I Have Resurrection Magic?
The process of discovering I possessed resurrection magic was simple enough.
It happened on my first day after transmigrating.
I was torn limb from limb and killed by a cult.
The place I arrived in was the site of one of their gatherings.
They were a religion formed by people who had suffered because of transmigrators in the past.
Their ideology was simple: not a single transmigrator would be tolerated in the First World.
And I just happened to transmigrate right into the middle of their meeting.
What followed was predictable.
“Kill the transmigrator!”
“Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!”
No matter how much I begged for my life, it meant nothing.
In the end, my neck and limbs were all ripped off, and I died.
Then I came back to life.
When I opened my eyes, I was in the dumping ground where the cult disposed of corpses.
As I crawled out of the mass grave, rain poured from the sky.
And I realized something.
My ability was completely useless.
What if those cultists had buried me while I was still dead?
I would have revived underground.
Then, unable to move, I would have suffocated from lack of oxygen and died again.
Only to resurrect and repeat the cycle endlessly.
Death was not liberation for me.
It was an endless chain of curses.
The moment I understood that, I hid my ability and lived quietly.
What good was coming back to life if I could still be trapped forever?
From what I could tell, resurrection took at least four hours.
If my body got buried during that time, I would suffer eternally.
Still, I tried to protect myself by attending the training camp run by the transmigrator association.
But I was just an ordinary person.
More precisely, someone whose physical abilities were slightly below average.
“Physical training isn’t going to work for you. You might want to learn magic instead. Unfortunately, we don’t have anyone here who teaches it.”
Proper magic education was expensive.
The association, built on pooled funds from transmigrators, couldn’t afford to provide formal magical training.
Street magic from shady mages was dangerous, too.
Without a proper foundation, mana could easily go berserk.
Even that option was out of reach, since the association’s support barely covered food and shelter.
‘That’s why I started following Bulldog around.’
The guy had actually learned proper magic.
He was an orphan who got lucky when an old mage took him in as a disciple.
Even after that mage died and he became an explorer, his skills remained solid.
Unlike most explorers who worked in teams, he only needed one porter—that was proof enough of his ability.
In the end, he died while traveling with just that one porter.
His neck was sliced clean off by a serial killer.
I could already see his cold, lifeless body.
I walked over and lifted his head.
Four hours had passed since my own death.
The killer had long since moved on to hunt someone else.
Thanks to that, the forest at dusk was eerily quiet.
Maybe because I had climbed over so many corpses in the mass grave, the sight of Bulldog’s body didn’t make me nauseous.
Still, a bitter taste lingered in my mouth.
Bulldog had a foul mouth, but he was a good man.
I had planned to slowly convince him to take me on as a disciple.
Among the natives of this backward world, he was the best person I had met.
Every other native I had encountered was the pinnacle of barbarism.
The disgusted looks and discrimination toward transmigrators.
The lawlessness of blaming us first whenever trouble broke out.
Yet they screamed about following the law the moment they wanted to throw us in prison.
Those filthy bastards.
They all deserved to die.
For a moment, a deep hatred toward the natives surged up inside me.
“Haa.”
I almost slammed Bulldog’s head against the ground in my rage.
I couldn’t do that.
He was a good person.
Maybe it was because of everything I had been through—first the cult, then getting robbed by street thugs.
These moments kept happening.
‘Transmigrator or not.’
Even a fellow transmigrator, that serial killer, had cut his throat and killed him.
People were all the same.
I gathered Bulldog’s head and body.
Then I gently closed his eyes.
Now what?
Even if I brought his decapitated corpse back to the explorer guild, what would they say?
“Oh, the porter somehow survived and even recovered the body. Impressive.”
That wasn’t going to happen.
Those barbaric natives would probably accuse me of murder and send me straight to the gallows.
I wouldn’t die, but getting my head cut off twice was more than enough.
Should I just leave his body here?
My faint sense of morality and conscience wrestled with the idea for a while.
Eventually, I started rummaging through his pockets.
Soon, I found a silver explorer badge.
Proof that Bulldog had been a Silver-rank explorer.
If I took this, at least I could report his death.
I also gathered up his belongings.
I still needed to get paid for today’s work, after all.
“Bulldog, you were the best person among all these barbaric natives.”
It was something I would never have said out loud under normal circumstances.
People would beat me senseless for saying something like that.
But there was no one around, so I muttered it anyway.
If I didn’t vent somehow, the stress would make me snap.
“You won’t make it to your son’s wedding, but at least there’ll be enough money.”
At least the serial killer hadn’t been interested in money.
From what I could tell, that guy was a real lunatic.
He didn’t touch a single coin—just killed for the sake of killing.
“Psycho bastard.”
I finished packing everything.
One last time, I reached out to close Bulldog’s wide-open eyes.
I offered a final prayer for him.
I sincerely hoped he wouldn’t be reborn as one of these barbaric natives in his next life.
