The other side of the grate was a tunnel that sloped down and split into twin staircases. Both sides transitioned from the slate tiles of the flooring above to a single sheet of gray marble, shot through with white veins. Jay took the left side, followed the path that both stairs merged into once they were far enough down, and continued onwards until the passage opened up.

  Every step was slow and as quiet as he could make it, though the noise of Agensyx’s feet wasn’t exactly helping his attempt to stay hidden; Active Stealth could only muffle his own movement, after all. Every slight noise that came from ahead of him had him stifling the urge to jump and aborting an attempt to shift the Crystalband into a weapon form.

  Just the idea that someone else was down here had made him far edgier than it had any right to.

  Once the hallway spread out into a room, first with the ceiling going from oppressively low to vaulted and then with the width stretching out to either side on diagonals, Jay realized Arus hadn’t been joking when she’d called these places palaces. It was all the splendor of Old World opulence with several blatant signals that magic had been the only way to create the structure.

  The whole thing was shaped like a U, with lines of columns rising up from the white-streaked marble as if they’d been grown there, complete with root-like structures at the bottom and matching branch-like offshoots at the top to anchor into the roof. Glassed-in windows were everywhere along the length of the two side wings and the back portion, some positioned as if to let in sunlight but most in reasonable places to have been looked out of. Jay couldn’t see in, so for all he knew he was being watched through those windows.

  It also looked like someone had turned up the saturation on the palace, too. The shocks of color that stood out from the gray were raffish red, gaudy gold, or occasional bits of glaring green. Outside of those, the name Gray Palace was well earned.

  One source of the shocks of color were the doorframes. Each of them was lined in gold as if people needed help finding them to get in the building. As embarrassing as it was to admit, Jay knew he might have needed the help if it hadn’t been present, so maybe it wasn’t an entirely impractical choice.

  Any door should work, given that he didn’t have a clue where inside the Gray Palace the entryway to its Red counterpart was. The maps didn’t have the interior of the structure listed to help out, maybe because this was technically a mausoleum and the graves were intended to be left undisturbed. Something about that didn’t seem quite right. Hadn’t this place been created by a [Necromancer]? Maybe it had been an attempt to keep the best resurrections a secret.

  As long as there were some sort of labels in there. Someone else was down here; Jay needed far, far more resurrections to be confident in taking anyone on one-to-one. Agensyx was great and all, but his vision from the cavern’s Pillar had shown entire armies under the control of a single Classbound. He needed that.

  And he could definitely feel the potential in the Palace. He couldn’t quite pinpoint where it was coming from, but he could tell there were dead to wake up in there somewhere. A lot of them. The unrealized capacity hung in the air like a thick bank of fog. He could almost see it.

  And then, like his eyes readjusted to focus on it, there was no “almost.”

  Yeesh. It really was everywhere, currents of red and gray and white wrapping around each other but never mixing. Jay wasn’t even sure if they were touching.

  The extra sensory input was somehow more disorienting than [Sense Magic] had been at first, since it was seemingly always there instead of just activating whenever something triggered it. Unless that was just because he was actively in one of the areas it was most suited for, but he wasn’t going to turn around and leave just to find out. It didn’t stay an issue for long; he figured out that he could shut it off with a feeling like mentally uncrossing his eyes.

  That issue solved, Jay finally headed toward the closest door and stepped into the Gray Palace.

  *

  The inside seemed like a reversal of the exterior, with small splashes of the gray stone scattered around a background of bright colors. Even the pillars were mirrored, though the interior’s version had statue-bearing alcoves between them. The plinths were labelled like tombstones, with a name, a pair of years, and a third label written beneath that Jay didn’t fully understand.

  The sense of death was heavier around the statues too, as if the bodies themselves were inside the stonework. Maybe they were; the niches certainly weren’t deep enough to accommodate the length of a traditional grave.

  Jay chose the first statue across from the door and scanned the description.

  Khashin – 1606 to 1701

  Sanguis

  The person depicted was huge and, in one of the weirdest fashion choices Jay had ever seen, was wearing a robe that left his broadly muscled chest bare while still covering everything else. There was a weapon propped up against him too: a staff almost as tall as he was with a sword blade mounted to the end pointing upwards.

  There was probably some official name for it. Jay didn’t know; Jay didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, it was a sword and a staff, so it was a swordstaff.

  Khashin would do, at least as a test run.

  Jay raised his hands, laid them on the statue’s knee, and triggered [Resurrection]. Fog seeped out of his palms, covering the statue and sinking into the stone. Apparently the bones really were in there.

  For the first time, a box appeared as the spell reached its peak.

  You have performed a spell on ground designed to amplify that type of power.

  Chance of spell failure reduced: 10% –> 0%.

  Cost reduced: 1 cast used –> 0 cast used.

  A smile spread across Jay’s face. That sounded like infinite resurrections to him. He could take the whole population of the mausoleum.

  As a matter of fact, screw “could,” he would. He basically had to. This was as free as anything could ever be. And if it wasn’t costing him anything, it probably wasn’t advancing the Curse, or at least not nearly as much as it would have if he had tried to overload it for that many casts.

  No sense looking a gift horse in the mouth.

  The fog stopped rolling out and the statue tore itself free from the plinth it had been mounted on. It picked up the swordstaff like the weapon was part of itself, handling it as if it were the lightest thing in the world in spite of the stiffness in its every motion.

