A month passed.
Eric spent every day buried in books, absorbing anything that resembled knowledge. By now, one thing was certain—this world was not Earth.
The continent was called Eryndor, an ancient landmass so vast that even a lifetime of walking wouldn't take someone from one end to the other. And that was assuming the traveler survived long enough to try.
Because Eryndor was alive in a way Earth never was.
It was crowded with beings Eric had only ever encountered in fiction.
Werewolves. Vampires older than kingdoms. Ghouls that feasted on fresh graves.
Reapers, ogres, trolls, fae with hollow smiles, night-stalkers that lived between shadows, draconids whose roars bent trees, wendigos with empty ribcages, banshees who sang people mad, lichspawn that spread like mold.
And others—creatures whose descriptions felt older than language itself, as if scholars simply gave up halfway through trying to categorize them.
Dense forests hid beasts warped by ancient magic.
Mountain ranges served as nesting grounds for winged nightmares.
Marshlands were said to swallow entire settlements, leaving nothing behind but ripples and silence.
Even humans—supposedly the most numerous race—lived scattered and constantly on edge. Their kingdoms worshipped the Goddess of Creation, believed to have shaped the world and forced order onto chaos.
Because without that order, Eryndor would have eaten them whole.
Their laws were terrifyingly strict: witches and warlocks—humans who touched forbidden magic—were executed the moment they were discovered.
Burning, decapitation, purification rites, drowning in holy water… the method didn't matter. The justice of this world was absolute:
Touch the wrong magic, and you die.
Eric closed another heavy tome, a cloud of dust drifting through the air like ash.
This world was lethal from every direction. Monsters saw him as meat. Humans would kill him instantly if they realized he wasn't breathing. His undead body gave him no safety—only more ways to die, again.
And still… he had found nothing about returning to human form.
Every book repeated the same cold verdict:
Once a body is reforged through necromancy, the transformation is permanent.
No reversal.
No cure.
No miracle.
But he knew better.
The game—the stupid, half-downloaded game—had hinted at a way back to humanity in its prologue. Something had to exist. Somewhere out there, buried under lore or hidden behind monsters and madmen.
And when he found whoever dragged him into this corpse-body?
He was going to kick that bastard with every ounce of undead pettiness he had.
If someone was going to drag him into a nightmare world and shove him into a corpse, they could've at least waited until he finished the damn game.
He barely saw the intro, hit download, and the next second—here he was. Dead, rotting, and stuck in a world crawling with things that made horror movies look friendly.
And then there was Atraxium—the damned mineral he had been mining every day like a half-rotted laborer.
According to the books, Atraxium wasn't just rare. It was precious, a universal catalyst for almost every major form of magic in Eryndor.
Enchantments, alchemy, spellcasting—if it glowed, exploded, summoned, purified, cursed, or transformed, Atraxium was probably involved somewhere in the process.
But the more valuable something was, the more dangerous it tended to be.
Atraxium's danger came from its "potential energy"—a contained force that reacted violently to anything living. Even brief skin contact could burn human flesh, cause nerve decay, or infect the bloodstream with crystallization sickness.
Some texts described victims whose veins turned black and brittle, cracking apart like shattered glass.
No human could mine the ore safely.
And suddenly everything made sense.
That's why the warlock needed zombies.
He didn't need laborers—he needed bodies that couldn't die again.
Eric rubbed the back of his wrist, remembering all the times the ore scraped his undead skin.
During that month, Eric also forced himself to practice speaking.
It was miserable at first. His jaw felt out of place, his tongue too stiff, the muscles around his mouth barely cooperating.
Half the sounds he tried came out as groans or wheezes—like a broken instrument someone kept insisting was playable.
But he kept going.
By the end of the first week, he could manage a few simple words, each one scraped out of his throat like rusted metal.
By the second week, he was forming short sentences. Awkward, slow, uneven… but understandable.
By the fourth week, he could finally talk normally—well, "normally" for a corpse whose face had partially slid off at some point.
*****
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