Laboratory Entry 22

The following is the 22nd entry in my laboratory logbook regarding the Cube of Mass Raise Dead. It contains vitally important information that I cannot keep contained to just my colleagues.

Entry #22

The Cube of Mass Raise Dead is far more than meets the eye. What the Darkwatch had initially assumed was an artifact capable of reanimating hundreds of thousands of animal carcasses within a 100m radius has a much more terrible use. As noted in Entry #5 and Entry #9, the reanimated corpses were nothing special: empty husks filled with false life and containing no sapience and little sentience, if any. Undead creatures that even a peasant who knows how to swing an axe could kill. But the true power of the Cube of Mass Raise Dead didn't lie in its ability to reanimate carcasses. It was the carcasses themselves.

At approximately 2056h, preparations were made to test rituals that interacted with the Rune of Renewal inscribed on the artifact. In Entry #2, I had hypothesized that the Rune of Renewal was the artifact's way of replenishing its power after each use, but as noted in Entry #19, this was not the case, as the artifact could be reused without the need to recharge it with a ritual. After a half hour of testing various rituals, including blood rituals and sacrificial rituals, I had found it. It was a ritual of bones, burning a skull, two ribs, a femur, and an ulna and allowing the smoke from the pyre to rise into the cube.

The two undead carcasses I had reanimated (See Entry #5 and Entry # 19) convulsed, before the telepathic connection I had with them was forcefully severed. They were no longer animated, but something far darker had taken over them. Their bodies imploded upon themselves, collapsing into two extraplanar rifts from which hundreds of creatures of infernal and undead persuasion appeared.

I culled the incursion and sealed the rifts before the invading creatures could breach my laboratory's walls, but the damage was already done. My laboratory is in ruins, and though it can still function well as a sanctum for my colleagues in the Darkwatch, I will not be conducting any more experiments there until I can replace the equipment that was destroyed in the incursion.

Whoever created the Cube of Mass Raise Dead did not intend for it to be a necromancer's weapon. They intended for it to cause a world-ending calamity. The artifact has since been moved to an isolated location while the Darkwatch deliberates on how best to deal with it.