Sylver Seeker

Chapter 282: No Rush

Sylver Seeker Book 7

Chapter 16 (282) - No Rush

The wind, hailstones, snow, and rain had all stopped, the clouds above had thinned enough for sunlight to shine through, and there was such an enormous amount of snow and ice between the float-boat and the surface, that it was utterly pitch black.

Digging through the compressed snow was simple, and even for the large volume the float-boat required, it took Sylver and Mora working together less than an hour to clear it.

Initially they just stored all the snow in [Still Water] and [Bound Bones] since it required less mana. But after a point Sylver got the idea to use [Novice Chloromancy] and a slight bit of [Mutating Override] to make a plant that turned water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then burned the two gasses inside itself, which made it hot, which melted more snow, which the plant used to grow and get hot, and so on and so forth until only the shiny ice ceiling remained.

The shiny, mirror smooth, ice ceiling.

Again, he’d seen stranger things naturally happen in Eira, but if he hadn’t personally observed the water fall from the sky, and freeze into ice, he would have assumed this was a giant slab of glass someone had placed on top of the snow.

Abyss magic cut through it like butter, but it didn’t melt when Sylver used heat, bent his dagger when he thought he could create a crack with enough force, and even when Mora tried it seriously, the most she could manage was a thin scratch.

There were holes and tunnels where the shades had dug through what had back then been wet snow, but because of the rain flow down them the tunnels were tiny, even the newborns on the float-boat wouldn’t be able to fit through them, only Sylver, Mora, and the shades could pass, even Nels’ head on its own was too wide to get through.

Some of the more keen eyed observers aboard the float-boat saw that something wasn’t right, but so as to not send everyone into a panic, they stayed quiet for the moment and just continued to watch Sylver slam his head against the almost indestructible ice.He only saw it when Nels suggested testing if it would melt with regular fire from a non-magical torch. There was a repeating five sided pattern inside the almost 150 meters worth of ice.

It was also apparently a strange shade of blue, it looked normal to Sylver and Mora, but Nels said the colour she could see looked off to her.

After three hours of nothing to show for it, Sylver broke the news to Kalok, Allson, and the woman with glasses he still didn’t know the name of, and all three did their best to hide their reactions, but they were unmistakably spooked.

Leaving the float-boat aside, the people were trapped.

The easy solution was to have everyone get inside Sylver’s [Still Water], and Sylver would let them out on the ice’s surface.

Even as he explained it, he knew nobody would agree to it, it was an insane proposition if all of them had known him for years.

Nobody said it out loud, but there was nothing to stop him from just taking all of them with him, to sacrifice to demons or whatever it is people imagined necromancers did, obviously Sylver had no intention or reason to do that. On top of that Kalok had told Merol they were on their way, so if every single person disappeared and Sylver was the only survivor, they’d hang him and burn his body just to be safe.

But he didn’t take the distrust personally, he looked the way he did, and was a mage that needed dead bodies to practice his craft, plus nobody had seen his status, and they only had his word that he was who he said he was.

The shades Spring had sent out to map out the ice sheet returned and after organizing their various mental drawings, Spring used [Black Mass] to create a three dimensional map on the table.

The ice reached as far as the shades could travel in two hours in one direction, plus the land they could see when they materialized on the surface.

There was a thin river flowing along the surface of the ice, it was cutting a line into it, but very slowly. It must have been flowing all night and all day, and the deepest part of the river was barely knee deep.

Aside from that, the rest of the land/ice was flat, hills and valleys were all flattened out into barely visible bumps on the ice, there wasn’t a single crack that the shades could find, and the few living creatures they encountered, they encountered by materialising on the surface, and pressing their ears down on the ice.

The shades couldn’t replicate the sound, and didn’t describe it very well, but Sylver had to guess every living creature and monster in the area was trapped underneath the ice and snow the exact same way Sylver and the float-boat were.

“We should have stayed in Velrod,” Allson mumbled in the silence that followed Spring laying out everything he and Sylver had gathered since the weather improved and they started digging their way out.

