Chapter 206: The Buildings of Ghosts
She was young, shorter than average, with dark eyes that were moving very quickly between all the things that had suddenly appeared around her, and her bewilderment was the genuine and total kind of someone whose environment had just changed dramatically without warning.
Neil opened his status panel.
『 [Lord Title]: Dead Man Walking
[Name]: Neil Yates
[Race]: Phantom (3rd Phase)
[Rank]: 3rd Origin
[Class]: Mythic
[Talent]: 3rd tier (31 percent)
[Domain Rank]: 2nd Order Mythic Class
[Familiar]: Magnar
[Soul Space]: Phantom’s Imprint, Soul Terror
[Sub Lord]: Jane Yates
[Sub Lord Skill]: The Building of Ghosts
[Skills]: (Aquamorph)
[Skill Description]: The ability to synthesize, manipulate, and create various chemicals, toxins, and fluids at will.
This skill allows the user to interact with their environment at the atomic level, allowing them to change the properties of matter to a certain extent.
{Extension}:
(SlimeMorph)
[Skill Description]: This extension of Aquamorph allows the user to convert any created fluid into an inanimate slime which follows all commands, gaining a certain amount of intelligence. Slimes inherit the viscosity, density, and traits of the parent fluid, gaining unique properties depending on what the user forms.
(Analyzer)
[Skill Description]: The ability to examine and understand situations or fights in detail and do better next time.
(Sonic)
[Skill Description]: A powerful mental and physical skill that releases powerful sonic attacks twice your strength level. It can stun enemies with a big power difference. Enemies with weaker mental defences than the user could be killed instantly.
[Imprints]: (Agility Lock Imprint)
[Gene Points]:
(Bronze): 1000/1000
(Silver): 500/500
(Gold): 100/100
(Diamond): 5/5
(Mythic): 2/2
』
Neil looked at it for a long moment.
Sub Lord: Jane Yates.
He had not asked her about the surname. He had looked at it and had chosen not to ask, because the question had several possible answers and none of them were things he was ready to receive or respond to right now, and there were more immediate things to address.
He closed the panel.
"Your surname." He said.
Jane looked at him.
"It changed in the panel." He said.
She was quiet for a moment, and her expression did something brief and controlled.
"The domain system must have registered sub-lord under the primary lord’s name, I wonder how that changed."
She made an unbelievable excuse, evenly and without making anything more of it. "Anyway I should call you lord now hehe."
Neil just shook his head and moved on.
"Tell me about the Building of Ghosts." He said.
Something in Jane’s expression settled into the easier quality she had when the topic was practical rather than personal.
"It creates a ghost." She said. "One per day. Each ghost functions as a substitute, so when I would otherwise die, the ghost takes my place in that moment and I am relocated to a random nearby location." She paused. "The ghosts accumulate if they are not used. I currently have five."
Neil thought about this.
A skill that produced an extra life every day. That accumulated if unused. That activated automatically in the critical moment without requiring a decision or a skill activation in a situation where decision-making was usually not available.
He thought about Analyzer, which gave him the same category of benefit but in a different form, the ability to start over with the knowledge of what had gone wrong. The Building of Ghosts gave Jane, and now through the sub-lord connection gave him access to, a version of the same principle expressed physically rather than informationally.
"How many can accumulate." He said.
"I do not know the upper limit." She said. "I have never let them accumulate beyond ten or so before something happened that used several of them."
Neil nodded slowly.
He checked internally whether the sub-lord skill connection allowed him to generate an additional ghost through his own domain’s energy, which was not something he had tested and was not something the skill description had specified, and the answer came back as yes, a faint additional ghost appearing in the count alongside the five Jane had accumulated.
Six ghosts currently available.
And one more arriving tomorrow, and the day after.
"Good skill." He said, which was an understatement he did not bother to correct because the accurate version would have taken longer to express.
Jane’s expression did the small thing it did when she was pleased about something and was not going to make a statement out of it.
They walked through the combined domain gate together and Neil looked at the interior, at the new configuration of it with Jane’s buildings now sitting in the expanded space, and called out to whoever was nearby.
