As I lay there waiting for my second life to end, I wondered if I would remember this short, sad excuse for an existence next time around.

I prayed I wouldn’t. Thus far, it had been blessedly free of pain, but that only went so far in the face of the constant trepidation.

Wentworth's boil covered buttocks being the greatest lasting instance of trauma forced on me.

And what did my demise mean for the recent memories stapled into my being? Being forced to carry the burdens of Oran Farrow did not seem fair. His experience still felt distinctly separate from my own, more like an encyclopedia that I could draw upon. I had no desire to carry his emotional baggage around with me.

Nevertheless, it had to be said, there were some pretty funny memories in there. Like the first time he drank wine, resulting in him pissing himself at a dinner party. Oran conspired to make the drunk widow next to him spill her cup on his lap so that he could get away with a semblance of dignity.

A spike of fear ended that indulgence. As it occurred to me, I was already in his dead body. Shouldn’t I have moved on by now? Oran’s memories, no, I guess my memories now, provided a hint of context to the situation.

In the world of Abatur, there prevailed a condition known as undeath. Any being with sufficient mana permeating their body could progress to an ever higher state of being. Including, apparently, corpses. However, most of such cases were at the behest of sapient undead or outlawed black magic types. Rarely did the undead amount to anything other than mindless fodder. At most, people considered them a nuisance, shambling around and spreading disease to ill-equipped peasants.

Oran had possessed little useful knowledge about the subject. But that hardly mattered to my mind, because I lacked the central defining characteristic of undeath: mobility.

To wit, the sprightly skeletal edgelord observing me. Ghastly green eyes fixated on a point in the center of my chest, which might have pinned me in place had I been able to move. Idly, I decided not to hold it against Wentworth for standing there stupefied while the creature amputated his arm. From under the shadows of its black hood, I could swear that the bone-carved face was evaluating me.

Having apparently decided a course of action, the creature turned its back toward me and stepped again toward the fleeing nobility. I wasn’t going anywhere, after all. Or maybe it just also thought I was a corpse.

I should have been relieved, but I remained uneasy. Getting left to while away the years in dark untraveled catacombs was not the ideal outcome here. The thing was, I wasn’t sure what difference it would make if the tomb guardian had chopped me up. I doubt I could do much to reverse the ritual that brought me here, and dismemberment likely wouldn’t help.

The boney horror walked a few feet and stopped at the precipice of the exit to the room.

What is this!? Are you screwing with me?

A loud, irritating scraping sound issued from the hallway. Hunched over, the monster dragged its proportionally evil looking weapon across the catacomb floor. Sparks trailed after the scratching blade in a nearly rhythmic pattern.

It looked preposterous. Almost as though it was using the scythe for its intended farming purpose. On the stone ground!

You used to be a farmer, eh?

According to Oran’s memory banks, mindless undead commonly performed tasks familiar to them when they were alive. So, maybe they weren’t so mindless.

But who was I to judge, anyway? There was an elderly man at the hospital that had the most fantastic habit of reviewing the jellos as if they were the finest of wines. He’d rip off the lid of the plastic cup, giving it a good sniff, before scooping out a taste to swish. His long-winded diatribes about mango flavorings this year, or hints of strawberry earthy sweetness, never failed to amuse me. It was one of the few times I had smiled before I lost the ability altogether. Back when I could still chew my food.

His passing had hit me hard. The man had single-handedly given me just a smidgen of joy for hospital lunch. As a person who had eaten more than his fair share of the slop, I counted that as a near mythological feat. I only got to spend a few months with him, but had looked for him at midday for years. Even when I rationally knew he wasn’t coming.

Why could I remember that, but not his name or face? I couldn’t tell if my spotty recollection was a mercy or a cruelty.

The tomb guardian finished its therapeutic activity, and I almost laughed. Mentally, I mean. Within its grasp was my discarded boot.

Silly as it was, it begged the question why it hadn’t simply gone out there and grabbed it. Leaning out into the tunnel to play boot fishing was a wildly inefficient way to get the footwear.

It can’t leave the area, I realized.

Which meant that Wentworth only lost his arm because he’d stopped. A few more feet and he would have been out of reach of the guardian’s attack. There was a lesson in there somewhere, I’m sure. Oh well, couldn’t have happened to a bigger jerk.

Far more gently than I expected, the bloodcurdling slayer of men placed the boot back on to my foot. Then, it carefully lifted me to sit in the center of the stone altar and set me in a pose with my arms crossed across my chest. That done, it straightened up my crooked legs, brushing me off along the way.

To top off my already thoroughly exceeded expectations, the tomb guardian ignited a pointer finger with a grayish-green glow. For a second, it held the glowing orb in the air, bathing me in the ill light before carefully touching it to the crown of my head.

A rush of the strange energy flooded through my corpse. At first, the sensation felt almost like a jittery caffeine high dancing around my limbs. Quickly, the green light reached the center of my stomach, and the feeling transformed into absolute ecstasy. Had I been capable, I would have gasped.