As they were talking Lostal very suddenly stood up straight and gave Sylver a frightened look.

Sylver saw Nels react to Lostal a few seconds after that, and about a minute later, during which Nels stared at him as if she was trying to transmit her thoughts into his head, Sylver realized there was a fairly reasonable explanation for the storm, the sudden snow, and the impenetrable ice.

The hollow vault, or rather, the hollow vaults, inside the Moaning Heights had all broken open, or if they weren’t all all the way open, they had at the very least leaked their oxygen rich extremely humid air out into the world.

How that resulted in unbreakable ice, Sylver wasn’t sure, but if it wasn’t possible through a natural chemical and pressure reaction, then it was either a spell, or the wet air itself was enchanted.

Having said all that, it wasn’t as if knowing where the ice came from helped break it, what Sylver needed was to know how it was made.

But the fact that the more he thought about the where the more the bits floating around in him that used to be a digestive organ made their fragmented presence known.

Since they were moving only as fast as the float-boat, if the hollow-vaults broke open shortly after Sylver left, they would have caught up with him in a few hours. Assuming they were after him in the first place, and hadn’t just wandered off elsewhere.

Could a cloud of hot wet air move faster than the “people” wearing masks could move? Presumably not, so did they break out last night and simply weren’t interested in catching Sylver or Nels, or didn’t have a way to track them and went in the wrong direction?

Then again, eight hollow vaults, if they opened at the same time, the sheer volume of air would mean it was under extreme pressure near the opening, it could have been pushed and traveled several hundred kilometers in a few minutes.

Then again… The Moaning Heights didn’t have just 1 peak, for all they knew all the other peaks had hollow-vaults inside them too, and with the piece of babel, and the dungeon, who’s to say there wasn’t some sort of chain reaction that made everything fall apart like a house of cards?

Sylver saw that Kalok and Allson were both looking at him, he prodded Spring, and he told him that Kalok had asked him if he had any ideas.

“Not right now… We could melt the snow to create a cup shaped seal around us, create a bunch of air pressure and hope that the ice above would break open since the ice around us would be held in place by the snow,” Sylver said, he raised his hand as Allson was about to interrupt him, “but everyone in here would likely die from the pressure, so it isn’t an option,” Sylver finished.

Allson closed his mouth that’d he’d opened.

“How long would it take to slice it into cubes with your magic?” Nels asked.

“If we’re talking a tunnel for everyone to squeeze through, maybe a year if I’m not doing anything else?” Sylver offered.

“So we’re stuck here?” Kalok asked.

“Is the ice on the surface unbreakable?” Allson asked.

“We’re not actually stuck, and yes, one of the first things I checked,” Sylver said.

“If it’s regular ice, the layers that formed last and were under the least pressure should be weaker. And if the suns are out, they should have warmed up, or melted,” Allson said.

“What do you mean we’re not stuck?” Kalok asked.

“It’s not regular ice then. And we can all be out of here in an hour or so if we use my perk,” Sylver answered.

It would take more than an hour, one living person at a time, high mana cost to get them into [Still Water] and high mana cost to get them out, the perk didn’t use his mana channels directly and siphoned mana directly from his core, but moving that much mana around would tire anyone out, Sylver included. Kalok, and the rest, pretended he hadn’t mentioned his perk.

“What about holes? Or an area where the ice is thinner?” Allson asked.

“My guys searched far and wide, no holes, and the nearest “thin” spot is eight kilometers away. But even the thin spot is thin, relatively speaking, it’s still not thin for me to make a person sized tunnel in under a year,” Sylver said.

Nels spoke with such a subtle grin in her voice that only Sylver heard it when she spoke in an otherwise deadpan voice and equally deadpan expression.

“Have you tried searching high, and then searching low?” Nels asked.

“I’ll get right on that… Wait here a second, I’m going to try something,” Sylver said.

He left Spring behind to carry Nels if she decided to leave, and used [Fog Form] to materialize on the [Black Mass] platform he’d glued to the ice ceiling when he asked a few of the miners to take a crack at the ice.

