The Ruined Death Knight-Novel

"As promised, this will be your room from now on. Although it´s quite messy, I hope it would be enough," said Gerak embarrassingly.

The room had one small window that allowed the sunlight to come through and a bed to the side. If you were to ignore all the lie in chunks of metal and some old-looking weapons, then you could call the room rather neat-looking.

"Well...would it be possible to move all this tra-"

"Weapons." Gerak cut my mind sentence.

"Yes...could we move those `weapons´ somewhere else?"I asked slightly annoyed...

Scratching this beard, Gerak sighs out loud.

"Haa...fine, let´s bring all that stuff down to my smith and see what I can do with them."

With that, we started carrying all those chests with metal chunks and weapons downstairs and by the time we were done with cleaning to my now own room, it was alright evening.

"Ugh, I feel like I lost 10 years of my carrying all that stuff. Compared to me you sure are a monster of your own." Gerak said while holding this back out of pain.

I just scoffed at him back.

"I ain´t no monster, you just old..."

"Me, old!? I will have you know that I am in my strong sixty-three years! I am still young!"

I could only roll my ethereal flame-like eyes at him.

`It hasn´t even been 1 year that I came out of the waters of nothingness and he wants to tell me that he is young. If living sixty-three years is considered young, then what am I? An infant!?´

Generally speaking though, comparing your age against an undead such as I am kinda pointless. Since we are kinda, well, Immortal beings. No matter how much time passes, we the undead will never change physically, excluding us evolving into a higher tier undead of course.

In turn, as far as I know, mortals will with time grow old and weak until death decides to embrace them.

So yeah, trying to compete with an undead with age is not the wisest idea that one could think of. Another idea as bad as that one is trying to compete with who got more stamina than the other.

Being able to wear heavy armor while being able to carry boxes of the chunk is only the question of the undead strength that the stamina of an undead. As long as an undead has enough strength to do a task, he will without a doubt be able to do that exact task for the close to integrity to come.

"By the looks of it, we are done for the day right?" I quickly changed the subject to make the old dwarf stop talk about this age and all.

Looking at the window that it was already evening, Gerak grumbled.

"Yeah, there is no point working anymore today, even though you look like that I can guess that you too are exhaust. We will start the real work tomorrow." Having said that Gerak left down the stairs.

Closing and locking the door on my side I felt strange.

"It´s not like I am tired, but saying that might result to an increase of my workload that I would rather not have..."

Standing in the middle of the room silently I couldn´t help but remember the recent days that I experienced, it reminded me of how I was back then in the gloomy hobgoblin cave.

But compared to the cave that was gloomy with only stone to see, the room that I was now felt more...calming. After all, these days have been nothing but uncomfortable for me. Being constantly with humans around me made my whole body heat up from hatred which I had to, by my pure will to stop myself to let loose on those around me.

Even though my body knew no fatigue, it didn´t help much with mental fatigue...

And now being here alone made me finally relax my body.

"Although I want to stay so and relax for a little while more, I still have the stuff to do."

Removing the bed blankets to cover the window, I sat down on the bed and removed my armor piece by piece.

With me being now completely naked I went right away to start what I had been waiting for all this time.

That`s Runesmithing!

"I should probably start with the chest piece since it seems the easiest."

With nothing else stopping me, I guided the mana in my body towards my hand.

"[Rune Vision]."

The nearby color of the room was slowly fading away until everything became black and white. The effect of that talent always somehow creeped me out. It was as if someone removes all sound and color, leaving only a blank world before my sight.

All color except that of my armor.

It was as if my whole armor was glowing ever so slightly with most of the green and yellow colors with a mix of some red in the mix. The green light was mostly to see.

"If I remember right the green area should be the place where I need to incrave the rune in."

Without further ado, I started marking the location as given by the information in my head. Similar to how the rune was called, the marking ended up resembling the words Ese in some way. But marking the words wasn´t as easy as I originally had thought. A single waving of my hand could ruin the whole marking process which in turn makes the second step all the more difficult for me.

The marking process felt like drawing the rough lines of a picture with your finger which in the case of failing makes the end product all the worst.

The only good thing about this process was that I could make as many mistakes as I wanted. Didn´t draw it right?

Remove the markings and start again, it wasn´t like I was in a rush or anything.

After removing and re-doing the markings several times until I was happy with the end result, it was time for the hard part.

Touching the start of the letter E of the rune, I started to channel the correct mana amount inside the rune with my utmost focus, while discarding all my worries aside.

In this soundless and colorless word, only my finger moved ever so slowly according to the markings that I had placed before. I didn´t dare to remove any focus at anything else other than channel the correct amount of mana in my finger.

One mistake and I wouldn´t be able to place the Ese rune in my chest plate anymore.

No mistakes allowed!

Seconds felt like minutes and minutes like hours.

But in the end, I removed my finger from the armor, thus ending engraving the mana in my armor.

It took me several seconds to notice that finished it.

'Alright, now that I am done with it I just need to activate it and see how it turned out.'

Placing my hand above the rune I constantly pour in mana inside it to permanently engrave the rune in the armor once and for all.

In a way this whole process looked like the heat treatment that is used on blacksmiths, maybe that's why runesmithing is called runesmithing instead of rune carving.

The whole process took a whole minute to finish.

And when it was done a status window appeared in form of me.

[Common Rune Ese successful engraved, Rating: Average]

I tried to cry out of joy looking that it was successful, but then I forgot that I still had [Rune Vision] activate...

Deactivating the talent and letting me speak once more I picked my armor and started to touch it like some hungry dude would when a high-quality steak was in front of him.

"Oh! Hitting the armor makes it glow slightly, is that the rune's effect?"

After being done with testing my armor around, my gaze fell upon the message.

"It says 'Rating: Average'.. does that mean that I could make the rune better?"

Pressing the 'Rating' in the window, another window showing what all kinds of ratings exist.

Apparently there is Poor, Bad, Average, Good, Well-done, Perfect and Beyond Perfection.

"So I am right around the middle huh..."

Although it felt slightly depressing not achieving the best result.

In a sense, though it was reasonable for me to make a rune of the rating average, if not being an achievement for this own.

After all, it still was my first time trying to carve runes in something real.

Although my rating did worsen my mood ever so slightly.

It did raise my motivation though!

It showed me that there was something to work on, something to aim at!

Knowing that there is more to it was enough to lift my spirit and try again!

Picking another piece of my armor, I started engraving the same Ese Rune in every piece of my armor.

When I was done and equipped with my now runed armor I felt a sense of accomplishment inside me.

They all were at the average rating, but I did notice a slight improvement in them.

"I will have to study and see how I could better myself on this rune. And then I have t-" While I was calculation the best way to make my tunes better, I heard some banging in my door.

"Danzel! Come out already! It's already time for work!"

Hearing Gerak's voice I was confused, but when I saw the light coming from the cover window I realized it was already morning.

"Coming..."

Cursing how time flew so fast, I went down to the workshop.