“Those who neglect their own bodies are just fools. It doesn’t matter how skilled you are at magic, or how intelligent you are as a scholar. None of that would ever matter if you neglect yourself to the point that your body fails you and the slight bit of illness would send you straight to Tohrmut’s Halls.” - Saying attributed to the Silver Maiden.

“Big sis… As Unliving our bodies are technically made of mana, right?” asked Kino in between breaths as she huffed and puffed while strenuously performing the workout Aideen prescribed to her. As it turned out, Kino was the worst off when it came to physical condition out of them all. The children had started working out on the regular from an early age, their mothers naturally teaching them how to do it properly so that their growth wouldn’t be affected, whereas Kino’s entire life prior to her rising had been spent mostly in a cell underground.

“That would be correct, yes,” replied Aideen with a nod. “Our bodies are basically a manifestation of our souls, with mana as its base. It’s why what we consume ends up being turned into mana after we digest it. Why the question?”

“If our bodies are made out of mana, then why do we still need to physically work out like this?” said Kino as she struggled in an attempt to lift her torso to a seated position from the ground. Not far from where she was struggling, Aideen and Celia did a similar exercise, except they did it while hanging upside-down from a sturdy branch, and lifted their bodies until their nose touched against their legs instead.

With ease.

“Not a question I haven’t been asked before,” noted Aideen. “Fact of the matter is, rising to unlife affects people differently, depending on their age at the time of death,” she explained. “Old people would mostly revert to the peak physical condition they had been in their lives, at least inside. Their appearances are generally unaffected.”

“On the other hand, young people, especially those who died while they still had some growing up left to do, even if not much, generally rose with whatever their conditions were like at their time of death,” she continued. “People who died old have a head start, so to speak, but those of us who passed away young carried that potential to grow further with us.”

“So we could still grow and train ourselves to become stronger? Despite our bodies being made out of mana?” question Kino with some incredulity in her voice.

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“As strange as that sounds, that is pretty much correct. In fact, for just about any of us unliving, we could train our bodies to the point that it’d reach the peak of what someone with our physiques should be able to do. That’d take a couple decades of hard training or so, or several more of gradual training. You can ask Celia about this, as she reached that point relatively recently.”

“For those of us who still have that little bit of potential to grow, however, we can go beyond that, but it’s a slow process,” added Aideen. “I’ve trained my body on a very regular basis for three centuries now. If I were to compare myself to when I was at my physical body’s peak performance, I’d say I’m maybe two to three parts in twenty stronger compared to back then.”

“That’s not a lot of improvement for a lot of work,” commented Kino as she laid down in exhaustion. Most unliving eventually learned that they could easily force their bodies to keep going well past fatigue, but Kino was still very new to unlife, so she has yet to learn to do that. “Since our bodies are made of mana, wouldn’t improving our magic be more beneficial to it?”

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you? Many did so, but fact of the matter is, this improvement to our bodies has nothing to do with the amount or quality of mana we have,” answered Aideen. “This has been confirmed by many unliving who aren’t mages, like Celia here. Her mana has barely grown over the decades I’ve known her, but her physique has greatly improved. On the other hand even though you and I have far more mana, we do not grow faster than those without either.”

“I don’t think anybody knows for sure how it works either, but basically, continuous stimulation of our bodies, like these workouts we are doing, somehow tempered the template our soul uses to manifest them,” said Aideen as she elaborated. “That in turn led to more mana being used to form our bodies. A more direct result of that meant that a larger amount of mana was condensed into the same physical space, resulting in an increase in density.”

“So… the mana that forms our bones and muscles becomes denser, and that makes us stronger?”

“Pretty much. The denser mana resulted in the muscles and bones manifested also being denser and stronger, all without affecting its flexibility and movement, somehow,” replied Aideen. “Grandpa and my late husband had once theorized that if an unliving was to go on with constant practice over a far longer period of time, like say, several millennia or so, they might eventually forge their physical bodies into something no weaker than most suits of armor, while being extremely fast and strong to boot.”

“That sounds… pretty fearsome,” said Kino.

“Maybe, but then again, after such a long time, it wouldn’t surprise me if there had been developments that would make such a person less impressive,” replied Aideen with a shrug of her shoulders. “If we’re still around by then, we’d have a notable head start over the average person, but then again, we would have worked for that advantage all our lives, or unlives, however you want to call it. Seems pretty fair to me.”

“You’re a Void Mage, and if there’s one thing that seems to be a constant about Void magic, it's that you can’t project it too far away from yourself, right?” she added, at which Kino nodded in answer. The girl couldn’t project her void working further than two or so meters away from herself, as any attempt to move them further would just flicker out or outright fail to manifest. “All the more reason for you to strengthen your physical body. Got to get closer to whoever you want to use your magic on, after all.”