My enthusiasm might have outweighed my ability to handle the adversity of my new condition. Upon awakening, I tried to lurch forward into a sitting position, only to roll off the altar and collapse face first onto the floor.

It didn’t hurt, as other injuries hadn’t, but I also wouldn’t have cared if it had. I was moving! For the first time in… well, I’m not exactly sure how long—it didn’t matter—I had control of my body. Err, a body!

A raspy rattling noise emitted from my lungs. It took me a tense moment to realize I was laughing. And, as is often the case with laughter, the acknowledgement of my reaction only brought forth more. Speaking had been another miracle that biology denied me for far too long. If corpses could cry, I would have done so right there on the spot. Spasming and choking on the dusty crypt floor was the happiest moment of my entire existence. Nothing else would ever come close.

A normal person might have lain back to consider what to do next if shouldered with a difficult to control body. But I had an entire lifetime of experiences doing that very thing. And so I endeavored to writhe about like a dimwitted worm until I could control things. I loved every second.

Hours, or perhaps a day later, I could finally stand and move on my own two feet. There was a trick that I hadn’t expected to being a shambler. Three of my four limbs were always stiff with rigor mortis, the tier advantage permitting me to only loosen one section at a time. The easiest way to facilitate moving was to relax one leg, drag the other and stick both arms outward in the “classic zombie” pose.

Likewise, other muscle groups reacted analogously. In trying to speak, I found I could only use my jaw or my throat and tongue, resulting in a hilarious speech impediment that I wasted a few hours slaking. The production sounded like Porky Pig and Daffy Duck mongolian throat singing. It never stopped being funny.

After a time, I took a moment to review the codex, and I realized it had attempted to explain the basics to me with its description of Rigor Mortis. It stated that I could use the ability to create a death grip, and I must have fixated on that portion of the entry. The more important section said, “relax to increase motor function.” In my defense, I had been a little too excited about bumbling around to appreciate words.

Trying to walk like a healthy person was difficult, but I refused to be deterred. Timing the switch between legs required a fair bit of mental juggling. After each step, I had to relinquish control of the forward leg right when the heel touched down and sort of rock myself forward with the now softened back leg. Meanwhile, my stiffened arms just sort of flopped about like a cow’s udders. The result would not endear me to the inhabitants of this world. Unless a culture unknown to Oran relished the pimp walk. Hey, if it could happen in one universe, it could happen in others.

With the use of the stone altar to catch myself, I went in circles until I felt comfortable trying it without a safety. Fortunately, walking in a straight line was considerably easier than going in a curve, and I mastered the skill rather fast.

Despite the difficulty, one enormous advantage I had was that I never tired. The undead never exhausted, nor did they require food or water. Considering my inability to sit still, I could not have been more in love with undeath. There was no pain! Further, I was immune to, and unable to feel, the fluctuations of temperature. I could wander these halls forever, doing whatever I liked without fear of starving or freezing.

Oran had believed that undeath was one of the worst fates a man could suffer. And, indeed, there were quite a few stories about people from this world going nuts. How a person could be driven mad by the state was beyond me. Living as an invalid, now that was crazy! These catacombs would be my wonderland. If I could skip in joy, I would.

Note to self: learn skipping.

Blessedly, the lack of feeling applied only to negative conditions. My skin retained enough awareness to provide me with the sense of physical touch, if at a subdued extent. The clothes on my body and boots on my feet were marginally within the boundaries of my sensation.

Smell was equivalently reduced, but without the drawback of being offendable. A musty crypt should have been, at best, annoying to breathe, yet I could barely tell. Focusing gave me stronger olfactory feedback, but that wasn’t any different from being alive. I suspected my utter lack of taste caused me to be unaffected by the putrid smells.

Sight was a mixed bag. Though magical torches lined the walls, I could still see rather well in the dark, but at the expense of not being able to see very far. A good ten feet was all I had, then everything got blurry. Given the circumstance of reanimating in a dark maze, I was more than accepting of the tradeoff.

Hearing was better than it had ever been! Ototoxic medications from my years taking hospital drugs had reduced my ability to hear and left me with a terrible case of tinnitus. Undead ears had no issue with this, and in fact appeared to be the only sensory perception that was above human. If only slightly.

