corpse would violently resist his magic.

He turned the page again, looking for the power scaling. He needed to know exactly what his current limits were.

Instead of a simple list, Alistair had written a detailed observation of how a Necromancer’s soul evolved, broken down by the core stages.

The entry level was the Grey Core, the first tier. Alistair described it as a fragile, flickering spark. A mage at this stage could control a few dozen humans who possessed no magic cores, provided they had Permission. However, the true weakness of the Grey Core was the natural world. Alistair noted that animals do not make oaths. They do not understand human concepts of loyalty. Therefore, beasts possess a ‘Wild Soul.’ Their instincts violently reject a necromancer’s mental commands. A Grey Core mage attempting to control a wild beast would find it almost impossible to keep the creature from turning feral and attacking everything in sight.

Jack felt a cold knot form in his stomach.

His entire plan for the Beast Tide had relied on a simple idea: wait for the militia to kill the first wave of beasts, raise the dead beasts, and use them to fight the rest of the pack. But according to his grandfather, a Grey Core was simply too weak to suppress a beast’s wild soul easily. If he tried to raise a dead beast right now, it would likely ignore his commands and start attacking his own villagers.

Jack read on, desperate for a solution. The next stage was the Iron Core. At the second tier, the mana solidified into an unyielding foundation. Alistair’s notes became highly specific here. A necromancer was strictly bound by the capacity of their soul. An Iron Core mage could simultaneously control a maximum of three Grey Core undead and two Iron Core undead. Furthermore, the sheer density of an Iron Core allowed the mage to force a corpse with intact flesh and vocal cords to speak, though doing so drained immense amounts of energy.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Beyond that lay the Bronze, Silver, and Gold cores. With each stage, the capacity for control expanded mathematically. A Bronze Core could command nine Grey Core undead or three Iron Core undead or two Bronze Core undead at a time. A Silver Core possessed enough pure mana to actually return fragments of the undead’s original consciousness back to them, allowing the dead to think and make tactical decisions without the mage directing their every step. A Gold Core could create highly intelligent undead mages giving them their consciousness back for much longer periods.

Below the Gold Core description, there was a final heading: Transcendental.

But the neat handwriting suddenly became messy and erratic. Alistair simply wrote that there were six levels beyond Gold, but he refused to document them. The methods required to bridge the gap past the Gold Core, he claimed, were too vile.

Jack slowly closed the leather cover of the book.

The diary was a massive treasure. It gave him a clear understanding of the rules governing his power. But it also presented a serious problem. The Beast Tide was coming. Jack’s core had been throbbing with intense heat lately, a sign that all his hard work building the village walls had pushed his Grey Core to the absolute limit. He was right on the edge of breaking through to the Iron Core.

Jack paused, a frown creeping onto his face. “Isn’t it a bit too sudden, though?” he thought to himself. From the inherited memories, he knew that breaking through to the next core stage usually required years of experience. He was standing at the edge of it after roughly two months. “Whatever,” Jack decided, shaking his head. “Maybe it is just because I have been completely draining and overusing my powers to build a village every single night.”

But until he actually broke through, he was stuck at the Grey Core stage. Which meant he couldn’t just rely on a massive army of dead beasts to effortlessly defeat the Beast Tide. His magic had limits.