He chose the smallest fin from the [Little King]’s corpse, used [Black Mass] to provide it a temporary handle, and was glad he chose the smallest fin, because its tip snapped off the instant he tried to use it to cut the ice. It didn’t even scratch it.

He wanted to throw it against the ice so the fin would shatter, but talked himself out of it, and just put it back into the [Still Water], next to the other fins sitting around on a giant platform made of snow.

Sylver materialised in the exact spot he’d been in when he left.

“May I ask something?” Nels asked towards Allson.

Allson had no way of knowing this but the fact that Nels was using her “girly” voice for lack of a better word meant she was about to be unreasonable.

“Of course,” Allson said.

“How does this float-boat float?” Nels asked.

Allson looked at her like it was a trick question.

“Why do you ask?” Allson asked.

“It doesn’t float on a cushion of air, it doesn’t negate gravity, it doesn’t use downwards facing propulsion, how does the float-boat float?” Nels asked.

“Why?” Allson asked.

“Because if it uses extremely long tracks in a separate dimension, we may be able to brace the float-boat against the ice, and use the tracks to compress the snow in front of it to make a tunnel for the whole thing underneath the ice sheet,” Nels explained.

Allson just looked at her.

Sylver also looked at her, but without the hostile confusion Allson was looking at her with, Sylver was looking at her with regular, friendly, confusion.

Nels’ mistake was simplifying what she meant to say to the point where even Sylver didn’t get it. But once it clicked what she was talking about, he understood that there was no way she would be able to use any of the technical terms she knew since it was very unlikely that Allson knew those terms under those names.

Tracks was the wrong word to use, although Sylver could see the logic behind using that word, wings would have gotten the point across better, maybe even sails, or parachutes, then again it was more to do with fluids rather than gasses, so tracks wasn’t too far off…

Allson just looked at her, as if he couldn’t decide whether he was the idiot or she was, and with Nels completely neutral and unreadable to mortals’ expression, from Allson’s point of view she likely looked like an undeservingly smug mage talking down to a wizard.

Sylver broke what was building up to be a tense silence.

“The float-boat puts all of its weight onto long planks in a separate dimension, right? Like a water strider that slides on water’s surface tension. You can alter the balance so the weight comes out in a straight line, it’ll push the snow down and make a gap for the float-boat to float through,” Sylver offered.

Now Sylver had done it too, he’d dumbed it down too much, and he’d also called Allson’s prized invention a “bug.”

But without getting into the technical specifics of it, how else could he describe the process through which a thing that had weight could exist in the realm without its weight affecting anything?

The reason the carts Manoc had initially made flew up into the air was that they were submerged under invisible water, like an inflated ball being pushed down, and when too much weight was removed from the carts, the inflated ball slipped out of the person’s grip and exploded out of the water.

Credit where credit was due, making something like that on a small scale was dead simple, it was like skipping a rock, elves used the principle for children’s toys, but scaling it up required a mastery that very few people in the entire history of Eira possessed.

Anything bigger than… Sylver didn’t know the exact size, he just knew the throne he once wanted to be made to float using the same magic splintered into pieces when the elf he asked to do it for him attempted it.

And this “float-boat” was a great deal bigger than a throne.

Allson’s face lit up as he figured out what Nels was talking about, and how her solution would work, then it dimmed, as he tried to figure out how someone could possibly know about this “ground breaking” technology, and then it lit up again, as he assumed Nels had lived among elves, or he decided not to question it.

Nels did her best to appear as non-threatening as she could manage, which wasn’t that difficult since she was just a woman’s decapitated head sitting on a pillow.

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“I need to check something,” Allson mumbled, as he pushed his way past Lostal who was standing in the doorway, and disappeared down the long winding corridor.

“I don’t understand,” Kalok said.

“The important thing is that it will work,” Sylver said.

“The boat will make its own tunnel in the snow, and the dead wolves will pull it to Merol,” Nels tried to explain.

“Undead wolves,” Sylver corrected.

“How?” Kalok asked.

“Necromancy,” Sylver answered.

