Apparently, securing unlimited funding for thousands of people was worth a lot of Karma. I ticked over the lever to Thirteen Sorcerer with it, with room to spare and a whole long ways towards Fourteen, at which point I’d be stuck for quite some time, just as I’d been with Twelve, upgrading my Secondary and Advanced Classes.

  Sorcerers had to take fixed spells, but with Mystic Theurgy and the Healing Domain to go with it, I could take Resurrection as my Clerical Domain spell through the Healing Domain, and I could now start bringing back the Cursed Dead.

  The undead soldiers of Mayoi and Hebian-To had not been idle. Although they didn’t work as much with the living, they were also energetic about going out there and earning Naming Karma for the Weapons that accompanied them in death, and specifically, looking to earn their own Diamond Golum Hearts.

  Amusingly enough, the best way to do that was to go hunting for Diamond Lords, the hot pink boss-golums found in the Direlands, which were anything but uncommon. It was convenient for them that landscape spawns couldn’t tell the difference between undead warriors and undead spawns, and so the Cursed Dead could rove the landbridge, north, and south Direlands almost with impunity, as long as they didn’t run across any living enemies.

  The south Direlands were big enough and broad enough for them to work large areas of Summons, generating new random spawns that sooner or later generated Diamond Golums, and occasionally the pink-hued Diamond Lords.

  The Diamond Sovereigns and their Synnast lightning Elemental cohorts, now, that was a different thing entirely, and only the elites went in and harvested them for their Hearts. Those things were big and dangerous, and a lot of undead took trips back to their graves during all those hunts, which didn’t deter them from returning in the slightest, although it was a long way to travel to get back there.

  Kris was perfectly able to carve a Heart down into the required diamond needed to power the Ritual, and it was a V Valence for me to Energize it properly. I was the limiting factor here, as my alternate Scarabs research to use Gold or Pyreal Scarab-level spells wasn’t going well, meaning I couldn’t tap my Mana Pool for them, which limited how many Valences a day I could spend on the spell.

  But, in the end, it didn’t matter much. Yeah, I was spending V’s down to nothing every day, but I’d crack whatever it took to get the higher Scarabs at some point and open up my Mana Pool for this. In the meantime, I would spend the Valences as I needed to.

  If that meant only six a day, so be it. I didn’t care, I was going to do them.

  ------

  Master Ben Ten was not the first to be quickened, despite all the calls from his students. Instead, those with living family were given first priority, with those few with surviving spouses going first, then any with children, then any with siblings, parents, and so forth.

  Once that was done, a lottery was set up for the remaining undead who had their Diamond Hearts, spurring them to acquire them and get really good at golum-killing, among other things.

  The first of them was a Shosuan Po, whose wife, son, and daughter had all survived the massacres near Hebian-To. They had not been able to visit him until his son joined the Scouts and was able to reach his father in Hebian-To to inform them that they were all alive still, and he had regularly visited his father there.

  Po doffed the armor he had died in, which wouldn’t fall apart no matter how mangled it was, and laid his bare bones down on a stone altar there in the grotto chapel in Hebian-To, sitting there among the final remains of the undead who had chosen to end matters. A cloth was thrown over him, and his family was in attendance, along with with Master Ben Ten and hundreds of undead, watching this impossible feat taking place.

  It had been proven many times that I could Raise the recently dead, and Cure Mortal Wounds could heal the just-deceased if it got to them fast enough.

  This, however, was going back years!

  The ground was consecrated, the Life Diamond made from a Diamond Golum Heart was in my hand, and the sun was shining down upon the cracked and weathered bare bones lying silently on the altar before me.

  The first thing I had to do was kill him. The spell would not work on an active undead. I calmly severed his head from his neck, and the white spark faded from the sockets of his skull. Actually, if I left him there, his bones would shimmer and rebuild themselves, his armor with him and Sword in hand, and he’d basically get up off the altar.

  But the first words of the spell stayed his spirit from fleeing to the purgatory haze that the undead endured before rising at the dusk if slain, arresting him there as I raised the Life Diamond up to catch the rays of the sun, and began to invoke Resurrection.

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  Positive energy and life energy. He had been gone from life for sixteen years, but my Caster Level was already post-20 at the very least, and there was no difficulty for me recalling his spirit. His bones were right in front of me, completely intact, but the spell would have restored them regardless.

  It was ten minutes to Cast the spell, building up the power until The Light of Life and Hope throbbed and glimmered in my hand as if alive. I brought it down over the silent bones of a man whose duty had bid him rise up from death and save the living, and as I swept it the full length of him, the Diamond in my hand slowly shattered and sparkled its magic down on him, bestowing life.

