Chapter 42: Retainer with Flesh

Late that night, the village was completely quiet. The exhausted militiamen were finally sleeping in their warm cabins, and the massive pile of beast carcasses from the siege was safely locked away in the new smoking sheds.

Up in the castle, Jack was still awake. He was at his desk, staring at a piece of parchment.

He held a piece of charcoal, listing his current military forces. The Beast Tide was broken, but the spring was approaching fast. When the snow melted, the mountain passes would open. Merchants would arrive, and worse, the tax collectors and the Holy Church’s inquisitors may follow.

Jack looked at his list. He had over twenty peasant militiamen armed with spears. He had his fifteen skeletal workers in the Night Shift. He had his armored skeleton guards—Rusty, Dusty, and Bones. Three more skeletons. And he had Grim, the giant undead Alpha Wolf.

It was a strong defense for a poor village. But Jack was frowning. He drew a dark line through the words ‘skeletons’ and ‘wolf’.

The siege had taught him a harsh lesson about the limits of his own mind. Skeletons and dead beasts were incredibly strong. They never got tired, and they felt absolutely no pain. But they were completely mindless.

They possessed zero instincts. When Jack commanded Grim to wind the ballista, or when he told Bones to swing a sword, he had to mentally drive their bodies like heavily complicated machinery. If a dire wolf lunged, Bones wouldn’t block it unless Jack specifically thought, ‘Raise your sword and block.’ Jack had to send micro-commands for every single step, swing, and dodge.

During the chaos of the beast attack, trying to manage the village defenses while actively puppeting his undead had pushed his brain to the absolute breaking point.

If the Holy Church came into his valley this spring with highly trained, intelligent soldiers, Jack could not afford to manually control every single sword swing. And they definitely won’t get fooled like this.

“I need a general,” Jack whispered into the quiet room. “Someone who knows how to fight on their own.”

He stood up, grabbed his cane, and walked over to the corner of his bedroom. He kicked the rug aside, revealing the trapdoor. He pulled it open.

He walked slowly through the main chamber. In the dark common guard niches, the fifteen skeletons of the Night Shift were standing perfectly still and waiting for their next labor command. Jack bypassed them entirely.

He walked past the broken stone wall in the corner of the crypt—the exact wall Rusty had smashed through to reveal the toxic coal vein. He moved much deeper into the subterranean structure, heading toward the very back of the crypts.

This section was entirely different from the common guard niches. These were the sacred tombs of the elite family mages and their sworn, high-ranking mage guards.

Jack raised his candle, walking slowly down the quiet aisle. Ornate stone sarcophagi were lined up in perfect rows across the floor. Above each tomb, a brass plaque was mounted on the wall, listing the name, age, magic type, and final core level of the person resting inside.

Jack didn’t need to read them all tonight. He knew exactly who he was looking for.

He stopped at a smaller stone tomb near the back wall. He wiped a thin layer of dust from the brass plaque.

“Elias Varna. Sworn Guard. Age 34. Fire Mage. Layer One of the Iron Core.”

Jack stared at the name, his mind flashing back to the night of the bandit raid weeks ago. During that desperate battle, Jack had come down here and tried to raise Elias to help defend the castle. The result had been a complete disaster.

Because Jack had only possessed a Grey Core at the time, Elias’s dead body had violently rejected the death mana. A shockwave of residual, dormant fire energy had erupted from the corpse, throwing Jack across the room, giving him a severe nosebleed, and nearly shattering his soul.

According to his grandfather’s hidden journal, raising an intelligent undead required two things. First, the ‘Law of Permission.’ Because Elias was an elite sworn guard who had taken a blood oath to the Frost-Grip family in life, the permission was permanently granted. His soul would not resist the family’s magic.

The second rule, however, was the spiritual weight. A necromancer could not dominate a corpse that had a higher core level than their own.

“But things are different now,” Jack muttered to himself.

Jack closed his eyes and focused inward. Instead of a flickering, cloudy spark, he felt the heavy density of the Iron Core resting securely in his chest. He was finally on the exact same spiritual tier as the man in the tomb.

Jack wedged his cane under the stone lid of the sarcophagus and pushed. The mortar had crumbled long ago, and the lid slid back just enough to expose the remains inside.

Lying in the dark was a perfectly preserved human body. The elite mages of the family were preserved using rare magical herbs so that their flesh wouldn’t rot away like the normal peasant guards. Elias Varna was pale, cold, and frozen solid by the ambient temperature of the deep crypts, but his muscles and skin were completely intact.

According to the journal, raising a corpse that still possessed its flesh was a completely different task than raising bare bones. Bone was just an empty framework. It accepted mana easily. But flesh, muscles, and a preserved brain held a deep stubbornness.

Jack took a deep breath. He reached out and placed his bare hand directly onto Elias’s cold forehead.

Jack pulled a thread of mana from his new Iron Core, pushed it down his arm, and forced it into the corpse.

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The reaction was immediate. When Jack raised the castle guards, the mana flowed into their dry bones like water pouring into an empty cup. But pushing magic into Elias felt like trying to force thick liquid through solid rock.

The dead flesh heavily resisted the foreign energy. Jack gritted his teeth as a sharp, stabbing pressure spiked behind his eyes. It wasn’t a spiritual rejection this time; it was purely physical. The stiff muscles and preserved tendons were refusing to move.

Jack didn’t back down. He drew a massive wave of energy from his dense Iron Core and slammed it downward. He used the sheer, overwhelming weight of his new tier to completely crush the passive resistance of the cold dead body.

The body in the tomb violently arched its back.

The sound of frozen joints popping was terrible.

The amount of mana required to fill the flesh was astronomical. Jack felt his massive Iron Core draining rapidly. Raising this one man was taking more energy than raising Rusty, Dusty, Bones, and Grim combined.

Suddenly, Elias’s eyes snapped open.

They were completely empty and dull, devoid of any human light. The dead man slowly sat up inside the stone sarcophagus. His head tilted slightly to the side, waiting for a command.

Jack took a step back, breathing heavily. His chest ached from the massive magical output, but a triumphant smile spread across his face.

He had done it. He had a flesh-bound undead.

“Step out,” Jack commanded mentally.

Elias swung his legs over the edge of the stone tomb and stood up on the cold floor. He was wearing the decayed remains of a high-quality leather tunic. His movements were slightly stiff at first, but there was a distinct, grounded heaviness to his posture that the skeletons lacked.

Jack needed to test the limits of his new creation immediately. He needed to know if the massive mana cost was actually worth it.