Maxwell was left with a bunch of smog-grass elements patrolling his territory, and he tried to figure out what he should do next. As it was, he wasn't exactly ready for war. As his forces were ready to defend his small kingdom, he wasn't exactly swimming in war material. He had about a dozen of each of his different types of undead grass elements, and they weren't exactly multiplying all that fast.

  Maxwell figured as his smog grass land expanded, the rate at which they created his undead grass elements would increase. Though that was in the future, for the moment he was effectively stuck with a bunch of green soldiers that had never seen any combat, and he had no idea how effective they would be until the pixies were attacking him, launching their invasion, and it would be a bad time to find out they were ineffective at fighting.

  So the best thing to do was to prevent fighting from breaking out in the first between him and the pixies as well as make some kind of weapon that he knew would be effective against the nearby pixies in case they launched an attack against him if negotiations broke down. So it would seem it was time for research and development once again.

  He began to think about the matter of how to try and establish diplomatic relations with his neighbors to the south. He would first need to speak to them to be able to establish diplomatic talks, which was a bit of a problem considering that neither he nor any of his current creations had the particular gift for communication.

  So his first goal in this round of research was to find a way to create minions capable of speech. The first problem was how to create such a thing, as he doesn't have any new material from what he had already used to create his other undead citizens. So Maxwell took in his entire domain, looking for any material that he hadn't noticed earlier that he could use now.

  He couldn't find anything on the ground, but as he thought about it, perhaps he could get something from the sky. So using the smog clouds, he slowly began to form a serpent made out of smog clouds and began to have it seek out anything flying above his wall of smog. He mostly got leaves, which he had stored in his skull, hoping to find another way to manipulate them than he had with the grass.

  Though eventually his little serpent of smog got a butterfly, which it dragged down. Which caused it to die as it choked on the smog that made up the serpent, so now Maxwell was left with a dead butterfly. "Well, I guess that's something, I suppose." Maxwell said he was not really sure how to deal with his smog serpent killing a butterfly randomly.

  His serpent, not knowing or possibly caring about its creator's feelings about its sudden kill, went on to target any other unlucky insect passing by. Maxwell thought about ordering the smog serpent to stop but then stopped himself. "No, Maxwell, you need new parts to play with to create some kind of undead that can take place in order to open up relations. It's better for random insects, of which some type only have a natural life span of a day, to die rather than sentient beings to die instead." Maxwell said before forming a hand smog and moving the butterfly body to a particular spot to experiment with later.

  Maxwell figured he would wait till there was a buildup of insect parts before he tried to make something out of them. So instead he began to work on the leaves that had been stored in his skull. Maxwell figured that the leaves would be harder because he wanted to try a second method of necromancy in case a counter was made for his smog-based one.

  Though how to go about creating a second form of necromancy would be rather difficult. He barely understood his first form of necromancy, but he needed a second one, as there was no doubt that a powerful magic forest would have someone or something skilled at magic who could counter necromancy some way. Hopefully having two methods of necromancy would make countering his undead harder, though he would have to actually get a second one.

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  So he would start with his memory of her getting the first form of necromancy. Now, as Maxwell recalled, he had gotten depressed about his failure. The emotion combined, he guesses, with his necrotic power to form a deadly necromantic spell that was made permanent by his transformation.

  So if he wanted a second form of necromancy, the best bet was to transform another part of him that would produce the magic needed to raise the dead, and since the leaves were now in his mouth, what better place to turn into a new building than his skeletal mouth? As it seemed the best place to release a second strain of magical undead.

  Though Maxwell wasn't entirely sure how to start such a thing, like before, a magical component was required for the process. So he went with his best bet, and like before, when he was learning to control his black necrotic smog, he began to feel the necromantic magic that connected his jaw to the rest of his skull.

  He figured since before it was like tears flowing down his face, which now gave him endless smog to play with. If he could figure out how to connect the feeling of breathing through his mouth with the necrotic magic in his jaw bones, he could create some kind of building as part of his constructed body. Though, like before, this was easier said than done, as he had not breathed in a very long time.

  As he had spent an unknown amount of time in the void then been immediately put in an undead body. So Maxwell may not have breathed for thousands of years by this point. So he would have to just try and imagine what breathing was like while trying to replicate it magically.

  For a long while all Maxwell succeeded in doing was opening and closing his jaw rather fast, but then as he did that, he started to cause a cold breeze to flow through his mouth. As the breeze went in and out, stirring up the leaf sticks in his skull, he started to remember the feeling of breath, and slowly, little by little, he built up a dark wind and held it in his mouth before letting it go.

  This dark, ghostly wind tore apart the leaves in Maxwell before heading out of him and into the land. It went around and around picking up and dropping smog grass elements with ghostly blue images of the shredded leaves appearing in the small tornado.

  "Hmm, seems I've created the ghost leaf tornado." Maxwell said to himself, watching the tornado as it moved around his territory, picking up and dropping his minions without doing any damage to them. Once he was satisfied he had seen enough, Maxwell called the ghost leaf tornado back, and it duly awoke going back through Maxwell's mouth and disappearing inside of him.

  "Well, pretty sure a ghost tornado is a decent enough weapon." Maxwell said to himself before turning his focus back on the pile of insect bodies that had been mounting while his focus was elsewhere. It seemed his smog serpent had been rather busy, as it had built a large pile of dead hornets and butterflies.

  "Well then, I guess it's time to go to work on this now." Maxwell said as he grabbed one hornet and one butterfly through his black smog and began to try and combine them. As he figured the combination would be able to communicate and be somewhat intelligent.

  So first he took the dead butterfly and reshaped its main body, making it effectively the spine of the new creature and twisting its head around to face forward, then heads it's limp face forward. He then added the hornet, merging it along the body of the butterfly where the ribcage on a normal human would be.

  Once the fusion of the body was complete, he began to work on the details, fusing both of the legs of the hornet and the butterfly to create a set of strong limbs, then fusing the heads to create one head instead of two, as well as extending the hornets stinger causing it double in size and drip with necrotic venom that promised a dark fate to all who were stung.

  He did not fuse the creature's wings, keeping the two separate and creating a smaller set of insect wings just behind the other ones. He also didn't merge the eyes, leaving the creature with four insectoid eyes. Now Maxwell was done with work on his creature, and so he brought it to undeath and watched it buzz around his limited sky.

  Once the creature had shown it was capable of movement with its flight, Maxwell then ordered it to speak. "Bzzzz destroy bzzzz enemies bzzzz of bzzzz of bzzzz hive." The creature said with an aggressive buzz, which Maxwell thought was good enough as he now had a creature type able to communicate.

  Though with that, his experiments were done, and he felt the energy hitting building up once again as his experiments with necromancy had unlocked new things for him once again. "I wonder what I'll get this time." Maxwell said curiously before a dark necrotic energy filled his small kingdom totally.