"Immortality."
"..."
With a sense of awe and disbelief, he watched as his body began healing from the void. The slow process of his skin and muscles regenerating was in stark contrast to the rapid pace he had experienced in his dream with The Lord. Red fibrous tendons of flesh materialised out of nowhere, weaving and twisting as they covered his skeletal figure, transforming him back into the same human he was before.
He lifted his hand and stared at it in wonder. The pinkish-white skin was distinct from the void he had just emerged from, and he felt the warmth from the presence of blood flowing through his veins. He marvelled at the intricate network of veins and arteries that crisscrossed under his skin, a complex and beautiful system he had previously taken for granted.
He brought that hand to his head, ruffling his straight black hair, causing many strands to fall, only to disappear as soon as they touched the wood.
He looked down through his torn rag, and sure it was, his original body that was neither muscular nor lean. Liemann never exercised much, so it was normal that he didn't have much to show for his body.
After a few minutes, a gradual and unsettling transformation began to take hold of his body. It was as though time was unwinding in reverse, undoing the very essence of his being. The warm, supple flesh that had once covered his bones slowly shifted to a sickly white hue, and the heat emanating from within dissipated into a frigid chill that crept along his limbs. Piece by piece, his body began to decompose as if the very forces of life were being drained away. His once-pink skin took on a sickly pallor, and with each passing second, it seemed to slough off his bones like sand from a dune, vanishing into the ether with a faint whisper of wind.
Liemann sat there for maybe half a minute...or half an hour, he didn't know. But he eventually regained his senses.
Liemann was more than stunned. No, it was to the point of being astonished and horrified, a mixture of feelings that he couldn't describe.
He cast the immortal rune again with his others runes that extended the effect and waited for it to disappear. Then he watched his body turn into a life-like one, lasting for an entire 15 minutes before it returned to being a skeletal zombie.
The 'Greater Archrune of Immortality' worked by changing the caster's body into one that did not age, or in his case, vice versa.
Liemann assumed that that was the case because he was already immortal - an undead - so it turned him back into his original human form.
...
...but it was not all.
The part that he had was but a fragment of the complete rune; that knowledge he gleaned from the absorption of that blue crystal only gave him the name - the meaning.
Liemann could feel that there was a much more complex and illogical completeness that made for 'immortality'.
"Immortality...what would the completed rune achieve? I cannot begin to fathom the power behind a rune that can turn someone 'immortal'."
"An immortal, by definition, is someone or something that cannot die. Be it conceptually or physically. An immortal spirit will remain a spirit forever, undying and careless of what happens in the world. An immortal person would live to the end of the world, the heat death of the universe. An immortal religion will always have people worshipping it, regardless of age and era, irrespective of the presence of intelligent life. An immortal thought will forever linger in one's mind, causing the person to become vegetative as they fail to think of anything else. That is immortality."
"Judging from the fact that this rune dropped from the ten-limbed bear ...it doesn't seem to represent that kind of immortality...not yet."
If it was according to his understanding, then the bear would not only not die, but it would be a lot more eldritch in nature as it lived and experienced 'immortality' in the truest of senses.
.
.
.
"!!!"
"Wait, what am I doing?!"
That was when he suddenly realised that he had been completely out of his depths, entering a state between the boundaries of sanity and insanity as he had been so terrified of The Lord's 'world'!
"Liemann...remember, you must keep a light heart and a strong mind. Whoever you were in the past 2 hours, that is not you. Remember, that one way keep your sanity intact in a strange world is to be slightly insane."
"Remember that decisions made when you are out of depth always lead to horrible outcomes!" he slammed the table with his fists as he felt angry.
Angry at the fact that something had scared him so intensely that he acted on a worst-case scenario basis, which led to him running for his life through the forest and manically going through his failsafe procedure of sanity checks and memory checks.
He even cast a rune that was potentially very dangerous just because he wanted an explanation of what happened - a rune that he'd gotten from that god-like entity's creation, a supposed 'Greater Archrune'. Who knows what could've happened if it wasn't actually immortality but a marker that forever bound him to the creature? Why should he have trusted that knowledge from the entity when it could've been deceiving him all along?
"How utterly terrifying! To make the great Liemann panic out of his mind and run for his life!" he shivered at the reality that dawned on him. The fact that he had been so pants-pissingly-scared that he lost a part of his rationale.
I cannot believe it. I got over the fact that I was dead pretty quickly, over the fact that magic and undeath exist in this world, over the fact that crystals can form when something dies, over the fact that there exists such an abominable creature like the Plague of the Midnight, only to get scared by a literal god entity that could've driven me insane?
He clutched his forehead as another realisation kicked in - that the runes themselves could be incredibly dangerous, no matter where they came from. He may not be affected by the buried zombie knight's light or fire runes, but those were probably leagues away in terms of effects on reality compared to a literal Great Archrune of Immortality!
How can I ignore that runes are more mysterious than I could've ever imagined? Why would a sane person decide to cast the rune of 'immortality'? What do they expect to happen when they turn 'immortal'?!
Runes are a crystallisation of someone or something's experiences! What did I think could possibly crystallise into a fraction of a Greater Archrune of Immortality?! A broken god?!
"Actually...I am also immortal. But my rune would be pain rather than anything else...what the hell would a rune of pain even constitute to?"
Liemann sighed at his folly.
"Tsk.Tsk. Close call, too close. Imagine if the protagonist died only a few months in because he got a dubious rune..."
"..."
"Hahaha!", Liemann laughed as he found himself a lot more comforted and relaxed after monologuing.
