“Don’t embarrass me, Aly.” He says, right before hanging up.

“Don’t embarrass me, UGH! '' I throw the phone over the ship railings, watching it fall and break the clouds.

Before the electronics can completely pass through the clouds and hit an eagle or something I see space connect. The space around the phone is connected to the one right in front of my face, for a moment there are two phones, the same phone, simply existing in two different places, well the same space technically just in two places at once. The phone is teleported and silently floats towards me.

I turn around and ignore it, seeing a bodyguard, their entire body a constant blur, reaching for it.

I couldn’t see a worm tunnel for that teleportation, meaning it must be quite high tech, or it doesn’t even create them. It does make sense, this flying cruise is supposed to have some of the best safeguards against pretty much anything, a normal wormhole might be as obvious to it as a guided missile, and about as effective. I tilt my head to look at my bodyguard.

“Hey, do you know if they have a space specialist he—”

“Everything alright Miss?” I hear a smooth low voice asking.

“Everything’s fine captain.” I answer, to the voice coming from all around me.

“Miss, we will be arriving at Mistfare, City of Light and Magic! At nightfall, might I recommend our bartender go up and prepare a few drinks? The experience of drinking them under the fleeting sun and into the darkening night is unique in this world I assure you.“

Would me arriving to meet an archmage drunk as fuck be considered ‘embarassing’? Hmmm, maybe not that drunk, just slightly tipsy. I could text a few of my ‘friends' about how I let my nerves get the best of me, since this is my first time near so many archmages, and before dawn every news outlet will be spinning that into their own little stories. Plus I’ve met archmage Balt before, he should be fine with it, especially since the lecture starts tomorrow. Archmage Balt is your stereotypical kindly old mage, baggy clothes in muted tones, kindly wrinkly face with kinder eyes and a graying multicolored beard that could probably be combed better.

“Sure.“

“He shall soon arrive at the prow miss.” The captain’s voice really is too smooth, like hazelnut chocolate or something, it just has a richness to it, man could host a podcast or something.

I see a few bodyguards moving ahead, opening doors for me and checking the rooms in the way.

The rooms are of course, all empty, since this is a two day operation none of the bodyguards are sleeping, so there’s only one room in use on this entire floor, mine. I feel my lips moving into a sardonic smile.

I didn’t arrange this, in fact when I got to my room and didn’t see anyone at the top of the most famous flying ship on the planet I got uneasy, until the bodyguards explained that my father just got the entire thing just for me.

Although it is an obvious scream for attention, it is also pretty impressive, not really something that can be done with just money, the old man probably had to use some influence or connections, well it did work.

There’s something just…funny, seeing the mediasphere talking about your expensive flying cruise while you are bored out of your mind. The cruise is also not supposed to pass through Mistfare, it is going there solely to drop me at the archmage’s tower. Thankfully archmage Balt is a somewhat private man, so there should not be anyone there besides himself and maybe some other attendees, like his students and other mages, each day I do not get flashbanged by cameras is a good day.

I sit down at the single table and chair in the prow of the ship. On the other side of the table there is a tall blond man, with purple tinted sunglasses, wearing an all white bartender’s getup and three refrigerator sized floating containers behind him, he looks at me with one of those self assured natural smiles.

The effect is slightly dampened by the fact that I can see his eyes darting from one blurry bodyguard to the next, I should probably not tell him about the invisible ones...

“Don't worry about it, they wont touch or trouble you, unless you are an assassin of course.”

“Ah, my craven plan, foiled so easily” He almost hides the slight quivering of his voice.

“Sadly for you, it is impossible to catch me without them, at least two follow me everywhere.”

“Everywhere?” He asks, the wavering in his voice replaced by bewilderment.

“Everywhere, always, and at least double the numbers if there’s someone else with me.”

I can see him opening his mouth a bit, through his glasses I see that look, asking me if I am seriously serious, I get it, the invasion of privacy is shitty, but what can I really do about it, besides.

“I can’t be mad at them, a few have taken bullets and meteors and everything in between for me so…”

“Oh! Meteors? Did they…are they well?” He asks, looking again at the people blurs, now there’s almost some sympathy there, together with uneasiness.

“Hah, these guys have been with me for almost ten years now, and I can tell them apart as well as you.”

“I see…” He looks at the sunset for a few seconds, before turning back to me, his smile refreshed. I wonder if he has advanced mage sight, that could explain the uneasiness. My bodyguards already look freaky, looking like blurs in reality, but that really is just the tip of the hat as the saying goes, the better your mage sight the freakier they are, a byproduct of all the spells layering them like armor.

“How would you like to end this fine evening Miss Pluto?”

“Just ‘miss’ is fine, and give me your strongest drink.”

