Chapter 176: Back to the Graveyard
The graveyard greeted him with silence.
Darion stepped through the old iron gate and paused for a moment, allowing his eyes to wander across the rows of tombstones stretching before him.
Some stood straight despite how long they’d been there. Others leaned slightly to one side. Grass had grown between many of them, and small patches of wildflowers had taken root where no one had bothered to clear them away.
He breathed in slowly and released the air through his nose.
It had been a long time since he had come here. How long exactly? Darion wasn’t entirely sure. A week perhaps. Maybe more. Time had blurred lately with everything happening: the battles, the negotiations, the endless planning. But standing here now, surrounded by silence and old stone, it felt like longer.
Darion smiled faintly.
"Well," he muttered.
His neck cracked softly as he rolled his shoulders.
"Time to work."
Darion reached into his inventory and summoned his undead knights.
They materialized out of nowhere, green light flickering briefly before fading, leaving twenty sets of hollow eyes standing in neat rows before him. The knights stood silently, then they bowed slightly, a gesture of acknowledgment, ready to serve.
Darion looked them over. Enough to do the work he needed.
"Find shovels," he instructed. "Then start unearthing corpses."
The undead turned and moved toward the graves. They found shovels scattered around, they were littered all over the place. There wasn’t even a tool shed. You could just find them lying on the ground, left behind by whoever had last been here, abandoned like everything else in this forgotten place.
The shovels were old and weathered, rusted in some spots, the wooden handles darkened and cracked in places.
Darion didn’t mind. They would do the job. He had been to this graveyard many times and had used these same shovels before, all rusty and looking like they would break any moment. Somehow, they never did. They held together just long enough to finish the work.
They’ll do, he decided.
He pointed toward the eastern section of the graveyard. "Focus on the newer graves. The ones closest to the back wall. Fresher corpses are more useful."
The undead understood. They didn’t nod or speak, they simply moved in that direction, their movements silent, their shovels held loosely at their sides.
Darion had learned about corpse ranks during his first visit, when his system had shown him the categories. Flesh. Fleshbone. Bone. Rust. Decaying. Rotten.
At the time, he hadn’t really put much thought into it. He had noticed them, but he didn’t really understand what they meant. A corpse was a corpse. But now, after everything he had been through, he realized something important. Rotten and Decaying corpses were more likely to fall apart in battle. Their bodies were weaker and their bones more brittle. If he raised them, they would fight, but they wouldn’t fight too well. They would break easily. They would collapse easily too.
That was why, in some battles he had fought with his undead, he noticed that the Decaying and Rotten ranked ones fell faster. They couldn’t take the same punishment as the fresher ones.
So he needed better corpses. Fresher ones. The kind that could take a hit and keep moving.
He would avoid the old graves. Those were too old. The bodies beneath them would be nothing but dust and brittle bone. Instead, he directed his undead toward the newer section, where the graves were more recent, where the bodies still had substance.
The undead began digging. Shovels bit into the earth. Soil flew through the air. The graveyard, which had been silent since his last visit, now echoed with the steady rhythm of excavation.
Darion did the math in his head. Twenty undead. If each of them dug six graves, by the end of the session they would have unearthed one hundred and twenty corpses. That was almost enough to fill his knight inventory, not quite, he still had room for ten more.
At that pace, the work would be fast. He might end up finishing in less than an hour and ride back to the castle with a full inventory and over a hundred new soldiers waiting to serve.
Darion sat on a nearby tombstone lightly, not putting all his weight on it. He didn’t want to knock it over, the old stones were fragile.
He watched his undead work, their shovels rising and falling in steady rhythm, their movements synchronized without any need for commands.
He remembered something. The commander. The one whose grave he had tried to open during one of his visits, back when his rank was too low: still at Novice.
His system had rejected the corpse, told him he wasn’t powerful enough to revive someone of that rank. He had been frustrated then, in a way. He had wanted that commander. But he had just let it go and seemingly forgot about it. His wolf being so powerful had made him forget he still needed powerful knights.
Now, he was a higher rank. Now, he had more power, more experience, more understanding of how his necromancy worked. It was time to try again.
Identifying the grave was simple. It had a tombstone, and a name was written on it. He remembered exactly where it was, near the center of the graveyard, marked by a stone that was larger than the others, carved with letters that were still legible despite the years. He would have his undead dig that one separately. He would supervise it personally.
If it worked, he would have a commander among his forces. Someone who had led knights in life and would probably lead them in death.
Also, the commander had been large and strong before he died. Darion had learned that from the corpse, the size of the grave, the way the bones felt when he had tried to reach for them before. This was not a small man. This was someone who had been built for battle.
The shovels continued digging. The pile of earth grew larger. The morning sun climbed higher in the sky.
It was full afternoon.
Darion watched and waited. The work had begun.
