The skull chattered ceaselessly, constantly trying to bite Julia. She sat on a branch atop a thick tree—a jog or two from her confrontation with the skeleton to which this skull belonged She’d decided to separate the skull from the body and take it with her for experimentation. This was a rather gruesome and cold thing to do, she thought, but a revelation came to her shortly after freezing the skeleton: they were everywhere.

  She had Truesight activated after freezing the skeleton, and as she looked around, she began noticing more and more on the swamp floor. In fact, there were far more skeletons than crocfrogs, which she could also see with her Truesight. The skeletons were identifiable only because their bones emitted a soft purple glow, while their skulls burned in the water like small purple flames.

  The skeletons didn’t seem interested in any of the swamp creatures. Many times she’d seen crocfrogs walk right over them, or swamp snakes swim close—even through their ribs—undisturbed. Why, then, did they attack her?

  Was it something to do with mana? Surely not. All these creatures, while not actively using spells, inherently had mana.

  Sure, they weren’t made of it the way she and Trixy were, but Braden had made it seem as though spirits were long extinct. Why would there be creatures that exclusively attacked an extinct species?

  What’s more, these bones were clearly humanoid. Julia refused to believe that the creatures originated as bones. That didn’t make any sense, but honestly, animating the bones of deceased humanoids didn’t either.

  Julia decided to stick to what she knew. These skeletons were omnipresent within the swamp, and at least one had attacked her, while all the others were ambivalent toward the swamp creatures. It would be safest to assume all of them would be hostile to her as well. In fact, that she hadn’t been attacked up to this point further proved her decision to move above the surface of the water.

  It seemed that it took the perfect set of circumstances for her to be attacked by one of the skeletons. She’d been knocked down so close to one that it could grab her. There must be a range beyond which their aggression didn’t extend. She couldn’t pin it down exactly, but she should be alright as long as they were underwater while she was above, based on her previous few days of not seeing them.

  Fundamentally, this didn’t change her situation much. She’d already suspected there were dangerous creatures in the water—this was one of the reasons why she was moving above it. It didn’t change that she’d have to keep moving above the water while watching out for threats. However, it felt like everything was different.

  Suspecting there are threats and knowing are different things. She felt sudden peril and resolved to learn what she could about this new, confirmed threat. Thus, she sat on a high branch—as high as she could get without fear of the branches no longer supporting her—and stared at the gnashing skull in her hands.

  She had confirmed that without the skull, the rest of the body would fall apart, becoming just some of the many bones in this swamp. The skull was assuredly the source of its animus.

  This was further confirmed by what Truesight told her. There was a…”wrongness” to the purple glow within the skull. She wasn’t sure what it was specifically, but the feeling she got was one of something that didn’t belong.

  It wasn’t the same feeling she got from the Abyss creature. That feeling didn’t originate from Truesight. It was a primal feeling that resonated with her entire being, as though just looking at it would change her on some fundamental level.

  This situation was more akin to the uncomfortable feeling you get when you look at an object that’s far away, but your eyes won’t focus on it. There’s a distress that comes from your eyes not focusing when you know they should. In the same way, Truesight knew that this thing, this skull, shouldn’t exist—at least, not in this time. It was a creature—a thing—out of time.

  With that knowledge, Julia had decided that now, while not under threat, was a good time to figure out how to deal with them. Clearly separating bones from the main skeleton could be useful for restricting its motion, but the thing wouldn’t cease until the purple glow was extinguished, which was what she had to figure out.

  She started by running her mana from her hands into the skull. This used to be a more involved process, as she had a physical body through which she had to channel mana. Now, she simply…pushed some of her body into the skull. Her fingers—while formed into flesh—were themselves mana, after all.

  Immediately, she cringed and withdrew the mana. There was something sickly about the mana in that skull—it was grimy and dirty. It felt like she’d stuck her hands in slimy mud.

  This was not a feeling she’d ever had with mana. It often had certain feelings associated with it since it had different aspects: fire mana felt warm, water mana cool, and earth mana solid, for example. Never had she felt gross from just touching mana.

  The mana was also ravenous. It wanted to consume her own and use it to propagate more of its filth. She didn’t feel a real will attuned to the mana; it was like that mana aspect’s natural proclivities were to consume and multiply. She shuddered thinking about what would happen if that mana were present in a living being.

  Regardless, she couldn’t counter it directly with her own mana. She bashed the skull repeatedly with the pommel of her sword until a piece of it chipped off and fell away. The hole in the skull didn’t seem to affect the purple glow at all. The skull continued trying to bite her as though it didn’t even notice.

  Smashing or otherwise shattering the skull might do the trick, but Julia was without a bludgeoning weapon, so that would not be her preferred method. She thought for a few minutes before she came up with an idea. It was a horrible idea, but once she thought of it, she couldn’t get it out of her head.

  She began casting her Bolt spell but focused her intent on the mana in the skull rather than on any physical material. She thought of the feeling the gross, purple mana had given her—a need to consume. She honed her will on the feeling of consuming that foul, awful mana and converting it into the types of mana she was familiar with.

  She bore down on her will, forcing the target of the Bolt into the shape of the mana alone while using the properties of electricity to travel on and through substances to get to it. When she felt her intent was properly conveyed, she released the spell.

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  An arc of dark red electricity crawled down her arm and blasted the skull into pieces. Julia rocked backward, almost falling off the branch before she caught herself. “She plucked shards of bone embedded in her face as she considered what had happened. Thankfully, her Mana Body made surface wounds like these inconsequential—the mana simply filled the damage in.