I meant it from the bottom of my heart.
Until a pure white light began flowing from my hand.
“Huh?”
A confused sound escaped my lips.
The light spreading from my palm had completely enveloped Bulldog.
A massive amount of power drained out of my body all at once.
I recognized the sensation.
It was the same feeling I got right before I resurrected.
The sudden weakness made my head spin.
Even so, I couldn’t pull my hand away.
I wanted to see with my own eyes what was happening.
When the white light that had filled the forest finally faded, I collapsed onto my backside.
My fingertips trembled violently. I barely had any strength left.
Yet somehow, it felt strangely satisfying.
“Ugh… ughhh.”
A familiar voice reached my ears.
I quickly looked down with tired eyes.
Bulldog, whose neck had been severed moments ago, was now staring up at me with his head fully restored.
He furrowed his brow as if nursing a mild headache and slowly sat up.
“What the…”
I stared at him with wide eyes.
He was alive.
The dead Bulldog had come back to life.
Just like me.
My gaze fell to my own hand.
Could it be… that my resurrection magic worked on other people too?
I hadn’t known.
Even when I crawled out of that mass grave, I never tried to revive anyone.
All I had meant to do was offer a prayer for Bulldog.
Maybe, deep down, I had wished for something more.
In this cruel world, I had quietly hoped that the one person who had helped me wouldn’t die.
That small wish had triggered an ability I never knew I had.
“Harua?”
Bulldog finally came to his senses and called my name.
I quickly hid my hand behind my back and shouted,
“Bulldog, are you okay?”
He shook his head at my worried voice.
“Yeah, I’m fine, but what the hell happened? Why was I lying on the ground all of a sudden?”
“The serial killer showed up. He almost took your head clean off!”
“My head?”
Bulldog touched his neck with his hand.
From his expression, it was clear his memories were jumbled.
This was my chance.
“You used magic at the very end. It exploded and forced the killer to retreat before he could finish you off. After that, I poured every emergency potion you were carrying into you. I really thought you were dead. You don’t remember anything?”
“I… I did? I almost died for real, huh.”
People rarely remembered the moments right before death.
The brain tended to block out extreme stress.
If you layered a convenient story over the gap, the mind would fill it in on its own.
After all, nobody usually assumed they had come back from the dead.
“……What about the killer?”
Bulldog looked around anxiously.
Having nearly died once had left its mark, and belated fear was creeping in.
“The regular army showed up after getting a report and he ran off. I got stabbed too, so I used what was left of the potions on you and rested until you woke up.”
“The regular army, huh. Whew. Those guys probably ignored us and went after the killer first, right?”
“It’s what they always do.”
Catching the killer took priority over helping half-dead explorers or porters.
The greater good required sacrificing the few.
It was standard procedure for the regular army.
“I would’ve died without those potions. Good thing I spent the money to keep at least one on hand.”
Of course, that potion was currently sitting safely in my pocket.
Since I had already claimed it was used, there was no way to return it.
I would just have to treat it as emergency funds.
“Bulldog, it’s getting late. Can you move?”
“Yeah. My head hurts a bit, but I feel surprisingly light.”
Well, of course. His head had been cut off, so no blood had been reaching his brain.
Bulldog stood up.
Meanwhile, I picked up his belongings as well.
“You sure you can carry all that?”
“Of course. Who else is going to carry the luggage of a guy who just came back from the dead with half his neck missing?”
“Hah, you little punk. You really worked hard today. I would’ve been dead without you.”
“If you’re grateful, teach me some magic later.”
“Ugh, still going on about that.”
“You might be bad at everything else, but your magic is solid.”
“Solid, my ass. Compared to the proper mages in the Magic Tower, I’m nothing. I just barely patched together the basics so my mana doesn’t explode. To them, I’m no different from some street mage.”
Bulldog had a complex about magic.
That was probably why he was reluctant to teach it to others.
Even so, he was the only person I could learn magic from.
To study at the Magic Tower, I would need to earn hundreds of times more than I did now.
“It’s enough to get by. Enough to be a father who can pay for his son’s wedding.”
Bulldog looked at me for a moment.
The way he kept touching his neck made me think he was still processing the fact that he had died and come back.
“……Tch. You really are good at running your mouth, you little brat.”
“You were moved, weren’t you?”
“Screw off.”
Bulldog turned around and started walking.
“There’s a book the old man gave me when I was a kid, telling me to study. I’ll give it to you. Come eat dinner at my place tonight.”
“I’ll do a backflip out of joy.”
“Drop even one thing and you’re dead, seriously.”
Today had been lucky.
I died once to a serial killer, but in exchange, I finally got the chance to learn magic.
And on top of that, I discovered that my ability could revive other people too.
What I should do with that knowledge was something I could think about later.
A few months after transmigrating to the First World.
At last, I could see a faint path forward.