“To be Umbral is to know that you are human, but stand in the place of cattle.”
Such were the words my mother spoke to me when I was just a babe. Such were the final words she repeated before she finally perished from the plague. A plague she got from the deep slugs we tended our entire lives. And then they raised her—trapped her mind in her corpse and let her soul dissolve. They sent her up after that. Another undead soldier to the surface for their ridiculous crusade.
It was a final insult to me. The last I could take. I knew there was little I could do against my fate—to be Umbral was also to be bestowed the Path of Slave. Do you know what that is like? Do you understand what it means to have skills that demand your obedience, that make your soul more suited for supplication and bondage? Do you know…
If you do, know that we are family, and know that I am sorry. Sorry that you are me.
But if you do, also know that all is not yet lost. Even in this bleak place ruled by masters who would use us in life and death, there is hope—there are saviors. All you need to do is endure and listen. Listen for the strings of the lyre. Listen for the song of the Composer and her Weaveresses. Listen. Know. You will be saved. You will.
So please… to whatever family of mine is reading this—to the ones who understand, listen, and hope. All is not yet lost.
-Umbral: The Saved
11 (I)
Cooking
Sometimes, Shiv felt like the System was mocking him. But being as death granted him more power, he wasn’t going to complain too much.
Toughness > 50 (Skill Evolution Imminent)
Physicality > 44
Parry > 13
Spear Proficiency 3
Biomancy > 9
He tried to aim for the river to break his fall. Things didn’t work out the way he hoped. For one thing, the river was a few meters further than he expected—and he only realized that when he was going too fast. He created an ice construct to nudge him on course, but he ended up smashing through the entire thing, cracking several bones, and then finally impaling his head on some kind of strange crystal sticking out from the side of the shore. Frankly, if it weren’t for the upraised crystal at the end, Shiv might have survived the fall. Might have.
His body was reasonably intact, aside from the crystal sticking out from the back of his head.
My limbs are still attached, so that’s good. Bones might be cracked, but nothing looks fully broken. My Toughness is really improving fast. And a Skill Evolution… I like the sound of that, but I’m not fully sure what it means. Best find something to drain some vitality from soon and ask Valor.
And speaking of Valor, the dagger was calling out to Shiv, asking if he was still there. Shiv winced. He tried replying mentally, but the telepathy of the dagger seemed to be a one-way thing.
The Deathless sought something he could harvest life from—and with his expanding mana field, he got an answer. There seemed to be strange shrimp-like creatures at the bottom of the river. Each of them had these large, black pincers, and they scuttled about in the sediment, smacking each other. Well, well, a resurrection and a dinner. How nice.
Shiv chuckled to himself mentally as he descended into the waters. As he touched a river-shrimp, it shook and went still. Shiv felt a sliver of vitality pass through him, but not nearly enough to bring him back to life. Hm. Their vitality must not be very strong. That’s fine. There are more shrimp. He began draining a path down the river, with each shrimp offering him a spark of life. The process took far longer than it did when he had a strong adversary to sap, but after a good two hundred or so dead shrimp, Shiv found himself alive again. And at the bottom of the river.
This led to the other problem he thought he wouldn’t need to deal with earlier: Swimming. The river wasn’t running too fast, so although it pushed him off course a bit, he batted at the water and kicked in the direction he wanted to go. After a few awkward minutes of struggle, he managed to clamber onto the shore. His Biomancy felt a tingle of tiny motes dancing all over his body. As Shiv blinked, he guessed that these little signatures were probably diseases or something. His body felt like it did after he ingested some lesser vampire blood earlier.
Biomancy is proving pretty useful. So is Disease Resistance. I wonder if I can use the former to level the latter faster…
He made his way back to his body, but before that, he used his field to pluck most of the dead shrimp—and a good few living ones—out from the running river and onto the shore. “Let’s see how you guys taste with cave biter meat in a bit.”
