Defiance of the Fall

Chapter 205: Draugr

“What?” Zac asked with a sinking feeling, hurriedly walking over to a mirror in the house.

He was shocked at what stared back at him, and he finally understood the odd stares from the three earlier. Ogras wasn’t kidding around with his comment, it truly seemed that he was looking at an undead rather than himself. Of course, it was still his features, but he now looked deathly pale like he’d lost all his blood.

But the largest difference was his eyes. They weren’t the murky empty eyes of the normal zombies, and neither were they the balls shining a red sinister life like those of Mhal, the Corpse Lord. Rather they were like two black holes. The whites were completely gone, and only true blackness covered them. When he looked at them it felt as though he was looking down into the abyss.

It was such an unreal feeling seeing himself like this that he had to touch his face to make sure he wasnʼt dreaming.

“What’s going on?” he said, his voice now a bit shaky.

It started to look like the purpose of his core was to give him a second chance at life, though as an undead. The dagger should have killed him, but instead he stood here completely fine.

“That’s what I’d like to know. Are you living? Are you dead?” Ogras said from the side, still keeping some distance from Zac. “Its weird, even if you died and somehow turned into a sentient Elite Zombie you shouldn’t have retained any memories. Undead are completely different people just inhabiting a former person’s body.”

Zac quickly opened his status screen to see if he could glean any information.

Name

Zachary Atwood

Level

1

Class

-

Race

Draugr (E)

Alignment

Port Atwood - Lord (Earth)

Titles

Born for Carnage, Ultimate Reaper, Luck of the Draw, Giantsbane, Disciple of David, Overpowered, Slayer of Leviathans, Adventurer, Demon Slayer I, Full of Class, Rarified Being, Trailblazer, Child of Dao, The Big 500, Planetary Aegis, One Against Many, Butcher, Progenitor Noblesse, Core

Dao

Seed of Heaviness - Middle, Seed of Trees - High, Seed of Sharpness - Early

Core

Duplicity (F)

Strength

344

Dexterity

162

Endurance

220

Vitality

188

Intelligence

90

Wisdom

85

Luck

93

Free Points

0

Nexus Coins

20 853 653

The sight made him completely befuddled. There were a few shocking changes to his screen. First, the fact that both his level and class were completely reset, returning him to level 1. The next thing was that his race no longer was human, but something called a Draugr.

What was confusing was that while he might have lost his levels and his class, all the benefits remained. His attributes were almost unchanged as far as he could remember, and his Titles and Dao Seeds were still there. The only difference was that the boost to Endurance and Vitality that he gained from [Forester’s Constitution] seemed to be gone.

He started to get an idea of what was going on, his eyes darting toward the line with his core. But to make sure he opened the ladders. As he suspected he was still in a comfortable lead on the wealth- and level ladder.

Zac could only assume that he was somehow split into two entities due to his odd core, each one possessing its own status screen. If he truly had been reborn as an undead he shouldn’t have all these attributes or still stay on top of the ladder.

He even knew of a few rankers who had fallen in the Dead Zone, turning into Zombies. They immediately were removed from the ladder, just like when anyone else died. That could only mean that the system still considered him to be alive.

Of course, this was only a theory tinged with desperation from his side, and he still didn’t know how to use the core. Even after it got satiated he wasn’t able to interact with it, and it was the same result now even after it had somehow awoken. It would take some time to figure everything out before he could decide his next move.

“I am fine. I think itʼs just the miasma in my body that went out of control. It might take some time to get it back in line,” Zac said, hiding what was really going on for now.

“Miasma?” Ogras said with a frown. “I thought you said you got better.”

“Well, it’s complicated,” Zac evaded. “It’s like what you said with the unholy beacons. Destroying them is a waste when they can be useful.”

The demon leveled an even gaze at Zac for a while, finally shaking his head.

“I don’t know what you’ve done, but you are playing with fire. The multiverse is full of people who have turned into abominations in their pursuit of power. You need to wield the power, not let it wield you.”

Zac could only grimace in response. He knew that growing an unknown core that was partly compromised out of miasma was a crazy gambit, but at the moment he didn’t have a lot of alternatives.

“Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing,” Zac could only say. “Or well, I don’t really. But I’ll be careful. More importantly, how did you show up so quickly?”

“Fine. But remember, if you die to some stupid experiment we’re all fucked,” Ogras said. ”As for why Iʼm here? Your sister told me something odd was going on, so I checked it out. I found no evidence that this girl was attacked, making me thing she did this to her own house. I wanted to find out what she was planning, so I stayed in the vicinity. I didnʼt expect them to almost kill you.”

”I still donʼt understand how itʼs possible,” Zac said as he looked down at the shining dagger. ”Just what is that thing?”

”Not sure, but I would guess itʼs an offensive array rather than an actual weapon. Otherwise, it shouldnʼt have been strong enough to almost kill you,” Ogras said.

Zac was inclined to agree. Not only did the thing slice through his robe, but it effortlessly pierced his body. Hannah simply shouldnʼt be strong enough to accomplish that. But if this dagger was something like the Thunder Punishment Balls still in his Pouch he understood why it was so dangerous. The one-time offensive arrays held extreme power.