After mastering ambulatory basics and the limitations of my senses, I gave a more in-depth examination of my immediate surroundings. Raised on a dais behind the stone altar sat a statue of a masked ghoulish corpse. Oran’s memories did not encompass the specific figure on the edifice. However, I could deduce that it was presumably one of the six Stygian gods of undeath, colloquially known as the “Death Cults”. Crude symbols painted in a blood-like substance surrounded the base of the altar. I expected they were the incorrect “sigils” written in Wentworth Willoughby's ‌steady hand.

I did not know what the trio had been trying to achieve with their ritual, but I also cared little. If I needed to understand their machinations at a later date, then I would focus my attention on it at that time. Oran’s recollection didn’t offer insight, either. Being unable to use the codex rendered him incapable of grasping the specifics of any magical form, much less the convoluted language of summoning.

Walking around the circumference of the oval room, I examined the skeletons burrowed in their shelves. The bones were in terrible shape, fragmented and yellow. Whatever clothes and equipment the builders of this place had interred them with had long since turned to dust or rust. Nothing of value or interest.

The magical patterns that adorned the walls were as nonsensical as the sigils. I gave up studying them with little effort on my part. But, I was concerned that the mystic scratchings would trap me like they appeared to do to the guardian. There were “wards” which could keep things from entering or exiting an area. It wouldn’t have been the worst outcome if I were to be stuck, but I had to be sure what my options were.

Thankfully, that didn’t appear to be the case. I tossed Wentworth’s arm down the hall and chased after the slapping appendage past the threshold without issue. A passing fancy to take the limb along with me on my adventures almost had me reaching for it, but I quashed the impulse.

Maybe I have become a little unstable. No issue here! It’s important to be open to new experiences.

So, there were two directions for me to go: after the nobles, or after the tomb guardian. Oran could not remember how he’d gotten down here. His last memory was drinking at an adventurer’s bar with Graham. His so-called best friend got him full of liquid courage under the pretense of a promising proposition. Wentworth had supposedly re-discovered a ritual for a “mana repellent” in his family’s famous library. That hadn’t been enough to convince Oran to risk traveling under the city, though, so Graham had drugged him.

Neither direction would be familiar or safe. And In either case, my biggest obstacle would be how others reacted to my presence. There were many and varied horrid rumors about what others might encounter in the catacombs. From unscrupulous adventurers to ancient evil lizard people that wanted to do things like… change the sexual orientation of frogs? That one might be from my memory.

Realistically, I would most likely find myself in a confrontation with a monster with foul intentions. Wherein “monster” was an umbrella term that included any non-human that had advanced by absorbing mana. Also dropped under that label were creatures from outside the normal plane of existence, like elementals, fairies, or demons. There appeared to be far more things that were monsters than weren’t. In fact, the people of Abatur classified me as one.

With so many potential enemies, I decided the safest place to stick to was the most frequented haunts of my pal, the tomb guardian. Undead were notoriously antagonistic to anything that didn’t look dead, and it looked more than capable of taking care of itself.

My direction decided, I walked away from the hallway the three nobles had fled and back to the original summoning room. Upon re-entering the altar room, I felt an immense weighty pressure descend on me. Unsure what had happened, I stood stock still and searched for an explanation. A tense few minutes later, I was no closer to the truth. Thus, I stepped back out of the room and back in again. The pressure came down on me a second time.

“Nice party trick,” I told the statue of the death god, then gave it a salute that would have made Uncle Sam proud. Well, I tried to say that at any rate. What I actually said was something more like, “Naughh sharrrrr rrruuuuukkk”. But I don’t think it mattered; no one was there to listen.

The wizard gobbledygook continued along the ‌spacious tunnel I traveled. From the floor to the ceiling was around twelve feet, and a good six feet across separated the walls. Spaced throughout the arched ceiling were bas reliefs of the unknown masked ghoul god. Ancient skeletons in bad repair continued the trend of slumbering inside the walls in rows of four.

Before long, I faced the first split in my path. To the left was a hallway that looked like a skeleton ball pit. The right did not look like a skeleton ball pit.

Obviously, I went left.

Tripping almost immediately on the hill of bones, I laughed with glee as I crashed down heavily on my side. Several skulls and bones cracked because of my antics, and then the most incredible thing happened.

Mana flooded into my core.