"Indeed. One of the greatest fears of mankind is the fear of the unknown. I do believe that I've just gone through an episode of sheer panic from the unknown."
Liemann sighed and decided to leave the re-interpretation of the events that just transpired for a later time. A time when he was a little more sane and calm to run through his memories again to verify the odd points he'd missed.
"Alright then. I guess I should go and check on Jim."
He stood up from the chair and went to find the mobile storage, which only required him to look across the house to see that he was playing with the old, mouldy books from a shelf nearby.
Creak.
Creak.
"Hey, Jim, what are you looking at?" he came and sat next to the zombie with a little backpack, seeing the stack of tattered books on the side of Jim's leg.
"Grah." Jim raised a book with a leathery cover, the letters on the front page no longer visible from the years of being abandoned.
Liemann picked the book from Jim's hand and flipped through the pages but eventually put it back down as the text was not discernable at all, for there were only blotches of black ink instead of letters.
He picked up the other books on the ground, hoping to find one that might be legible, but all of them were mouldy and soggy.
"Tsk, haa..."
Liemann stood up and carefully looked at the building they were in. He realised that he had not even observed the building in its entirety or checked for any fault before rushing in...which was precisely why being out of one's depth was so dangerous.
"God...can I even say god now? Whatever. Goddammit, why was that thing so terrifying." he could still feel the terror that lingered, but at least he had the presence of mind to acknowledge it.
Shaking his head, Liemann looked at the house's interior.
They were in a wattle and daub house; yes, he got that right. The once-pristine facade had aged ungracefully, the years of disrepair leaving a yellow tinge upon the once-white walls. Yet it was easily recognisable to a former European like Liemann.
The ground floor was lined with bricks and had windows ever so often, the size of them large enough for a person to fit through easily.
The arrangement of the wooden beams was vertical, and the second floor was slightly larger than the first, just like how he remembered it to be.
Creak.
Creak.
Clang.
Liemann unlocked the front door and swung it open, careful not to let the door break free of its hinges from his carelessness.
He then stepped outside and looked at the dilapidated building in the middle of a forest. The structure was weathered and worn, its walls of crumbling mud and rotting wood giving the impression that it had been abandoned for many years. Vines crept up its sides, clinging to the rough surface and slowly reclaiming the building for nature.
"Undeniably, this is further down the lines of history than medieval housing, but not yet at the Georgian era style. I would guess it to be somewhere around the Tudor or the Stuart era. The presence of binded books also is a good indicator of technological progress, the printing press had been invented", he muttered to himself, bringing a boney hand to his chin.
Hmm...interesting. Society still managed to develop to this point even with the existence of runes...or are rune users really rare? The only one able to use runes in the entire knight squad was the 'extraordinaire', which means that a specific criterion has to be met to use runes...else everyone in that squad would be donned in long mage robes like the extraordinaire...
"Praise be to RPG logic." Liemann chuckled as he put his hands together to pray to the one true god that would forever keep him sane. RPG logic.
Crunch.
Crunch.
Creak.
Liemann returned to the house and locked the door behind him, even though it would probably break anyways since one of the hinges had already gotten loose.
"Not my fault. That was crazy Liemann. Not my fault." he shrugged and strutted to the stairs on the right of the house, walking up the dubiously stable rotten wood as he prepared for one to break any time.
On the second floor, Liemann spotted a wooden 4-poster bed, a wooden closet, and a lavishly decorated wooden mirror that was quite opaque. The bed's mattress was beyond saving, and the closet's wood was corroded to the point that it seemed like modern abstract art.
"No offence." he chuckled.
That left what Liemann presumed to be the mercury body mirror in the corner of the room with its two intricately carved wooden supports.
He walked towards it with a curiosity that was hard to hide, for it will be the first time he saw his whole body as a reflection in this world!
"Let's see, let's see."
Liemann already had a pretty good idea of his height and the general shape of his body - both boney and fleshy. After all, he had seen one too many x-ray scans from his time in the experiment chamber.
"..."
The zombie that appeared in the mirror was closer to a skeleton than anything. The little flesh and skin that clung to the bone were so little that there might as well not be anything on the body but bones.
"I remember having more flesh than this...maybe moving around and transforming back into a human had finally gotten rid of the last bits?" he chuckled with amusement at the fact that he was actually a moving skeleton rather than a zombie. That would explain why he felt so weak when he first awakened.
"Jim is definitely still a zombie, though. He still has half his face attached to the skull and a body with some meat on it." Liemann held a hint of jealousy for Jimmy boy but released it shortly after realising that Jim may be a moving skeleton instead of a zombie - just that he hadn't moved around as much as Liemann or been transformed into a human.
"That's one more thing I need to find out, I guess. How can a skeleton move, and how can it see? How can it sense anything like a normal human when no organs are left? Heck, how can I even think without a brain?"
More unknowns, but at least these were somewhat bearable.
Liemann wanted to revert to his human form with the partial immortal rune, but decided against it as he'd not thoroughly verified his memories that the information brought along with the blue crystal was sensible and correct.
He'd cast it twice, and it may already be too late...but as they say, the third time's a charm! What if it required him to transform three times before something strange(r) happened?
"Well, lets just hope there isn't a thing I missed when I panic casted that rune." he shrugged and walked back down the stairs, past Jim, who was still trying to figure out how books worked and onto the chair and table that had two black crystals on it.
He pulled the chair out and sat on it, closing his eyes as he was now mentally prepared to go through his memories once more, through the horrifying experience of his encounter with The Lord.
"Do I trust my memories? No. But they are the only thing I can work with."