  The last of it fell from my hands, gathering in the emptiness of his ribcage among sparkling bones, and began to pulse.

  The light turned ruby, the color of fresh living blood, and redness stole across all the bones, flesh reforming out of nothing, blood vessels rising and filling with crimson, while a pulse everyone there could actually feel hung in the air.

  It grew with breathtaking speed, the spell not slow once it took effect, rebuilding the bones and their connections, layering on them with muscle and organs, rapidly hiding everything under a tightly-drawn mask of drawn and tanned Sho skin. That skin was at first like parchment, but rapidly swelled in depth and volume as the flesh underneath was rebuilt and restored.

  There was a swirl in the air, and I knew all the undead could see it by the way they shifted as a spirit was drawn out of the aether, down in a spiral of motes of light the living mostly couldn’t witness, riding the first infusion of air to inflate renewed and restored lungs once more.

  Dark eyes snapped open, and there was a long, half-panicked breath as the young man who’d died nearly two decades ago arched his back in shock and sudden, painful remembrance of how he had died back then, recalled for perhaps the thousandth time.

  There was rustling from the watching undead as he blinked at me, recognizing me, and slowly he lifted up his hands before his eyes.

  Hands with firm and healthy living skin, muscle, and blood, the sure weight of the living.

  He burst into tears as I clasped his hand and he sat up, unable to hold them back.

  The undead around weren’t the loudest things, and their cheers were hollow and sepulchral as they rose, but they were there and they were sincere, a bright spot of joy as they saluted the first of those who had given their life and their deaths to their people. Now the Sun of Suns had brought His magic here to finally bring them home.

  If they could have cried, this place would have been awash in tears.

  I swirled the covering around him into a simple robe as his family charged him and swept him into a group hug. If his young wife of all those years ago looked more like his mother now, he looked on her with the eyes of a man who had seen only bones and souls for years, and could read the devotion in her eyes far more now than back then.

  His embrace was all the fiercer for walking through death and coming out the far side.

  I let them help him off the altar there, where he paused for a moment, and then, before everyone’s eyes, he fell to his knees and prostrated himself before all those many, many alcoves, where rested either dust or scattered bones with remnants of armor and weapons of those who had fallen forever before him.

  He bowed, and he gave thanks to those who had died and not been given this gift, would never be able to receive it, and all the surrounding undead went to one knee with a clatter with him.

  Thousands were dead, some of them here, others unknown and reduced to dust in Deathstone Craters and elsewhere. They had made the true sacrifice, and now, some of them would be able to live again because of it.

  Sergeant Shousan turned to the decaying armor that had clad him all these years, now finally crumbled to parts and shards… but the reforged Named Katana, Eryu, that had rode with him gleamed ready and new for use.

  He gathered up the pieces of that armor, and brought it slowly and carefully to an alcove on the wall. He placed them carefully within, stepping back and bowing once again as the raiments of his death joined those who had fallen before him.

  “When I die, the rest of me will join you,” he whispered, but how could the dead not hear a promise sworn on one’s own grave? I watched heads nod solemnly all around as they knew and understood.

  One day, he would die again, and his bones return here for the final, true time.

  As would those of all of them.

  ------

  I watched he and his family walk off, arm-in-arm, still crying, heading towards the true sun and open sky above, and waited until they were out of sight before turning to the next.

  “Wilford Cuprishire,” I called him forth, while his daughter looked on eagerly from the side. She was one of my promising Clerical candidates, and while she wanted to bring her father back herself, she had realized that might be some time away, and had said absolutely nothing when he drew the lot to become the second to return. “Come, sergeant. Aru is bidding you return to the light of the living!”

  His jaw almost gaping off of him, the former scoffalong and probably bandit clattered toward me. I helped him remove his moldering mail and greaves, set his cloven helm aside, and his naked bones and half-chopped skull clambered into place atop the altar before I tossed a new cloth over him.

  The Life Diamond from the Golum Heart he’d hunted down himself came into my grasp, proof of his valor and determination before the eyes of the gods. Whatever he’d been before in life, he’d proven himself something more at the time of his death, and then during his death.

  As the sun continued to shine down overhead, I began the chanting invocation of my second Resurrection of the day, and so brought about the return of yet another worthy soul back to life.

  It might only be six a day, but eventually I would get to all of them. Master Ben Ten had sworn that he would be the last of those to take the step, helping all of the others with their hunts as needed, and had brooked no calls otherwise.

  He was there to see the first of them return to life, and he would be there each and every day going forward as I did my task.

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