Bob appeared from around the side of the main building immediately, because Bob was always nearby and had apparently been watching the whole merger from a position of what he imagined was tactical observation but was actually just standing in the open air with his arms folded.
"So." Bob said. "That happened."
"That happened." Neil confirmed. "The domain merged. Jane is a sub-lord now. Her domain is part of ours."
Bob looked at the new buildings, then at Jane, then back at Neil with the expression of someone processing multiple things in sequence.
"Right." He said. "Good. More people. Rob will want to know about the structural changes to the wall section."
"Tell him." Neil said.
Rob appeared approximately four seconds later, which suggested he had also been watching from a position of tactical observation nearby, and looked at the wall section with the critical eye of someone who cared deeply about wall integrity and needed to verify that the domain merger had not compromised anything important.
He walked the length of the joined section, pressed his hand against the wood at two points, and came back with an expression of cautious approval.
"Held properly." He said. "Skill did it clean. No structural weakness."
"Good." Neil said.
Mob appeared from the direction of the storage building and looked at Jane, then at Neil, then at the new buildings, and said nothing for a moment, smiling.
"Bigger domain." He said finally.
"Yes." Neil agreed.
"Good." Mob said, with the comprehensive satisfaction of someone for whom bigger was a value in itself, and went back toward storage.
Fay came out of the cooking area and stopped when she saw Jane standing in the interior of the domain rather than outside it, and her expression went immediately to the warm and uncomplicated welcome that Fay produced for anyone who was clearly going to be here regularly.
"Are you staying?" She asked Jane directly.
"Yes." Jane said, with the same quiet certainty she had used with Neil.
"Good." Fay said. "I will make more tonight." She glanced at Neil. "You look better than yesterday. Less like something bad happened."
"Something good happened." Neil said.
Fay nodded, satisfied by this, and went back to her preparation.
Jane’s subject, the young woman who had been standing inside the merged domain looking bewildered, had apparently recovered enough of her equilibrium to begin moving, and she came through the combined space with the careful step of someone navigating new territory.
She was looking at everything with those quick dark eyes, taking inventory of the domain’s population with an attention that was sharp beneath the uncertainty.
Jane walked over to her and brought her back toward where Neil was standing.
"This is Rin." Jane said simply.
Rin looked at Neil with the expression of someone meeting a person they have heard a great deal about and are now calibrating expectations against reality.
She was younger than Jane, lighter in her build, with the particular quality of stillness that people had when they were doing most of their processing internally rather than externally.
Her ability, which Jane had mentioned before, was the capacity to temporarily use another person’s skill through physical contact, which was the kind of talent that could be extraordinarily useful in the right circumstances and required an enormous amount of trust to deploy practically.
"Welcome to the Graveyard." Neil said.
Rin gave him a nod that was respectful without being performative, and then her attention went to the rest of the domain, moving across the population of it with those quick eyes.
She found Leon.
Leon was at his post near the inner barrier in the position he was always in, upright and attentive and entirely focused on whatever his current assessment of the perimeter required, and he was not looking in Rin’s direction because he was looking in the direction his post required him to look.
Rin stopped moving for a moment.
Her expression did something that she appeared to become aware of after it had already happened, a slight warmth in it that she adjusted back to neutral with the speed of someone who had practice at that particular adjustment.
She continued her survey of the domain with the same quick eyes, but she returned to the direction of Leon’s post twice more in the following few minutes without appearing to intend to.
Neil noticed this but said nothing, because it was not his business and he had enough things that were his business.
Ray appeared from somewhere near the outer boundary, where he had been doing something with the supply inventory that Fay had asked him to do earlier, and he gave Neil a nod that welcomed him back without requiring words, and gave Rin a nod that welcomed her to the domain with the same economy of expression.
Rin nodded back, and then her eyes went to the elven archers on the perimeter rotation, whose existence she appeared to find interesting on multiple levels given her ability, and then to Bob and Rob, whose appearance she had clearly not been prepared for and was now recalibrating around.
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