Pestilence: Rise Of The Pure Undead

"Incredible! And you say that you've never practised magic in your life?" an excited old man spoke with one hand in front of his mouth.

"There was no such time to practise" Loimos responded truthfully.

Unaware that his question was set up for such an answer, the old man rubbed his short beard, still having a hard time that no one else had ever picked up this man as an apprentice ever, even without having ever used his mana, his aspects were incredibly good.

"Well, I don't think I am qualified to recommend anything to you in particular, I don't think there are any areas of magic were you couldn't excel with your raw talent, just walk around and check if anything catch your attention" the old man was actually the keeper of the main library of Weafewand, and having obviously noticed Loimos's peculiar mana, which he believed to be like this due to a trait, which was probably exactly what this was.

Everything Loimos related just had the 'undead' trait attached to it, but since even amongst the ranks of the dead that wasn't something typical, none of the many mages that had approached Loimos were able to notice that his trait was something so condemning.

The undead had done a good job of concealing his death force, and since he had an abundance of other energies plagued by his trait, the attention of people was absolutely absorbed by those as they surrounded his death and covered it from view.

He had spent a few days roaming the streets and listening in on conversations, saw someone get slashed in the throat on a rooftop, that guy had gotten absolutely dominated, absolutely demolished by what Loimos could only qualify as a professional, he had only been able to know the mage wasn't spontaneously dying from self-manifesting slashes by looking at the scene directly, absolutely impossible to sense the presence of his attacker otherwise.

And still, he hadn't been able to tell what had been attacking him exactly from his spot, that was some pretty exemplary show energy suppression and sheer stealth.

Being stealthy whilst having already been spotted was simply another dimension of sneaking and infiltration.

In any case, keeping everything he had heard and seen in mind, Loimos began to scour the lengthy halls of this library, it was by far the largest inside the city, and Weafewand had a soft spot for books, the undead had counted twenty-four of such buildings, and that was only counting those that were only libraries, you could read books in most public places here, he was planning on checking those as well.

One advantage he had was that he couldn't forget anything, so there really was no need for him to read things in a specific order, he just needed to read everything, so he began with a book that supposedly compiled every known usages of mana, reading through it exceptionally fast as he was reading two page at once, from top to bottom, bottom to top all at once, had he had actual eyes, he would have looked absolutely idiotic.

Already, one could see that there was a little problem when tackling the vast field that was magic.

"Ah shit" exclaimed a young man reading another copy of the same book as Loimos, he was just reading the table of content, but that was enough to give someone a splitting headache, so many categories, sub-categories, sub-categories within sub-categories, pure nightmare fuel.

Not only was magic a difficult thing to study in any capacity, but the lack of communication between the various scholars and researchers meant that each subject had multiple interpretations and theories linked to them, sometimes contradicting one another, ideas of the far past clashed with newer ones, some of those scholars taking shot at one another, completely unrelated to the matter at hand and blurring everything some more.

Turning his head and seeing Loimos reading through this mine-field of a book like it was made up of nothing but images made the young man pale, put the book back and place and leave, his psyche wasn't strong enough just yet to tackle magic.

So far, Loimos counted seventeen big categories, although that number depended on how you saw things, it may be more or less, not that it mattered.

Categories that caught the undead's hollow sockets were the ones relating to spirits and golems, putting aside spirit calling and spirit binding, there was something called spirit creation.

Depending on how you created said spirit, it could end up in two different ways, you either made it from nothing but mana and called the job done, or you imbued something into the spirit as well, generally a specific spell.

That was interesting to Loimos because of golemcraft, which was pretty much the same thing, only that you used materials as a base and then used mana or any other of the many ways to get it to move around and do your bidding.

Combining spirit creation and golemcraft was considered the greatest way of using those two categories, though that was the very biassed opinion of the cited source, two lines lower and other researchers called this thing absolute bull diarrhoea.

The undead found this interesting because it appeared like something he would have a rather easy time making, since he could produce a variety of things with his primeval rot and that they would all easily circulate his death force, being technically a part of him as well, they could carry on his intelligence and reasoning without any tinkering, or so he assumed.

Having numbers on your side was always a good thing, undead hordes were always a problem even if only made up of mindless and weak cadavers, by getting better at transforming his primeval rot and learning to better control his death force, he would be able to create himself an army of allies at a moments notice, each of them he would be able to control as he wished due to their composition.

This would certainly aid him in getting the guards around the crypt away from it, nothing like an old fashioned undead legion to rile people up and get them to crap their pants.

In any case, there was still some way before he could do such a thing.