A timeless moment passed, where I felt whole for the first time in two lives. The universe reached into me, filling me with an ambition to become more than I was—not that I needed much pushing in that direction. Potential coalesced in a spiraling gas cloud, showering me with visions of what could be.

An image of myself as a vampire lord sitting on a throne drinking from a skull filled with blood passed.

How very cliche.

Another scene, of what I presumed to be myself, as a skeletal wraith floating in the night sky, rending the life essence from people below me. Then I was an amalgamation of body parts dressed in Stygian armor, cutting down men with a gigantic sword. Another showed a picture of me hijacking the skin off people and pretending to be their loved one. Moment after moment of grotesque tragedy revealed to me the paths that awaited my future as an all powerful undead.

Mentally, I rejected them all. There was bound to be a path that I could live with that didn’t revolve around me tearing up the lives of others. I was grateful when the dream ended.

The tomb guardian, which presumably stood there watching me the entire time, simply walked off, clanking away to wherever it came from. Stoic as ever.

After that mindgasm, I really hope that skeleton was a chick.

Oran’s recollection told me that the green lightning had been the aforementioned “mana”. Albeit a type filled with a necrotic energy that was not desirable in respectable society. Probably why all the advancements it showed me were uncouth.

Not that that would have stopped him from embracing it had he been able. Toward the end of his days, he’d even contemplated making a pact with a demon for demonic mana. Which, as he understood, would have been a poor bargain on account of his inability to store mana in his mana core.

A problem that I did not share, being that my manacore was full to bursting in its metaphysical location above my navel. When I focused on its impelling call, the world disappeared, sucking me into the necrotic green nebula floating in my inner sight.

Name: Oran Farrow

Race: Undead

Level: 0

Tier: Corpse

Level Advantages: None

Tier Traits: None

Please choose a trait for your tier - Corpse.

Halted Decay - significantly reduces your rate of decay.

Verminbane - you emit an aura that repels non-magical vermin.

Poisonous Gas - your stomach builds up a toxic gas that you can expel once a day.

You have sufficient mana to advance a level. Please choose from the following list.

Shambling Corpse - you can now move in a halting, jerky manner. Provides the trait: Rigor Mortis - you can selectively use your stiffening limbs to achieve a death grip or relax it to increase motor function.

The Naram-Sin Codex! Poor Oran had spent his life uselessly trying to retain enough mana to activate the codex. For it was only through this internal method of progression that a person would matter in the world of Abatur. With enough mana, men could become demigods, and beasts could transform into terrorizing monsters. Although, as Oran understood it from an outsider’s perspective, the codex offered men “classes” to advance through rather than tiers.

According to Oran’s lessons on theology, Naram-Sin had been a powerful god of knowledge that had created the codex as his last gift to man. His task complete, he left the world of Abatur to seek knowledge elsewhere.

Within this cosmic gift were all the paths of progression available to a being. The scriptures stated that the codex calculated the physical and the metaphysical in determining what roads you could take to improve. Entire lifetimes of sages had been devoted to trying to piece out how the thing worked.

Now, here it was before me, offering me the chance to go a-shamblin’!

Supposedly, powering through a class, or I guess a tier, like I had just done, was easiest in the beginning. Each level refined the person physically and mentally and was said to be more taxing as the cost of mana grew ever increasing.

One thing that people and monsters did not do was sacrifice their own mana progression. The tomb guardian must have given me a small amount of its own death mana to facilitate this evolution. Why it had done that would be a problem for another day. It was time to pick my trait!

First, Poisonous Gas was right out. Useful as toxic gas may or may not be, I had no desire to have it. It was as gross as it was disturbing. That left Verminbane and Halted Decay as the only realistic options. Both were extremely attractive, as I had no desire to have parts falling off or maggots burrowing in my body.

Thankfully, the choice wasn’t that hard. Since I was down in the catacombs under the capital city, bugs would be less of a worry than they would be topside. Also, since I was a fresh corpse, taking Halted Decay would have me looking practically alive!

After selecting my first trait, I tiered up to Shambling Corpse. This prompted another trait selection.

Please choose a trait for your tier - Shambling Corpse (I).

Verminbane - you emit an aura that repels non-magical vermin.

Poisonous Gas - your stomach builds up a toxic gas that you can expel once a day.

Disease Spreader - your bite has a chance of infecting a living creature with zombification.

Another straightforward decision. I already wanted Verminbane and had no desire to go around biting people. That was just nasty. I selected the choice with no delay. The codex updated my status.

Name: Oran Farrow

Race: Undead

Level: 1

Tier: Shambling Corpse (I)

Level Advantages:

Rigor Mortis - you can selectively use your stiffening limbs to achieve a death grip or relax it to increase motor function.

Tier Traits:

Halted Decay - significantly reduces your rate of decay.

Verminbane - you emit an aura that repels non-magical vermin.

With a satisfied grin, I exited the codex and prepared to go exploring the catacombs.