Chapter 434 – Little Black Grew Crooked

After Mo Lan removed the silver-plating effect from the little skeleton’s bone frame, she soaked it back in the Bone Spirit potion.

The soul fire still needed more nurturing anyway, so she might as well let the bones soak a while longer.

She levitated the basin of potion behind the little skeleton—only this way would it have any effect.

If she put it inside the spatial ring, time was frozen in there, and no matter how long something sat inside, it would be exactly the same as the moment it went in.

When Mo Lan and Zhizhi came downstairs, Lilith, Vasida, and Sylph were already in the living room.

Seeing that Lilith and Vasida had nothing beside them, it was obvious they had both chosen zombies.

Zombies didn’t require cultivating a soul fire—they only needed proper corpse maintenance.

However, the early-stage maintenance of a zombie’s corpse was far from as simple as soaking it in potion.

When Lilith, Vasida, and Sylph heard footsteps and looked over, they were all drawn to the oil lamp floating in front of Zhizhi.

“Is that what a newly born soul fire looks like?” Vasida asked in amazement. “It really does look exactly like the illustrations in the books!”

Lilith and Sylph came closer and noticed the skeleton soaking in the basin.

“Why did you pick such a tiny skeleton?” Lilith asked, puzzled. “It’s so small—one whack from someone and its bones would scatter everywhere, wouldn’t they?”

“I’m not planning to develop it as a skeleton warrior for now. Training it to fight would be worse than just going in myself!” Mo Lan said.

“Zhii!” And me!

Zhizhi chimed in anxiously.

“Yes! Zhizhi is a great fighter too!” Mo Lan said with a laugh.

“I think the little skeleton is actually pretty cute! And it’s even wearing a gemstone crown!” Sylph felt this little skeleton was shattering her impression of undead creatures.

“Zhii!” Zhizhi hopped up and pointed at her own head.

“Oh! Zhizhi has a matching one!” Sylph deliberately pretended she had only just noticed.

Watching Zhizhi proudly lifting her chin, Bi’er giggled nonstop.

“What about you two? How’s your progress?” Mo Lan asked Lilith and Vasida.

“I was busy all last night and only managed to make a well-sealed coffin out of blackdeath tree wood for ‘Mala Hotpot’—I haven’t even started treating the corpse yet! ‘Mala Hotpot’ is the temporary name I gave it,” Vasida said as she took out the coffin.

Inside the seamlessly fitted blackdeath tree coffin lay the naked corpse of an adult male.

From the neck up, there was nothing—no head.

Now this was more in line with Sylph’s impression of undead creatures. Even though the corpse was clean, there was still an air of decay about it.

Still: “Why doesn’t it have a head?”

“I haven’t decided what to sculpt the face to look like yet,” Vasida said.

The corpse material cards from the shop all allowed appearance adjustments, as long as the modifications stayed within the range of an ordinary human body.

She had plans to eventually develop the zombie servant into a member of the Corpse Clan and make it her companion, so she couldn’t sculpt the face carelessly.

“You can always change the face later! There’s a huge gap between a zombie and a death servant!” Lilith said as she brought out her own death servant.

She had prioritized treating the corpse first and hadn’t prepared a coffin for her death servant yet.

It was a male corpse with a generic, unremarkable face, its skeletal frame and build pushed to the most muscular extreme possible for an ordinary human male.

Standing upright beside Lilith, it was a full head taller than her.

The chest and abdominal cavities were still open, all internal organs removed, and a layer of black grease had been smeared along the inner walls.

The genital area had been cut away. It was clear she intended to develop her zombie servant purely for combat from the very start.

Yet Lilith still wasn’t entirely satisfied. “An ordinary human corpse is still a bit too scrawny.”

“Just how muscular do you want your zombie to be?” Mo Lan asked curiously.

“About the same as Zhizhi’s enlarged form—the kind that can carry me around!” Lilith said. “Zombies are all about physical strength, so naturally bigger and more muscular is better. I’ve given up on the idea of developing a zombie into a Corpse Clan companion anyway. I just want to raise a zombie bruiser—super huge, the kind that makes everyone’s jaws drop when you send it out!”

Mo Lan didn’t quite understand, but she respected it. “Then you’ll probably need to find an Orc corpse. I hear there’s also a giant race in the other world—that might be even more suitable.”

While they were discussing this, Bi’er sensed something. She turned to look behind her, then stood there in a daze and poked Sylph. “Sylphy! Little Black grew crooked!”

“Little Black” was the name Bi’er had given the mutant Animated Blackdeath Tree.

Sylph turned around and saw that the sapling in the planting pot, which had previously been growing perfectly straight, had curved entirely toward their direction.

This had never happened before.

Ever since the mutant Animated Blackdeath Tree had been planted, it had behaved as though it had completely lost its animated properties, never once moving.

She immediately realized that something on their side must have suddenly attracted it.

“It’s the corpses!” Mo Lan blurted out.

Only Vasida’s and Lilith’s zombie servants—or rather, they couldn’t really be called zombie servants yet, they were just corpse materials—were the things that hadn’t been there before and had suddenly been brought out.

Lilith floated her corpse over to the far side of the living room, while Vasida put her coffin away.

The sapling in the planting pot did indeed move.

Its black half of branches all turned to follow Lilith’s death servant corpse to the other side.

But the green half of branches remained firmly oriented toward Mo Lan and the others, not budging an inch.

The whole little sapling, half reaching left and half reaching right, made one worry it might tear itself in two.

Clearly, the black half had indeed been attracted by the corpse.

But the green half was drawn to something else entirely.

“It seems there’s something on our side that’s attracting the green branches too,” Sylph said.

They tested it one by one.

When Zhizhi finally walked to one side, the green branches turned to follow her.

Mo Lan, Sylph, Vasida, and Lilith all stared at Zhizhi, and their gazes eventually settled on the oil lamp floating in front of her.

Zhizhi usually had plenty of opportunities to be near the mutant blackdeath tree, but it had never reacted this way before. So it could only be something new that had appeared near her.

The oil lamp nurturing the soul fire was the most likely candidate.

Though the oil lamp itself was just an ordinary brass lamp—not even a magical item—something Mo Lan had casually shaped with the Metal Shaping spell.

“Is it the soul fire, or the soul essence?” Vasida wondered aloud.

Just then, the alarm clock Zhizhi was holding went off—it was time to add more soul essence.

Zhizhi materialized a Material Card – Soul Essence, and before she could even add it to the lamp, all the green branches of the mutant blackdeath tree quivered in unison.

“Looks like it’s the soul essence,” Lilith said.

Mo Lan nodded and took out the corpse material cards that Sylph had returned to her yesterday. These contained not only ordinary human corpse parts, but also soul essence.

She handed them all to Sylph. “Now these materials actually have a use for you.”