A sharp light pierced through the forest as I sat at a clearing, my mind wandering as I slowly created a second core using the Dryad core. Crackling could be heard as I slowly did this process, now having experienced this once before I had more control over the process. Forcing out the life force of the trees around me, and grass under me I swirled it along the glass like surface of the core. Blue popups kept asking me if I wanted to finalize my creation making it into a fully formed Dryad, ignoring them I continued to force life force to work trying to test out the upper limits of this ability. A few times the sound of breaking glass was heard inside of it, but as I kept on it seemed to force out bubbles of black energy that made hissing sounds as it touched the air, and smelled of spoiled meat.

For hours I sat down as my brothers gathered up various things for me, gathering up small creatures, not to be sacrificed to the core but for further experiments my undead energy leeching only off of plants. As they gathered next to me they seemed to calm down, I knew this was because of the sweet smell that still lingered around me giving them a false sense of security. Mr. Fly was my savior here, keeping flies from around me, horrified by my indiscriminate slaughter of his kind before him. Against his protests, and to be fair screams of terror, I had forced the life force of those uncountable flies that I had killed into his body and that is what started my mad scientist quest into these cores.

As I added more life force to his body his duration expanded exponentially until, like me, his duration was removed from the equation. It made me wonder if what I was doing was really necromancy as I think of it or if I was creating new life. It didn’t make a difference to me to be honest, both were the same, the undead and the living I just needed to know the line, and how to cross it. If I could turn undead energy into life energy wouldn’t that basically mean that I could come back to life? Not that I had ever been alive to begin with in this world.

Collecting undead energy from my surroundings were cut off from me for now until I find myself another graveyard as I feared gathering from any of us might actually unmake us. That didn’t stop me from studying the energy, gathering it through my breathing exercises, letting it form around my gut into its own mini-core before absorbing it into myself. I found out through this that what I breath in is sort of a pseudo-death energy, until it flowed through me it was in the process of decaying. Though it was sort of trying to figure out the owner of a set of fingerprints without knowing what anyone else’s fingers looked like.

I continued this routine for three days, Mr. Fly standing guard on the top of my head, finally I stood as the area around me was in decay for I tried to force out the energy to the last drop. A few of the small animals had died too, merely because I forgot to feed them. Living without hunger for so long I had forgotten about such things, which actually scared me quite a bit fearing I was becoming more inhuman in nature. Putting the core into my chest, inside the oozing place between my ribcage. It was actually rather convenient as I could force items out of it to my hand.

I had another core sitting to the side, it seemed as though the Dryad core couldn’t absorb all life, and needed very specific life or it would refuse the energy. I found it couldn’t absorb most molds which I found strange. The core was yellow, and unlike the previous cores this one was more like a jelly rather than glass like, this one I kept far away from my chest in fear they might fuse together making my ribcage into a monster. It might have been a baseless fear, but it was a fear none the less.

I slightly chuckled to myself, “It seems as if I’m making a monster army with necromancy, I still haven’t found a way to create a skeleton though.”

“Why would you want more of us?” One of my brothers seemed slightly annoyed at my suggestion of making more of them.

“To understand myself better. Aren’t you curious about yourself, what makes you tick?” I look back to my two brothers and they shake their heads.

“No skeleton has ever wondered that, we came to be from the bodies of the deceased, born out of undead energy.”

“But what makes us evolve like we have? Why is my body so vastly different than others of my kind now?”

One of my brothers shrugged while the other spoke, “Maybe it is that blue screen you speak with, but all undead seek power. The more powerful you are the longer you live as an undead, it's a struggle for life.”

“Is this why you follow me? For more power?” I paused, mid stride, carrying two of the cages that held little creatures of this forest. A white rabbit with the head of a bird looked up at me with its red little eyes before pecking at my finger with its beak.

The two skeletons looked at eachother, then shook their heads at the same time, “If we wanted that we wouldn’t have followed you. You were weak at first, you… have something about you, something that we lack and we are attracted to it.” This made me involuntarily look at their hip bones again, knowing that was the key to figure out what gender they were as I heard the word attracted. “Not like that.” One of them spoke up, turning its body so I could only see the side of its hips obviously flustered.

“Sorry, just… Nevermind.” I shook my head turning away from the skeleton behind me, even if I stared I wouldn’t be able to tell if either was male or female anyway. Though a blue box appeared, I brushed it away before reading it so the others didn’t see it, noticing something about anatomy.

The skills were starting to annoy me when they came up, it was just a conformation that I was learning something. Unlike a video game character I wasn’t restricted to my skills, though having them seemed to help, as if some function was helping me. Though the magic side of it did seem to help through reduction of mana cost, also it might restrict me to certain spells when the time comes.

The second experiment would happen tomorrow when my mana was at its height, the night was slowly coming as the sky turned to a light red. Pulling up my menu, I used it as a soft light in front of me which set the forest to a soft blue color as the red in the sky dimmed. Flickering stars above me started to brighten into existence, reminding me that this was not my world.

A rather loud grunt came from in front of me as a very furry black shadow walked out from the trees, “Hello Mr. Skeleton!”

Shocked, I stopped, “How do you know my name?”

The furry shadow pointed forward with a large clawed paw, the tip of his claw pointing to the status menu floating in front of me, “Says.. right there ‘Mr. Skeleton’.” He let out a large husky laugh as his eyes looked down at me, large yellow eyes shifted between my brothers, and I. “Clever, no one would guess you’re an actual skeleton with a name like that!” The paw crashed down on my shoulder, making my body shiver, and groan under the pressure. “My name is Bear!”