With her guardian knight gone, Arthur dealt with Maya in less than twenty seconds. Isaiah had been carrying heavily in that fight and with him out of the picture, Maya quickly followed. Arthur spent the next few minutes going through the corpses of all his slain enemies, searching for loot. He'd yet to find a single monster core in all the deepstone gremlins he'd killed and he was beginning to think the creatures just didn't form them.

  From the two dozen other monsters he'd killed, he only managed to find three cores which was terrible considering all these creatures had been well over level 200. it was one of the many downsides of battling fallen creatures. Corruption tended to destroy their monster cores long before they were killed and there was little use for their body parts.

  Arthur still collected anything he thought might prove useful; venom sacks, stingers, a slimy substance that acted as a potent acid and a few other titbits that he thought looked interesting, if Arthur's plans worked out, he'd find use for the ingredients that had succumbed to corruption. The tainted monster cores were marginally more useful than anything else found in a fallen creature's body. They could be purified using certain resource-draining rituals, but their true use was in experiments to better understand the fallen realm and develop weapons to more effectively deal with it.

  Finally, Arthur approached Isaiah’s skeleton. The vast majority of sapient creatures possessed no parts that could be harvested which Arthur was grateful for, though they tended to be far more lucrative to loot by virtue of their possessions. Case in point, Isaiah's sword and shield were both epic+ items. The kite shield had its force absorption effect and a function for self-repair and the great sword ignored 30% of a target's defence and dealt extra damage the more consecutive attacks it landed in the span of forty seconds.

  While the weapons were great, Arthur didn’t see himself using them. Perhaps in the far-off future when he had the time to focus on another weapon, but Armaments of the Soul meant he’d rarely if ever rely on another tool—at least once he’d managed to level the skill enough. The items were far from useless, though, and surprisingly neither was Isaiah's skeleton. Arthur was interested in learning rune inscriptions so he could apply them to his Armaments and now he had access to runic weapons from a whole other realm. Sometimes, the universe just provides.

  Isaiah’s bones were also covered in runic script, something he found eerily familiar. He was pretty sure the lich queen invading his world had similar markings adorning her frame. Was it something common in all undead or something unique to sapients in Haadran? Looking at the markings, Arthur could clearly tell that they’d been inscribed onto the bones. He wasn’t a forensic expert, but the runes had the tell-tale markings of a tool being used. The script wasn’t uniform in depth and while the penmanship remained the same across the entire skeleton, certain bones looked like they had very different handwriting on them, clearly the work of separate rune scribes.

  Either this was how necromancy worked, or… Well, Arthur wasn’t sure. The fact that the other corrupted undead he’d fought hadn’t possessed inscribed bones told him something else was going on. Arthur placed the skeleton in his storage ring. It looked interesting, and he had the space for it. He walked over to the elf mage's corpse.

  Maya was still covered in flesh, though it looked like hardened wax, drained of all water. Was this how mummies looked? Arthur wanted to get a look at her bones, but butchering a humanoid corpse wasn’t something he felt comfortable with. Thankfully, he had a solution at hand. Arthur summoned Wovan. She now had twelve bodies to work with, three of which were on their second lives. At least Arthur now knew that Wovan instantly generated the new bodies she unlocked after a level-up instead of having to form them slowly according to her regeneration rates. That was definitely a plus in his book.

  Arthur pointed at the dead elf mage. “Can you eat her, please? Not everything though. I want you to leave the bones behind.”

  The spiders immediately set to work and Arthur quickly turned away. No reason to feed his nightmares with new material. He was already scared of his Soul Splinter. Much like a hydra, Wovan could consume multiple times her body's mass in flesh and so she’d become his impromptu cleaner whenever he felt like a monster needed to be completely erased. As an Ender class entity, consuming corrupted flesh posed as much threat to her as eating eggs a day past their sell-by date, and so he let her eat away without worry. The rest of the corpses here, he’d leave to the elements and if they came back as undead, Arthur wouldn't be complaining. He needed all the experience he could get.

  Thirteen minutes later, Arthur had a clean set of bones before him, with one of Wovan’s spiders standing beside it proudly. The rest of her had wandered off to do who knows what. Scrutinising Maya’s skeleton only confirmed Arthur's suspicion. This wasn’t necromancy at play but something else. Maya’s skeleton was free from all runic script except on her skull and the finger bones of her left hand. What in the world was this bone script and did it tie to the lich queen invading Earth? Was there a connection there or was he jumping at shadows?

  Arthur was so lost in thought he almost got crushed by the massive corpse of a magma serpent suddenly dropping on top of him. He managed to narrowly dodge it but was left sputtering by the cloud of dust and gravel that slapped him on the face. Arthur turned and glared at the one responsible.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “What the hell was that for?”

  Wovan didn't reply, twelve small spiders standing in a line and staring at him patiently. When it became clear she wouldn’t provide an answer, Arthur huffed, exasperated.

