Seeing Vinara there with the crusade was a wake-up call for me. I was aware that my social acumen was poor to start with, and that living as a recluse for decades had done little to improve it, but I never really had to deal with the consequences of it — being an Archmage was a potent deterrent for anyone who might have taken offense to my words or actions.

When she had attacked me, she would not have known I'd tampered with her mind — it was entirely possible she was still unaware unless Ludis gave her a very thorough inspection. Instead, her actions should have been motivated by the duke's murder, and I couldn't help but curse at so blindly having fallen into that trap.

She was an enemy of my own design, unintentional as it had been, and now she'd rallied some truly powerful people against me. My odds against Ludis were questionable at best, and having followers of Yain in the mix would greatly increase their chance of success. My only saving graces right now were time and location — with a week and a half on my hands, I had the chance to stack the deck in my favor, and the fact that they had to come to me would give me some degree of control over the battlefield.

I would have to make this time count.

Ludis would be the most challenging foe in the upcoming battle, so a way to raise my own power quickly would help even the odds — and from what I'd gathered from the Heroes, I might have discovered a way to fool the System into helping me with this.

When I told the pair how the System gave me a perk in exchange for destroying my fledgling mana well, I could have sworn I saw Sarah's eyes sparkle. She, then, began to talk at length about the video games from her world, and specifically about something called an exploit which she then defined as 'creatively using game mechanics to gain an advantage.'

Shiro interjected that crafters of the game would punish players who used them and then stop other players from using them in the future — and that it was unlikely whoever had designed (if it even was designed) the System hadn't thought that far.

Even so, it was a possible chance to gain an advantage quickly, and in the worst-case scenario I'd only lose an hour or so — it would be my third attempt at crafting a mana well, and I already knew the process by heart.

I retired to the reinforced training room in the basement of my tower and readied myself for the procedure.

It flowed much more smoothly compared to my previous attempts. Whether this was because of my familiarity with the spell, or because of my improvements in my weaker Aspects, I wasn't sure, but the threads seemed more... willing to do my bidding. It was an interesting contrast.

I Hasted myself as I watched from the inside of my soul as the well was created, hoping to see the well's destruction in greater detail — if it was destroyed. I wasn't yet convinced the 20% threshold the notification had indicated was a hard and fast rule, and moreover, I wasn't sure the System would try to anchor itself a second time — the first time could have been a fluke.

The last of the Origin threads fell into place, and for an instant the well was complete; I was fortunately quick enough to shield my eyes with a spell, as a blinding light radiated from the construct.

I was able to see a new construct, appearing from inside the well, trying and failing to find purchase on the well's walls -- the difference in quality between my threads and the ones summoned by the System was staggering, several degrees purer and thicker than the origin mana I'd seen inside the fox figurine.

In their frenzied attempts to attach themselves to the well, the foreign threads pierced cleanly through my construct, triggering a cascade of structural failures — and an instant later, everything was gone.

I left the space inside my soul and was greeted by an array of notifications as soon as I opened my eyes.

I smiled wryly as I let out a deep sigh. Well, so much for that.

Scratching "Cheat the System" off the list, I moved on to the next phase of my preparations. I already had an army loyal to me, though it was fairly small. Unless I opted to use the Cannerian forces, which I was fairly reluctant to, given how it was in their best interest for me to be defeated, I was largely limited to my Dead Legion.

As it stood, the Dead Legion numbered about half a thousand humanoid wights, in addition to auxiliaries such as the flying scouts. The reason for this was that they needed to interact with people to some degree, and people would find it more natural to try to communicate with an undead that at least mostly looked like them. So, for the most part, the Legion was made of humanoid corpses or constructs built out of animal flesh and bones arranged to at least partially look humanoid.

That wasn't to say I had used up all the raw materials I had at my disposal, or that I was limited to half a thousand connections. In a cave not far from my tower, I had stashed away a veritable mountain of animals and animal parts just waiting for a moment like this.

The entrance to the cave system was well-hidden within the dense foliage of the forest, but I found my way there with no issues — I had directed many wights to deposit body parts in the cave over the years, and at this point I knew the area like the back of my hand.

It was buried underground, and the damp atmosphere inside had given birth to many patches of moss and mold. The mountain of corpses was mercifully shielded from decay — I would have had to turn off my sense of smell, otherwise, and I didn’t like working magic without a functioning nose.

