Feed me, the inner-voice repeated, edgy with desperation. Though if Seymour could be honest with himself, it felt less like a voice and more like an urge originating deep within himself.

  An urge that straight up disgusted him as a man – but which obviously seemed cool and normal to the blood-drinking cactus with whom he shared a deep, emotional bond.

  “I’m sorry, what?” Seymour stammered, feigning confusion in the hopes his instinct might be mistaken. “How can you be hungry at a time like—”

  Feed me, Seymour!

  “Wait, you don’t mean—”

  Feeeed meeee.

  “Alright man, just stop it.” He locked eyes with the cactus. It lacked any actual ocular organs but Seymour had the unshakable feeling that Jerome was returning his gaze. And the spiny little bloodsucker was begging his pactmate to place him on the slab so he could slurp up some Brute Force Billy Soup.

  The thought of doing so was viscerally awful and nauseating, but at the same time it only took Seymour a moment to recognize Jerome’s plan as an objectively good idea. The sanguine succulent required blood to sustain himself. That happened to be a simple fact of his strange biology, and really no different than many animals. Sharks and whatnot, right? In that context, Jerome’s insatiable hunger wasn’t actually so strange, he told himself.

  But under normal circumstances this hunger meant that someone or something had to bleed in order for him to feed; had to be bled, with or without their consent. So in a way, letting Jerome indulge in a little bit of Billy’s reconstituting corpse would be a legit cruelty-free act. The mass of bones and organs and blood throbbing over there on the slab wasn’t actually Billy Mantooth yet. It wasn’t sentient. At least Seymour didn’t think it was. But in any event, it certainly wouldn’t miss a little bit of blood since the slab was straight up manufacturing an entire body from thin air, anyway.

  Seymour needed to remove his emotional barf reflex and examine the situation with a detached, strictly rational mind. If rather than a pet cactus, he had bonded with something more recognized by society as carnivorous—say for example an apocalyptic swarm of leeches—he wouldn’t have thought twice about feeding it a little bit of Billy. Doing so would have been a foregone conclusion.

  And it wasn’t as if Seymour himself wasn’t eager to eventually have some fun of his own with Billy’s corpse, too, once it had cooked a little longer. So he couldn't very well judge Jerome for simply being what he was, could he?

  “Alright, just this once,” he finally relented, and he picked up Jerome in his pot and moved to be beside Billy’s slab. With utmost care, he set the cactus down close to the vaguely humanoid-shaped viscera. Then he backed off a step and waited.

  Jerome trembled all over, emoting excitement. Seymour hadn’t seen that before. It would have been cute if it wasn’t all so goddamned gruesome. Then the now-familiar tentacle-like slurping-tube slithered out from between Jerome’s furry spine-lips and swam into the undulating mass of Billy’s blood and bone.

  All at once, Seymour felt a rush of power and had to back up a step and sit down, his head suddenly reeling. He watched as Jerome slurped and slurped to his evil little cactus-heart’s content.

  Then one of the blood-drenched tooltips Seymour associated with his Sanguine Sight ability appeared:

  Seymour flexed his bicep. He wasn’t certain what this notification meant by blood pool but he suspected it simply had to do with Jerome holding a volume of the powerful blood he’d slurped from Brute Force Billy. He had questions—how long would the blood remain in the blood pool? And where would it go when it was no longer in said pool?—but one thing was for sure:

  Seymour felt strong as a goddamn ox and he really liked it. “Are my shoulders an inch or two broader?”

  He regained his feet and just stood in his body for a moment, admiring it. Then he flexed dramatically, striking a pose like he was onstage in a bodybuilding competition – and the back of his shirt tore open along a brand new seam. He laughed. And then he swooned and fell back into the Matron’s butt-groove as the strength left him just as quickly as it had arrived:

  The debilitating recourse lasted only a moment, thankfully, and afterward Seymour felt normal again. Glancing over at Jerome, he watched as the cactus began to swell, cracking his way out of the terracotta pot as easily as he'd busted out of the dainty little teacup Seymour had originally found him sitting inside. He realized his pet succulent had undergone another transformation, same as the first time Seymour had fed him back in his quarters.

  Once again the cactus had roughly doubled in size, though this time he had grown more vertically than horizontal. Where he had previously doubled to be the size of Seymour’s fists side-by-side, he had now developed a more cylindrical protrusion—again about two-fists tall—which grew straight upward from his center.

  There was no denying the phallic undertones of his new form, but Seymour set that thought aside to better examine what other changes had occurred.

  The freshly-grown protrusion was covered in thick, stiff spines, and dotted lines of red and yellow and blue traveled up its skin to meet at its very apex. The furry stripe which Seymour had come to think of as Jerome’s lips and from which his feeding tentacle would emerge remained located low on his trunk.

  As he gawked at the impossible growth, Sanguine Sight activated once again:

  The line This entity contains less than one whole unit of Blood immediately caught his attention.

  “How are you empty again already?” Seymour wondered. “Did you use all that blood to grow your new, uh, shaft?”

  It took him by surprise when Jerome quickly replied with two suckling little kissy noises. Seymour pondered the implications of everything that had just happened.

  “Okay, so tell me if I’m understanding this right: you drink blood to become bigger.”

  Kissy kiss.

  “But you can also keep it inside of you—in your Blood Pool—which is what made me so strong there for a minute, right? Like if you get some blood in you from an exceptionally strong dude, then I get buffed to be stronger, too. Am I on the right track here?”

  Kiss kissy.

  “Well that’s pretty damn cool.” He paused. “And a little dark, too, I guess. But don’t get me wrong, it’s mostly just cool.”

