Chapter 16: Chapter 15

She slept peacefully on my hard cot, her hair stained with her blood on the corners. I removed her barrette as usual and placed it on my table, after which I went to the common laundry area and brought a wooden trough that was lying idle in the large open space, surrounded by blooming flowers. The maids of the manor had planted them and water runoff, usually laden with froth, was the only source of nutrition to the plants.

I don’t get infuriated because that emotion would undoubtedly lead to the destruction of this world. I had ravaged kingdoms after kingdoms when some brats dropped by my thatched house for my head in the past, well beyond a millennium. That’s why when my lady came to me with a scarred face, the least I could do was [Heal] her and stop her pain. And well, promise a terrifying death to the lady of the house.

For now, I would focus on washing my lady’s hair in her stead because she was too lazy to do it. After much urging, she washed it once a week.

I walked back to my room with the trough, too drained to even heed the maids scampering along the corridors. If it wasn’t for the fact that my lady was an ignored miss of the mansion, then it would have been impossible for me to serve her. But I was clever enough to choose such a world, so you can only credit my foresight.

“My lady,” I called out as I shook her shoulder lightly. She had been sleeping too often since she had started channelizing mana from the external world. Though pitiful, the progress was notable, and I was sure she could reach Amateur high-tier, if not a Progressive mage, before the graduation. She needed to reach it to participate in the graduation tournament, which would ultimately decide whether you were worthy of the title from the Academy, but that’s a story for the future.

She opened her eyes lazily, the noticeable glare directed at me. I deftly avoided her nails that would have left quite a deep gash on my face and stood above her. She searched for items to throw at me or a pillow to cover her ears, and when she found none, she lazily sat up with a pout. No, do not think it was cute, for fire was blazing out of her eyes. At least metaphorically.

“My lady, you slept in the afternoon too,” I said, holding the wooden trough in my hands, and she cast [Ice Shards] as more than five ice sickles materialized in front of me and rushed towards me wildly. I liquefied all of them with a flick of my fingers and found my lady staring at her palms in surprise.

“Did you see that, mongrel?!” she couldn’t conceal her excitement, and her drowsiness disappeared instantly.

I smiled. “Well, I clearly told you that I am not a fraud.”

“But that was insane, mongrel! I could hardly cast two small shards before, and now….” she stopped short, trying to cast the spell again but failed terribly. Her mood took a turn almost instantly, and she hurled curses at me.

“Don’t worry, my lady. Your spell will get much stronger when you master channelizing mana. But you have to unlearn everything before you do that, and that’s always the most difficult part.”

She looked at me thoughtfully and nodded. It took almost twelve years, but she had finally started to acknowledge my words. Undead are stubborn, and once they decide something, they never stop short, even if it takes a millennium. Because the only thing we do not lack is time, unlike mortals.

“You don’t age, do you?” she asked, spreading her legs down the cot. “You looked the same two years ago, and I haven’t even seen beard growing on your face. Do you shave every day, mongrel?”

I laughed and took a seat on the floor so that she wouldn’t have to stare up. “I can choose to stop my body’s aging any time. For instance, I stopped this body’s growth when I was twenty-two years old, after removing my facial hair, of course. It’s called [Garken] spell, stop in my language.”

“So you can manipulate time?” she asked, a ponderous expression on her face.

“Well, not exactly, my lady,” I thought for a while before explaining. “It’s like cryopreservation. The herbal merchants usually have ice attribute to preserve the freshness of the goods. That’s the general gist of how this spell works. Nevertheless, it doesn’t confer immortality. Just like how even preserved herbs go bad after a the while, your body stops functioning once you breach a certain threshold.”

But for undead, it did confer immortality.

“That means you can’t be ten again,” she said, and I affirmed her with a nod. That much was true even in my case.

She might ask me to cast a spell on her in the future, but for now, she was worried about her bust size. Not that she should be particularly, because she was just sixteen and almost seventeen in a couple of months. And no, I don’t have a spell that increases bust size. I don’t have any intention of creating one either.

