The Ashen Wastes had no true "night."
The sky could darken, but the ash-fog never withdrew. It clung like cold soot—to the ground, to scattered bones, to a man's eyelashes. Wind came from farther out, from the ruins of old battlefields, carrying grit of bone powder that struck skin like the flat of a blade. It wasn't lethal. It was persistent. A reminder that this land did not welcome the living.
Lucian tightened the clasp of his cloak, then loosened it by one notch.
On the road he had learned how to spend himself sparingly: don't breathe too deep, don't walk too fast, don't let your heartbeat chase the wind. When mana ran thin, the body would begin making decisions ahead of the mind.
He did not allow that.
The gravewarden's hut sat behind a low rise of stone. Half a wall had collapsed, exposing timber gnawed pale by weather. Rusted iron plates were nailed across the door, their edges whitened by salt frost. From the eaves hung brittle vines like dead nerves, trembling lightly whenever the wind shifted.
Inside there were no servants, no leftover warmth from a hearth, none of the laboratory-clean scent of reagents that stung the nose back in the academy.
Only the order death left behind: ash, cold, silence.
Lucian set his pack on a table missing a leg and wedged a stone under it until it stopped wobbling. Then he guided the skeleton into a corner and positioned it with its back to the door—so that if anyone peered in, they would see only a scrawny, unsteady "scrap" missing ribs.
Only after that did he lift a hand to his temple.
A dull pressure throbbed there, like a fine wire cinched tight around bone. The price of holding the contract stable while traveling. No one had seen how many times he bit down until his teeth ached, or how he broke pain into tolerable units and filed them away in silence, one by one.
He took out the last stub of a candle and lit it.
The flame jumped, and the room finally had a stable reference point. The boundary of light was clear. The boundary of shadow was clear. Lucian liked clarity.
The skeleton stood in the corner. Its joints occasionally rasped with dry, minute sounds. There was no flicker of soul-fire, no seep of common corpse-miasma. In the Empire's textbooks, it would be called "a carcass with not even the lowest response."
Lucian watched it for a long time.
He wasn't reliving the humiliation of the rite. He wasn't chewing on laughter. He was replaying a different detail: the momentary drag in the circuit, the excess of golden mist, the way grey bone had remained intact under a throughput meant to summon a sacred bone dragon.
If it were truly trash, it should have shattered.
But it hadn't.
He opened his notebook and held a corner down so the wind couldn't pry at the pages through the cracks. The first page was blank, like a sample sheet waiting to be contaminated.
He wrote a title: **Zero-Capacity Vessel: Initial Observations**.
Then his first line: **Death-energy response: 0**.
He raised his left hand and slid his fingertips slowly near the gap where ribs were missing. Even a low-tier skeleton, even broken, leaked a thin, damp reek of dead energy through its seams—like spiritual mildew. Stronger undead were obvious: their soul residue pressed like hot iron, painful at proximity.
This one… was stone.
Not the emptiness of "no response," but the silence of "no channel." As if any mana that tried to enter was forced to rebound, to fold back, to detour around the surface.
Lucian withdrew his hand and moved to the simplest test: tapping.
He knocked his knuckles lightly against the tibia.
The sound was short, clean—like metal on dense ceramic—swallowed before it could bloom into resonance. Normal bone carried some hollow echo. This did not. It sounded like a solid billet.
He put his ear close and tapped different points: tibia, femur, ilium, scapula. Each note matched. Nearly no variance.
"Uniformity is excellent," he murmured.
As if appraising industrial alloy rather than undead remains.
Next came cutting.
Lucian drew out his silver scalpel. Candlelight flashed along its edge. People at the academy knew that blade: thin as shadow, its spine etched with fine marks meant to separate material lattices. It had sliced sheets of mithril. It had peeled soul-crystal into flawless planes.
He brought the skeleton's forearm onto the tabletop and fixed the elbow joint.
His movements were not fast, but they were precise to the point of cruelty—angle of bone to bone, point of force, rebound. He ran the calculation once in his mind, then let his hand execute.
The blade came down.
The first stroke carried no force.
The tip slid along the bone like a line on glass. No dust. No chips. Not even a scratch remained.
The second stroke carried more pressure.
A thin, shrill shriek of friction cut the air. Lucian's brow twitched. The bone was not being cut. The blade was being honed against it.
On the third stroke, he fed a thread of mana into the scalpel, the etchings on its spine flaring briefly as he tried to make "separation" happen.
The candle flame wavered. His temple pulsed hard, as if something inside his skull had been struck.
He stopped.
Slowly he drew the scalpel back and looked down.
The silver edge… had rolled.
Not a chip. Not a fracture. The metal had been flattened and folded inward, forming a tiny arc—small enough to miss at a glance, fatal enough to ruin fine work.
Lucian stared at that arc, and for the first time an emotion showed plainly in his eyes—not anger, not despair, but a controlled, almost clinical excitement.
Because it meant one thing: the common story was wrong.
The textbook equation—undead strength equals density of death-miasma—failed here. This was not a weak skeleton with thin dead energy. This was structure so strong that dead energy could not even settle.
He set the scalpel down, took out a whetstone, and sharpened twice—then stopped.
"Not yet," he told himself.
