Chapter 43: Chapter 43: No body left behind

With bleary eyes, Norman looked at the clock on his phone. It was five in the morning, but he had finally succeeded in modifying the spell to do what he wanted.

“Who knew that such a small change would be so hard to get right?”

Norman stood and stretched the sore muscles in his back. He also rubbed his hands against the chill morning air. He had decided to do these tests on the roof of his apartment building so he wouldn’t have a repeat of waking people up like last time. That didn’t mean he enjoyed being up here in the cold.

Before Norman did anything else, he quickly transferred this new spell into his grimoire. It was one of the simplest spells that Norman now had at his disposal, minus Glimpse from Beyond but Norman didn’t really consider that a spell anymore. That was more like an accident that he stumbled into. He would look into fixing that at a later time. Because now he had to shower and get ready for work.

Returning to work sucked. Norman would have preferred to stay at home and continue experimenting. At least coming in wasn’t a complete waste, now that Norman had his new spell.

Norman waited until the last of the bodies for the day came into his room before implementing his plan. It had been hard to wait an entire day to test this out but Norman didn’t want a random gron to come by while he was making the bodies vanish. And while he thought the possibility of someone spying on him was low, he wanted it to be after hours so there were fewer people around to stop him or arrest him if what he was doing was deemed illegal.

Not that he thought it was, Norman had checked through the gron legal system – which was barbarically long – but didn’t find any law pertaining to the theft of corpses. So he figured the chances of being arrested were slim. It didn’t mean people would be happy about what he was doing though.

He went over to the last corpse and dug out a small bottle of red liquid from his pocket. Norman had tested a bunch of stuff overnight and he had learned that he could simply paint the symbols of the spell onto the Bone Wall he was using as a test subject and the spell would work. Of course, that paint needed to be imbued with mana. So Norman just made a crude homemade ink out of his blood powder and a bit of cooking oil.

It wasn’t the greatest but it would mean he didn’t need to carve into the bodies to add the spell. The whole point of this plan was to keep the bodies intact as much as possible for future studies and experiments. Having the ink also gave him a third option when using the spell, the others being carving into the skin or directly into the bone. The information he learned from last night's testing also allowed him to modify the Bone Wall and Bone Armor spells to allow for the same activation process. Although, Norman would keep his reliance on carving the spell anchors. He had a feeling the painted-on method or carved-skin method would not be as robust or long-term as a carved symbol.

Norman dipped the brush into the mixture and began to draw the symbols onto the body of the dead gron. This method had another bonus, as he didn’t have to add the additional magic powder to the symbols, after the fact, for them to activate. As soon as Norman finished the magical script, it flashed red, encompassing the body with a red glow before quickly fading away. Norman smiled at that, it meant the spell was working as intended.

He quickly dug out one of his prepared spell anchors and touched it to the body. There was another flash of crimson light and the body vanished, leaving behind a blackened and smoking spell anchor in the form of a tooth in its place.

It did seem that the rapid storage capability of his new ‘Stasis’ spell, as he dubbed it, had a deleterious effect on the spell anchors. The anchor burst apart almost immediately, dumping the naked body back onto the table.

Norman sighed. He had expected this outcome from his tests the night before but he had hoped it would be different with an intact corpse, versus the Bone Wall. It seemed that was not the case. It wasn’t a major setback, it just meant he needed to utilize a larger storage medium to make it work.

There were a few ways Norman could go about this. He could go for mass storage, using an arm or leg bone. That would mean only having to carry one around with him… or he could use smaller bones like the ones found in the middle of fingers. Easier to conceal and easier to carry. With the spell anchors being one-time use, it wouldn’t leave a ton of bodies dumped on the ground if Norman just wanted to work on one.

With the decision made, Norman fished around in his pocket for a chicken bone. It wasn’t the most ideal but it was what he had on hand until he could start disassembling bodies. If nobody raised a stink about what he was doing today, he could simply cut the fingers off some of the corpses before tossing the rest of them into the incinerator. It wasn’t like he was going to take every corpse that came into his room.

He touched it to the body and the red flash appeared again, making the body vanish. The spell was so useful, but Norman wished it could hold things other than bodies. But the spell simply wouldn’t take in anything other than bone, muscle, flesh, or whatever else a body was composed of. It was actually a bonus for him at the moment, since the clothing and all possessions simply remained behind.

Norman simply pushed everything that was left behind to the floor and moved to the next body. After seven more spells, the room was empty of corpses and nobody had come running to stop him. He took that as a good sign and began to clean up the clothing and other items, tossing them into the correct bins.

The next few days went by much the same. Only Norman steadily stole more and more bodies as nobody seemed upset or worried by his activities. It really did seem like nobody knew or cared about what he was doing. That was just fine with him.