“Can you lean on the cot, my lady?” I asked, showing her the trough in my hand. She nodded, turned around, and lay on her back, letting her hair flow beyond the edge. I ran my fingers along the length of her hair a few times before I collected all the loose stands in my hands.

“Hey, mongrel,” she kept the discussion going instead of falling asleep. “If I can channelize mana from my immediate surroundings, doesn’t this mean I got a surplus supply of mana?”

“Yes and no,” I said, placing the trough below and casting [Waterfall] over her hair, slowly but steadily. She shivered at the abrupt coldness but didn’t complain. “It depends on how well you can channelize the mana. Internal casting is a much easier option, given that you have total control over the purity of the mana. The casting is just a procedure to convert these chunks of energy or mana as you call it, into a different form, with your body acting as a particular attribute factory.”

I paused, trying to make my explanation simpler. “Try to think of an oven, the brick ones in the bakehouse. You keep the raw dough inside the brick holes and heat them until you get your bread. But if you don’t know what the dough entails, there’s no point in the amount of dough you have, for you will never get your tasty bread. In internal casting, you have prepared the dough after repeated refinement, but in external casting, you use the dough given to you by others.

“So, if you master the ability to use mana in its raw form, and not the refined one, you will have infinite, or surplus, mana. Else, you can only use the mana that has an affinity to your attribute.”

“The mana in my body is meant for Fire and Ice attribute?” she asked.

“Yes, because your body collects it from the immediate surroundings, purifies it, and stores it in your mana reserve if you are an internal caster.”

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“It’s complicated, but I get think I got it. All I need to know is how to channelize the mana that is not meant for fire and dark attribute.”

“Precisely, my lady. And that’s when you can have surplus mana because the spells you use will restore the impure mana in the surrounding.”

She closed her eyes, and I used [Freeze] spell to clear the water from the trough before casting [Waterfall] again. A solid chunk of ice lay beside me, but it was pale brown in color. I need to wash her hair more often.

“Do regions closer to lakes have more mana for water attribute?” she continued with her questions.

“No, my lady. The mana fluctuates between different attributes occasionally. If you think of mana as small rocks that change color, then every few seconds, I mean, a while, different rocks would have a different color.”

“Seconds?” she asked, catching the obvious flaw. “Is that similar to bread, mongrel?”

I laughed. “Seconds is, how do I say it,” I paused for one second and continued, “this long, my lady.”

“Mongrel,” she paused for slightly more than a second, “this long?”

“Yes, my lady. One hourglass has 3600 seconds.”

“If you dare teach others like me, I will cut your tongue.”

“I won’t. For, you will do the explaining. I called them here just so that I could test you,” I said, freezing the second trough of water that was almost transparent.

“Scoundrel!” she said, but I saw a smile on her face. “Did you come from hell?”

“No, my lady. Just from somewhere far away. Really far.”

“Will you take me there?” she asked, and I stayed silent. She didn’t insist on an answer like always, instead said, “You promised not to leave me.”

“I won’t,” I said and closed the conversation about me.

You see, undead don’t have a place they can call home, so I can’t really answer questions about my origins. I don’t have memories of my home, nor do I have any of my human life, except that I died young. Real young. Probably before I could understand what an erection meant.

I was a genius young mage of my era, and how I discovered [Undead] is something I have long forgotten, along with my solitude. [Memory Make] isn’t meant to archive my boredom, but some exciting things like spell theory, the names of my spells, mathematics of the twenty-first century, and the likes. So, except for few important bits of my human life, and my first world, I don’t really have anything. If you left out craving for bread and preference for hard cot. That's how important likes and dislikes are for undead.

Once I was done washing her hair, I filled the trough with ice and got up.

“Hey, mongrel!” she called out, sitting upright. “Is your name Rudolf?”

“In this world it is, my lady.”

“If you tell me your real name, then I will stop asking questions about you.”

With a smile, I walked closer to her. I cast [Ward] around us, leaned closer to her ears, and whispered my name.

She nodded and looked at me intently. “I’ll stick to Rudolf.”

I chuckled and walked out of the room when she burst out laughing inside my [Ward]. That would have been quite a sight to behold.

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