[ WP ] The taboo over necromancy is a thing of the past . You live in a world where it is normal to become a lich and `` live '' forever .

Graff leaned back in his chair as he awaited centuries of research and engineering to culminate; he was sure that he had accomplished it this time, and as he awaited his desired results fond memories came flooding back to him, reminding him of how far he had come. 
 
 He remembered his early days. He had spent so much time in locations, both rumored and known, to be the sites of the worst atrocities mankind had to offer. From abandoned asylums and `` haunted hotels'' to remarkable places such as Auschwitz and Stalingrad: he desperately attempted to prove his theory. He had been deemed a ghost hunter; the most attention he had received was from public networks hoping for any kind of footage that proved his theory: the dead were still among us. Scientists ridiculed him and everything he published; grants, financing, and any attempt to fund his efforts were met with amusement rather than intrigue. Yes: back then, he was a joke. A cult was founded upon his beliefs and their attempts at ritualistically summoning or harnessing the power of the dead, sometimes including ritual killings, brought him so much bad publicity that he had been exiled from sixteen countries. 
 
 They were not entirely wrong, the cult, but they were lacking in ambition. In fact Graff himself had first been made aware of the residual energy left behind by the living at a somewhat young age while serving alongside his parents on a mission with their local parish. An old man had told him stories about a warlock that had harnessed the power of the dead and prolonged his life long enough to rule over three generations of his subjects. However: even with the time he had the art had never been perfected and he succumbed: joining the dead without passing on his secrets. `` The costs would be too great,'' he had told Graff, `` for an entire population of people to pursue immortality.'' Needless to say as the devout Christian he was Graff had not believed the old man, and so the Old Man offered to show him: to let him feel the power of death. He had accepted, and for a brief time he did indeed feel the tremendous imperceptible energies of several millenniums of death flowing about him in great torrents. Graff's lips pursed into a tight smile as he remarked on that particular memory. It was bittersweet, a reminder of a time that was long gone. 
 
 By the time of the cult, though, he had become the individual that would later be remarked upon as `` brilliant,'' and `` one of the greatest scientific minds of our time.'' Death was not simply the end of life, death was in fact the release of energy from the living to a pool - no, an *ocean* that encompassed the world. Some theorized, in the aftermath of his revelations, that perhaps it was comprised of souls of our ancestors, and perhaps as we lived our souls became fragmented and this is why those who were closer to death could better perceive it around them. These details were unimportant to him, and he in fact doubted their credibility because if it were indeed distinct souls of the living one would expect destruction, or at the very least distortion, of the individual as they prolonged their life with the energies of the dead. In spite of how much he had consumed in his eleven hundred years of life he felt no less himself. That is, until recently - until the beginning of his most recent project. The changes he had gone through, the things he had done: he never would have considered them before. `` No,'' he spoke quietly to remind himself, `` death is an ocean - its currents flow outward across our world from the atrocities committed by our ancestors. If I have a soul, it is still my own.'' 
 
 **Continued in comments**