The blade was a tool, and a damaged tool would slow later work. But more important than the tool was the rule: why it had failed, and what that failure meant.
On the next line in his notebook, he wrote: **Material hardness: beyond mithril cutting threshold**.
Then: **Mana penetration: failed (surface rebound)**.
He paused, lifted his head, and looked at the skeleton again.
Missing ribs. Crooked neck. A joke on legs. But now he could dismantle the joke into structure: what was missing was not "fragility," only "incompleteness." And incomplete things were, in a certain sense, easier to rebuild.
He pulled the candle closer and leaned in toward the bone surface.
In near light it wasn't wholly rough. The "random" striations had direction, like fibers inside had been twisted and re-twisted, leaving a faint bias in the outer skin. His fingertip traced the grain and felt a minute difference in drag—one direction resisted slightly more than another.
Natural bone did not do that.
"There's internal ordering," he said quietly, as if pronouncing a verdict.
He closed the notebook and leaned back, eyes shut for a beat.
The pain in his head remained. He demoted it to background noise. What he needed now was a conclusion—a smallest conclusion that could still bear weight.
He opened his eyes and wrote: **Hypothesis: absolutely dense / near-solid blank frame**.
Then: **Hypothesis: carrying capacity = 0 (not "cannot improve," but "cannot be infused")**.
His pen hovered over the zero.
Zero.
In the Empire's language, zero meant useless. Abandoned. Kicked out of the Institute's door.
In his language, zero meant: no impurities.
It meant control.
He put the notebook away and began to arrange the table: scalpel, needles, a small pinch of silver dust, the last little vial of alcohol for cleaning etched grooves. Resources so poor they would have been laughable at the academy.
Lucian did not laugh.
Poverty was not an obstacle. It was a constraint. And the clearer the constraint, the cleaner the solution.
The skeleton still couldn't stand properly. When wind slipped through the gaps in the wall, it swayed. That sway wasn't fear. It was simply an unstable center of mass.
Lucian stepped in and crouched, taking hold of its ankle.
On the inner side of the ankle was a small patch of flatter bone, suitable for engraving. But "engraving" here could not mean simple carving—he already knew a blade would fail. He needed the surface to accept a mark, even briefly.
From his pack he produced a short stick of alchemical acid wax—waste from an academy lab used to etch metal surfaces, thrown away as trash. He had kept it because he didn't believe in the word "trash."
He scraped off a tiny amount with a nail and spread it onto the bone.
There was no smoke. No hiss. Only a nearly invisible dulling, a faint dark bloom. Lucian held his breath and watched the rate of spread—agonizingly slow, like acid gnawing at a material far beyond its strength.
It was enough.
He took out a silver needle.
Finer than a blade, smaller contact area, higher pressure at the point. He held it between two fingers and fed a thin, reluctant trickle of mana down the shaft. It felt like forcing blood from a wound—sharp, metallic, expensive.
The needle touched down.
He didn't carve a lavish circle. He carved a micro-rune, simple to the point of brutality: two intersecting vector lines—one representing gravity's pull, one representing an opposing correction—joined at a tiny balancing node that would continuously adjust deviation.
**[Vector Balance]**.
With each stroke he paused, waiting for the "rebound" of mana at the surface to diminish into something controllable. The rebound came like surf against rock, trying again and again to wash the mark away. He didn't fight the wave head-on. He segmented his work into shorter pulses, finer intervals, letting the wave burn itself out inside a rhythm he controlled.
Sixteen strokes.
On the last, his vision dimmed for a moment. Cold sweat beaded at his temples. He slid the needle back into its sleeve, drew in a careful breath, and swallowed the iron taste at the back of his throat.
"Stand," he told the skeleton.
It lifted a foot.
The familiar wobble began—then was cut off in the next instant, seized by an unseen rule. The sole met the floor; the center of mass did not drift. The knee joint locked with a crisp, bright click.
It stood.
Not barely. It stood as if nailed to stone. Wind pushed through the hut, making the candle flame sway. The skeleton did not.
Lucian watched it the way one watches a proof that finally closes.
He reached out and pushed at its shoulder bone.
The skeleton tilted by a degree. The rune on the inner ankle gave a faint, dark flash in candlelight and pulled the deviation back. No wasted motion. No wasted force. Its stability wasn't brute strength.
It was calculation.
Lucian straightened slowly and leaned against the table. A thin smile touched his mouth, like light reflected along a knife edge.
"It's not that it can't become strong," he said softly. "Their method is just crude."
He opened the notebook again and added one more line beneath **Zero-Capacity Vessel: Initial Observations**:
**Conclusion: infusion-based upgrading is invalid. Prioritize engraving and structural modification.**
After writing it, he paused as if listening to the wind.
The wind remained. The ash-fog remained. The world had thrown him to the border and waited for him to rot.
But the candle still burned. The rune still held. And the skeleton—dismissed as waste—stood before him in its first posture of stability.
Lucian closed the notebook and pressed it beside the scalpel, as if pinning a new era to the table.
"Tomorrow, we map the hardness profile," he said. "From the calcaneus to the skull. Not a single joint skipped."
The skeleton gave no answer.
It only stood a little straighter.
The candle flame jumped in the ash-fog, like a small crown that refused to go out.