Ever wondered if a skeleton can have a child?
Or how a skeleton could possibly give birth?
Welcome to today's episode of "Into the…"
—wait, wrong show.
Anyway—after seeing one of her skeletons actually reproduce, Hel's entire worldview expanded dramatically.
Her mind was spinning. So that's possible?
Truly, a once-in-a-lifetime learning experience.
It turned out that when a pile of bones gives birth, it's nothing like a human pregnancy.
Instead, it's more akin to a slime dividing itself.
First, the skeleton's soul began to split—a small fragment, roughly a tenth, peeled off from the original.
Then its elemental core, which held the soul, separated a portion to house the newborn fragment.
After that, part of the skeleton's bones fell away and reassembled themselves around the new core, forming a tiny new skeleton.
This new skeleton was about the size of a human infant—and just as weak.
Its only distinguishing feature was a purple trait: [Affinity for Decayed Mana].
Pretty underwhelming.
Hel turned toward the Skeletal Archmage beside her.
Now, it too had gained a new black trait:
[Weakened State]: Mana -90%, lasts 30 days.
Hel experimented and discovered that this trait could actually be removed.
Once she stripped it away, the Archmage's missing bones visibly regenerated, returning it to its original form.
However, the missing portion of its soul did not recover.
Meaning, this division process had a limit.
Not that Hel couldn't fix that—she could always use the Philosopher's Stone to inject more soul energy.
But… spending a high-tier mage's soul energy just to get a purple-grade trait?
That hardly seemed worth it.
So—could higher-quality traits be inherited?
Hel added a golden trait to the Skeletal Archmage and tried again.
The result was disappointing: the newborn skeleton only inherited a purple trait.
It seemed that [Undead Creation] could only pass down fully awakened traits.
In the Archmage's case, although it had a gold-grade trait, it hadn't yet reached the strength needed to fully unlock it—its power still capped at Archmage level.
Hence, the offspring could only inherit a purple-grade version.
If it could ever reach Title Mage rank, then maybe the child would inherit gold-quality traits.
But Hel herself hadn't even reached Title Mage yet—where was she supposed to find a Title Mage skeleton?
Time for a different approach.
Hel summoned a basic first-rank skeleton soldier and applied [Undead Creation] to it.
Before long, a tiny newborn skeleton appeared at its feet—and Hel gained a new white trait from it.
That was much more efficient.
All it cost her was a common soul's worth of energy.
The new skeleton could immediately be used for fusion—no need to wait for it to grow.
And she still had plenty of soul energy stored in the Philosopher's Stone.
With that, she could theoretically mass-produce an entire undead army.
But then again—why bother with skeletons when she could just make ghosts directly?
Was it because ghosts were too fragile?
Too hard to conceal?
Neither of those should really matter with enough power behind her.
The real issue was that with her current strength, any ghost she created would be at best Archmage-level.
And if she used her Necromancer's Sigil to fuse them, their souls would become chaotic and unstable.
Without transplanting a fresh soul, they'd be as brainless as those berserking undead husks.
But then again—that was exactly why she'd resorted to the Sigil in the first place.
If she could just conjure King-tier souls on her own, she wouldn't need the Sigil at all.
Creating a few Archmage-tier ghosts wasn't worth it.
With no special bloodlines or abilities, they'd be barely stronger than cannon fodder.
At that point, she might as well feed that soul energy to Haki-Krall and let him burn things down—at least he could go berserk and dominate his tier.
Thinking it through, [Undead Creation] suddenly didn't seem so useless after all.
Maybe she could turn it into a kind of undead ranch—
A place where she could continuously breed skeletons to harvest new traits.
That way, she could safely gather resources from corpses without ever being caught meddling on the battlefield.
Of course, this could wait. No need to rush things.
Still, Hel wasn't one to leave a theory untested.
So she experimented further—
Letting newborn skeletons reproduce again,
Fusing multiple baby skeletons together,
Stacking dozens of traits onto one skeleton to see how much the next generation could inherit…
Soon, she had skeletons upon skeletons—each smaller than the last.
And when she finally fused them all together—
She ended up with a Miniature Archmage Skeleton.
Hel stared down at the little thing, which barely reached her knees.
"…This? A Magister? You've got to be kidding me."
It looked more like a pocket-sized wizard doll.
But small had its advantages—less of a target, and she could literally stick it inside the Flame Arbiter's hat as a mobile turret.
The best part, though, was the harvest.
Through this whole breeding-and-fusion experiment, Hel collected tons of new traits.
Each baby skeleton could only inherit three, but with such massive numbers, that added up fast.
During her three-day seclusion, she focused entirely on this process.
After duplicating [Undead Creation] twice more, she set up a production line.
By the end, she'd produced three thousand white traits—
One thousand each of [Death Mana Affinity], [Life Mana Affinity], and [Elemental Mana Affinity].
Those were all quite rare for her, so this was a good haul.
Then, after some synthesis work, the three days' effort yielded 24 purple traits.
Sure, the efficiency wasn't great—her daily duplication skill was still more reliable—but this gave her a new method to farm traits, with bonus undead to boot.
If she ever invested heavily into it—maybe she could even achieve Trait Freedom one day.
But that was for later.
Three days cooped up in the undead realm was her limit.
Her brain was crammed full of data—
Er, her head was full of traits.
What she really needed now was some good, solid sleep.
Unfortunately, fate had other ideas.
Just as Hel curled up in her warm little bed, ready to drift off—
Her maid Anna came running in.
"Master, master! The beastman main force you told us to keep an eye on—they've just crossed the Ashton Bridge. They've entered Heim territory!"