  The morning crept along slowly. The other slabs became occupied by other reconstituting corpses. To Seymour’s surprise, there didn’t seem to be any odor, despite the fact that the four frothing corpses sure looked like they should stink. Eventually, Billy Mantooth’s body grew skin, and that was Seymour’s cue.

  He stole one last glance at his internal spell registry to ensure he wasn’t missing anything about the new sigil power he intended to try out:

  Over the past few weeks, Seymour had found plenty of opportunities to clone minor magical items with simple material requirements. Penny didn’t love the fact that he had been depleting a portion of the materials she needed for her job, but they were all easy enough to replace, and he’d been using Cash Out to convert them into gold coins, some of which he shared with her; a bribe between friends.

  Of course, for the most part he’d been feeding the coins into his palm using Blood Money to progress his sigil powers toward the next rank. Infringement and Cash Out were both over halfway to Adept now. But after exorcizing his demons and turning their evil-ass souls into a trio of shiny new evil-ass powers, he’d held out a sum to use in his experiments.

  As he stared down at the lifeless-but-mostly-complete corpse of Brute Force Billy Mantooth, a graphical overlay appeared, floating in the air beside the body. Seymour instinctively knew that no one else would have been able to see it:

  Lucky for Seymour, he’d brought just enough. He held a stack of ten coins in his fist like a roll of quarters. As he concentrated on the corpse, the Sigil of Greed drawn on his palm came to life and swallowed the stack – much to his relief. Up until that point, he’d had a sneaking suspicion that he’d be required to actually insert the coins into the corpses he wished to animate, and he wasn’t eager to locate slots capable of accepting his currency.

  As soon as the coins were absorbed, Brute Force Billy sat himself up naked on the slab. His blonde mane hung down to his shoulders and his skin was suspiciously tanned for being the zombie-version of a dude who spent allhis time alternating between a dungeon, a commercial crypt of necromancy, and the seediest taverns Ghizo’s Crossing had to offer. Much to Seymour’s surprise, Billy barely looked dead, aside from the unfocused look in his eye and the way his jaw hung slack.

  And evidently dungeon crawling was a killer ab workout, too, because Brute Force Billy here was absolutely shredded. In a way, it was an even greater trial for Seymour to gaze upon Billy's bare abs than it had been for him to watch the barbarian be reborn from bones and goo.

  The barbarian zombie turned his face up to gaze upon his new master, awaiting a command.

  “Uh,” Seymour began, “how about we get started by just standing up?”

  Brute Force Billy’s animated corpse rose to its feet with a grace and fluidity that once more took Seymour by surprise. None of the zombie content he’d consumed back on Earth had prepared him for this. He got the sense that he’d almost waited too long to test out his skill.

  “You’d seriously kick ass in like a Weekend at Bernie’s situation or whatnot.”

  The zombie with the killer abs tilted its head at his words, and Seymour realized it was searching for its next objective. And so began a montage of Billy hopping on one foot, running laps around the room, performing jumping jacks, walking on his hands, picking his nose, plucking out one of his eyes and eating it, and finally laying back down on the slab.

  “Well, he’ll definitely do whatever I say, but if I’m gonna excel as a necromancer I really gotta come with some better orders for my corpse army.”

  No more than ten seconds after the appearance of that message, Billy’s remaining eye slowly closed and he once again laid perfectly motionless on the slab. And no more than two or three minutes after that, he sat back up and opened his eyes – both of which were once more intact. But unlike the last time he’d awakened from death, he now blinked in the dim Ressurectory and then extended his arms and had a good stretch. There had been some risk it wouldn’t work, but Seymour had wagered that the slab would pick the resurrection process back up where he’d interrupted it, and his gamble had proved out.

  “Martha, get over here, Honey,” Brute Force Billy grunted hornily. “Time to make sure the Ressurectory put Little Billy back together again in proper working order.” What little light shone in the Ressurectory was kept minimal, for obvious reasons, and the freshly-risen barbarian didn't realize at first that Seymour was the one working the crypt today rather than Matron Martha. Hoping to head the situation off before it became any more awkward, Seymour cleared his throat. Billy flinched at the sound, which was clearly more masculine in tone than he had been expecting. “Oh, heh. You're not Martha. Sorry, Brute Force Billy was, uh, just joking. Me and Martha…. Let’s just say we joke around sometimes.”

  “She's out sick.” Seymour handed him a green robe embroidered with Dragon Dan’s golden face on the back and then quickly changed the subject. “So, you score any good loot?”

  “Whattya say we go see?” The barbarian burped loudly. It went on and on. “You gotta excuse Brute Force Billy. I bit off four or five fingers from these fish-man wizard creeps. Tasted just awful but I think every single one had a ring on it.” He grinned. “Guess we'll find out!” He patted his stomach twice and laughed and his tummy didn't jiggle even a little bit. He stood and pulled on the robe, belting it closed. He made his way over to the stairs but paused before heading up to the showroom. “Hey uh, what’s your name again?”

  “I’m Seymour. I’ve seen you around the shop but we haven’t actually been introduced yet. I’m from another universe.”

  “Ah, alright. Well hey, Seymour. Just between you and me – you think Matron Martha will be feeling better soon?”

  “I suspect she will, yeah.” A chuckle puffed out of Seymour. This Brute Force Billy dude was somehow grosser as a living man than he’d been a short time earlier as a self-mutilating zombie.

  But as the horny barbarian headed upstairs to presumably purge his stomach of its contents, Seymour found himself cracking an evil grin. The morning’s events had proved that with enough gold, he could raise an army of undead. Undead with no fear and rock-hard abs.

  And it gave him a horrible, wonderful idea.