Oran, having never been a mana adept himself, only knew of three ways to advance with the codex. Tutors hired by his family and mentors from within his family had given him this knowledge. However, it didn’t do him any good because his core could never draw enough in to link him to the Naram-Sin. This problem was not uncommon; most of the people of Abatur could not form a core for a variety of reasons. He’d been told that roughly one in fifteen people could become adepts.

For nobility, the numbers were closer to one in five. Those that couldn’t create a core did not keep a noble status for long. Getting called a dud and exiled was the most likely outcome, though House Farrow had a habit of shuffling them to their business to do white collar work. Oran had recently received such an assignment.

The first technique to improve, and most common among children, was to draw mana in with meditation techniques. Theoretically, these kinds of exercises would work anywhere. That said, the only real chance of this method succeeding in a reasonable timeframe was to do it in areas of high mana concentration. Places that only nobles had access to or were dangerous to travel to. Oran had spent many years meditating in his family’s enchanted garden maze.

I assumed the catacombs were one such place too. It was the only explanation that I had for the intense pressure I encountered after crossing the threshold. What I wasn’t sure was if the meditating would work on my animated corpse. Eventually, I figured I’d get around to trying it out. There was no rush. It’s not like I didn’t have an eternity!

The second technique was to consume alchemically treated potions, elixirs, and pills. Rare and expensive components, crafted by uniquely talented people, were required to create these items. The beginning of Oran’s downfall within House Farrow started right after he consumed two costly pills gifted to him by the patriarch. The one in five numbers dropped to one in three for nobles taking mana-sponge pills. And that still hadn’t been enough for him. Losing reputation from that failure had been swift and unrelenting, culminating in physical abuse from his cousins.

Finally, the third and most prolific method of progression was to kill things that had mana. Because of this growth from death, the world of Abatur was exceedingly dangerous. Monsters in the wilds could snowball to become a serious menace in a short time. Most people lived in heavily guarded city-states because of the all consuming monsters that threatened civilization. Nobility and adventurers were all that kept chaos from descending, and they did that by slaying monsters themselves. Strength was all that mattered, which meant that mana was all that mattered, too.

Interestingly, unlike beasts, killing things wouldn’t help a person without a manacore. Peasants couldn't murder their way to unlocking a codex. If they could, Abatur would probably be a very different place. Worse, I wouldn’t be here!

The donation I’d received from the tomb guardian hinted at a fourth method of progression, but I had no inclination to look that gift horse in the mouth.

It took a while for me to understand where the mana rush came from. I’d never intentionally hurt a thing in my life, and the barbarity of Abatur’s “kill to fill” way of living was still just too foreign. So, I searched around the skull ball pit looking for an explanation, and doing as I do, fell over again. A second skull cracked open.

I got another rush of mana.

That’s when it hit me! This bone pit was full of undead!

By circumstance or design, the skeletons sat dormant on the ground in a dirty pile. They didn’t mind my jumping on them, or react at all to my presence; doubtless, since I was one of them. I could slay them at my leisure.

It took me roughly thirty seconds to get over the moral quandary of murdering monsters for power. Then another minute to sort out if the tomb guardian would be angry. I still had no answer to that, but decided I didn’t care. What, was it going to kill me again?

I practiced tap dancing on heads for the first time in my life. Then the skipping that I promised to teach myself. Both proved impossible to do without falling over. Stone bowling was a lot more promising, but took a lot of the fun out of it. Soccer was a heap of fun, though. My WWE flying elbow drop worked like a charm, but I only did it once for fear of hurting myself. I’d always wanted to learn golf but couldn’t find a bone big enough to be a club. These activities proved feasible and entertaining only due to the skeletons being so brittle.

An hour and several bone snow angels later, I got another prompt from my codex.

You have sufficient mana to advance a tier I → II

Name: Oran Farrow

Race: Undead

Level: 1

Tier: Shambling Corpse - II

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.

The sensation was nowhere near as grand as my previous advancement, but it still felt quite good. My manacore grew, and a liquid surged around my metaphysical pathways in a tour de force. Unhealthy colored green mana traveled to every portion of my mana pathways, feeling both icy and itchy, yet pleasurable at once.

Regrettably, the codex didn’t offer me another trait to choose. But after some experimenting, I noticed I felt marginally stronger than before. Rigor Mortis became easier to control. I couldn’t tell if Halted Decay and Verminbane also grew in strength, because there was no way to test it. But I suspected they did. That alone justified the destruction of my boney brothers. Spending undeath just lying around all day, they should have been ashamed!

