Extra's Guide to Surviving a Dark Fantasy World-Chapter 65: Corpse Crafter

"I am still injured, damn it." I hissed while tightly clutching my head.

"Crossing the Wastes all alone, it’s a good thing you contacted me; if it were your parents, they..." He suddenly paused.

I let out an awkward smile. I doubted my parents would have cared. I had insulted one of the most powerful families in the alliance in front of most of the powerful people in the alliance. Even reaching out to help me would have been a stain on their reputation.

That’s why I had contacted Uncle Mordek; out of everyone in my family, he was the least likely to care about flimsy things as a reputation.

Uncle Mordek lightly coughed to dispel the awkwardness before slowly taking out a skewer-like tool and stabbing it inside one of the carcasses.

"And what happened to your leg?" He asked after pausing for a while.

"It was a duskwraith that attacked me while I was sleeping," I answered, pushing my wheelchair a little bit closer.

"The cut on your leg was too clean to come from a beast." Uncle Mordek paused and looked at me for a second. I momentarily paused as well.

The cut, I hadn’t considered that.

"Oh, that might be because of..." I tried to play it off when Uncle Mordek suddenly cut me off.

"So, what kind of bloodline did you awaken from?" He suddenly asked, pulling out an arm from the carcass.

"I...uh." I sighed, he already knew I was lying to him, if he wanted to change the subject than so be it.

"It’s a fire-based bloodline; I got one of my contacts to get it for me."

"Fire? That’s strange; I never thought our family could produce a fire affinity. What beast does it belong to?" He looked at me.

"I have no idea, He offered to sell me one and I bought it. I didn’t exactly had the privelage of asking questions?

Uncle Mordek looked at me with a somewhat somber look in his eyes. "It’s truly a shame what happened to you son, you must have suffered through a lot in last years."

"It’s fine, uncle, all that stuff; I kind of had it coming anyway."

Uncle Mordek suddenly looked at me with a strange look in his eyes. "You have changed from before." He spoke. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"How so?"

"I don’t know, it’s something in your eyes. Before you used to look at your surroundings like it owed you money, now you don’t seem so-"

"Arrogant?" I chuckled while finishing his sentence. "Arrogance without substance gets you killed on the streets, Uncle."

I moved over to the table. "Enough about me; what are you making here?"

Uncle let out a small sigh as a somewhat eager expression covered Uncle Mordek’s face.

He moved over to the side to give me a better look at the table. "Oh, I have a feeling you are going to like this one. I am making this a present for your sister’s birthday."

"Look at this." He pointed towards a large bone on his side. "That’s Gryphon’s spine; even dead, this thing has continuous streams of lightning flowing across it. Additionally, I have laced this with the mucus of a Kelpfiend, further increasing its lightening affinity."

"And that’s not it; look at the skin; I personally removed it from a still-breathing Stoneback Goliath, just so it doesn’t lose its..."

Uncle Mordek began explaining the details of the new chimera he was crafting, talking about each individual organ and what beast he had extracted it from.

Uncle Mordek, like Ashe, was a corpse crafter. He specialized in extracting organs from beasts with similar affinities and crafting a chimera out of them before binding it to his own will. Or selling it to the highest bidder.

This went on for a while, with Uncle Mordek going into the nuances of the crafter trade. It was around when the sun set when he finally stopped.

"Look at the time; I almost forgot you are still recovering from your wounds. We will talk tomorrow, for now, you should go and rest. Kaelix outside will guide you to your room."

I nodded. Maybe the meds were wearing off, but the pain had started to return, and I had started feeling a little woozy as well.

I turned around to exit the room when I suddenly stopped.

"Uncle, there was something else I needed your help with."

"Something else, what is it?" Uncle Mordek asked while walking over to the table.

"I need ritual materials to advance to the next stage of body refinement."

Uncle Mordek looked at me with surprise. "Second stage already? Your bloodline must be higher tiered than you thought. Maybe we should send someone to that contact of yours and figure out what beast it is?"

"Actually," I hesitated. "I meant the second and third stages."

Uncle Mordek’s smile suddenly fell off from his face. "What are you talking about?"

I took a deep breath. This was going to take some convincing to do.

In the world of Valoria, humans themselves never had the ability to cultivate, and that’s why they extracted and inherited the bloodlines of those monsters, fellspawns. This was one of the reasons why the quality of the bloodline one was inheriting was so important because in order for one to progress through cultivation, they had to resonate with their inherited bloodline.

Up until now, humans have uncovered four distinct stages of cultivation, with Body Refinement serving as the foundation. Each stage was further subdivided into three tiers, commonly referred to as low, mid, and high.

For one to progress through the cultivation stages, especially the body refinement, they had to attune their own souls to their bloodlines, aligning with specific elements, emotions, or concepts, maybe even artifacts depending on the whose bloodline they had inherited.

Now, these elements, concepts, or emotions could be anything.

For some they had to meditate near water sources, harmonizing themselves with flowing rivers and oceans, shaping their souls to water’s fluidity and adaptability. For others, they had to understand concepts like anger, maybe understand it as a protective force or something.