School of Necromancy (Variant)

The school of Necromancy explores the cosmic forces of life, death and undeath. As you delve deeper into your studies, you gain the ability to manipulate the primal energy of the soul to your advantage. As you progress, you learn to sap the life force from a creature as your magic destroys its body, transforming that vital energy into magical power you can manipulate.
Necromancy tends to be seen as the dark path of magic but one can learn the less destructive and evil part of this. Or at least, the more hidden ones.

Necromancy Savant

Beginning when you select this school at 2nd level, the gold and time you must spend to copy a necromancy spell into your spellbook is halved.

Soul Shadow

Your early studies in the art of necromancy have given you access to tap into the power of your own soul to materialize a fraction of it's power in the form of a soul shadow.
As part of an hour long ritual you can perform during a long rest, you summon your very own soul shadow. See this creature’s game statistics in the Soul Shadow stat block. You determine the shadows' appeareance.

In combat, the shadow shares your initiative order and takes it's turn during yours. It can move and use its reaction on its own, but the only action it takes on its turn is the dodge action unless you take a bonus action on your turn to command it to take another action.

The Soul Shadow is considered an undead so it can't be healed by most spells. It regains all of it's hit points after a short or long rest.

Siphoning Soul

At 6th level, your link with your Soul Shadow grows stronger, allowing your arcane powers to flow through it.

While your Soul Shadow is within 30 feet of you, you can cast spells with it as your point of origin.

Additionally, as a reaction, whenever a creature dies within 5 feet of either you or your Soul Shadow you regain an expended spell slot of up to half your proficiency modifier (rounded down)

Inured to Undeath

Beginning at 10th level, you have resistance to necrotic damage, and your hit point maximum can’t be reduced. You have spent so much time dealing with undead and the forces that animate them that you have become inured to some of their worst effects.

Invasive Soul

At 14th level, your soul has grown powerful enough to host two bodies at once.

Once per long rest, as an action, a creature that you can see within 30 feet of your Soul Shadow must make a charisma saving throw against your spell save DC. On a failed save, your Soul Shadow possesses it. The creature is incapacitated and the Soul Shadow dissappears.The Soul Shadow now controls the body but doesn't deprive the target of awareness. The Soul Shadow can't be targeted by any attack, spell, or other effect, except ones that turn undead, and it retains its alignment, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma, and immunity to being charmed and frightened. It otherwise uses the possessed target's statistics, but doesn't gain access to the target's knowledge, class features, or proficiencies.

The possession lasts for 1 minute, the creature makes a charisma saving throw at the end of each of it's turn, getting freed of the possession on a succesful save.

You can target a corpse using this feature, in which case, it automatically fails it's charisma saving throw and it has half of it's maximum hit points.