BONUS CHAPTER!

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After spending half the day recovering from the magical overdose. Norman couldn’t quite get over the ridiculousness of that statement ‘magical overdose’.

He returned to the kitchen. Despite the weird situation, he found himself in, he needed to see if his hypothesis was correct or if he had just nearly died for nothing.

It didn’t take him long to figure out the truth. As soon as he saw the recipe, he felt the tickle in the back of his mind that let him know the recipe would work. Norman verified it again with the three spells he had verified so far and the feeling was the same. It was even stronger on the bone wall spell than when he had originally looked at it.

That was enough evidence to tell him, he was right. Not that he felt good about that fact as he literally banged his head against the table in frustration.

Norman rubbed at the sore spot on his head as he mulled over this new problem. Relying on a foreign substance to continue using his magic sucked. Well… he didn’t know if that was true yet or not.

All he knew was that he needed the substance to feel if a spell would work or not. He hadn’t tried casting any spells without that internal reservoir provided by the magical powder yet. It was probably something he should have tried, but it was too late now.

Norman started jotting down notes of tests that needed to be conducted to verify this information.

Due to his lack of foresight, he would need to wait until this refilled magical reservoir ran out to see if it affected his spells. He also needed to know how long this reservoir of energy lasted. Was it something that slowly leaked away, or had he simply exhausted it from casting spells previously?

Another thing he probably should have figured into the equation was the amount of powder per magical reservoir, or if there was even a correlation between the two. He wouldn’t know until his current energy stockpile ran out. He had certainly taken a larger dose of the powder this time around than when accidentally ingested it the first time. At least he had a good measurement of how much he had taken this time since he cut it into a line before deciding that snorting it was a bad idea. It would make comparing it on his next attempt far easier, not that he was looking forward to the experience again.

Just thinking about that next attempt made Norman shiver and a cold sweat break out on his back. A few ideas to make it less awful flitted through his mind. Could he lessen the effect if he re-dosed before the internal reservoir of energy dissipated completely?

He just didn’t know, Norman ran his hands through his hair in frustration. It was just another question he didn’t yet have an answer to and it meant his next few weeks were going to be consumed by trial and error testing and a whole lot of pain. And if he wanted the results to be as accurate as possible, Norman either needed to perform no spells or perform the exact same spells during that timeframe so he reduced any wayward variables.

While not casting any spells during this time would be the easiest way to get an accurate measurement, Norman decided that going cold turkey on spell usage was a no-go for him. He didn’t know how long these tests would take and losing a month or two where he could be coming up with new spells wasn’t worth it. He had come too far to stop now.

With his mind firm and his goals set, Norman dove into his old journal. His first goal was to figure out every single spell in his notebook that was usable. Even if he didn’t cast them, at least he would know what to get rid of.

***

It took Norman three full days of pouring over his notebook to find the spells that would work and transfer them over. What surprised Norman the most was that none of the spells he had for raising the dead were viable, at all.

Some bits and pieces triggered the feeling in the back of his head, but nothing to complete a full spell. And no mental prompt on what to change to make it work, like with the spiritual communion spell, where he kinda knew that the blood portion of the spell was wrong.

Norman copied those broken elements onto a new page and just continued working. Maybe he could figure something out at a later time.

While he was a bit annoyed that nothing would work to raise the dead, Norman was actually quite happy about that issue. He liked experimenting and while getting premade spells was nice, it was also rather boring to him. This also meant anyone else trying to raise the dead like him were in the same boat. Norman wasn’t so vain as to think himself the only person in the world to want to become a necromancer.

When he was complete, Norman had only a dozen or so spells that were viable. Some like Glimpse from Beyond and the Bone Wall were relatively safe to use. But then he had ones like Soul Communion and another he found called Corpse Explosion that was not exactly safe. At least Norman assumed something called ‘Corpse Explosion’ wasn’t meant to be safe.

How was Norman even to test something like Corpse Explosion without getting hurt himself?

It was something Norman would have to figure out as he went. Then again, a spell like that sounded rather wasteful.

Surprisingly, most of the spells Norman found were utility focused. All of his current spells fell into the category of utility. The only attack spell Norman found in his old notebook was one called Orb of Decay.

Norman was curious to see what the spell would do, but it required a rotting skull with partial brain intact to cast. Norman gagged at the thought of what something like that would smell like. He decided that spell could wait since he didn’t feel the need to go around attacking people or animals.

He focused his first efforts on learning a spell called Bone Armor instead. It was similar to the Bone Wall spell, in that it used symbols carved into the bone to activate. Norman certainly didn’t want to be covered in a layer of pulsing muscle and blood though. Assuming the spell worked the same way the Bone Wall spell did. Norman had an idea on how to modify this spell but he needed materials first.

That was another thing Norman had noticed after the second dosing. The blood gave him clarity of mind and a drive he normally lacked. It was kind of like Adderall without the side effects.

Sneaking out around midnight, Norman biked to a nearby butcher he knew of. He had been to the place a handful of times when he used to help the scavengers. It was where they took their kills when they managed to kill an animal while out and about. The place took in any meat and processed it for the grocery stores in the area. This place and others like it were the sources of the mystery meat packages that wound up on store shelves.

