Chapter 130- The First Undead.

Chapter 130: Chapter 130- The First Undead.

As Leo reached toward the girl, Elona called out in warning. "Wait! Don’t touch her—"

His hand paused for the briefest moment, but he kept moving anyway, gently resting his palm against the little girl’s head, stroking her hair with quiet tenderness.

The girl froze completely..... A flicker of awareness crossed her face, and she immediately tried to pull back, clearly terrified she was about to hurt someone else the way she always seemed to.

Elona braced herself, expecting Leo to be hurt too. But nothing happened to him at all.

"It’s okay, little one. It’s okay," Leo murmured, slowly closing the distance and finally catching her properly in his arms. She struggled at first, trying to twist free, but Leo held on gently and pulled her into a full hug. "It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay."

The girl had never once felt real warmth like this. She was still just a child, and yet everyone around her had always kept their distance — even her own birth parents had abandoned her. And now, here... was this stranger, holding her close without hesitation. Tears began streaming down her cheeks as quiet sobs broke free. She bit down hard on her lip, trying desperately to hold it in, but the tears kept dripping down her cheeks regardless.

"It’s okay. Let it out. Just let it all out," Leo said softly, never once stopping the gentle strokes against her hair. The girl cried for a long while before she finally began to settle. Leo simply held her, cradling her in his arms as the sobs faded.

Meanwhile, Hugh had gotten the dwarf back up onto his feet.

The dwarf, too, was clearly stunned that nothing had happened to Leo. "You... that girl... nobody’s ever been able to touch her before. Even a mouse that wandered too close by accident would end up dead within moments. And nothing happened to you at all?" he asked, his voice still rough and hoarse.

Leo just shook his head, offering no real explanation. The girl stared up at him intently, as though trying to memorize every detail of his face, committing it carefully to memory.

She kept a tight grip on his clothes the entire time. Leo tried speaking to her a few more times, but she never responded.

He turned to Elona and asked her to pull out the stone the death guardian had given them.

Understanding flashed across Elona’s face, and she quickly retrieved it from her inventory. The moment it left her storage, the stone pulsed intensely with dark purple light. She brought it closer to the girl, and the light flared even brighter in response.

Between the three of them, Leo, Hugh, and Elona now understood clearly — this girl carried an exceptionally high affinity for the undead.

They decided to head straight back to the guild.

The dwarf gave his name as Sigil when Hugh finally asked.

He walked alongside them as they made their way back, while Hugh dragged along the cart holding the wolf, which had finally stopped thrashing against its cage bars. Leo continued carrying the little girl the entire way.

Elona still didn’t dare attempt to hold her.

They reached the teleportation plaza, paid the required fee, and teleported straight back to the guild.

The rest of the group had gathered again inside the hall, having not yet left for their leveling excursion.

Leo introduced Sigil and the girl to everyone and gave a brief rundown of what had happened.

Nobody said a word in response.

Leo dismissed the group. "Hugh, help me restock the forge and sort out the inventory while I handle something else."

Hugh nodded. "Understood."

Leo made his way to the door linking to the Eternal Forge’s dimension, and right beside it, opened a second door — this one connecting to the Hall of Undead.

He stood in front of the wall, pressed both hands flat against it, and called forth the connection to the undead hall. A doorway slowly manifested where solid stone had been a moment earlier.

A notification appeared:

[Ding~]

[Hall of Undead — Guild Link Established.]

[Access Point: Main Hall, Blackstone Fortress.]

[Status: Active.]

The air in front of the wall shimmered, then darkened. Leo pushed the door open, and a wave of cold air hit him instantly.

He brought both Sigil and the girl through with him. As expected, the girl showed no reaction at all to the undead mana permeating the space, while Sigil and the wolf were both visibly affected, shrinking back in fear.

Leo wrapped Sigil and the wolf in a protective layer of mana and qi, shielding them from the surrounding undead Mana.

He led the group toward the Preservation Chamber within the Hall of Undead. Inside, the space was properly isolated from the rest of the hall, and Sigil finally let out a relieved sigh once they stepped inside.

Leo brought the wolf out of its cage. Both Sigil and the girl visibly tensed at the sight of it.

The wolf thrashed violently against the chain restraining it, snarling and baring its teeth at anyone who came near.

Leo dispatched it almost instantly, with barely any effort at all — a single clean strike to the throat, breaking it without damaging any other part of the body.

The wolf collapsed to the ground, lifeless.

Sigil stared, stunned. "You... killed the wolf you just bought?"

"Yeah," Leo said with an easy smile. "I wanted to run some experiments."

Sigil felt like he’d just had cold water dumped over him. Did he buy us for the exact same reason? the thought crept into his mind, unbidden.