“The tunnel part,” Kalok said.

“In essence, it’s a lot of fancy words for what is basically gravity magic,” Sylver said.

Kalok was too busy looking at Sylver’s face to see Nels roll her eyes.

“Is it dangerous?” Kalok asked.

Sylver gestured towards Nels, she straightened her face just in time.

“Only if it’s done wrong. It’ll either break through the ice ceiling, push the ice upwards, or it’ll make a tunnel. The float-boat itself will be acting like a fulcrum, but very little actual force will be exerted onto it,” Nels explained.

Allson half walked, half crawled, back into the room with a large leather bound book in his hands, it was as tall as his torso was, the edges were stained black and it brought with it the smell of an old oil lantern.

He walked over to Nels and if Kalok hadn’t moved out of the way he would have been bumped aside by the tall wizard. Allson opened the giant book at the page he’d pushed his thumb into to bookmark it, and held it up and open so Nels could see it.

“The lambda in the bottom left should be negative, but otherwise looks good,” Nels said, barely an eye blink after glancing at the page.

Allson angled the giant book so he could look, and a good ten seconds of silence later he pulled it away from Nels’ face, and once again ran out of the room.

“What do we do if the ice is like this all the way to Merol?” Kalok asked after a few moments to gather his thoughts.

“It depends if Merol is above or below the ice. If it’s below, then it’s a separate issue that I’m sure one of their wizards or mages will be able to figure out. If it’s above the ice, one of their wizards or mages will make a small portal for everyone to walk through,” Sylver answered.

He could see Kalok wanted to ask “and then what?” but he could tell by Sylver’s relaxed and neutral face and tone of voice, the answer he would get would be some variation of “not my problem.”

It was possible the whole entirety of Eira had been covered and sealed inside the ice. That had never happened before, but a lot of things that had never happened before, happened in the last couple months.

Sylver for his part saw no purpose in trying to guess what the future held, if the entire realm was sealed in ice he would work around it, and if this was local, then Arda and Tuli were both far away and it wasn’t his problem.

###

Putting Nels’ theory into practice took over two days.

The float-boat had to be lowered onto the ground, everyone had to disembark while Allson dismantled it and put it back together, and although it only took Nels a few minutes to do all the calculations Allson needed to figure out the adjustments he needed to make, it took Allson well over a day to dial everything in properly.

Then everyone had to get back on board, the modified float-boat took what felt like an eternity to build up the spell layers again to float up into the ice, and then Allson decided he was no longer certain of Nels’ math, and quizzed her on every little matrix and basic arithmetic, right up until it was morning again.

During the two days Sylver sent shades out through the snow to scout ahead, and collected enough frozen blood in his [Still Water] storage to build a mansion out of.

After building the aforementioned red crystal mansion, he used a mixture of [White Haired Ape] parts, mixed with some of Mora’s string, and attached two small razor sharp fin like blades he got from the [Little King] to create a meat puppet he was surprised to find he was genuinely pleased with.

It looked slightly crab-like because of the thin limbs, it had twelve of them, not counting the four stubby legs so it was stable, it had an egg shaped body to fit all the parts it needed to be self-sustaining, and between the hand carved claws, scissors, pliers and scalpes it was a walking all in one tool to use for dismantling dead bodies, and for performing surgery.

Aside from that, he also picked a moment when he felt the least irritated, and looked through his choice of perks for reaching level 80 in [Swamp Lord] and his choice of effects for all of his skills except for [Undead Mastery] and [Mutating Override].

In terms of perks, now that he wasn’t furious and actually properly looking at them, there were genuinely so many good ones he struggled to make a choice without feeling like he was fucking himself over by not picking a differnet one.

[Heart Of The Swamp] in effect removed the requirement of physically being in a swamp, any piece of land or body of water Sylver made contact with would be considered to be swamp land and swamp water as far as the rest of his perks were concerned.

Which would have been fantastic, if he’d picked so much as a single perk that required him to be in a swamp. But now that Sylver was looking at it, with the fact that he would only get 3 more perks after this in mind, there was no guarantee something as good or better than a universal 10% increase like [Shawl Of The Swamp] would show up.

