Error:

  Unintended use of [Skill]

  Use of [Skill] Outside of intended

  practices detected

  [REDEFINING Skill]

  That didn’t bode well, but what could I do, just kill off a member of the second group that has even considered coming here. That just seems like poor form, and honestly I want to try and avoid as much a body count as possible. I thought it would be unavoidable considering how things where worded but in practice. I found I had a bit more wiggle room with what I could do then expected, and it was rather easy to just do it. Though now I had the system a bit angry at me because of it….or something to that nature anyway. It was throwing errors into my head left and right as it tried to figure out what had happened.

  It was really quite simple but it is simple in the way a person would see it. The skill let me take a person who died, and use their soul to make a monster, probably a more powerful one at that. Any person with half a mind could ask the question “what if I put it back” and clearly the system was either working with dungeons that wouldn’t consider that, or I had thought far more out of the box then anyone else. I am leaning towards the former simply because it seemed like such a simple question to ask and well, I felt bad.

  The encounter felt cheep, the crawler was a bit too stealthy for this and I had altered around its orders to be hiding above the entrance door. I really should have given more of a hint to it being there so something like that couldn’t happen in the first place. Well that aside, it is good that I was able to manhandle a solution out of it in the end, to no end of error screaming from the system. Speaking of which.

  [Redefining Skill]

  Returnal: (Spirit Affinity)

  [Rare]

  This skill allowed you to call the souls of those who fall

  within your boarders back into the world of the living.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  They may be bound to your will as a monster

  retaining both personality and mannerisms

  or if the body remains intact, they may be returned to

  life at a small cost to their own personal strength

  given as tribute.

  Well looks like the system has decided to seed some ground about this whole thing, letting me keep people alive. Though taking some from them for resurrection feels a bit off for this, but also like a reasonable give and take. Honestly I will take it since it’s far more then I had before and let’s me take off the kids gloves a bit. That aside I do still want to be fair so I just quietly give the guardian crawler a small tweak to his orders to make his presence known before striking. In smaller groups an assassin or an ambush type of attacker would be better used but for a boss, not so much. So that aside it is best to start working on the castle since I want to finish it up right now, and maybe level up soon. I’m not quite sure where these levels come from but I am hoping the next one will be useful for the forest.

  The next thing of import is definitely going to be the throne which I want to be the kind of goal of the whole deal. The main thing I want out of it is to form it into some kind of key, since it would make it harder to get to me. Hell, maybe giving the lord a genuine key for the crypt but that felt easy to cheese past in ways, definitely worth work shopping later. No I am not trying to distract myself with all this death stuff and my skills changing and aaaaaaaaaaa.

  Anyway I bring my attention away from carving out the throne room and building up the stones to my elemental. He had been hard at work and had found some more mineral veins to work with, and is fully revealing them. Oddly enough they appear to be closer to how one would consider a vein then how a vein is actually made. There is just this chunk of iron rich rock that can be worked over and honestly I am fine with that. The less work this takes the better since I am going to be working without more refined processes already so not having to deal with the other parts of mining helps me.

  Now I have to consider how to make a forge and a forge monster, and I have some ideas to try and do industrial things but. Well honestly with the system being malleable if a bit broken it might be possible to assemble something I can have running a foundry. I need to make a simple one that can get all the complex bits figured out first, and for that I would need a forge, and a clock-maker. So work needs to be done and I need someone to do it, and I don’t want to half ass it so I need to not only figure out a forge, but these monster core things.

  Taking a step back though, collecting is a good idea first and foremost, so I begin forming earth into two figures. First a generally bipedal form which I slink a few metal bits into hands of. Humanlike is a good way to describe them, though they have no heads which looks odd but In a neat way, then I slip some iron into the claws to make it easy for them to work on excavating the ore. The other thing I work on is the cargo creatures, vaguely centipede shaped so it can work and crawl around the rocks. Instead of just a bin I make them have almost hollow rib cages to fit the ores into and carry them around. The two begin to slowly come to their senses as I quietly put two ghosts into the creatures to give them some animation. The two get to work as they begin moving forward to gather the materials for what will later be my interesting little forges.