Saintess Summons Skeletons

If I want to keep my unlife runes up, I can’t keep wasting mana hiding in the walls…

Sofia had her ghostly skeletons carry her through the thick walls up to the third floor, taking special care to avoid the air vents.

The skeletons had previously backed up from that room, letting Sofia know that there was an elf in there, but the graveyard skeletons were quite dumb so maybe they had been mistaken. Slowly nearing the closed room, Sofia focused without producing any results, to her senses, that room was still empty. Carefully, she poked a finger out of the wall to let Pareth out.

She felt a wave of relief when she discovered there was no iridescent creature lying in ambush inside.

So there was actually an elf… Credit where credit is due, I was the one giving a bad order this time…

In the spacious room which seemed to be an office of some kind with much machinery of undecipherable use everywhere, a long-dead elf sat in an armchair. Like a dried zombie. Looks like he tore down some of the machines to reinforce the door and plug the vents. This steel must be pretty darn strong if it can stop the level 200 rats.

Sofia’s first order of business was to make sure these barricades would hold. Basically she just stacked more heavy things in front of the door and the vents. It wouldn’t stop the elven parasite thing but it should be enough to fend off the swarm, which seemed to lack any attacking power whatsoever besides probably spreading the parasite on contact.

I never tried attacking them, did I? Well, I don’t really know how. The whip is the best option maybe, assuming I can even hurt them.

Turning her attention toward the dead elf Sofia quickly understood what had transpired in this place. The state of the room and the corpse told her all she needed to know.

This elf must have witnessed what had happened to the other elves. He had first barricaded himself, and when he ran out of supplies, had decided to leave this world on his own accord rather than risk becoming one of the monsters.

And his body has survived long enough to tell the tale. It should have become nothing but a pile of dust by now. I suppose without air it works differently, no maggots or carrion-eaters either.

The fact that anything still works here after who knows how many thousands of years of neglect speaks volume about both this strange environment and the elven technology. I can clearly see now that the mage in zangdar was studying the same kind of thing. I wonder if his own version would be considered an upgrade or the contrary…

Hmm… I shouldn’t let myself get distracted. I have three months, how do I kill the corrupted elves? First I need to know how many there are.

Sofia focused on her link with the few remaining rats, she hoped they could flee and survive long enough to be useful still. She quickly understood that no matter where they went, they couldn’t hide from the swarm, which seemed to track them wherever they fled to. Still, a few of them managed to survive by leaving the building altogether and finding refuge in dark corners of the main building.

The ones left in the same building as her all got tracked down by the swarm and dispelled themselves before they could be taken. She could only lay low for a while and hope that her rune of unlife masking the heat and mana she produced would be enough to escape the scrutiny of the swarm. Considering it had found her once before, she was not hopeful.

Thus, she hid in her sealed room with a long-dead elf for sole company. She wanted to try to feed it to her book, it still had a skeleton, after all, but it would have to wait, she couldn’t risk using any external mana right now.

 

Laying low had paid off, nothing came to bother for the next hour, after which she put all the things she had thought of during that time to execution.

 

In Sofia’s hand was a bone-made wireframe three-dimensional map of the entire northern inverted pyramid she was stuck in. After the spiders on the outside had to jump off, confirming that the elven-hosted monstrosity had left her for now, she sent one of her measly three surviving rats to check for the presence of the swarm. It was gone. Following that, she had them carefully lay out a plan of the place for her by ordering them to walk along every corner of every room, staying close to the wall when possible. It was then a ‘simple’ task of precisely making a small-scale bone sculpture out of their movements. She could easily track tens of birds on a flat map back in the trial’s labyrinths, but in three dimensions, following three speedy rats was already pushing it. She had to order them to slow down multiple times just to be able to keep up. Eventually though, the result was worth the headache.

Despite only understanding the layout of rooms and vents without any indication of what room had what purpose, she wouldn’t have to navigate this part of the orbital temple blindly anymore. She also knew for certain that there were no other hostiles in there for now, which was a great relief.

Alright, next up is some reading.

Fishing around inside of her ring, among all of her chaotic but organized mess of possessions, she finally the one book from Zhǎng Lú’s collection that she hadn’t read yet, it was a thick soft-cover book titled ‘Field usage of power cores in deployment of mana isolation fields and high-frequency lattice shields’

She needed a way to use a lot of mana without risking drawing Ormoncleth’s spawn’s attention, so Zangdar’s ‘mana isolation field’ was potentially exactly what she needed. She still had the power cores and the strange brass contraption that came with it, having never used them after getting them from the very same ring she still stored them in. Of course, she had contemplated learning to use it more than once, but the book was a pain to sit through. She didn’t understand a quarter of the words on each page. Either way, now she had the opportunity to use the damn thing, she would try again. Perhaps her newfound experience in deciphering the Draconic language would help her guess the meaning of the unknown words.

It hadn’t been an hour before she wanted to give up. Her progress was terribly slow, and she was on a tight time limit. She couldn’t afford spending two of her three months reading a book. As she decided to close the book, she felt a small shock in her brain, and her health tracker opened.

Sir Scribe?

Sofia focused on the health bar, in front of it, another small system notification flashed for a fraction of a second. It sent a wave of pain through Sofia’s skull that made her reel back, gritting her teeth.

[pil]

As far as the Scribe’s communication attempts went, this was the tamest pain backlash from it to date. It was pretty clear to Sofia now that the scribe knew very well how to communicate, but for some reason wasn’t allowed to. Even when in scribe-only-mode, the system must have had some safeguards in place to prevent scribes from acting out of place.

Pil?

Another riddle like last time? Or it could be just ‘Pill’, but an L got erased to save a character?

Pills… These? Right, I have three of them. Never ate them because Sen said I should level up a few times to be safe before getting more stats.

[Processing pill] : Consume to gain 5000 maximum processing.

Item level : 200.

Grade : Flawless.

Now is a good time I suppose? Is ‘Processing’ meant to help me with the book? I hope this is what you meant because I don’t really see it if ‘pil’ is meant to be something else.

Oh, right, I still have this thing too.

[Scroll of assisted inspiration] : Infuse it with mana after writing your current issue on it; the system will provide you inspiration to resolve the problem. One-time use.

Item level : 100.

Grade : Flawless.

The situation isn’t desperate enough to use that now, but that’s an option… If it even works? It could very well not, considering the system apparently doesn’t reach here. Kind of strange that it could reach into the margin to Zangdar but not to the sun, which shouldn't be that far in comparison. I mean, it’s in the same plane at least.

Sofia really wanted to make the ‘mana compartment field’ work. If she was right and the monster tracked her from her mana emission, it would allow her to create a safe space where she could relax, regenerate her mana, and try things without worry. And she would do it then and there, and try to feed the dead elf to her book, which she knew usually spilled a lot of mana everywhere. The book of skeletons in general was constantly leaking mana fog when it was out. Comparatively, she could take a regular book in and out of her storage ring a hundred times before using that much mana.

Alright, let’s eat the pills for the weird stat, and hope this doesn’t make me more visible to the monster somehow.