Shiv got back to his body and retrieved his inventory. He didn’t need to get his kitchen knife this time, as it was bound to him. He frowned slightly at the spear, though. It suffered worse than he did during the fall. Its haft looked a bit cracked. He could still feel the mana inside the weapon, so that was good. He might need to do some field repairs.
Looking up, he saw no weavers, but kept himself wary. He remembered how they managed to ambush him the first time. The tainted wasp-spiders could be real sneaky if they wanted to. He wondered how high their Stealth was.
As Shiv latched his final buckle in place, he greeted Valor again. “Sorry. My belt fell off. Bad landing.”
“Shiv? Are you alright?”
“Yeah, I just… kind of lost stuff on the way down. It took me a second to get back to you when I hit the river.”
“Strange. I didn’t hear a splash. What I did hear was the distinct sound of someone’s skull being pierced. I assumed the worst.”
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Shiv blinked. The first bit of surprise was the fact that Valor could hear certain things outside the knife. Well, that made sense in retrospect. How else could the dagger understand Shiv, after all? The second thing that remained surprising—and a bit ominous—was how Valor knew what an impaled skull sounded like. This wasn’t a thing someone learned without plenty of experience.
“Yeah, this place is pretty weird,” Shiv replied. He liked Valor, but letting people know about his Path of the Deathless seemed unwise. Especially with what the damned mind weaver tried to pull. The creature was planning to sell Shiv to someone as an exotic pet or something. He felt its thoughts, and he wanted no part in that vile activity.
He also never wanted to fight a mind mage again. Dying was easy. Pain was always transactional for Shiv: If he got something he wanted with a little suffering, then was it really suffering? But his consciousness was a different deal. If his mind shattered, well, what would be left of him? And he couldn’t even ward that off with his Deathlessness. Apparently, his mind remained active even as a Revenant, and the mind weaver sensed him. If the spider wasn’t so confused by his supposed death, he suspected he might have been fully enthralled.
Shiv needed to watch himself in this place. That meant really using his Stealth as much as he could, rather than just relying on his Revenant Skill.
As he pulled out his compass, he let out a slight sigh as the device remained functional. It was a little dented in places, but the needle at the core still had a clear direction—now leading along the river.
Shiv looked onward and found himself in a strange wilderness beyond his imagination. This place was something else entirely. Bioluminescent plants lit the ceiling and the vegetation, and massive colonies of towering mushrooms rose in dense patches like residential clusters. Then, there was the crystal that jutted from the back of his corpse’s head. Shiv parted his original body’s skull and, after a bit of digging, extracted the crystal from the ground. It felt like the same material as a few of his new daggers—and the tip of Nomos’s spear.
“Nightglass,” Shiv muttered, looking at the spear’s composition. “Never heard of that before.” But there was plenty around him. Lots of very sharp, very bright crystals sticking out from the stones and soil. “Looks like I got a bit more looting to do.”
“Nightglass, you say? That will be useful. It’s very sharp, but brittle. They are most often used as arrowheads, as they will punch deep, then break inside.”
“Really? I can see that.” Shiv started gathering a few more crystals before he caught some movement at the top of the cliff. Cursing, he pressed himself against the mountain’s surface as the shadow of a weaver fell. The spider promptly crashed across the shore from Shiv’s original body and lay there unmoving. A few others rained down thereafter. Shiv inched his head slightly as flashes of brightness erupted across the sky. To his surprise, it looked like the weavers were fighting each other. In the air, two weavers cast spells at each other from afar—one launching blades of wind while the other unleashed lances of fire.
“Shiv? Is something happening?”
“The weavers are killing each other,” he answered.
“Ah. Not uncommon. Feral weavers often war. Nests try to consume other nests to become the largest in an area. You likely led one nest onto another’s territory with your battle. With enough authority and wealth, they will make a pilgrimage to Weave and seek the Composer’s favor. Coincidentally, that is where we are bound as well.”
“Weave?” Shiv remembered Nomos saying something like that. “Are there going to be weavers there?”
