Chapter: 267

Each time a skeleton left, it took longer and longer to return as they had to travel further to find a rat.

The soap rat population was thoroughly decimated. Eventually, Jay considered leaving the swamp and returning so that the rats would all respawn, but he decided to just wait.

“I’m nearly ready to head back to Losla anyway…” he had been waiting there for hours for his health to regenerate – not to mention the time he spent reading his book and messing around with the spell channelling crystal.

Jay had plenty of teeth by now, so he put Red on primarily corpse collection duty. It was quite a strange sight seeing a skeleton drag corpses across a swamp, it was like it was an ant bringing home food for the colony… If the colony was a large hive of bones and flesh.

Collecting 5 more corpses, Jay was satisfied as he watched a thick curtain of bones floating around him.

He called his skeletons back to him, collecting any teeth they had.

“58 teeth and 10 corpses, this will keep me going for a while” Jay smiled to himself, “I think it’s time to go.” He willed his skeletons to return to him.

Jay looked at his skeletons and made sure they were all complete; having 45 health.

“Ok, you all look as bulky as Blue, so I’m happy. Clearly the bone eater skill is doing its job..”

“And your new bones still have red flakes in them, good” he smiled at Red.

“Hmm… speaking of different bones…” An idea flashed across Jay’s mind.

“Sweeper, come here.”

Jay unsummoned sweeper, its bones collapsing to the ground. Jay took out parts of its blue bones and added some soap rat ones of approximately equal proportions.

There was now a mix of the rat bones and the wolf bones before him.

“Arise.” he said.

[Chimera Research 7%]

Jay repeated this process until his mana got low.

“Arise.”

[Chimera Research 8%]

“Arise.”

[Chimera Research 9%]

“Okay… I think that’s enough for now” he said, feeling a little light-headed and checking his mana.

[MP 24/68]

“I’ll keep some mana in reserve so I can raise another in an emergency.. I’m about to unsummon all of them and leave the dungeon after all.”

Raising a level 3 skeleton would take 13 mana. Jay could ‘raise’ again, but that would leave him with only 11 mana left. This would be dangerous because if he left the dungeon with only 11 mana and no skeletons, he would have no hidden trump – which of course is the ability to summon a skeleton.