The three containers behind him open up, revealing a variety of cups, fruits of all kinds, but mostly in bright colors, and a lot of alcohol bottles.

A hurricane cup flies from its container, with my mage sight I see the telekinesis spell around it, leaving leftover mana as it passes and spins around the bartender. Three bottles leap out and do the same, one orange, one red and another a caramel color, again leaving a trail of mana where they pass.

This is not a sloppy display of control, rather, together they all create a spiral in front of the bartender, I see how each of their trails is slightly different, the one at the bottom being razor thin and each trail getting bigger and longer, until the one at the very top becomes a misty ring. The bottles open mid-motion and start pouring their contents down, all bottles moving together with the cup, not a single drop splashing off.

The bottles realign themselves and stop pouring down on the cup, which suddenly jerks upwards, all of the liquid content flying up, the cocktail stops mid air, in the exact shape it was on the cup. That’s how none of the liquid dropped off, there was a slim film of mana around the liquids, the alcohol could go in, but not out, and now the same film is holding it into the glass shape in the air.

A single slice of pineapple and a cherry come out next, the pineapple goes down, while the cherry goes up, with the orange, caramel and red mixture in the middle. Both of the fruits accelerate towards the drink, both spinning in opposite directions. The cherry pulls the lazy slices of mana around itself, while the pineapple slice just pushes its much tighter and thinner ones above it. Before each can touch the liquid they accelerate once again, dispersing all the mana before it can touch the liquid.

They hit the mixture, which moves wildly, though still in the confines of its invisible mana cup, which is soon replaced by the actual glass cup.

The drink settles down, now into a bright orange in the bottom, getting into bright red and then into darker red going up, a slice of pineapple at the bottom and a cherry on top. The drink gently floats towards me, it was a pretty enough show, standard mage entertainment.

I see the bartender look up.

“We must be closer than I thought, we are probably going to arrive slightly sooner.”

I also look up and see a large aquamarine tower, standing so tall it should be passing through the atmosphere.

“The soul tower? You do know they move around a bit right?”

“They do? Really? They just let them move around like that? Those are…kind of important, even though there’s no one around most of the time.”

“Well, that's normal though, you know how they work?”

“Well, not the specifics, no.”

“All of the towers on the planet, and the ones on the moon, are connected and are part of a point strengthening array. Each one makes the others stronger, making the whole thing overall stronger. They are made for cataclysmic events, like glassing the planet to the to the bottom of the sea; there's nothing in the solar system that can threaten them.”

“I see…thank you for the explanation miss.”

I just smile and bring the cup to my lips, ready to get drunk and hopefully talk less.

As the glass comes closer to me my vision splits, the sun and warmth vanish completely, replaced by a vacuum of temperature and both a lightless view and a thousand stony gray walls.

I scream, and it takes less than a second to notice how no sound escapes my… I cannot feel my body at all, not my arms, my hands, my my… my anything. Some kind of hallucination attack? I feel the mana around me, so dense and heavy.

From ten thousand to three, from three to two, from two to… My multiple visions wink out, and slowly I repeat the mnemonic from my training, now only having one field of view. A layered one, I see both nothing but shadow and a gray stone wall, a cave wall right in front of me. Or what I believe is my ‘front’. This doesn’t seem to be an illusion, or a hallucination. Why is the mana so thick here? Seriously this looks like it could be lethal to babies, actually I think this is lethal to grown humans too, it should be lethal to me.

Was I teleported? How? Not only was I anchored to all my bodyguards, but we were also anchored to the ship, which anchors itself back on the passengers. If you tried to teleport me you would need to teleport everybody and the ship along with me.

Wait.

I focus and look into my body, deep inside it— Why the fuck do I look like crystalized vomit?

Also why do I look like a giant piece of rough gem? Or rather a children’s collage of rough gems. Where the fuck is my body? Inside? I again look deep inside of myself, past the ugly gem exterior, and deep into my true being, deep into my soul.

Ah shit.

My soul is… not destroyed, but I can see it suffered damage, and I can see it’s regenerating into weird geometric shapes, instead of the smooth wrinkly texture of the normal human soul. I look deeper and see that my true self, the part that carries through reincarnation, is untouched, though I can see pieces of my protective talismans floating inside of my soul. Meaning something did attack me, and probably… killed me, somehow. How? Again my talismans were linked with my bodyguard’s. If something did try to harm my soul…

Okay, so they either killed me, directly attacking my soul, or they teleported me, into a giant rectangular pile of crystalline vomit. Wait, not into, I don’t have my body, my soul is directly inside the crystal. Did they teleport only my soul? And that’s the damage that broke the talismans? That should not be possible.

You know what? Fuck it, I’ll think about it later. I feel the mana around me moving and it’s frankly a ridiculous amount of it, plus I seem to be absorbing it.