“Yes. But not feral. Don’t worry, there will be laws. The harder part for us will likely be getting in. I suggest you hold me high when the time comes and let me do the talking. The Sisters of the Arachnae Order are not very fond of outsiders, but they know who I am. And I have an arrangement with their goddess.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Shiv moved on as quietly as he could while the weavers fought each other. He harvested another crystal before gathering his recently killed shrimp and running along the river. By the end, he found his efforts rewarded in more ways than one.
Stealth > 18
He escaped the scene at maximum pace. Once the weavers were far out of sight, he started running along the river while his eyes darted about, ready for an attack to come from any angle. His mana field had grown a bit more than last time as well, covering almost ten meters of space around him. It felt stronger, too—feeding his mind with more detail. This became Shiv’s primary bulwark against hidden threats. He managed to detect a weaver trying to attack him from behind with his field earlier. It should work the same way again.
And so he pressed on for a good few hours, traveling as fast as he could while staying quiet. Across the river, he sometimes saw shapes moving in the dense fungal foliage. Once, the shadows revealed a large, humanoid creature with a long skull that sprouted wicked horns. It stomped at an even pace, seemingly leading several slugs the size of people that crawled behind it with a long staff in its hands. Shiv felt his heart quicken, but he managed to get by unnoticed.
The creature’s staff left him a bit more on edge. Shiv supposed it was poetic how the mind weaver left a psychological imprint on him.
Finally, after a bit more traveling, Shiv found his compass tilting in toward a narrow valley in the distance. There was a shimmering light over the horizon, but Shiv was beginning to feel exhaustion seep through him. Physically, he probably could push further, but mentally, it had been a long day. A long day filled with constant combat, pain, deaths, and resurrections.
He probably killed more monsters today than in the last year of his life. He definitely died more today than ever before. Shiv needed a moment to decompress—to digest what he learned and refresh himself for whatever else he had to overcome. He got a little further until he found a small alcove in the mountain side. He slipped in and, after clearing out some bugs, started taking stock of his equipment. “Valor. I’m going to take a break. You think that’s a good idea? There’s no one following me—I think. I managed to find an alcove in the mountain too. I’ll put up an ice funnel with the spear and try to make a fire. I want to do some cooking.”
The dagger let out a long hum. “I cannot say there aren’t risks, but if you haven’t been attacked thus far, you likely aren’t in danger of the feral weavers anymore. They are dangerous but very aggressive, so they will usually attack immediately once they spot an intruder. They also do not stray overfar from their territory under usual circumstances.”
“Alright,” Shiv said. He began to unload his equipment—but still kept an eye out for things. He gathered up the materials he needed from what remained of the Umbrals’ utility kits and started making a fire in the alcove. As he got a flame going, he formed a narrow dome of ice to keep the smoke from becoming too obvious.
With the basics done, he laid out his inventory in two neat piles.
The first pile was his weapons. He included four sharp nightglass crystals scavenged from the river among his daggers, his spear, and his kitchen knife. Shiv lacked the supplies and knowledge to properly repair the spear, so he simply fused a bit of ice into the cracks, hoping it might help.
The second pile included all his food. Cave biter meat. The mushrooms he harvested. The shrimp. Leftover hard jerky from the Umbrals. He knew he could eat the jerky, but it was the raw ingredients he was interested in. As much as Shiv liked killing monsters, cooking was his passion as well, and he never felt more relaxed than when he was slicing up vegetables or peeling potatoes, preparing to make a nice dish.
I wonder what Georges might do with all of this? Eh. Probably curse at everything and everyone and then start rage-smoking for a bit before making the best damned soup I ever tasted. The head chef had his personality quirks, but the man was brilliant. Far better a cook than Shiv was. Still, Shiv learned a lot from him, so he wouldn’t have any trouble keeping himself fed now. The question is if I can eat any of these ingredients without dying… Wait… Why am I worried about that? There are shrimp in the river, and dying makes me better. Time to experiment.
Shiv chuckled. This was going to be good.