It's spring the roads are still muddy and deathly difficult to traverse...
I haven't seen large animals in the forest... I just get mice, and occasional cat, the village had cats already before the plague though.
The rats are breeding, scary fast. I think there's about 6000 and 2000 of them are my corpses. I have 3 cat corpses and 15 human corpses and 4 oxen. The oxen were like large machines that could pull immense weights.
The corpses seem to remember my instructions and after they've been doing something they get better at it and remember the lessons from the last try. I don't think they understand words, just my intentions through our shared connection.
Managed to build a water mill, I stopped getting sick from eating rotten and contaminated food... Seems I need stronger illnesses... The concentration of death within the village walls is so thick it's almost tangible and sticks to the body. It must be the contamination and the dead corpses moving around. Any living being dies within 6 hours of getting in here. I've become immune I guess without my powers I would be dead by now.
I moved the cemetery to inside the village walls, dug out the bodies which were basically bones and dried flesh, are made of wood the stones are not enough to build the walls yet, I'll have to search for it. All living animals in the village are dieing, including the rats. I feel my mana increasing exponentially everyday. I'm getting stronger and faster. Using dark mana heals me quickly and I can use mana to gain a boost in strength and I discovered injecting it into living animals puts them to sleep and if I saturate them with it they die and get raised as my corpse. Which makes them stronger and smarter corpses.
I've cut down more forest and got the fields inside the village, they aren't super big and they take up as much space as the houses and cemetery put together. The corpses work all day and night they don't get frozen by the cold...
I've gotten the black Smith corpses to make weapons and tools, the Cooper corpses to make barrels and other things like baths and buckets, herbalists to gather and package surrounding herbs. Farmer corpses to farm. I've introduced two water mills to grind food and one for the black smiths use. The village was busy and good for me, the dark mana concentration nourished the corpses, I didn't need to refill them to keep the corpses in working condition.
While corpses kept busy all day and night, the village seemed empty and the village smelt of decay and rot and every now and again my rats would bring me rats to raise and squirrels and birds...
The village was developing nicely, I just need to find iron and stone to truly up lift my village. My survivability was now at a level of you had to destroy a strong wooden wall, fight a whole village of tireless dead and fight the hard to kill self healing, dark mana container me, Elian has a chance to thrive now.