Leo had already collected the wolf’s soul by then, and carried its body over to a nearby table. The animal had clearly been starved for some time — its ribs were visible straight through the skin.

Leo had never actually forged an undead being before. The closest thing he’d ever done was soul forging, which was related but not quite the same discipline.

The system had given him two distinct methods for forging an undead. The first involved forging an entirely new vessel from raw materials and binding a soul to it. The second relied on using the original soul together with the original body.

Leo summoned the wolf’s soul. It hovered just above his open palm, flickering faintly with the last traces of warmth still clinging to it from its final moments alive.

He called forth soul fire and began the refinement process.

[Ding~]

[Soul Refinement — Initiated.]

Leo burned away the unnecessary layers first — the fear, the pain, all of it stripped away cleanly. The wolf’s core identity remained untouched: its experiences, its strength, its cunning, its will, all preserved intact. The refinement process left the soul noticeably stronger, still hovering steadily above his palm, though it now felt considerably denser than before.

Tempering came next.

[Soul Tempering — Initiated.]

Whatever remained within the soul was now strengthened and reinforced. Countless small hammers formed from soul fire appeared in the air around it, pounding steadily against the soul’s structure. Its patterns gradually solidified, gaining real density and resistance to damage.

[Soul Memory Processing]

The irrelevant surface memories burned away first — the smell of the cage, the sound of rattling chains. Then came the deeper layers: the wolf’s last hunt, the taste of something warm and fresh. All of it burned away in turn. But Leo carefully preserved what actually mattered — the raw experience of being alive, the hunting instinct, the fighting reflexes, the survival drive. Every scrap of muscle memory and body memory stayed intact.

[Soul Will Processing Initiated.]

This step carried the most risk of all. A single wrong move here could shatter the entire soul beyond repair. Consciousness, awareness, the capacity for independent thought — everything hinged on getting this part exactly right. Fortunately, Leo didn’t need to do much active work; on an instinctual level, the wolf’s will had always been simple — a strong, singular drive to survive, hunt, and protect its pack. There was no real complexity to untangle. Still, the soul fire and death qi together carefully wove a mark of loyalty into its consciousness as the process completed.

The soul was finally ready. Leo set it carefully aside into the soul receptacle for the moment and turned his full attention to the wolf’s physical body.

He pressed his palm flat against it. Death mana/ Undead Mana poured out from his hand, enveloping the wolf’s entire form. A wave of cold, dark mana flooded the chamber. Sigil shivered visibly at the sight of it. The girl showed no outward reaction, though she watched the whole process with obvious fascination.

[Ding~]

[Undead Body Reforging — Started.]

The death mana sank steadily into the wolf’s body, which absorbed it eagerly, like a sponge soaking up water.

Leo and the others watched the transformation unfold in real time.

The fur darkened first, shifting from its original grey-brown to a deep, solid black, each strand stiffening and hardening as the change spread. Beneath it, the skin itself changed too, growing denser and thicker, almost metallic in texture.

The muscles thickened and tightened noticeably. The wolf’s body grew larger overall, its entire structure undergoing what looked like a full restructuring. Death mana seeped through the skin, into the muscle, through the organs, all the way down into the bone itself, where faint undead runes began carving themselves directly into the bone’s surface. The bone shifted from plain white to a pale, creamy grey. Muscle fibers reinforced themselves under the death mana’s influence, and the throat Leo had broken earlier realigned itself cleanly as the mana flowed through it. The claws on its paws lengthened and grew sharper, faint traces of death mana still clinging to them.

Its teeth lengthened slightly as well, the jaw reshaping itself to accommodate them.

The eyes were the last thing to transform. What had been dull, lifeless animal eyes shifted into a pale, glowing green.

Still, for now, they remained lifeless.

The body reforging had completed in full, leaving behind a proper vessel, ready for soul binding.

Leo brought out the wolf’s refined soul, the pattern of it hovering steadily above the newly transformed body.

He began the binding process.

[Ding~]

[Soul Binding — Initiated.]

Leo summoned death mana and soul fire together, wrapping both the soul and the body in their combined glow. Slowly, carefully, he guided the soul pattern downward into the body, the fine threads of it sinking gradually beneath the surface. The death mana anchored the soul pattern firmly in place, while the soul fire made that anchoring process possible in the first place. Under their combined effect, body and soul gradually merged into a single, unified whole.

The fire and death mana finally receded, leaving only faint traces of death mana still lingering around the claws and neck.

The wolf’s still body twitched once.

Then—

[Ding~]

[Soul-Forged Undead — Successfully Created.]

[Method B — Original Soul + Original Body.]

[Reconstruction Potential — 150% of the original being.]