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  Douglas definitely feels something there, though. Guiding mana through his bones is a lot easier now, but he hasn’t managed to guide it outside of his physical form even once. The mana flows outside of his bones when traversing the voids inside his joints, but he feels something is there. Instead of cartilage and sinew, there is something odd that keeps his bones together and allows mana to flow through.

  The anomaly that woke him from his meditative state are the three bones spectrally connected to his lowest vertebra. The lowest bone is just another piece of his spinal column; the interesting ones are the two small ribs forming a ring as they move away and back together.

  Vague memories of how a skeleton is supposed to look emerge from the fog of Douglas’ past. The topmost pair of ribs slowly becomes visible in his mental image as he tries to overlay the sensations from his physical form with shards of memory, both recent and long past.

  [ New skill gained; Mana Sense lvl 1 ]

  He wonders what something called Mana Sense can do.

  [ Mana Sense lvl 1; mana is 1.1 times easier to sense at all times ]

  The same sensation as before happens. He doesn’t receive hard information about sensing mana, but each thought he has concerning the subject is accompanied by an odd certainty that other people have had success with trying this or that. Lots of nudges require him to have flesh and bone, though. Douglas laments that there seems to be a certain anti-skeleton sentiment in whatever is helping him.

  Combining his sharpened sense of his own bony body with his improved mana control, Douglas takes the first real decision of his undead life. He decides then and there - stuck in a metal grate and having only a skull and neck bones - to regrow his right arm first.

  He surely made decisions before, but can’t recall having to weigh a few options against each other and then pick only one. Putting action to thoughts, he guides his mana to flow through his neck and into the right rib.

  Carefully wiggling his neck, he tests his new mobility. The moment the lowest vertebra of his prehensile neck touches metal puts a large smile on Douglas’ face. Grinning like a maniac, he starts wiggling the short stump of his spine, searching for purchase. His eighth vertebra gets stuck behind some unseen scrap, and with a teeth-clenching sound of dry bone on sharp metal, he drags himself through the ragged vent. He pops free from the ragged trap and spins away.

  Then Douglas has a good think about the concept of centre of mass. Previously, he consisted of only a skull. All rotation in the zero-gravity environment so far has been centred around his eyes. Now, with the inclusion of a decent length of neck, his spinning vision feels distinctly off-centre. Douglas is pretty sure he’d be heaving and puking his lunch out if he still had any flesh to do so with.

  His extremely rapid spinning slows down as he feels his neck grow larger. He sees occasional white flashes shooting by, the rest of his world a blur. Smacking into other floating objects bleeds his rapid spin into a gentle tumble, allowing Douglas to properly observe the new space he finds himself in.

  The dim light of distant stars comes in through ragged holes, lighting up the otherwise dark room. Rows of benches are attached to what Douglas assumes to be the floor. Each table has varying sized drawers and some form of tool or mechanism attached to it. The walls of the room are adorned with endless rows of cabinets and storage areas.

  Everything is metal. Douglas fully admits to not knowing much, but the overabundance of metal everywhere seems slightly off to the floating skull. The room is of medium size, around three by ten metres, and looks like some form of a workshop. Douglas manages to identify one object as a vice with a screwing handle, but the rest of the apparatuses present remain a total mystery to him.

  Douglas’ eye sockets briefly flare as he sees fragments of bone floating through the room, occasionally bouncing against the other items strewn through the interior space. He eyes one particularly large piece of bone - a suspected piece of his sternum - when to his great horror, it tumbles through one of the holes in the outer wall.

  Burning eye-flames trained on the precious piece of himself, he helplessly floats on as the white fragment bounces off the lumpy and melted-looking edge before flying outside into the starry void. Douglas feels like he should panic right now, his very life-bone floating out of reach, but the emotion just doesn’t happen. Then Douglas imagines himself floating out of the hole, spinning slowly through that endless abyss.