It almost felt like a trick, like it was mocking him for choosing wrong so many times. If he had just accepted perks that required him to be in a swamp, he could have-it didn’t matter, he couldn’t have predicted this.

[Black Thumb]’s presence felt like a similar mockery, if he’d picked it instead of [Still Water] he would have had access to 4th tier chloromancy at this moment.

[Fruit Of The Rotting Tree] would be a perfect fit for [Still Water], it turned dead bodies into fruit that provided temporary attribute boosts, it was in effect a major upgrade to [Corpse Blossom]… But, as the fight with the [Little King] showed, it wasn’t the fights Sylver had time to think through and prepare for that he needed help with, it was the fights that came out of nowhere, and caught him as off guard as he could be caught.

But there was nothing similar to [Mage Cap], or anything with a direct offensive or defensive effect, which is what Sylver wanted right now, if not what he needed in the grand scheme of things.

The one Sylver liked the most was called [Corpse Candle], it produced either blue fire that stole heat from whatever it burned, or a green fire that caused a wet rotting acid like slime to spread to everything living.

But he could already make fire, and as nice as it would be to have something to layer up with [Draining Blight] he decided to wait until something that would be useful in a one on one fight against an opponent that was too powerful for his regular skills, perks, traits, and magic showed up.

On the topic of skills, [Mirage] felt almost like an apology.

Like the skill had seen Sylver try to use it against the [Little King] and was embarrassed by how useless it ended up being.

[Skill: Mirage (V) [A]]

Skill level can be raised by using illusion magic.

I – Create visual and auditory illusions.

II – Create translucent illusions.

III – Cost of illusion magic decreased by 10%

IV - Deceive C rank or lower sensory skills/perks/traits by increasing the amount of MP per illusion to 1,000%.

V – Create solid illusions.

VI - Create a perfect mirror copy of a creature or object.

*Quality of illusions dependent on caster’s ability and understanding.

He partially regretted trying it out right there and then, because in his head he thought it just meant appearance, but no, the mirror copy Sylver created of himself, felt like it had his soul.

It was fucking mortifying, Mora instantly woke up from the corner she had been sleeping in and nearly attacked the thing before Sylver had a chance to explain to her what it was.

It was solid to the touch too, its eyes felt wet when he touched it with his finger, its skin even reacted to his fingernail slicing through it the way Sylver’s skin would have.

But once he cut deeper it became obvious it was an illusion, it wasn’t empty on the inside like a bottle, it sort of looked like it was made of clay, and that the colours on the outside had bled down into the clay, like a boiled egg dipped in dye.

Similarly, the mirror image’s robe was attached to it like skin and came off in a weird dark clump when Sylver pulled at it hard enough. Mana wise it wasn’t cheap, but it made sense given the quality.

But once it was made every little cut cost as much as bringing a decently powerful shade back to full health.

He couldn’t quite say how it was doing it, but the illusion seemed to know what to do without Sylver thinking or saying it, somewhat like [Lesser Undead Instruction]. It could even speak, but for that Sylver needed to actively focus on it. He wasn’t going to go as far as to say the thing was exactly what he’d been looking for, and been trying to create on his own, but it was really close.

As for making perfect mirror copies of objects, it surprised him there too, he made a copy of a magical lantern, and as far as all the ways he would have thought to check if the lantern was real, it almost passed with flying colours.

Something about it was off to Sylver, he didn’t know what specifically, but he knew that if he had this feeling, there was a none zero chance someone else might notice too.

Although the chance of that happening if he used it in the middle of a fight to create a hundred fake throwing knives to hide the real one was close to zero. Nobody had that much attention to spare in a fight with Sylver to notice something so subtle even he couldn’t fully figure out.

The part he didn’t like was that he couldn’t modify the copies he created, not directly at least, when he made a copy of Mora the copy had all the little marks she had on her feet, same with when he tried to make a copy of Nels, and the head and body parts were all separate from each other, instead of being whole as Sylver intended to summon.