One time CDT did come by to check up on him. The man seemed impressed that Norman had managed to clear all eight bodies in less than thirty minutes. “You keep this up, you might make Corpse Disposal Technician rank yourself in a year or two.”

CDT left shortly after that and Norman dropped the fake smile. He had no intention of remaining in this dystopian nightmare for two months, let alone two years. The free corpses were nice but it barely made up for the fact that the gron people were so regimented that it left Norman feeling stifled.

With that in mind, Norman kept plodding away at his next improvement. Toby would have told him to focus on finding a way to fix him but Norman decided to let the man stew for now as he worked on something else.

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It took a few days but Norman managed to improve his Glimpse from Beyond spell. He could finally consider it a spell and not an accident. It gave him a measure of control over what memories he saw and helped increase the time he got to view the memories from five to ten minutes. Actually, that last part was rather simple and norman kicked himself for not realizing it sooner. As long as Norman didn’t puncture the eyeballs, the interface between his mind and the corpse didn’t degrade. A simple smearing of the magic blood between his finger and the eye allowed for that connection.

The only downside was that if he wanted more control over the spell, he had to re-implement the spell circle, the one that forced him to feel everything. That was fine too, as long as Norman shied away from the subject's time of death.

And Norman learned more by scanning the memories of the dead in one day than he had learned the entire time he had been in Grothlosburg. Heck, probably more than he had learned since the fall if he was honest.

One of the corpses Norman had stolen was once a scholar. The man studied what the gron called the ‘collapse’. It seemed the gron had a more fundamental understanding of what was occurring than any other species, simply for the fact that they were the first species it had happened to. At least that’s what the gron thought.

Norman didn’t understand everything he had gleaned from the gron, but what he did take away was this. The multiverse was a thing, all layered atop each other like some massive lasagna. Earth was Earth in most ways across many of these layers.

The gron hadn’t figured out why the collapse had started but their hypothesis had to do with how inconsistent the layers had become over eons. Some like the gron’s layer were rife with magic and technology mixed. But their world was almost three times as dense as the Earth’s on most other layers. So it collapsed. Eventually, other layers without magic collapsed as well.

Then came the jorik layer, which seemed to have come hundreds of years after the gron layer. They were one of the first besides the gron with innate magic. It led the gron to study them in secret. Norman wasn’t sure what was learned during this study as his spell ran out. He also hadn’t found an explanation for why the planet kept increasing in size to allow these new realities to mesh together.

As for why the density and gravity had decreased across the gron areas. Norman figured it was due to having the denser land interspersed with the less dense land masses. It all just kind of averaged out after enough time passed.

This was all very fascinating to Norman, but not really what he was looking to learn.

Norman had noticed something on the first day of work. Most of the bodies that came in were completely intact. No blood, no wounds, and no signs of advanced age that might explain their deaths.

Now that didn’t go for all of the dead, but for a good majority of them, it did. Norman sought these bodies out to experience their last moments, without adding the spell diagram of course. What he found surprised him.

The gron were trying to expand south into a new zone. Apparently, theirs was at capacity. What confused Norman was the fact that the southern zone was not Colorado as he suspected.

It was a weird area filled with volcanic vents and a perpetual haze that clung in the air. The haze quickly dissipated as it crossed the boundary into the gron state. Almost like it couldn’t remain intact outside of a specific area.

That wasn’t what interested Norman the most about this area though, it was what was inside the mist that caught his attention. The gron didn’t seem to realize what they were fighting against but Norman sure did.

Norman watched through the eyes of the corpse as they were overcome by the things. The gron he was riding in tried to bash the spectral apparition with a wrench. Of course, this did not affect a ghost and the gron’s life was sucked away by the unearthly chill as the things poked and prodded at him like curious toddlers.

It didn’t look like the ghosts were malicious. It looked more like they were curious and didn’t understand what they were doing was harmful. After their victims died, the spirits moved on. The vision showed that some of the magic the gron employed did seem to affect the apparitions. But it seemed more an annoyance to them than anything that actively caused them harm.

The gron didn’t seem to care that they took devastating losses each and every day as they slowly pushed back against the mist. It probably helped the gron to incur more losses, that way they weren’t as pressed to move into the additional zone.

Norman wasn’t sure what the point of it was. Wouldn’t the new zone just get separated eventually from the gron’s main zone? There was something there he wasn’t understanding. That was a mystery for some other time though. Norman now had a way out of the city, one that nobody without his skillset would be able to follow him through. Could he go north, east, or west, sure. But he had no idea what was in those directions. Also, how could he turn up an opportunity to study an entire civilization of naturally occurring ghosts?

Next on Norman’s agenda was figuring out a way to make that trip without turning into a husk.

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