The Unwanted Undead Adventurer

Rentt Faina has spent ten years as a bronze-rank adventurer slogging through goblin nests for chore-grade pay and has finally found the secret passage off the standard map. The passage takes him to a dragon. The dragon takes him to his death. He wakes up minutes later as a skeleton in the dragon's cave, alive in the technical sense, no longer human. The series is Rentt's slow project of climbing back up the undead evolutionary tree — skeleton, ghoul, wraith, eventually maybe human again — while continuing to clear adventurer contracts under an assumed identity and a flimsy hooded cloak.