I absorb the mana more forcefully, bringing it into my soul space, which is another weird thing. Normally mana is stored around my soul, shielding it, the fact that I have none right now means whatever happened to me it extinguished all my mana. I look at… myself and see a black mist around me, necrotic mana. I am creating necrotic mana. A lot of it.

Fuck I really am dead. There is no way a living anything can create this amount of necrotic mana at this level of purity, honestly this mana might kill someone through sight alone. I notice how I am looking at myself, my…self, now an ugly crystal. Shit I didn’t exactly have the most confidence in my body but I would take ‘somewhat scrawny bitch’ over this geomancer’s nightmare any day of eternity.

I will it and my vision spins around, in all axis, slowly I focus and my vision splits again, now two sights straight forwards, imitating human vision, I open two more views, now I can see front and sides! Soon I again have a 360 vision, all around my rectangular body. There’s not much to see, just rock all around. That and the black of necrotic mana. Well, it could be worse.

I concentrace and will the mana to smash itself against the walls. It feels like I am dunking my hand in tar and trying to mix it with cement or something, even with its new denseness it should not be that difficult to move mana around. It’s my new body isn’t it? This thing is seriously shit, it does not look pretty and it cannot control mana well? I can feel the wall give in, the mana in it being consumed and creating more necrotic energy.

Necrotic energy tends to be entropic, meaning it rots or decays, and soon I should see the rock turn into dust. That is what should have happened, but instead as the rock weakens it is suddenly absorbed into the mana, my mana. A hole appears in its place and I can suddenly see into it. Is my mana my actualy vision now? Really?

I focus and control all the mana around me, at least this body can do that, thankfully. The mana starts to spin around me, and slowly sanding the walls.

Again my mana goes up as the walls are destroyed, not by much, but it is noticeable. Am I absorbing the remaining wall pieces, the dust? Interesting. The entire room is expanded, upwards and sideways.

I keep doing it for a little while, the action needing me to concentrate a bit, since the mana moves as fluidly as a dead moose. I focus and instead of just covering the wall in black mana I try to create spikes of mana, to drive them deep into the wall, and see if that’s better.

I fail, the spike is more like a hill, still I drive it against the wall and feel a bit of resistance. By focusing against the wall I can thin the hill into a little peak, looking now more like a proper spike, though still chubby. I feel force coming from it, like a magnet pointing and pulling my hand towards something. I feel… two points, the mana is in the middle and near the middle there are two paths, I choose one at random. The mana congregates inside the hole, and transforms into a zombie…

Excuse me? I can just… I try to control the mana and I am not nearly as dextrous, not half or even a quarter as dextrous as I would need to be to actually create an undead from scratch like that, what the hell. The mana just moved on its own. As if I used a spell circle or an array to facilitate the casting. But now that was pure mana manipulation. I stare at the zombie, who is trying to leave the hole it's stuck in, thankfully it was not a human, otherwise the human would have a lot of trouble breathing. I use my mana to widen its hol… I help it leave the wall pit with my mana.

I can’t help but notice how the monster drinks my mana so easly. Soon it is out, the monster is quite the work.

Green rotten skin, yellow eyes, the monster does not have clothes on, which is not really a problem, since pretty much most of its chest and privates are just not there, only rotten flesh in their place. The monster's face is the same, there are no discerning features, no nose, ears or even lips. The points of the fingers and toes end in bone too. The monster stands in a relaxed slightly curved posture. Swaying around a bit.

I create a second spike at its side and feel that choice again, I choose the opposite.

A white skeleton pops out of the mana, compared to the rotting corpse it looks quite dashing. It also absorbs my mana very well. I push it deep inside them, and feel their differences. The skeleton has two places where it stores its mana, the blood of its unlife basically, the bone marrow, which is now filled with necrotic energy, and the inside of the skull. The zombie is different, there’s mana inside its bones and skull, just like the skeleton, the difference is that all of its flesh has necrotic energy too. If you knock a skeleton's head or disconnect too much of its body they die, since they do not have enough energy to function. Meanwhile with a zombie you could destroy half of their bodies and their head and because of their flesh they will still move around. Yes the whole ‘head is their weak point’ thing is a lie.

I wonder if I could…

I manipulate my mana and slowly seep it into the zombie, I can feel it absorbing it, I keep pumping, soon the flesh is saturated with too much necrotic energy, and actual necrosis follows, I take care to not touch the skeleton as the flesh of the zombie is destroyed, revealing dirty skeleton underneath.

I again look deep inside of it, and outside of being dirty it’s the same as the skeleton. Why does my mind suddenly feel itchy?

{Analyze} Gained.

What. I felt that, deep in my soul, I saw the text and heard voiceless words. Damn I really just died and came to a world with a system? Is this seriously real?