Nearly as important as the increase in power was the information. Oran knew only how human-mana advancement worked, and I already knew that differed from my own. A single tier up did not count as a level increase. Having gone from Shambling Corpse I to II was the only change in my Naram-Sin record. Conversely, humans had no tiers and simply leveled up. After enough levels, their class would change to offer additional advantages.

For me, the only important question was how many tiers it would take to advance in level. My hypothesis was that for monsters, each level indicated a new evolution. And the sooner I evolved, the better!

Several hours later, my antics had turned the bone pit into a bone gravel road. I determined it was time to move on and cannibalize other undead for more of that succulent mana. Or rather, move backward. I went back and crushed the head of every skeleton leading up to and in the altar room with my bowling ball stone.

That netted me only a few kills, and they all came from the hallway. Those altar room boneheads just didn’t have what it takes to turn a profit in the skull-crushing industry.

The extra mana hadn’t been enough for another advancement, but that didn’t hurt my enthusiasm in the slightest. A single tier up turned me from an unmoving corpse to a self-actualized stumbling one. What would three or even six tier ups do for me?

Stumbling across the crushed bone pit was much easier than it had been the first time around. Unfortunately, after I made it through the room, the tunnel narrowed to below head height. Since I could not bend my head and another body part together, things got stupid.

A pure exercise in frustration.

Trying to slide along on my stomach was doable, but very slow and scuffed my clothes. Not knowing how long the path was, there was a possibility that I got to my destination in tatters. I outright refused to be a naked corpse in a crypt. My mother raised me better than that.

Unwilling to slide against the walls or floor, left me hunched over like an upside-down “u”. I persisted rocking back on my knuckles and feet for a few yards before I gathered I was doing damage to my hands. Only minor scrapes, but again, not knowing how far I had to walk like that meant that I could do unfixable damage to my fists. It simply wasn’t worth the risk.

The classic duck walk had me cussing. For whatever reason, known only to the gods of undeath, any time I attempted the maneuver, my legs would rebel and stand me straight up. The thudding sound my head made against the roof after a single attempt swore me right off of that.

So, dejected, I traveled back to the original split after the altar room. This time, I took the right path.

I quickly noted that signs of a struggle were present down the gloomy hallway. Bones looked tossed around haphazardly, as if by an angry toddler. And they weren’t just shattered, either. Someone neatly cut them in half, or burned and blackened them. The burial depressions were empty. Which I took to mean they had gotten up and defended the catacombs.

Whoever had wrecked the undead had not been messing about. I considered, from Oran’s experiences, that the probable culprit was a “classer”—a normal human being with a manacore. Reputedly, they had fun abilities similar to my tier powers. However, I doubted they had to bite or fart on anyone like the spiteful Naram-Sin encouraged me to do.

That left me uncertain about continuing forward. As a weak creature at the first advancement, I would be easy pickings for a skilled adventurer team. Further, my poor communication skills wouldn’t even give me a chance at talking my way out of a fight.

A counterpoint was that I couldn’t tell how long ago the battle was. Except for the tomb guardian, every skeleton I’d encountered had looked positively ancient. Also, considering I hadn’t heard the sounds of a struggle with my superior hearing, I guessed that it probably wasn’t recent. Sounds traveled well throughout these unhallowed halls, and that worked both ways. If righteous heroes had been in the vicinity, they surely would have checked on my earlier fun.

That decided, I plowed along, bulldozing pelvic bones and femurs to the sides of the tunnel. Every so often, I stopped and listened for signs that I wasn’t alone, but never heard a thing.

It took me by surprise when I discovered the torches weren’t lit. I had been walking alone in complete darkness for a while, and hadn’t even realized it. My sight shifted to a colorless, or maybe black and white, way of viewing things. But because the catacombs had largely appeared that way anyway, I’d been none the wiser. I was ecstatic to learn that I wouldn’t be traveling blind!

Eventually, the skeleton parts disappeared, and I started finding the unmolested carcasses resting in the wall holes again. This led to my pace slowing considerably, as I stopped to crack any bone-dome in my path. None of them gave me mana, and there weren’t too many.

I picked up a rancid odor. And for a terrifying moment, I thought the smell was emanating from me. I knew I was dead, but I didn’t want to smell that way! Being a fresh corpse should have saved me from such a fate. Smelling my armpits provided no clue to the culprit. It wasn’t until I backtracked a little way that I could rule myself out. My armpits whiffed of common sweat. Unless, of course, I couldn’t smell my own dead funk.

What a horrifying thought!

After the stinker snafu, things weren’t all bad. After ten minutes of traveling, the hallway widened open into another oval-shaped chamber like the one I’d originally woken up in. Except this time, there were no altars. There was something much more exciting than architecture! The true culprits of that malign reek.

Zombies!