When he tried to make a copy of his old self, Sylver the Lich, it accepted his mana as he fed it, but nothing came out of it. The same was true when he tried to make a copy of Edmund, there was likely a condition he needed to meet to be able to make a copy of something.

Skill: Draining Blight (VIII) [B]]

Skill level can be increased by draining HP, MP and Stamina. (Skill level will only increase if the creature being drained is killed.)

I – Create a cloud that will absorb Health, Mana, and Stamina from the target creature.

II – Absorb through solid materials. *Efficiency decreases by 50% for every centimeter of material.

III – Channel a drained attribute into a willing creature.

IV – Drained creatures can be chained together to increase range and efficiency.

V – Mana can be drained from a spell or object. *Type of magic being drained must be known.

VI – Absorb MP, HP, and Stamina through a mana imbued object.

VII – Create a liquid rain that will absorb HP, MP, and Stamina from the target creature.

VIII - Convert absorbed HP, MP, and Stamina into a single attribute.

*May not work on targets with a high enough resistance.

*May not work on targets without mana channels.

Unlike [Mirage] this didn’t feel like an apology, just a logical continuation. Given how often he fought things with more HP and Stamina than he had mana ten times over, this was perfect. Not as perfect as, say, a dagger or syringe he could use to bypass a creature’s thick armour, but Sylver wasn’t going to complain, this was perfect in the grander scheme of things.

Skill: Black Mass (VI) [D]]

Skill level can be increased through use and conversion.

I – Manipulate biological matter.

II – Empower a creature or item using manipulated biological matter.

III -Increase the range of [Dead Dominion] by 50% for [Black Mass].

IV – [Petty] Souls can be infused.

V – [Common] Souls can be infused.

VI - Can move through shadows.

*Quantity of conversion dependent on biological material.

Simple, and on the surface useless since he already had shades, and [Deadly Darkness], but unlike [Deadly Darkness], [Black Mass] had mass. It could be compressed quite a bit, but at the end of the day it needed to exist somewhere in the physical world.

And now not only could he store a lake’s worth in his own shadow, but he could send a lake’s worth with Aleri if he wanted to, or he could put it in an infused [Black Mass] blob so even if it was damaged it would have its own supply of spare [Black Mass] to replace the lost material with.

And it was just nice that it didn’t need to dig a hole to travel underground anymore, it could just use the shadows like the shades, or fly along with a thrown rock or something similar.

[Arcane Insight] caught Sylver off guard with one of its effects.

It allowed him to see who the target being arcane insighted soul belonged to. As in, which god the target’s soul would end up with. Or possibly demon.

Then it offered to show him which of the seven deadly sins and seven virtues the target most adhered to. There was slightly more normal stuff there, range increases, target’s age, target’s most used skill/perk/trait, there was even that effect both Nels and Edmund had where anyone who tried to look at Sylver’s showed their status to him.

If he could see which gods, or more importantly demons, owned a person’s soul, then hunting demon worshipers down would be a breeze. Then again, if he had access to this, presumably priests did too, so the fact that demon worshipers were still largely at large meant they had a counter to the effect. Still… it was one thing to know which gods people prayed to, it was a whole other to know which god their soul belonged to…

Most used skill/perk/trait looked promising, until Sylver thought about what his most used skill/perk/trait would show up as. Either [Undead Mastery]or [Black Mass], depending on the effect’s definition of “most used”, so chances are Sylver would face a man with a [Swordsman] class with his most used skill showing up as [Advanced Swordsmanship].

It would have helped a bit with the [Little King] if he knew about it’s ranged blade attack from the start, but then again, that’s assuming something like [Poison Production] wouldn’t show up instead.

Obviously given what this skill was he wasn’t looking for something strong, just something that could be useful.

In the end, given that he had been effectively doing this since he saw Edmund do it, Sylver picked the effect that let him see the status of anyone who tried to look at his status. If he was lucky the next time the skill leveled up he’d be able to make them go blind for the attempt.

