A Jaded Life

Chapter 1360

Eventually, my conversation with Lisa was over, and I moved on to Alice and Xander. While talking with Lisa had been quite interesting, she had dutifully reported everything she and her two compatriots had done in the last few days, there was little of actual substance. With Alice and Xander, it was even worse. The pair told me what I wanted to know, but their behaviour made it quite obvious that they weren’t all that interested in keeping me informed. They were simply aware that keeping me happy, or at least not annoying me, was in their best interest, as I was literally the hand that fed them.

Similarly, their lack of interest meant a lack of creativity. Lisa was obviously considering what I said and trying to anticipate my needs, even if her motivation was completely selfish. She wanted to be useful to me because being useful meant I would keep her around to use. To her, being my tool was a better prospect than being back out in the wild, where she had to worry about predators, human or otherwise, hunger, her shelter and all the other necessities a modern person generally took for granted. Necessities I could provide easily, something she saw every day, while living within the space I had prepared for the three of them. Lisa wanted to stay in such a space, and she might have realised that they were replaceable.

Especially now that she knew I had transported them across a good portion of the continent, she would realise that my range was substantial, giving me access to a large number of people to acquire.

A part of me was curious how Alice and Xander would react if I were to simply kick them out. To drop them on a random hill somewhere between the Nexus Tower, Jademoon Tower, or maybe even closer to the south, near the shrine next to the Charland. Somewhere far from here, without any additional supplies or help, nothing beyond a vague direction in which they might find people who might want to help them. Would that break through their arrogance, their belief that they would be alright, despite the situation they had found themselves in? That cooperating and keeping me happy wasn’t just in their best interest, it was their only option? Or would they keep their arrogant self-assured belief that they would be alright, until the jaws of some beast clamped down around their neck? Or maybe it would be the claws of another beast that tore into them and disembowelled them. There were a few ways to die out there, and few were pleasant.

Maybe I should kick one of them out, just drop them off and leave them to their fate. I might even create a scrying construct to follow the person around, linked to a crystal similar to the one I used as a window here, allowing the one I kept to watch their former partner struggle in the wilderness. If I wanted to motivate them, that might just do the trick, especially if I made any help given to the one out in the wild contingent on the other one’s cooperation.

A part of me couldn’t help but grin at the idea that might just have the potential to motivate the two arrogant fools. Motivation for them, entertainment for me, I might have to pursue that idea.

And generally, the idea of making a few additional crystal windows, linking them to scrying constructs, and setting them up was a good one. I hadn’t really considered it before, simply because I had focused on things I could directly use, and this wasn’t one of those ideas. If I wanted to use scrying constructs to explore, I could just do it, no need to use the crystal windows. But my time and attention were limited, so unless I allocated some focus to observing my constructs, they were useless.

With the windows, however, I could set up a few of them in Maggie’s community and ask some of the people there to watch the feed and notify me if anything interesting was visible. Maybe I could even have them draw maps, allowing us to chart the environment and identify any geographical changes, such as the merging of Denver and Colorado Springs, potentially dangerous areas, such as the Burned Land and other settlements, human or otherwise.

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But those were considerations for a later day. For now, I had a certain Revenant to check, though I was quite happy to see through my constructs that the creature was still far from complete. Its body was partially regenerated, though it had yet to take a form I’d consider useful. Its upper body, the chest and shoulders, was largely complete again, which looked rather strange given that the abdomen and hip area were still missing. However, while the connecting parts, the upper arms and thighs, were still gone, the creature’s feet, calves, hands and forearms were already back, just lying on the ground. It looked, quite frankly, ludicrous, making me wonder what would happen if I were to start moving parts around.

The parts had obviously started to manifest in their designed, or desired, positions, but what would happen if I were to switch an arm and a leg? Or even just remove the partially manifested arm, would it start to crumble as the part I had cut off had, or would it start to grow longer? Or, even more amusing, what would happen if I were to put something in between the manifesting arm and the shoulder? Would the arm grow around the obstruction and encapuslate it, as a tree might do to a foreign object leaning against it, or would something else happen?

Unwilling to let this fascinating specimen just regenerate at will, I stepped through the shadows and appeared in the room above the cell. I had to dig through the obstacles I had placed to seal the creature in, but that wasn’t an issue, just a little tedious.

My nose had started to crinkle as I was walking up, making me realise that the creature’s disgusting scent wasn’t just part of it being a dead body, though I probably should have realised that immediately. Given that Joshua had only been dead for a few seconds before becoming a revenant, there just wasn’t enough time for decomposition to occur, and the previous lack of feeding prior to his demise prevented the other common reason for dead bodies to smell. Now, I realised that the stench wasn’t physical at all, but that it was a magical scent and a highly offensive one at that. Death, decay and, above all, hate, it was somewhat similar to the nethersprites I had encountered on Mundus, with their endless hunger. Only that this creature wasn’t hungry, it radiated hate on an incredible level. Hatred, directed squarely at me.

Then, I was finally standing above it, looking down through the grate in the cell’s ceiling, observing the creature with my own eyes. And not only with my eyes, though they were important, but with the myriad of magical senses I had acquired over my journey.

My magical sight revealed thin tendrils of almost smoke-like power linking the Revenant’s head to the rest of its body, already outlining where each part would go. I wondered if it would be possible to interfere with that, to add part of my own magic into the process, but I had a feeling it wouldn’t work, certainly not with this Revenant. Its sole purpose seemed to be my destruction, so trying to add my own magic, my essence, into its being would only cause destruction. Which would likely result in the loss of any power I used in the attempt, unless I brought enough to bear to overwhelm the creature entirely, destroying it in the process.

Maybe I would come across another of these eventually, but, for now, the magical aspect of this creature was solely focused on my destruction, limiting quite a few possible experiments.

When viewed with my Soul Sight, I couldn’t help but gasp. While I had seen a fair variety of Undead before, the Revenant wasn’t like them. In fact, I had to reconsider my stance that it was an Undead at all, or what traits I considered to be Undead. Because, sure, it had risen from a dead body, but there was still an echo of its soul, different from the way Lia’s soul lingered. And different from the energy any other Undead I had encountered so far was animated by. The energy those Undead were animated by was always of Life and Death, with some decay mixed in. Cyclical, natural and completely necessary for the world to function.

This creature, however, was different. If I had to put a descriptor to it, I’d call the energy animating it emotional or something along those lines. In fact, the Revenant seemed to be driven by one thing only. Revenge.

Or maybe calling it spite would work, too.