Inside the foggy wasteland.
Jack once again made his way toward the edge of the zone, but unlike before, he did not stop beside the skeletons that sat around 'chatting' with each other in their strange way.
Instead, he walked right up to the point where his body would begin collapsing into a normal skeleton.
Ever since wearing the ring artifact, Jack had become far more familiar with the feeling of abnormally felt lack of energy due to the unnatural growth of his body.
That familiarity eventually gave him an idea.
Every time he dissipated as a fog body and woke back in bed.
Every time his skeleton body collapsed after pushing too far.
There was always a pattern.
The distance he could travel increased when he used the skeleton body rather than the fog body.
But the opposite was also true.
If he wanted to head deeper into the zone, where reality itself became increasingly illogical, the fog body performed much better.
Jack understood the reason.
The body needed something specific in order to persist in certain areas.
If he moved outward, toward reality and Order, the body needed to become more logical and biologically stable.
If he moved inward, toward the depths of the fog zone, the body needed to become increasingly illogical.
That was when he realized what the skeleton body lacked.
Muscles.
That much was obvious.
Without muscles there was no proper way to generate force, no stable way to move, only whatever unnatural force animated the bones themselves.
But Jack hesitated trying to solve that issue directly.
The farther outward he went, the more reality demanded proper biological function, and Jack barely understood how muscles actually worked.
Then he remembered something else.
Victor's artifacts.
Magic could be carved into objects.
During one of his lessons Jack had personally watched Victor use a spell to move his cane and even drag furniture across the room without touching it.
If magic could move objects…
Then why not bones?
Jack looked down at his arm.
I don't need muscles…
I just need movement.
Bit by bit, he began carving tiny lines into the bones.
Each line contained a simple function.
Forward and backward.
Up and down.
Left and right.
Rotation.
Tension.
Release.
Individually, each enchantment was extremely primitive.
But together they formed an artificial replacement for muscular motion.
A magical nervous system carved directly into the skeleton itself.
The next problem was energy.
A body could not move forever without fuel.
That was when Jack remembered another one of Victor's artifacts.
Grisha.
An artifact designed to absorb sunlight and convert it into stored usable energy.
Victor once explained that the artifact functioned by harvesting external energy forms from its surroundings and converting them into something stable.
Jack stared at the lines carved into his own bones.
Then his non existent eyes since he was a skeleton 'widened'.
If I can absorb and convert external energy…
…then movement itself stops being the problem.
His idea quickly became far more ambitious.
Instead of relying on a single energy source, the skeleton would absorb nearly any external energy it encountered and convert it into usable internal power.
Heat.
Light.
Radiation.
Sound.
Electricity.
Even impacts.
Anything carrying energy could theoretically be harvested.
Meaning that magic attacks would become extremely inefficient against the skeletons.
Fire would feed them.
Lightning would empower them.
Heat would strengthen them.
Even part of the force from weaker physical attacks could be absorbed and redirected throughout the body.
Only sufficiently overwhelming physical force would be capable of damaging the skeleton faster than it could redistribute the energy.
After hours of carving instability-assisted enchantments into the bones, Jack finally stepped back.
The skeleton body was now covered in impossibly thin dark lines.
It looked less like a corpse and more like a weapon blueprint etched directly into bone.
Now came the important part.
Testing it.
Jack gathered instability into his hand before suddenly solving it into a burst of intense heat.
The surrounding fog distorted.
The skeleton immediately began absorbing the energy.
At first nothing happened.
Then the carved lines slowly lit up.
More energy poured inward.
Heat vanished into the skeleton's frame.
The air around it began trembling.
After a while, excess energy started escaping the body itself.
White transparent flames resembling plasma leaked from the gaps between the bones, wavering like heat haze.
The skeleton stood there silently, glowing faintly in the fog.
Jack stared at it for a few seconds.
Then he slowly walked past the edge of the zone.
This time—
his body did not collapse.
The skeleton continued moving normally even outside the area where it should have failed.
Jack looked down at his hand and clenched it.
The movement was smoother than before.
Faster.
More stable.
Behind him, the nearby skeletons stared silently for several moments before approaching him.
Like always, they began copying him.
One after another, they started carving lines into their own bones.
Jack watched them before looking toward the outer edge of the wasteland.
Now the skeletons possessed bodies capable of persisting even near the borders of Order.
And unless struck with overwhelming force—
most magic would only make them stronger.