Chapter 1995: Modified Mandrake Formation
Chapter 1995: Modified Mandrake Formation
Eren stood silently at the edge of the altar, the last words of his speech still lingering in the air.
Below him, the crowd was caught in a storm of thoughts. Some looked at each other. Some lowered their heads.
Others stared at the ground as if the answer would rise out of it. None of them had moved yet. None had stepped forward to swear allegiance.
But no one had walked away either.
"Still thinking, huh?" Eren muttered to himself, his voice low and amused.
Then, shrugging to himself, he pulled out something from his storage. A thin, palm-sized circular object—simple looking, but filled with layers of magic.
The Modified Mandrake Array Disk.
It had taken a long time to refine. Eren had learned from many—Minerva's woodland magic, Rey Remus' creature summoning, Goro Remus' necromancy.
The butcher had fused everything into one deadly, multi-elemental tool. A disk that turned death into something useful.
"I might as well put this to use," Eren muttered and flicked the disk like a frisbee.
This was another of Eren's creations that he had made as an experiment in his experiment basement back at Siren's Sanctuary's underground facility.
The disk soared through the air, whistling past the silent crowd, and flew toward the battlefield where hundreds of corpses littered the blood-soaked land.
Bodies of mana practitioners and demon beasts alike. Broken, burned, mutilated—but not useless. At least not to the Young Demon Emperor.
The moment the Hex magic disk stopped above the bodies, it hummed. It expanded in all directions, forming a large, circular domain nearly 800 meters wide.
Complex runes spread across the battlefield like ripples in a pond. The formation glowed faintly, not in one color, but many—black, green, brown, silver, purple.
Death, wood, shadow, earth. Each element and various Aspects attached to it responded to its own set of instructions.
Roots shot up from the ground, wrapping around broken limbs and hollow torsos. Wood wrapped around bones and mangled flesh, repairing and reinforcing what had once been alive.
Death-element mana seeped into the bodies like thick fog, calling to souls that hadn't yet fully crossed over.
Then came the shadow magic. Eren's unique touch.
Dark chains made of shadows crawled out from beneath the bodies, winding around the soul fragments. Anchoring them. Binding them back into the reconstructed corpses.
What rose from the ground were not mindless zombies. They were something else—something new. Hybrid undead. Better than Eren's previous undead summon variants: Contract Undead.
***
The woodland undead looked like creatures pulled from myth and nightmare—men and women whose bodies had fused with vines, bark, and brambles.
Their skin had turned rough and wood-grain textured, the color of moss and dark soil. Eyes glowed dimly behind thick canopies of leaves and twisted antlers. Some had full trees sprouting from their backs. Others had legs shaped like twisted roots or limbs resembling branches, reaching with finger-like claws.
Yet despite their monstrous appearance, there was an eerie familiarity to their faces. Some in the crowd recognized their friends, comrades, or family.
The woodland undead were not mindless. Their souls had returned, anchored by the power of shadow magic and bound to their new forms by necromancy.
Many of them remembered who they had been and even retained the tactics and experience of their past lives.
Then came the golem undead.
Heavier. Grimmer. Less elegant than the woodland type, but far more brutal.
Their forms were shaped from a mix of soil, gravel, and the bones of their own former bodies. These creatures were like moving statues—tall, broad, with thick frames that glowed faintly with demonic mana.
Their chests had cores embedded in them. These weren't stable mana cores. They pulsed erratically, charged by a mix of undeath and leftover battle spirit. But they worked. And they made the golems terrifyingly strong.
Both types of undead were fiend-like in nature. Their bodies looked similar to the demonic, from the twisted horns to elongated limbs and ominous auras.
And like fiends, they could grow stronger. Their corrupted mana cores could be stabilized over time, and their bodies—though artificial—responded to strengthening rituals and mana infusions just like living beings.
In short, each of the summons was different.
Basically, the array disk took the summons' Individuality into account as it manifested mortal forms for them. This way, the summoning process was made permanent.
Once summoned, the creatures didn't have to rely on Eren's mana to survive. Their undead woodland bodies or golem forms were perfectly capable of sustaining their presence for as long as Eren allowed them to exist.
Eren calmly poured his mana into the array disk, feeding it steadily while standing tall and relaxed. Not far from the altar, Thalisa stood over the sea and released her vitality into the formation. Her mana streams in the form of water shimmered as they flowed into the land, seeping into the roots and the summoned undead like liquid energy.
The array disk started operating at full speed. It kept resurrecting the fallen in multiple batches simultaneously. Although these hybrid summons couldn't be categorized using conventional ranks, they were roughly as powerful as they had been before their deaths.
It meant that Eren had managed to summon creatures ranging from C to A-Rank. The resurrection rate was also very impressive. For every 100 dead mana practitioners the array disk worked on, around 90 of them would be revived, and only 10 would stay dead.
It showed that Eren was trying to recover the lost might of the Raashim Temple as quickly as he could. But that was not all. He was also leveling some of them up using the tricks available at his disposal at the time of their resurrection.
Unfortunately, Reen had devoured the sacrificial followers of God Raashim. Without their bodies, it was very difficult to use the Modified Mandrake Formation on them.
Eren wanted to resurrect some of these sacrificial followers because they were considered as elites among the Raashim Templars. Too bad, his ex demon beast turned Immortal Artifact Spirit was a little unruly.
She prioritized Eren's safety and devoured the followers so that she could help Eren as soon as she could in killing God Raashim.
As such, the butcher could not reprimand her as well.
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AN: Eren obtains Mandrake Formation with unlimited woodland summoning magic from Minerva in chapter 1456. He had plans to make use of Minerva's legacy properly after he left Anfang.
Eren also obtains woodland magic from Rey Remus around chapter 713, golem magic from Gilhause around chapter 793, and lastly necromancy from Goro around chapter 873.