Chapter 1: Silent and still

Ang was awakened by the sound of pecking. His soul slowly ignited, and ripples radiated from his hollow eye sockets; whatever he touched, he could perceive. This was how a skeleton observed the outside world.

His soul extended, landing on the ribs in front of his chest, exactly where the pecking sound originated. A small bird was pecking at a fracture in Ang's ribs, digging out the grass seeds embedded there to eat.

Ang remained in his original posture, not moving, letting the bird clean his body. This was a good thing for him; if the grass seeds embedded inside got wet, they would sprout and swell, cracking his bones.

After the bird flew away, Ang climbed up from the ground and checked his body.

A lot more is broken, time to replace them...

After a winter of slumber, Ang's skeleton had suffered significantly more damage than the previous year. If he didn't replace the parts, it would likely affect his mobility.

However, at the thought of this problem, Ang turned his head in distress, looking toward the palace that resembled a mountain peak in the distance. So many years had passed, and only in the King's palace were well-preserved skeletons kept. Replacing bones required going inside to find them, which was a distressing task for him.

Although the Undead King had been missing for a thousand years, the prestige that remained in Ang's soul still made him unwilling to approach the palace.

I'll make do with these this year, and worry about it next year... Ang dismissed the idea of going into the palace to find replacement bones and walked toward the nearby fields.

The place where he rose was a haystack, which was also Ang's home for sleeping and shade. In the past, when the sun was fierce during the day, he couldn't withstand the scorching heat, so he would hide back in the haystack to rest in the shade, waiting until the sun was about to set before coming out to work until the next day. Sleeping by day and working by night was the normal routine for undead creatures.

Back when he still had companions, they would dive into the haystack and crawl out covered in dry grass at dusk.

Ang found this to be bad; the haystack was damp and dark, which would breed insects and corrode his bones.

Therefore, Ang would bundle the grass stalks together, stacking them into a semi-enclosed hollow, and then crawl into the hole. This way, he was shielded from rain and sun, and his bones remained in much better condition than his companions'.

In recent years, he hadn't cared much about the sun's heat, but the routine he had developed in the past still influenced him, keeping him in the habit of resting at sunrise and working at sunset. It was currently dusk, the time for diligent labor once again.

Ang was a small vegetable-farming skeleton on a farm near the Palace of Rest, responsible for cultivating fifty acres of farmland, a job he had held for one thousand one hundred years.

In the past, the entire farm had over sixty vegetable-farming skeletons like Ang, each responsible for fifty acres. Ang was just one of the most unremarkable among them; the only thing special about him was probably that he had lived longer than the others.

Ordinary skeletons never maintained their bones, liked to chase away birds, and loved to burrow into haystacks, so the bones on their bodies would rot and become unusable after a dozen years or so, causing them to collapse on the ground.

Occasionally, high-level undead creatures would pass by from the sky, and upon discovering that a certain field was abandoned, they would know the responsible skeleton had rotted away and would report it upward. Ten days or so later, a new skeleton would be assigned.

Of course, farmland that had been abandoned for a period of time would certainly have no harvest that year, but it didn't matter. Undead creatures didn't need to eat; the things grown here were only stored to entertain visiting human delegations when necessary.

However, given the hostile relationship between the Undead Empire and humans, it was possible that no humans would visit for hundreds of years.

But what did that matter? The cost of investment wasn't high, just sixty-some skeletons. Maintaining the operation of this farm was effortless, to the point that later on, the high-level officials of the Undead Empire even forgot the existence of such a farm, and it just continued to function out of inertia.

On a farm maintained by inertia like this, no one ever noticed Ang, the skeleton who lived exceptionally long. High-level undead creatures with intelligence rarely came by, and since he hadn't rotted, naturally, no one came to throw him away. Moreover, he had discovered a method to extend his lifespan.

Some skeletons rotted and lost their ability to move, but their entire bodies weren't necessarily rotted. Some just had broken hands, some just had rotten lumbar vertebrae, but more often, their feet were ruined.

Taking advantage of the times when those skeletons lay on the ground unable to move, Ang would dismantle the still-intact parts of their bodies to replace his own rotted areas.

Just like that, over a hundred years passed. His companions had been replaced a dozen times over, but Ang was still maintaining himself in his tattered state. Then, in the one hundred and thirty-ninth year, waking up once again from his long winter slumber, Ang realized the whole world had changed.

The surroundings became absolutely silent. There were no wails of vengeful spirits, no shrieks of fierce spirits, and even less of the high-level undead creatures that used to fly across the sky from time to time. Even his companions on the farm were gone.

Ang didn't realize what had happened. He repeated his work of over a hundred years step by step: weeding, tilling, sowing. After continuing for a week, he noticed that except for the area he was responsible for, everything else was barren.

Have more skeletons rotted?

Following precedent, he immediately set out to find replacement bones. After searching through all the abandoned plots, Ang found fifty-nine skeletons that weren't severely rotted, their soul fires extinguished.

At this point, Ang finally felt that something was wrong, but he was only a low-level vegetable-farming skeleton and couldn't figure out what was wrong. However, harvesting fifty-some intact skeletons made him happy for a long time.

Ang used the method he invented, using haystacks to stack out hollows to store these skeletons. In the next two hundred years, relying on the replacement of these skeletons, Ang passed the time peacefully.

During these two hundred years, Ang had been completing his work: sowing and harvesting. He would keep the seeds of the harvested crops and drag the rest to a large pit at the edge of the farm, throwing them down along a slide.

The pit was covered with Breath Soil, which could keep the crops preserved for a very, very long time, and the space inside was very large. If it were up to Ang alone, filling this pit might take a thousand years.

Time passed day by day, and the skeletons would eventually run out, especially as time went on, and the bones stored in the hollows also slowly rotted.

After the last spare skeleton was used up, one of Ang's feet broke, which forced him to limp out of the farm he hadn't left for three hundred years.

The entire Undead Empire was silent, and not a single soul could be seen. There were many broken and weathered bones on the ground, and judging by the degree of decay, they had been dead for at least two hundred years.

Why would it be like this? Ang walked on this dead and silent land with doubts, looking for bones that could be used for replacement, and finally found his way to the palace.

The Palace of Rest was the supreme existence of the Undead Empire, the sleeping place of the Undead King who governed souls and eternal life. It had a natural pressure on low-level undead creatures.

Ang wandered nearby for several days before he adapted to this pressure and stepped into the scope of the Palace of Rest. The death aura here was thick, and the Breath Soil on the ground was dense. Breath Soil could make all objects lose their vitality and dry out, allowing them to be preserved for a longer time.

In the Breath Soil, Ang found some stronger and sturdier skeletons. If Ang was a low-level withered bone skeleton, then these strong and sturdy bones once belonged to higher-level gray bone or white bone skeletons.

Unfortunately, these skeletons that were once stronger than Ang had now lost their souls, leaving only a pile of bones. If they hadn't been buried in the Breath Soil, they would probably have rotted and decayed like their counterparts outside.

Ang picked up a pile of bones, pieced them together into a complete skeleton, and then transferred his soul onto it. With a shake of his body, he became a higher-level gray bone skeleton.

Although he wanted to piece together a higher-level silver skeleton, he found that his soul was too weak to drive it, so he had to give up.

Just like that, Ang returned to the farm and continued his life of resting at sunrise and working at sunset, until the bones on his body rotted once again.