  “That’s new,” Jay muttered.

  He’d seen a message similar to it when he’d resurrected Alister, but it hadn’t had the extra information on him being an incomplete target. Was it because he had more experience now or was it something to do with the increased power of [Resurrection] itself? Jay gave the box what it wanted, pushing the five nuggets of Divinity through the window when they manifested.

  While doing so, he reviewed his memories of Alister’s creation. Jay hadn’t been in the best state of mind at the time, between the unexpected attack and the ongoing mind control. He was checking mostly to see if the macabre parasite had been complete or not. At the time, he’d thought it was.

  Now? Looking back at it, the piece he’d resurrected had never had a head. It had been shaped more like a stingray’s stinger with a bit of tail attached than a full, actual snake until the Divinity went in and the bones budded out into the writhing mess of ribs that had very much not been anatomically correct (and still wasn’t).

  So he’d basically regrown the entire parasite out of just its stinger and a bit of the lower portion. Wild.

  The stone statue was undergoing a similar transmutation, turning from its original material into something that looked like flesh. It might not have actually been normal skin and bone for all he could tell, but it certainly looked like it was. The transformation spread in stripes like bandages that transformed every inch when they touched it. Where the lengths would overlap, the new material ended up gold, but the rest was a very Mediterranean-style bronzed tone.

  Once the transformation finished, the newly resurrected Khashin did something else unique: he took a deep breath. He let it go and took a second. That one came out as a long, low groan, and Jay could have sworn he heard the man’s spine popping from just that little motion.

  “Right,” he said. “What’s the situation?”

  It was very tempting to think that he was continuing a conversation from before he’d died, but the deliberateness the deep breaths had shown put the kibosh to that.

  Khashin had no patience for the lack of an immediate answer. “You can’t have brought me back for nothing, kid. What’s. The. Situation?”

  “I was told something about the Red Palace leaking,” Jay started. “Not sure what that means but Arus seemed very concerned about it. Something to do with the things inside?”

  The broad-shouldered man tapped his swordstaff on the ground twice. “That’s definitely not a good thing. Any idea what specifically is leaking?”

  Jay shook his head.

  “No one else to ask?”

  “There’s one other person down here, but I haven’t seen them and I’m pretty sure if I ever do see them, we’ll get into a fight. Because that’s always how it goes,” the [Necromancer] replied.

  “Well. That’s unfortunate. How many slots do you have left?”

  “Slots?”

  He sighed. “Resurrection slots, kids. How many more things can you resurrect before the strain becomes too much?”

  “That’s a thing?” Jay felt clueless.

  Khashin gave him a confused look. “Yes. Yes it is. It’s not listed in your sheet?”

  Jay checked his memory just to make sure. “No.”

  “Then we’re going to load you up,” the resurrected statue said. “You don’t know what’s down there. You don’t know the state of anyone else in this place. You need a good all-around team, with every discipline represented: Sanguis, Magus, Medius, Spatius, and Viscus.

  “Lucky for you, that was exactly my group. Follow me.”

  The resurrected man gestured to accompany his last words and headed up the hallway, leaving Jay reeling at the influx of new terms. One of them made sense easily enough – Magus was similar enough to magic that it was an easy bit of logic – but the others baffled him. Khashin had been labelled Sanguis, but there was no information on what that meant.

  Still, the odds that the statue was anything but genuine were slim to none. Even Agensyx hadn’t objected to Jay’s immediate trust; there didn’t seem to be anything most of his resurrections could or would do to betray him.

  Khashin led him to five other statues: Zaros, a runebound man labeled with the Magus title; Salvidor, who Jay was pretty sure was an elf, with the Viscus label; Tanom, who looked like he was made of terracotta even after he was moving and whose plaque had read Spatius; Viketsu, a sphinx-like Sherian labelled with Sanguis; and Cino, a human woman with too much claylike eyeliner, classified as a Medius. Each of them had a different label except the penultimate, who doubled up on Sanguis for reasons that Jay mentally noted down as something to get an answer to.

  Under the logic of better safe than sorry, Jay gave them all an investment of Divinity. Five seemed to be the maximum he could put in for any of them, as that was the number that manifested each time. The process fascinated each of them every time; they stared at the golden nuggets like it was something out of mythology.

  Maybe it was. How else could you define manifested pieces of godly energy except as something mythical?

  Once they were all back up to whatever level of limber they each thought was acceptable, Khashin brought the other resurrected statues up to speed while Jay scanned through the limited information he had on them.

  Jay didn’t have any information on what those abilities were. There didn’t even seem to be a way to make those show up. That seemed odd, but he couldn’t see anything like that for Agensyx either, so maybe it was something to do with the fact that they were intelligent.

  Was the System that strict on personal privacy?

  With everyone caught up, they headed in the direction of the hatch that led down into the Red Palace. According to Khashin, it was hidden in a hallway tucked away right at the back of the Palace. The hatch itself was rounded, bulging up at an angle from the back of a hallway that had more empty plinths than filled ones.

  It was also split cleanly in half, with one half shoved out of the way.

  Zaros sniffed. “Dimensional work. Sloppier than my own, but still a clean cut. Fresh.” He turned to look at Jay. “Found your other person.”