Norman rode around back and set his bike behind a dumpster. After ensuring there was nobody around, Norman donned his face mask and placed a clothespin on his nose.

The place didn’t smell all that bad but Norman was about to go rooting around in their garbage, Not something he would likely enjoy.

White light flickered on from the small flashlight Norman had and he cast it toward the dumpster. The stupid flashlight flickered a few times but it remained on. Norman frowned at that but kept going.

He pushed the bin lid up a bit too hard and it flipped back and banged loudly against the back of the bin. Norman winced at the loud noise and glanced around. He didn’t see any new lights coming on so he kept going.

What surprised him was that there wasn’t much in the way of garbage in the bin. At least he didn’t have to rip open and dig through garbage bags to find out what was on the inside. Everything was just loosely tossed into the bin. He used a stick he found nearby to push stuff around but all he was coming up with was some torn butcher paper, a bit of blood, that had browned and dried, and a few scraps of fat.

Where the hell was the rest of the animals? The excess fat, the hooves and feet, and the organs?

Norman’s questions were interrupted by a door slamming open.

“Who the hell is out there!” a man’s voice demanded from the backdoor of the butcher’s shop.

Norman flicked his light off and ran for his bike.

“I told you fuckers that if I found you rooting through our trash again, you were getting a beating.”

Norman heard fast-approaching footsteps on the gravel parking lot as he leap onto the bike and started pedaling for his life.

A baseball bat whizzed past Norman’s head, barely missing him as he raced past the angry butcher.

“You homeless fucks go find a job. I catch you around here again, and it’ll be the last time, you hear me!”

The man’s screams chased Norman down the street as he rode out of sight. At least it seemed that the man didn’t know who he was. Although being mistaken for a homeless person was a blow to his ego.

Not that Norman could blame the owner for thinking that. Norman was looking rather haggard lately and digging through trash certainly didn’t help his image. Norman wasn’t done with the place though, he needed to figure out where they kept their excess bones.

In the light of day, the butcher’s yard was vastly different than in the night. For one it was bustling with people coming and going. Horse-drawn wagons and even some people-powered ones would drop off animals to be processed. Norman even saw a semi pull up at one point, only for a group of men to come out the back of the building with the pelts of the skinned animals. The pelts were loaded into the truck and it left.

Norman slapped himself for being stupid, of course, they would try and find a way to utilize every bit of the animal as possible. He vaguely recalled that bones were used to make glue and gelatin. The question was, where?

It took most of the day but eventually, another truck pulled into the yard. This one was more a dump truck than a semi, but Norman was still surprised to see it operating. Working trucks were far rarer than even cars nowadays as diesel was expensive and hard to come by.

Norman hadn’t seen any trucks in months, then again he didn’t frequent the manufacturing side of town.

As Norman watched, carts full of bones were lifted over the side of the truck and dumped inside with a bone-chilling rattle that Norman could hear and almost feel from his hiding spot.

Before the truck was filled up, Norman got back on his bike and started riding in the direction it had come from. There was no way Norman could keep up with the truck but maybe if he got lucky its destination wouldn’t be too far away.

Norman’s luck was not that good. While the truck did indeed go back the way it came, Norman quickly lost sight of it.

It took Norman four full days to track the truck back to its endpoint. It was another manufacturing plant near the opposite end of the manufacturing area of town. This was where the tannery was located and the smell was awful.

It made sense to have a place that manufactured glue near a place that made leather goods. Norman was just glad it wasn’t near his house.

The dump truck emptied the bones into a large pit. Norman had to sneak to a nearby window to see what happened with the bones once they made it inside. Men on the far side of this pit collected the bones and tossed them into a large boiling pot of water.

That explained the steam rising out of the large chimney stacks on the roof.

After some time, other men with large poles would scrape off all the gunk that floated to the top. Then the cleaned bones would be removed from the water and tossed into a cart, and once it was full it was rolled into another area of the building that Norman couldn’t see.

But that didn’t matter, Norman had seen what he needed to see. He jumped down from the window, he had been spying through and got back on his bike.

He needed to go home and get the things he needed before it got too dark.

The way Norman saw it he had two options. The first and arguably the fastest way to acquire the bones was to just snatch the bones from the pit and ride off. But as quickly as those men were going through those bones, he wasn’t sure there would be any left by the time he arrived tonight. That meant going for the cleaned bones inside the building.

That should be easy enough. Norman didn’t see any sort of gate or door that closed off the pit that lead inside so he could easily get in. He would have to hope their secondary processing was slower or this whole trip could be a bust. Norman doubted he could use glue or gelatin for his armor but it might be an interesting test for a later date.

Norman also thought about asking Toby for help, since his van would hold significantly more bones than the little wagon Norman had, but he quickly dismissed that idea.

Norman wanted to keep his spells close to the chest for now. And while Toby did apologize to Norman, the fact that Toby betrayed him so readily still sat badly with Norman. Once bitten, twice shy as they say. Norman would remain friends with the man, but it didn’t mean he trusted him anymore. It would take time and effort for Toby to rebuild that lost trust.