Adamant Blood

Before Mark could just slot in a fourth ‘Ability’ and use it alongside everything else he had, Mark knew his soulhouse worked a certain way when it came to using new Abilities. He had even given this information out to others, like Addavein and anyone else who cared to watch his house experiment videos. System Prime had even told him how it worked, because Mark had asked about switching out Abilities before.

Either he could switch out one of his current Powers, which the System called Abilities, for something new, or he could put his whole house into a kind of ‘sleep mode’ and use the Ability without actually slotting it at all. This came at the cost of completely disabling all of his current Powers. Mark hadn’t done this at all. Not yet. But only because he didn’t have any realextra Powers sitting around in his soulhouse until about 3 weeks ago, when he learned how to extract Bindings from other things, starting with the cows.

He had thought about slotting in Water Shaper, just because it reminded him of Dad, but… No.

He had made a few Incomplete Powers before then, mainly Healthy Body and a few others. Mark could have used those and subjected himself to all the horrors of having another Incomplete Power episode, with a body that lost all feeling and with a mind that slowly lost itself to Dragon Wake… or he could just go to sleep with his Incomplete Power and see what happened when he woke up. Probably nothing. According to System Prime, those Incomplete Powers needed to be grown and stretched by living life in order to make them stabilized Powers.

Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Another thing that nobody had time for was the process of shutting down and stripping out all the parts of his house that contained Adamantine Immortal, Adamantiumkinesis, or Union, in order to slot Necromancer into those places.

Mark did not want to start using 4 Powers at all. Not yet. Maybe not for a long time.

But he still needed to experiment with Necromancer, and fast. So Mark had a little think, sitting on the upper deck of the small ship, flying back to Domal’Takela after the mausoleum excursion.

The breeze was great, and Mark was mostly alone, decompressing properly this time. Most everyone was inside of the ship as they had been when Mark went hunting for ghouls and ghosts and liches. It had been the work of a few minutes to completely evacuate the Green House, but everyone was in the small ship, though Derek was still also the Green House.

Addavein stood behind Mark, about 7 meters away, on guard.

Mark took a breath, and got to working out this Necromancer-Power-thing.

First of all, Mark didn’t want to permanently use Necromancer at all. It was a means to an end. Secondly, Mark couldn’t ‘just use Necromancer’ without taking something out, even though he could, but he didn’t want everyone to know that he could use a Fourth Binding, which was long-thought to be impossible. Fourth Bindings turned a person into a monster, every single time. Elves kinda broke that rule, maybe? Mark wasn’t sure. He wasn’t really an elf, even if System Prime said he was. So Mark wasn’t going to straight-up use Necromancer alongside everything else, even though he could. Thirdly, all of his other Powers were going to interfere with his ability to understand his new Ability.

So Mark was pretty sure he was just going to ‘make his house dormant’ and use Necromancer without actually using it.

And yet… What would that do to him? He had never actually tried using an Ability like this at all, but System Prime said it was possible… right? Actually, there was one easy decision to make. Mark could just ask again.

Mark said, “System Call, Help. What happens to my house and self when I use a stored Ability without slotting it?”