  Very, very carefully, Douglas starts trying to manoeuvre through space. Now having access to his jaw and a rather flexible bit of spine, the skull continues practising moving without the aid of gravity, trying to grab onto one of the many protruding bits of iron. He uses his lower jaw and the front of his spine like a pincer, but his smooth bones don’t get much traction on the few bits of metal that float into his reach.

  Instead, he continues training his ability to make controlled bounces, finding that it has improved greatly. His jaw only moves in one direction with a little wiggle room side to side. His spine moves like a snake, allowing him to actually aim at which direction he kicks off without spinning out of control.

  He manages to fill in his right rib after only a few jumps, successfully aiming at clusters of floating bone shards. A large white splinter now sits in the curved, green outline of his rib. Douglas feels his mana working to change the bone fragment into the correct shape, bending and smoothing it slowly. A few more fragments get stuck inside the glowing border before others pass through without sticking, the needed bone mass apparently reached.

  Now Douglas can choose to regrow the top part of his sternum or his clavicle. He immediately guides his mana to his clavicle, letting half of his mana flow continue working on repairing his rib.

  Douglas spends the next few hours carefully bouncing around the room. He first focuses on the largest pieces of bone he sees. Those gone, he finds a true treasure trove of fragments stuck beneath one of the larger workbenches. He fills his clavicle with pieces, after which he can choose his shoulder blade or humerus. The fear that he needed to fill the large, wing-shaped bone first doesn’t come to fruition, so he chooses his humerus to work on next.

  His upper rib, clavicle, and humerus are still more glowing cracks than actual bone when he starts on his ulna, deciding not to work on his radius until later. Having looted the mass of osseous fragments under the bench, he starts exploring again, this time aided by a partially formed right arm.

  Seeing a large piece of pelvis float near one of the holes in the room, he overestimates his own manoeuvring skills and nearly flies out into space himself. The only reason he doesn’t float off into the great unknown is due to his jaw getting stuck behind a sharp piece of outer hull. He manages to get the large piece of bone attached to his ulna and immediately decides that gambling like that isn’t worth the risk.

  Half the bones in his body are now made of loosely held together fragments, and Douglas finds that his flow of mana shrinks with each broken bone it passes through. The more cracked bones he has, the less power he can dedicate to repairing and reconstructing his skeletal frame.

  His latest bone, the ulna, is an especially bad case. He can move the partially transparent bone around only when exerting a lot of effort. The feeling of the rough fracture line of pelvis bone scraping against his reconstructing humerus anytime he moves his elbow joint is like scraping nails across a chalkboard. Briefly wondering what nails or chalkboards are, he discards those thoughts. Holding his ulna in front of his face; he sees that it’s essentially a glowing stick with a large piece of white matter stuck on one end.

  He briefly wonders if using the mana to regenerate the bone instead of reshaping the unwieldy piece will be more effective.

  Douglas decides to work on filling up his arms with bone shards before taking the time to fix them properly. He can't feel any pain, but seeing his mana seep from all of his bones is uncomfortable on a deep level. The idea of having a functioning hand is more attractive to the skull than his unease at inefficient mana usage, so he
grits his teeth and continues gathering his shattered self.

  Working hard to gather bits of himself he finds one more thing to worry about, the green glow seems to be becoming a lot paler. Douglas clacks his teeth as he looks at his slowly repairing arm. Instead of the murky leaf green, his power has started taking on a distinct teal hint. He then looks at the small glowing outlines of his wrist bones, immediately forgetting his vague worries in his muted enthusiasm at the prospect of having a functioning hand.

  Not floating away into the void is still his highest priority, so the slowly re-growing skeleton carefully steers clear of the gaping holes in the wall and starts exploring the room again.

  He finds another windfall when exploring the far side of the dark space. Thick bolts secure black webbing to the wall, which in turn keeps thick plates and long rods of metal in place. One of his limbs must have tumbled this way because the webbing is riddled with bone splinters.