Back in my world we got plenty of reincarnator who remembered their previous world, people who just teleported between dimensions and all kinds of travelers. Travelers from farther away than we could go, further than the various elemental planes.

Some of them talked about their previous universe, one where there was a large… thing that helped you gain power, is this it? Uh….

Status?

…

Sheet? Character sheet? Self Sheet? My status? Inventory? God? Goddess? System? Aaaaah fuck it.

I am glad I’m dead. That was kind of embarrassing. I am going to pretend that never happened. Thankfully no one saw that… That makes me wonder if I was the only one killed, my soul should’ve been absorbed and safeguarded by the soul towers. I should not be here at all, did they get destroyed? Did everybody die? I know I have been saying 'fuck the world' since I turned eleven but I really didn’t mean it like that…

Fuck, okay don’t think about it, it’s not your problem, focus on the literall hole you find yourself in.

Okay I feel the thing in my head, and soul actually, I can see it in there, a weird blob close to my soul. And I trigger it, it's surprisingly easy I can feel it needs a target. I chose the skeleton.

Skeleton LV1

Cult Initiate LV1

Squire LV1

‘LV1’? This really is another fucking universe. Can you little piles of calcium do anything? Can you talk? Can you spread the word of my apparent cult?

The two are just staring at me. I concentrate and feel a connection to them, I tell them to punch a wall. I can feel the information traveling to them, through the link between us, it’s… weird, I can feel my words turning into something else. The skeletons understand it though, turning and punching with all their miserable might. It does fuck all to the walls.

Well great, I guess you two can be emotional support or something. No wait, wait a minute. I focus and start moving the necrotic energy. I see the two choices and slowly choose the skeleton again, I don’t like seeing the rotting flesh and dead eyes of the zombie. I see the mana forming the bones, and the third skeleton joins the rattle party.

Right, I think I got it, somewhat. I am not using pure mana manipulation, my necrotic mana in fact seems to become bone a lot easier than it should. I do not have another explanation, my mana just has that property.

I start concentrating on mana again, imposing my will on it, and this time I focus on creating bone and like the actual magic it is, bone starts sprouting out of the thick black mist, in the form of a femur. I think if I really try I can make other shapes, eventually.

I tell one of the skeletons to grab it and hit a wall. It does and again it has absolutely no effect, right just making sure.

Guess it’s back to excavating for me, but now I… I have these skeletons. Oh shit, my mind just went there.

When a human is just conceived, they gain a primitive soul, which used to be called a plant soul, when they start growing inside the womb they get a common soul, which was called creature soul and at last just as they are about to leave the womb the soul fully matures into an advanced soul, or a human soul as it was called, there were further classifications from that, but they were purely theoretical.

Once a soul is fully ‘molded’ it cannot go further, a plant soul will always be a plant, an animal always an animal, and a human will always just be a human, it was not a question of magical acumen or anything like that, my universe was simply believed to not have the right density of mana, it is simply impossible for a soul to ‘evolve’.

But this place, this new universe, maybe here it could. I look over at the skeleton with the femur club, it… They could one day gain a true soul, could I also advance my own soul?

I died, probably, like 99.99% sure I died somehow, but now maybe I could have an opportunity no one else had. An experiment impossible back in my universe.

But first things first, I start to erode the walls around me and absorb them. The skeletons just stare at me. Yeah, that empty stare is honestly a lot better than the zombie’s dead eyes.

But what can they do while I tunnel away? I tell them to clap. They start hitting their bony palms. Right, not quite the cheering I was hoping for, though I am not quite sure what I expected from skeletons.

Hmmmm.

I summon a few more skeletons, enough to make a circle. I tell the one with the femur to stand in the middle, besides them there are two skeletons staring at each other. The femur goes up, and then down, the match starts!

I tell the skeletons to punch each other. They do so, awkwardly. I give them some pointers.

From a cruise ship to what might as well be a stone coffin, my body is gone, replaced by an aesthetically displeasing crystal one, and my only company is a bunch of skeletons. Am I forgetting something?

Oh yeah.

I tell the skeletons that when one of the fighters is knocked down they should clap. Maybe make some teeth clattering noises too while they are at it. Where was I again?

Right, I am down probably deep down into the earth considering all the stone around me, probably in another universe considering the dense mana. I either died alone, or most of my planet died with me, who knows at this point.

My only company is a bunch of skeletons with no personality, as of yet. I have no idea if there’s even civilization out there or if I am alone in the world. Yet I feel something deep within me, something I have not felt since the first time my mother taught me magic, since when I saw my blood nourish a bean sprout, something that was gone when she… I feel like I can soar. I feel like I could grow wings and fly into the moon, unburdened.

With a quick jab a skeleton knocks their opponent down, the little crowd cheers, as best as they can.

And I feel free.