Saintess Summons Skeletons

“What makes someone a murderer?” Sofia answered, biting into her own piece of roasted bird.

“Killing people?” the girl hesitantly mumbled.

“Then yes.” Sofia said in between two bites. Dumb bird actually tastes pretty nice. Can’t believe Alith doesn’t like my cooking. Wait, I forgot the salt…

“Why?”

“They attacked me and I defended myself.”

“My dad says necromancers are bad people,” she answered. Then, as if realizing she’d just made a terrible mistake, she covered her own mouth with both hands, dropping the food. She's rather well informed for a village kid...

“Hey, don’t waste the meat.” Sofia complained as she threw the dirt covered piece of meat into the fire and ripped off a wing that she presented to the kid. “Come out and say hi, Pareth.”

The girl gasped as a skeleton appeared out of thin air near Sofia. For some reason he had activated his halo. He turned to the girl, went down to one knee and bowed like a knight before his king.

Hoy! Are you trying to change employers or something?

“What do you think?”

The girl looked perplexed as she stared at Pareth.

“I…”

“It’s okay, you don’t have to force yourself to say you’re fine with it. What’s your name?”

“... Eleonore.”

“Alright, Eleonore, think you can find your way home from here?”

The girl nodded.

“Good. Listen,” Sofia summoned a small pouch and dropped ten gold coins inside, “take this, hide it well. When you’re an adult you’ll know what you want to do with it. Maybe take it to the adventurers' guild in Hooasow and ask for help to get a magic class or something. Or if you trust your parents, give it to them. Good luck out there. Pareth, Heal.”

Sofia was enveloped by golden light, her wings regrew almost instantly. Funny how the mark of Aphenoreth cancels the penalty of Pareth’s [Greater Heal].

It did say ‘Causes a heavy strain on the target’s soul’ in the description, but now she didn’t feel anything from it.

Leaving the kid on the bedroll, Sofia flew up, grabbing Pareth by the hand.

Hopefully she can still sleep at night after this.

Sofia flew to somewhere where she was less likely to be spotted, far north past where Couvauz’s borders were supposed to be.

I just hope she isn’t going to go around telling this to everyone around her.

Well. There’s no way the kingdom would send a punitive force my way on the basis of one young kid’s words that there’s a necromancer. Surely.

 

The rock hills of the north east were largely uninhabited, so it wasn’t hard to find a place where she wouldn’t be bothered, but she even found old ruins to set up camp in. It was some kind of weird mansion overlooking the sea, carved into the cliffside. It would have been hard to reach it without wings.

It was completely empty, not even the doors survived. Feels almost like I’m back in Zangdar.

The floor was flat stone, the ceilings high. Nobody could see her. In other words, the perfect place to get up to some good old necromancy.

She had four skeletons, she would use three of them to test out a few things, and keep one for emergencies.

First she tried messing with the ritual circle. Adding different patterns that were meant to help with defense or speed. But the ritual failed every time. She tried different things, and ways to implement them, covering a large portion of the floor in test circles.

Ritual circles worked by assembling different smaller circles inside a big one, each small circle was called a module and contained runes meant to direct mana in specific ways. Sofia felt like she could improve the ritual somehow. So she tried again and again.

All failures.

Then she tried messing with it in other ways, replicating some patterns, changing some runes, she was trying to force the ritual to accept parts coming from different skeletons. But no matter how much she tried, nothing worked.

I can’t be stuck with the same basic ritual circle forever, right? This isn’t anywhere in [Eclipse Skeleton]’s description.

What about messing with the mana distribution modules?

The mana distribution module was the basis of all complex ritual circles, it was the part the controlled how much power each other module would receive.

Altering it in a completed and working ritual circle was something that was quite dumb to try, in theory. In most cases, it would lead to unstable spells from the ritual since the mana wasn’t spread how the other modules had been designed to work with. But some rituals existed for which that wasn’t true. In particular, one of Zhǎng Lú’s books about mana shields explained how you could tamper with these modules, with the effect of changing passive shields to reactive ones.

Sofia understood pretty much what each module of the raise skeleton ritual circle did. With the exception of the central module, which was so complex it had been hard to even learn to copy properly. So besides the central module which was off-limits, she could somewhat guess what she could touch without messing everything up. I’ll try to reduce the mana gathering module’s share and add to the spatial coherence one…

For once the experiment worked. The result was Pareth occupying this new skeleton with only a few hundred mana points and a few thousand more health points.

Interesting but not incredible, some stat points are even lost in the conversion. At least I know what to do if I want to change Pareth into a mage. His stat spread is good now though.

Can’t I remove the whole contract enforcement and communication modules?

These were useless to Pareth who was linked to her soul anyway, and he could already do whatever he wanted. So Sofia just completely erased these parts.

I have some excess power to distribute now. She thought maybe the lack of power was what had gimped her previous attempts so she tried them again with the new changes. And while it didn’t work for the bone mixing, she did manage to raise Pareth with a speed boosted body.

I can’t tell the difference. Doesn’t look any faster.

“What do you think? Feel faster?”

No reply.

Sigh. Was worth a try. I think I saw his eyes’ light flicker though. It’s like sometimes he’s there and sometimes he isn’t… Well. Back to the mind melting ritual modules…

She knew of a few other enhancement modules but their shape wouldn’t fit with the main module of the ritual.

I can also leave it empty and send the extra power to more stats.

After some testing it seemed that for whatever reason, stamina gained the most points for the amount of mana used in the ritual. With mana being the lowest, and Health in the middle.

She also discovered that there was a maximum amount of stats she could get like this. She had added the mana input module that she copied from what she recalled of the dwarven tablet in the pyramid. Now she could send some of her own mana in addition to the blood for the ritual’s activation. That barely helped, as she soon learned the central module of the ritual had a maximum amount of mana that it could accept that wasn’t far from what the base modules had already been providing it.

It turns out the base ritual circle for ‘raise skeleton’ is already pretty optimized… Maybe if I understood the central module I could change more but this thing is still a mystery. Even the runes don’t look like the ones from the smaller modules!

 

Sofia tried many inconclusive things but there was one she had neglected until then: the ritual she had learned from Valeure.

So she tried to incorporate that. It failed.

She tried again but with a hundred gold on the circle as well. It worked to raise the skeleton, the gold disappeared, but Pareth only had an augmented mana regeneration while he stood in the circle. And the circle didn’t even work for Sofia.

So that’s just worse than the base ritual.

Though there might be an interesting thing to explore about area of effect ritual circles that only affect one particular target.

Then she had another idea, to carve the enhancement circles directly on the bones.

It turned out that they did nothing as they had no mana source, and since the bones were already enchanted by the raise skeleton ritual, they couldn’t serve as a source for anything else. Even worse, these useless mana pathways carved into the bones disrupted Pareth’s regular mana flow. Eventually, the bones crumbled from the disorderly internal mana. Pareth died. That’s one skeleton ruined.

Alright what if I carve the sun ritual on the skeleton, but also draw a module to direct some of the mana to it. Wouldn’t that work?

It was easier said than done. Sofia even ruined another skeleton, her self-made module simply wasn’t up to par. The mana distribution must have been all over the place as the skull exploded before the whole skeleton could even start assembling. Good that I tried like this before I sacrificed another 100 gold…

At least Pareth is still fine in the dormant soul state…

Does he resent all this testing I wonder?