  Putting one of his work-in-progress outlined bones to the splinters causes the fragments to get stuck in the suspended field of mana. This allows him to carefully pull the pieces free from where they are stuck inside or behind the cloth restrains. He can still faintly hear the hour-long broadcast, but more as a murmur in the background instead of the loud conversation it was previously. This allows him a sense of time that otherwise would have been completely absent.

  A few commercials and half the news later, he has filled out all the tiny bones of his hand. He needs to use over half of his mana to keep his fragmented arm together, but he has a hand again! He experimentally moves the cracked limb, finding he can contort the floating bones in ways that his mind slightly rebels against. He is sure that his hand isn’t supposed to fold in half like that, but the mental resistance fades as he forces the creaking limb into all kinds of joint destroying contortions.

  Focussing his available power on one of the small bones in his wrist, he starts exploring the room in earnest. Now able to actually hold onto things with his glowing fingers, traversing the room goes from a series of uncertain gambles to a slow and steady slog.

  The partial skeleton first makes a round trip exploring the walls. He finds lockers with locked doors, some of them partially destroyed, and webbing holding blank materials. He also finds a closed door. The wall with holes in it doesn’t hold much interesting stuff, and Douglas is pretty wary of accidentally slipping through the gaping openings. The fact that three smaller areas of damage are present on the opposite side of the hull breaches leads Douglas to realise that these holes might not be on purpose or by design.

  Once again slightly frustrated at how long it has taken him to realise something so obvious, Douglas tries to capitalise on the broken lockers by attempting to pry them open. One of them contains a large collection of small items with painted crosses. The lack of light still doesn’t allow him to see colours, but he has the odd suspicion that these items should be white and red. The other two lockers merely have small holes punched through, their doors still firmly shut. He tries looking through the openings, and manages to spot a collection of boxes partially illuminated by his eye flames.

  Unable to figure out how to open the closets, Douglas decides to go towards the single door he has found so far. Carefully moving his weightless skull around with his single arm, he reaches the closed door while only bumping into the floor a few times. He has to turn back occasionally, unwilling to cross large areas of the empty floor now that he doesn’t need to bounce and float randomly to get around. His single hand clings to the benches, tools, and ripped metal with a desperate strength as he pulls his body towards his destination.

  The door is a rather large and imposing slab of metal. It doesn’t move a single millimetre even though Douglas throws all eleven of his Strength points against it. The only way he manages to get purchase on the door is when he bites down on a protruding screw with his teeth while shoving at the door’s handle with his single hand.

  He then finds a marked handle behind a thin layer of glass after looking around some more. The oddly painted thing is placed on top of the door frame. Floating over, Douglas tries smashing the glass. It works perfectly, but the recoil almost flings him through one of the outer holes again; he only manages to stay inside by grabbing onto a ragged edge.

  Once more being extremely careful, he makes his way back to the door. He starts pulling on the now exposed handle while carefully biting down on a decorated metal edge. The handle takes quite some strength to pull, but his efforts are rewarded by the sight of the door sliding open slightly.

  Looking back, Douglas stops. There are still some bone fragments floating through the room. Most had been absorbed by Douglas while even more have undoubtedly tumbled out into space. He has learned that his health regeneration can make material from scratch, but giving it bone to work with is much, much faster. Keeping a wary eye on the gaping holes on the far wall, Douglas then spends a few hours meticulously gathering all the fragments he can.

  Stuffing the last few parts behind the webbing, he looks at the fruits of his labour. A bony bounty sufficient to form another arm and maybe a piece of his ribcage is now stuck securely behind the webbing. Douglas then inspects his hand, finding that his smallest wrist bones are all healed and in perfect condition.

  The metacarpals of his thumb and pointer finger, including the fingers themselves, are also in near perfect shape, only faint blue cracks still showing. The rest of his arm is still a horrendous mess of cobbled together bone fragments and glowing splinters.