  “Do you want me to harvest the snake for you?” he asked.

  This time he got a reply of sorts, though it took him a second to work through what his Soul Splinter was trying to say. It was an image of him, seen from a spider's perspective vanishing away Isaiah’s skeleton. Arthur chuckled and shook his head in wry amusement.

  “Why pray tell, do you want me to store this massive snake away? I mean, I’ve got the space, but it’s gonna be a tight fit.”

  This time, he understood Wovan’s message instantly—a massive spider, far larger than she currently was, riding imperiously on the magma serpent's head as it attacked her enemies. There really wasn’t any other way to interpret it.

  “You want to make the magma serpent your first puppet, don’t you?” Wovan mentally nodded yes. “Is there any other reason why you want the snake specifically? Most of the monsters here are far stronger. Are you being sentimental here or can you only puppet creatures you’ve personally defeated?”

  Two minutes later, Arthur still hadn’t figured out what Wovan’s answer meant. His best guess was that it was a bit of both and that puppeteering creatures she’d defeated herself was far easier. At least he knew with certainty that puppeteering would be impossible until she’d evolved—that was the one part of her message he'd understood perfectly—which if Solana was to be believed would happen at level 5. Putting the snake in his storage ring would take up over half his available space, but it wasn’t like he had anything else to put there right now.

  “Just this once, okay Wovan. You’re going to need to level up your own storage space asap or you’re going to have to start leaving potential puppets behind,” Arthur said sternly, before storing the Magma Serpent. He also put Maya’s skeleton in there with Isaiah’s.

  Arthur was pretty sure most of that had gone over Wovan’s head, but he wasn’t willing to spend the next two hours explaining the limits of storage rings to her. The spider in question looked about as giddy as a terrifying Ender could and she immediately set upon feasting on the remaining monsters littering the area. Something was bothering him about the snake's corpse, though, but he just couldn’t put his finger on it.

  Arthur pulled it out of his storage ring and stifled a laugh when he saw Wovan’s many spiders suddenly freeze up. Arthur waved her off, “Don’t worry. I’m not changing my mind or anything.”

  Relieved, Wovan returned to her feast. It took Arthur a second to realise what had put him off earlier. Wovan had created a web to trap the serpent, one that had been incredibly durable. Her name was literally The Eternal Weaver, and yet Arthur could see no sign of the weave she’d created. Calling one of Wovan’s spiders over, he asked her to explain.

  Arthur should have realised by now that Wovan was not a master of communication. Instead of explaining anything, his Soul Splinter decided to demonstrate her magic. Her ether instantly bottomed out and Arthur watched alarmingly as three of her spiders suddenly lost half their health. With Wovan’s conversion rate from health to ether being 5:1, she’d effectively spent a little over 6,000 ether in the space of a second. Crawling over to him, the spider placed a tiny glowing blue string in front of him, very different from what she'd used in battle. It was barely 3mm long, which meant it had cost Wovan 8,000 health to produce a single millimetre of the stuff. Bending over, Arthur picked it up. The weave appeared to be completely mundane, emitting no energy whatsoever. The only thing it had going for it was the pretty colour. Arthur knew he’d be in for a treat when he identified it. Wovan hadn’t disappointed him so far.

  If Arthur was being honest, he didn’t know how useful Wovan’s weave truly was. It was durable, that much was easy to understand but its greatest effect was a little too esoteric for him to define. What did it mean that you could use it to weave into the fabric of reality? One thing he was certain of, though, was that Wovan had just become an even bigger money maker than he was with his blood. A creature that could constantly create mythical-grade material was unheard of and was just another line on the long list of reasons why he needed to become as strong as possible.

  To do that, it was about time he started focusing on the one skill in his possession that was truly unique, even amongst the ranks of the legendary soul mages. Armaments of the Soul was a skill that broke all the known rules regarding the soul, most probably caused by how much he’d fractured his own before unlocking a class. Soul mages weren't supposed to be able to create physical constructs out of their soul—no one was.

  The perfect Homunculus was a singular existence in that regard and it was time for Arthur to start exploring what that truly meant. He’d signed up for the runic scribing and alchemy module as part of his onboarding package with the Guild of Fringe Walkers. If he could learn how to inlay runes into his soul armaments, then the sky was the limit. Arthur could already imagine it, a soul staff inscribed to cast a barrage of deadly fireballs, each of them causing true soul damage because of the medium he’d used to deliver them.

  Unfortunately, circumstances had prevented him from attending any lessons on rune craft, and so Edward had hooked him up with the next best thing, an Epic grade Lesson Cube. They were items that contained a copy of the consciousness of whoever had been meant to teach him the subject and while it wasn’t the same as actually attending the lesson, it was the best he was going to get.

  “Wovan, wake me up if anything as strong as Isaiah gets within 300 metres of us.” Arthur poured ether into the lesson cube and the world faded away.

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