Skill: Arcane Insight (V) [A]]

Skill level can be increased through successful use.

I – Get relevant detailed information about the target.

II – Get notified if an A rank or lower level [Appraisal]-like skill is being used on you.

III – See the quality of the corpse and soul of a target.

IV – Increase the skill range by 600%.

V - See the status of the user of any A rank or lower level [Appraisail]-like skill being used on you.

[Vigorous Conditioning]’s options sat there with their heads bowed low in shame. And they were right to, because at no point did Sylver feel like his body had been protected against physical damage.

It didn’t even offer him an increase in health regeneration, nothing even remotely close to any other form of healing, and the bell of the ball sat there amidst the other useless effects like it was less than them, like it was an imposter that wasn’t worthy of sitting on the same bench as all the others. He almost walked right past it.

Skill: Vigorous Conditioning (VI) [A]]

Skill level can be increased by receiving damage.

I – Increase resistance against [Positive Energy] by 25%.

II – Increase resistance against [Physical Damage] by 40%.

III – Increase Stamina Regeneration by 50%.

IV – Reduce body weight by 20%.

V – Increase resistance against [Physical Damage] by 25%.

VI - Increase metabolism by 100%.

This was likely all in his head, due to him feeling like he’d achieved something he wasn’t supposed to, but he could have sworn he heard the system’s heart skip a beat as it tried to figure out what it had missed by offering him this specific effect. Like when someone went all in in a game of poker and their opponent started giggling.

It probably offered the effect as a joke, Sylver was “undead,” and therefore didn’t have any life to sustain, therefore he had no metabolism of which to speak of.

But it was wrong to think that, his skin was alive, so were his teeth, one of his hearts was certainly alive, as a whole Sylver was dead, but there were parts and segments of him that were by all definitions “alive.”

More importantly. Much, much, much more importantly, Sylver’s body wasn’t limited to his insides, it wasn’t limited to the confines of his skin.

The poorly slapped together “digestive” sack Sylver’s white haired meat puppet sowed together looked like a cauldron made out of flesh; he didn’t even have enough acid on hand to fill it up properly, however.

When Sylver reached out through the [Still Water] portal and connected two of his blood vessels to the fleshy contraption, there was a long pause, followed by the meager function of the thing doubling without any cost or effort on Sylver's or his meat puppet's part.

The System had fucked up. It didn’t know what it was offering, it didn’t know what Sylver could do with what it had given him for nothing. But it was too late now, it couldn’t take it back.

Granted, he would likely need to be physically present and connected to any flesh, blood, or bone, ritual he wanted to increase the effectiveness of, but within [Still Water] he could plug himself into anything and everything within it, even now the meat puppet was digging through the [White Hair Ape]’s body and was pulling out long strands of veins to chain together to create a network.

He spent the rest of the day grinning to himself, a full spare body usually took several months to fully form, and the system had just accidentally cut that time in half.

When the float-boat was ready, and Allson was happy with the math, and dialed everything in properly, nothing seemed to happen for at least an hour.

Nels had come up with a great metaphor for it, they were going to use the float-boat to splash all the weight onto the snow.

There was a slight hiccup when the tunnel formed in the blink of an eye, and since the ice above was created an air tight lid on everyone, the newly added volume dropped the air pressure underneath the ice and on the float-boat low enough that room temperature water boiled, everyone’s ears popped, and Nels just barely managed to create a barrier around the float-boat in time before people’s lungs started to bleed from being in a vacuum.

Sylver immediately turned water into hydrogen and oxygen, and to make short of a long story full of coughing, screaming, crying, urinating, and vomiting, nobody died, and nobody got seriously hurt, at least not by Sylver’s definition of serious.

With the path cleared, undead wolves started pulling the float-boat forward, and the people on board got to work cleaning up all the vomit, and the various other fluids and solids that hadn’t been hermetically sealed in the boxes they were stored in and had leaked, foamed, exploded, or caught on fire.

Sylver in turn laid back down on the spot he’d spent the last two days laying on, and handed what used to be a lung a few minutes ago to the meat puppet.

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