He only didnʼt expect it to look just like a weapon. Clearly, the Church of Everlasting Dao held various means beyond the understanding of both Ogras and himself.

“Iʼll look into the weapon. Please try to find out just how a shapeshifter could replace David, and if the real one is still alive somewhere. Perhaps he kept him for questioning. He did manage to trick Hannah for potentially weeks, after all,” Zac said.

”Have they reached the archipelago, or was it just a cultist lying in hiding from the incursion? It even managed to block my danger sense and fake its death right in front of us,” Zac added with a frown. “How is that even possible?”

“Nothing is unbeatable in the multi-verse. Any powerhouse has a good deal of Luck accumulated through the years,” Ogras explained. “But there are many means to trick it, at least temporarily. That’s a major part of the pure Assassination classes. You can’t let your Luck be a crutch for you. Always be vigilant.”

Zac’s eyes thinned slightly when he heard the demon’s explanation. What Ogras said made sense, but he wondered why such an important piece of information never had left his mouth over these past months. Was the lordling still planning things in the shadows?

“As for the fake death, I have no idea. I think this guy must have been a second in command or a leader of the shapeshifters, he’s very slippery. It seems we will need to buy a lot more springroot. Be careful of anyone approaching you now. He might have more of those daggers,” Ogras continued with a frown as the shadows swallowed him and the unconscious Hannah.

Zac could only sigh and take out a hooded robe from his cosmos sack to hide his new appearance. He also picked up the weird knife that Hannah used on him, as perhaps it was a clue in all this.

Finally, he headed back home. He snuck over the wall when no one was looking, as he wasn’t ready to show his appearance to the guards. His mansion was empty at the moment, with both Emily and Kenzie luckily still at the academy. He quickly erected his set of arrays around it so that he wouldn’t be interrupted.

Zac sat down and started to ponder on his next move. The first goal for him was to turn back to a human, as he didn’t want to stay a so-called Draugr forever. However, he never received a shape-change skill or something similar from the core. And this was provided that he was correct about the function of his Specialty Core.

He could only turn his sight inward, looking at the core inside his body, trying to glean any hints. And to his surprise, he saw one. Before he turned to an undead his core was completely balanced, but now that balance was off.

The side with the miasma had shrunk by at least 10 percent. The intricate fractals still covered the core though, creating a fine mesh on it. Perhaps it meant that the core expended some of its deathly energy to transform him.

Zac could only guess that the clue was in the fractals on the core. He still had no idea where they came from or how they were formed, but there was nothing else that could explain the weird things that were happening to him.

He slowly went over them one by one with far more scrutiny compared to before, trying to glean any meaning from them. The minutes turned to hours as he scoured the small orb over and over again until he started to see a pattern. For the first time since the fall, he felt he had some use of his job as an animator for a marketing agency.

Just like he needed to look over his designs frame by frame, he looked over the inscriptions fractal by fractal, trying to understand how they fit together and what they meant. And he actually made some progress after arduously creating a mental map of what was going on.

While at first glance the two sides seemed to possess quite similar fractals, there was a startling difference between the inscriptions of the life-attuned and death-attuned sides. There were more of them on the life-attuned side.

And after slowly mapping out just what the difference was, he was realized that he recognized what remained. The inscriptions on the two halves of the cores formed a mostly closed network of pathways that were only connected at two places. After understanding the base framework he could see what was added on the life-attuned side.

It was his own pathways he got from the class Hatchetman. They were somehow added into the larger mesh on the life-attuned side, whereas the equivalent addition was missing on the death-attuned side.

While the phenomenon was weird, it wasn’t too surprising that it looked like that. He was currently level one without a class, and he had already realized that his pathways were already gone. That was a big reason he had first thought he’d truly turned, as the familiar routes for his power were missing.

But Zac felt positive after having discovered the fractals for the Hatchetman class. Together with the other facts it truly felt like the core only stored his class in the half containing the life-attuned energy. Now the next question was how to load it up again, so to speak.

But that wasn’t really what was on Zac’s mind at the moment. It brought to question something even more exciting. Was he able to gain two classes from now on? Just what would happen when he leveled up with this undead form?

The question burned in his mind but he restrained himself from doing anything drastic. At first, he just wanted to rush out into the woods and start killing barghest by the truckload, rushing toward level 25.

But he also realized that this might be an opportunity. He knew far more about the system now compared to when he first was weak and alone on the island. Perhaps he could accomplish some amazing feats and gain titles with his status as a level 1 warrior.

The first title that came to mind was His Title chain that began with [Giantsbane] and ended with [Slayer of Leviathans]. He didn’t know where the limits to that title chain lay, but he felt there might be a final, ultimate title for killing a beast 75 levels higher than himself.

That was because it would mean that he surmounted an entire grade in a fight. He suddenly felt infinitely lucky that he wasn’t the one that killed the shapeshifter that had taken David’s form. Zac believed that getting the [Slayer of Leviathans] quest shouldn’t be an impossible endeavor for many people, as a level 50 without any titles wasn’t very strong.

But killing an E-ranked being at level 1 should be extremely uncommon, even in the context of the whole multiverse, and should bring big benefits. It made him once again lament that he had no one like Greatest to consult about other opportunities like that.

All kinds of plans and opportunities flashed through his mind, and his worry was slowly being replaced with excitement.