  Satisfied at making progress, he carefully manoeuvres to the door and starts sliding it open. He immediately praises his own insight into the matter, as the space to the right of the new hallway is filled with stars. Everything to the right of the door except for a metre of the wall is gone. The floor’s melted edges are sheared through in a rather clean manner, the solidified globs of metal similar to the holes in the walls Douglas entered through.

  To the left is an intact hallway, its floors and walls made from a white material, the ceiling bare metal with ducts going across. Douglas notices a particular skull-shaped dent in the metal channel closest to him.

  Other than his own bony profile, he sees a barren hallway. Dark smears cover large parts of the light interior further down the corridor. The wall opposite from Douglas features a door located a few metres to his left. He thinks about it for a good ten minutes and comes to the conclusion that the door should be the one with all the pillows. More doors with nameplates are visible down the hall which curved to the right after the last door, taking a sharp right turn two metres further.

  On a whim he doesn’t quite understand, Douglas decides to look to the left. He knows that he should go explore the other areas and find out where or even what he is. Instead, he creeps closer to the edge, his single hand grabbing the melted blobs of metal. The open space is filled with stars, the absolute lack of anything at all seemingly speaking to the placid skull on a deep level.

  Douglas loses track of time again while looking at endless space as the ship does its slow tumble. The lack of any bodily desires, functions, or needs lets him hang there, floating at the edge of nothingness.

  [ Rewards for discovering of UNKNOWN have been calculated ]

  [ Reward for discovering unknown town; 100 xp ]

  [ Reward for discovering unknown city; 1000 xp ]

  [ Reward for discovering unknown state; 5000 xp ]

  [ Reward for discovering unknown country; 10000 xp ]

  [ Reward for discovering unknown continent; 100000 xp ]

  [ Reward for discovering unknown sea; 5000 xp ]

  [ Reward for discovering unknown ERROR NAN xp ]

  The sudden intrusion of blue screens is enough to wake the meditating skull from his daze. Something seems to churn in the background of his mind for a while. He stares at the rows of blue boxes a little longer before mentally commanding them to vanish.

  [ Lesser skeleton lvl 1 100/100 xp reached ]

  [ Lesser skeleton lvl 2 200/200 xp reached
]

  [ Lesser skeleton lvl 3 400/400 xp reached ]

  [ Lesser skeleton lvl 4 800/800 xp reached ]

  [ Lesser skeleton lvl 5 1600/1600 xp reached ]

  [ Lesser skeleton lvl 6 3200/3200 xp reached ]

  [ Lesser skeleton lvl 7 6400/6400 xp reached ]

  [ Lesser skeleton lvl 8 12800/12800 xp reached ]

  [ Lesser skeleton lvl 9 25600/25600 xp reached ]

  [ Lesser skeleton lvl 10 51200/51200 xp reached ]

  [ Congratulations, you have reached Lesser skeleton max level ]

  [ Your skills allow you the following options ]

  [ Lesser arcane skeleton 0/10 ]

  [ Lesser soul skeleton 0/10 ]

  [ Minor skeleton 0/20 ]

  Wondering what that large list of notifications is about, Douglas asks if the blue boxes can please show him the information about his race.

  [ Lesser skeleton; a skeleton raised by a necromancer. This race is often used as cannon fodder. Animated by magic and a pact with a deity of death, these creatures are a combination of arcane and necrotic magic. Although very rare, lesser skeletons that survive being controlled long enough can grow into more powerful variants. +Str +Con ]

  Necromancer - that must have been the dirty, old guy. Douglas nods to himself, knocking his chin against the floor as he finds the dark sounding moniker fitting for the wrinkled wretch. He doesn’t quite know what the term cannon fodder means, but he understands that it isn’t meant as a compliment. Douglas finds that he didn’t enjoy being a lesser skeleton, some deep and forgotten part of himself rebelling at his very state of existence.

  Looking at the partially fractured bones of his hand, the floating skull can almost see the flesh and skin that should be there. The mana pouring from the cracks is even paler still, now only a slight hint of green remaining among the pale blue glow.