Chapter 38: Wild Soul

A full week had passed in the frozen valley, and a new routine settled over the village.

Jack was standing at the window of his balcony, looking down at the settlement. Even though it was far, he could barely see a group of heavily coated men was pulling a wooden handcart up the path from the old mine. The cart was loaded with dark chunks of coal.

Because of the airtight, pitch-sealed doors the Night Shift had installed in the mine tunnels a week ago. Human miners were finally able to enter the mine safely upto a safe point marked by Jack. Small-scale mining had officially started. The village now had a steady supply of standard fuel to keep the communal furnaces burning bright.

But heat, as Jack was painfully realizing, could not be eaten.

Jack turned away from the balcony and sat down at his desk. He opened the village supply ledgers, his expression grim.

The massive pile of grain he had bought from Merchant Gary was disappearing at a terrifying rate. When you had an entire village of desperate, hard-working people who had been starving for months, food vanished much faster than the standard winter suggested. They were eating into their reserves too quickly.

Jack thought about the greenhouse his skeletons and the villagers had built. It was a complete success. But it was just one small building. A single greenhouse could only provide a few fresh vegetables to ward off sickness, it could not provide staple calories to feed over forty people.

To actually feed the fief, Jack knew he needed at least five more greenhouses. But building them was completely impossible. To trap the sunlight and keep the cold out, a greenhouse required clear glass panes. They had barely managed to salvage enough unbroken glass from the castle to build the first one. Making fresh glass required specialized sand, massive kilns, and highly skilled glassblowers—none of which existed in this impoverished territory.

A knock on the door pulled Jack from his dark thoughts.

“Come in,” Jack called out.

Giles stepped into the room. He looked shaken.

“My Lord,” Giles said, pulling off his wool cap. “The woodcutters came back from the woods early today. They dropped their axes and ran back to the palisade. They refuse to go back out.”

Jack frowned, leaning forward on his desk. “Why?”

“My Lord. They found a carcass,” Giles replied, his voice tight with anxiety. “A dead mountain hound. It looked like it had been in a fight with something bigger, but the important part is that it was far below the snowline. It was barely a mile from the village gates.”

Jack’s heart sank.

“Did they see any live ones?” Jack asked.

“A few fast shadows were moving in the deep trees, they said. It is just the scouts of the main packs,” Giles explained, running a rough hand over his beard. “The men have lived in these mountains their whole lives. They know exactly how this starts. The beasts are starving up in the high peaks, and they are moving down to the valley looking for meat. In just a few weeks, the entire valley will be crawling with them. The men have decided they will not go out into the woods alone anymore.”

Jack nodded slowly. He could not blame them. Regular peasants with wood-axes were just fresh meat to a desperate predator.

“Tell the men they do not have to work alone,” Jack ordered firmly. “From now on, no one leaves the gates without an escort. Assign two guards armed with Barnaby’s new boar spears to every woodcutting detail. And double the watch on the palisade walls at night.”

“Yes, My Lord,” Giles said, visibly relieved that Jack was taking the threat seriously. He bowed respectfully and quickly left the room to organize the guards.

Jack sat alone in the quiet study. His Grey Core was painfully close to breaking through to the Iron Core. But a magical breakthrough wouldn’t matter if his current military strategy was flawed.

His original plan for the Beast Tide had been very simple: let the human militia kill the first wave of beasts, use his necromancy to raise the dead animal corpses, and send them charging back into the forest to fight their own packmates. But Jack’s grandfather’s diary had warned him that animals possessed a ‘Wild Soul’ that violently resisted magical control.

He needed to know if his grandfather was right. He wanted to test it.

Jack stood up, grabbed his cane, and left his study. He walked down the stone corridor and told Karen not to disturb him for the rest of the afternoon. Then, he locked his bedroom door and descended the hidden trapdoor into the crypts.

He bypassed the Night Shift and walked straight over to a tall skeleton leaning against a stone pillar. It was Bones, one of his original and most reliable retainers.

“Put on your armour,” Jack commanded mentally. “You are coming with me.”

Jack and the disguised skeleton left the castle through the hidden cellar chute. They walked silently down the mountain path, bypassing the busy village entirely, and headed straight into the southern woods where Giles’s men had been working.

The forest was incredibly cold and entirely silent. After walking for nearly twenty minutes, Jack spotted a patch of trampled snow near the base of a tree.

Lying in the snow was the carcass of a wild mountain hound. It was a massive, ugly creature, its ribs showing clearly through its matted gray fur. It had likely died of starvation and the freezing cold just a few days ago.

Jack stood a few feet away, leaning on his cane. Bones stood silently beside him.

“Alright, grandfather,” Jack whispered to himself, his breath pluming in the air. “Let’s see if you were right.”

Jack focused his mind. He pulled a thread from his Grey Core and pushed it directly into the carcass of the mountain hound.

The beast’s body violently twitched.

With a sickening crunch of joints, the dead hound pushed itself up from the snow. But the moment it stood, Jack felt an agonizing spike of pressure in his head.

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It felt like grabbing a thrashing fish with bare hands. Unlike his human skeletons, which were empty vessels that accepted his commands perfectly, the beast’s mind was a chaotic storm of pure instinct. It did not understand loyalty. It only understood hunger and rage.

The undead hound snarled, its dead eyes flashing with unstable magic. It ignored Jack’s mental command to sit. Instead, it lunged forward, snapping its jaws directly at Bone’s leg.

“Sit down!” Jack commanded, forcing a massive wave of mana into the creature to suppress its instincts.

Jack dropped to one knee, grabbing his head as a vicious migraine ripped through his skull. The sheer willpower required to force the beast to obey was staggering. The hound froze in place, its muscles trembling as it fought Jack’s control with every ounce of its wild soul.

Jack quickly severed the magical link.

The undead hound collapsed back into the snow, lifeless once more.

Jack stayed on his knee, panting heavily. Alistair’s diary was completely right. The Wild Soul was too chaotic. It took nearly all of his focus just to make one single dead beast sit still. If he tried to raise and control twenty dead beasts in the middle of a chaotic siege, his brain would simply melt from the strain, and the feral beasts would turn around and attack his own villagers.

His strategy was not going to work. He could not use the Beast Tide against itself.

Jack slowly stood up, relying heavily on his cane. “This is a problem,” he muttered.

He needed heavy hitters to defend the village gates. But human peasants were too weak, and fresh beast corpses were too wild.

Jack stared at the dead hound in the snow, his mind racing through the rules of necromancy he had learned.

Rule one: Humans resist foreign mana because of their soul-core, unless they swore an oath. Rule two: Beasts resist foreign mana because of their wild, feral instincts.

Jack paused. He looked at Bones. Bones had no soul-core, and he had no flesh. He was just perfect for the job.

An idea struck Jack like a bolt of lightning. What if the wild instinct of an animal was tied to its flesh and its recent life? What if he found a beast that had been dead for so long that its feral spirit had completely faded away?