  After contemplating, she realized what the issue was. She had focused on converting the malicious, foreign mana into aspects she was familiar with. She didn’t specify which aspects. The easiest aspects for mana to assume were the ones she was most familiar with, which were very likely the four primaries: fire, water, earth, and air.

  She wasn’t sure about earth, but the foreign mana being flash-converted into the other three in a tight space would undoubtedly cause an explosion of some kind. The good news was that the foreign mana was unquestionably gone. The bad was that Julia was unsure whether that was a product of her spell or the explosion.

  She would need to test it on another—

  Suddenly, Julia’s brain felt like it…expanded. It was as if she had previously been confined to a small room, stuffing all her thoughts into it until it was about to burst. Now, she suddenly had multiple rooms to store things. She found that she had three different lines of thought proceeding simultaneously—and she could probably manage more if she tried.

  Undoubtedly a factor of her new Class Skill, she thought about the implications and potential uses of it while also considering the other information the notification had revealed. She had gained a level for destroying the “reanimated skeleton,” which felt like a significant amount of experience considering how many crocfrogs she’d killed up to this point.

  She also unlocked an Arcane Magic spell called “Consume.” She suspected she might get something like that, but she had been hoping for a friendlier name—like “Conversion” or something. She couldn’t deny that consumption was an adequate descriptor for the will she imparted into the mana and spell.

  There was a visual oddity with the spell. It was…different from the rest of her spells. As she contemplated what that meant, she also thought about how much experience that one skeleton granted her and reached a hypothesis: these were summoned creatures—or the magic that was animating them originated from something summoned.

  This would explain the sense of wrongness she felt. She didn’t want to, but she decided she owed it to herself to consider whether this wrongness was truly different from the Abyss. She had avoided contemplating that moment thus far for fear of even the memory of that creature messing with her mind, but she had to know. She had to make sure they were truly different.

  She held two thoughts simultaneously for compare: one was her memory of the out-of-time feeling from the purple mana, the other was a replaying of the memory of that Abyssal creature. Strangely, she didn’t feel the same mind-shattering effects the creature had imparted when she’d first laid eyes on it—strange.

  The two were distinctly different, she decided. The feelings were in the same vein, but their only similarities were that they felt “wrong.” It was not something she could properly verbalize, but it was sort of like the feeling of discomfort from seeing a blue apple, and the feeling of stepping onto a wooden platform only to sink into it. The feelings are similar only in that they're wrong in some way—otherwise, they’re completely different.

  That resolved, she decided she needed more data before she started changing how she was acting. It wouldn’t do to risk her life on hypotheses she hadn’t properly confirmed. She stood on the branch—Truesight still active—and scanned below for any waiting test subjects. There were many.

  The swamp was positively infested. She could almost throw a rock anywhere and hit one lounging on the swamp floor. That was hyperbole, of course, but it was not an exaggeration to estimate a skeleton lying every four to five strides.

  She noticed on closer inspection that there were a series of threads extending from the skull. It looked to Julia like veins crawling down from the skull to the rest of the body, but she knew they were threads of mana—likely used to actually animate the body.

  She could potentially disrupt the threads of mana to render the skeletons immobile—at least, for a while. The threads were draping down from the skull, though, so even disrupting them would only last as long as it took the animus to send new threads down and regain control. Still, it was worth keeping in mind.

  She selected the closest one—just a few strides from the tree she was perched in—and reformed her spell. This time, she focused on converting the purple mana into earth mana. It shouldn’t have any reactive properties even if formed very quickly, so it shouldn’t contaminate the result with any skull explosions.

  The dark red bolt lashed out and struck through the water like the crack from a whip. She saw the water bubble for a moment before it stilled. The skeleton—motionless the entire time—now had a brown glow in its skull. Julia watched as the purple threads began dissipating. It didn’t happen immediately, but now that the source of that filth—the animus—was gone, the threads slowly faded until they were no more.

  Julia was pleased to note that her method worked, but she realized that just converting the mana into something inert was a waste. She didn’t know—nor did she want to test—how long one of those skeletons would continue to fight with its animus gone. If she instead converted that mana into air and fire mana, the explosion should be enough to shatter the skull and kill the skeleton outright.

  She also realized that she’d been calling that purple mana in its skull the “animus” for a while now. She’d never heard of any “animus” or “corpus” that she could remember, yet the words were there in her mind. That was weird, but she chalked it up to her new skill increasing her information processing abilities.

  She scanned the area again with Truesight and resolved to keep it active. She didn’t beat herself up for forgetting about it again too much. Sure, she’d learned the lesson in the dungeon to use it more, but the last few days had been hectic and hard on her both mentally and emotionally. She already suffered enough from the events themselves. She didn’t need to add shame for not being at 100% on top.

  Truesight was originally a useful but costly Skill for her. Not only did it require mana to maintain, the information it provided was difficult to process. There was so much more information that she was used to receiving with her eyes, so extended use would wear her out and give her a headache. Now, with more mana and increased processing power, she could leave it active for a long time without much issue.

  “Come on, Trixy. Let’s keep moving,” she said with new confidence. She had developed a defense against those skeletons; she and Trixy now had a methodology for killing crocfrogs, and she would keep her Truesight active for as long as possible.

  She was determined to get out of this swamp—even if she had to kill every crocfrog in it to do so.