Sighing as I took in the macabre sight before me, I directed my accompanying wights to sort the parts by size and shape, and got to work.

Creating wights is not a very complex process, though it requires careful application of multiple magical Aspects.

I started with a whole corpse, as a warm-up, since it would be significantly easier to animate. The first one I could find was massive: a gigantic black bear, its fur partially grey with age — evidently a ferocious specimen to have survived for so long.

In death, though, everyone was equal.

Gathering threads of Soul, I peered into the Near-Beyond, searching for souls that to use in the process. I had long enchanted the cave and its surrounding area to trap the souls from moving on to the Greater-Beyond, and given the sheer amount of bodies, the realm of newly departed souls was more crowded than I’d ever seen before.

I took the first soul that passed by me, the soul of a raccoon if I wasn’t mistaken, slicing it into a myriad of equal parts with a knife spun of Soul mana. I anchored all but one of the fragments to myself, as I would need them for the next raising, and left the Near-Beyond with the single shard of soul.

Attaching the soul to the bear’s body was a delicate process, but one I’d had so much practice with that I could do it with my eyes closed. It was almost like cross-stitching, if instead of fabric you had a corpse and instead of thread you had a soul.

Maybe not like cross-stitching, then.

With the soul attached, the rising was half-way done. What remained was to give the bear a mind.

I could have used the bear’s original mind, but that would have required a much bigger soul than my flimsy shard — exactly a bear’s worth of soul, to be precise. Moreover, that would have given me a normal, if undead, bear — one unable to understand the commands it was given, and unwilling to follow them, anyway. Bears don’t care much about what is expected of them.

No, what I needed was fresh programming, and I had solved that problem long ago; it merely needed to be embedded into the soon-to-be-undead.

This was the most difficult part of the raising, and the one I hated the most. To my mind’s eye, I brought forward the image of the pattern I’d designed to work as a mind for my wights. It was a careful weaving of thousands of threads of Mind, flowing into specially crafted geometric patterns that would serve as the programming of the wights’ automaton-like minds.

While I had created a pattern that I used in all the wights, copying it over to each and every undead had to be done manually every single time. To that effect, I drew several dozens of threads and began weaving them together, following the original pattern as a guideline.

It was a very intricate and error-prone procedure, and any error meant scrapping the working and starting from scratch — mistakes in the weave had unpredictable consequences most of the time, ranging from turning the whole mind inert, to making it behave in a completely different manner than expected.

The mind I was creating had been my Magnum Opus in my career. It was a stripped-down mind, containing only the bare essentials required to function, as well as the ability to parse and execute commands. None of the emotional processes that were needed by the living were included, which reduced the size of the soul needed to support it to a pittance compared to a living creature.

Before I was interrupted by Sarah’s arrival and unwillingly thrust into the web of intrigue I presently found myself in, I had been trying to find a way to automatize the engraving of minds into the new undead. I hadn’t been planning to break open the cave until I had the ability to raise them all easily, but with Ludis and the followers of Yain hot on my heels, I had little choice but to raise my army now, as quickly as I could.

The bear’s mind was done in just about five minutes. I managed to do it without errors, but I could not count on doing it perfectly every time.

“Hopefully I’ll manage to shave off some time as I get used to the process,” I mumbled to myself as I drew a thread of Soul and connected it to the unmoving bear.

The effect was instantaneous — the bear’s eyes opened, though the spark of life was lost forever, looking straight at me. With an effort of will, I directed the bear to leave the cave and wait outside, and, after a beat, it raised its rump off the stone floor and left to follow the order.

I glanced at the rest of the corpses, releasing a weary sigh. The wights had made some headway into sorting the small mountain inside the cave. Glimpsing the pile of bones in the corner, I resolved to leave them for the last; they would be the hardest to raise, needing a system of locomotion in addition to the mind and soul — bones did not simply move, especially not mismatched bones from dozens of living creatures.

The next week would be full of mind-numbing work, and I wanted to punch myself for not raising the army gradually, over the years. I recalled a saying about spending more time trying to automate a task than it would take to do the task manually, and I winced at the truth of it.

Sighing, I resigned myself to my fate. One undead down, about two thousand more to go.