But Now What?
So... what now?
In the deepest reaches of the Demon Realm, in a dense forest near the ruins of the Demon King's Castle, there sits a tiny cabin hidden even deeper than the forest itself. And inside that cabin, a demon necromancer was carrying on with her experiments, just like any other day.
Yes. That would be me. I once lived high and mighty as one of the Four Heavenly Kings of the Demon King's Army, but those days are long gone — now I'm just a shut-in wasting away in the corner of nowhere.
Nearly a century has passed since the Demon King's Army was annihilated, and the Demon King himself perished long ago in mutual destruction with the Hero.
Alone in this cabin, holed up like a hermit, what meaning could a title like "Heavenly King" possibly hold? These days I'm nothing more than a recluse hiding my body from the subjugation squads that keep sniffing around at the most inconvenient times.
Though I honestly can't fathom what crime so terrible I committed that they keep charging at me with murder in their eyes.
So I released poison and contaminated their water supply. So I cursed their farmland into barren wasteland. So I performed live experiments on prisoners of war and converted them into undead for my legion. All of that is just standard wartime practice — it's not as if they fought their battles with clean hands either.
Anyway, today's experiment had a simple purpose.
A new servant. My own ultimate bodyguard.
I needed an impregnable shield — something that could repel the human subjugation squads that pester me every time they show up, not to mention the Heresy Inquisitors of the Holy Kingdom, who could descend on me at any moment. No one, absolutely no one, should be able to lay a finger on me.
But for that, raw power alone wouldn't cut it. I needed political weight as well.
What good is strength on its own? They can just gang up on you and beat you to death.
That's why I chose the corpse of Radian, the legendary Hero of Humanity.
The hero who fell alongside the Demon King in mutual destruction. The man they called the living myth of humankind.
I had kept his remains hidden away in secret for the better part of a hundred years, ever since the day he fell.
If I could resurrect him as an undead, not a single lunatic on this earth would dare raise a hand against me. In a world without the Demon King, the Hero is god. The Hero is law.
In the novels and manga I read in my past life, there were plenty of stories about heroes who slew the Demon King only to be betrayed and discarded on their return. But actually doing that here would be genuine insanity.
Why on earth would you antagonize someone who has the power to kill the Demon King? That's not defiance — that's lying down and begging them to kill you.
The real problem, of course, was the method.
I couldn't just stitch and graft the corpse together like your average undead, cobbling together a monster from scraps. Anything made that crudely would be exposed in no time, and the Holy Kingdom's priests would blast it straight into the afterlife the instant they laid eyes on it.
My whole plan was to borrow the Hero's prestige so I could live in peace — an ending like that would benefit me in no way whatsoever. If I got caught, I'd be facing an even bigger subjugation squad, screaming about how I "desecrated the corpse of humanity's hero."
And so my plan was this: a perfect reproduction of the original.
While other necromancers were haphazardly sewing rotten flesh together, I had long harbored a single question.
Why bother stitching decayed pieces back together at all? Why not just restore the body to the way it was?
Instead of gluing dead flesh in place, revive every last cell and reconstruct a flawless body. Reconnect the blood vessels, weave fresh muscle fiber, layer the skin one strand at a time. Rebuild the digestive system so the body can function without drawing power from me, and revive the brain so it can think on its own without my commands.
No trace of necromancy would remain on the surface — no visible sign that a dead thing had been raised.
The result would be indistinguishable from a living human. Perhaps even more perfect than one.
The technique itself had been finished ages ago. I needed it during the war, to slip undead infiltrators into human cities.
The undead created this way were, by appearance alone, practically identical to their living selves. They ate. They breathed. They slept. Given the need, they could even hold a conversation.
Admittedly, a conversation that ran too long would give them away, but if they kept a low profile, they could pass among humans for months at a stretch without issue.
The resurrection rite was ready as well.
Mind you, it wouldn't be easy — the soul had been dead for an eternity, and not just any soul, but the Hero's soul of all things.
This was the one part that made me a little nervous. Even an ordinary soul becomes nearly impossible to track down after enough time passes. And a century had gone by. If his soul had already entered the cycle of reincarnation, or returned to the Goddess's embrace, simply dragging it back would be the first great obstacle.
But I didn't consider it impossible. A being of the Hero's caliber would have left far deeper marks on the world than your average human ever could.
So the plan was: summon the Hero's soul, seat it into the perfectly restored body, and bind that soul to the flesh with my craft.
Settling a soul into a corpse is something any necromancer can do. I was merely making sure that corpse looked very, very healthy and whole.
From where I stood, there was no reason for this to fail. If anything, it was the other necromancers — so bereft of imagination that they were still stitching corpses together — who seemed pathetic.
And now, at long last, only the final step remained.
I made my way down to the cellar buried deep beneath the cabin. There lay the treasure I had hidden for a hundred years, patiently awaiting the day it would surely be put to use.
An iron coffin. And inside it slept the bones of the legendary Hero, Radian.
I still remember the day I first obtained them. The day the Hero and the Demon King fell together, when the battlefield was swallowed by blood and flame — and in the thick of that chaos, I made damn sure to grab the corpse.
From that day to this, I had personally cleaned, preserved, and sealed those bones with a warding circle, and thanks to that care, they had retained their form all the way to this very moment.
I slowly opened the coffin lid, and the groan of old metal echoed through the cellar. Within it lay an unbroken skeleton, unbowed even by a century's weight — the remains of the great hero who had once shaken the world itself.
"Heh heh heh... Finally."
I began the preparations exactly as I had rehearsed them countless times before. A vast magic circle carved in a perfect ring, auxiliary circles ringing it in concentric support, alchemical formulas devised to simulate the flow of blood — every last piece had been made for this moment.
I lifted the bones out and placed them at the center of the circle.
The air instantly grew heavy, pressing down like a physical weight. As if the very presence of these bones was warping the balance of the space itself.
So this was the Hero's power? Even after nearly a hundred years dead, it was this overwhelming. What would it be like, I wondered, when this existence rose again and served at my command?
I laid my hand over the bones and let out a long, slow breath.
Death energy spread outward into the darkness, and the bone fragments began to tremble with a faint hum. Flesh welled up over the bone. Muscle stretched out in fine threads and wrapped around the frame. Skin crept over the muscle, and pale tissue flushed with color as red blood began to circulate.
A heart boomed dully — thud, thud — before settling into a steady rhythm. Lungs swelled as they drank in air, the chest rising and falling into the cadence of breath. The face recovered its living countenance, and through the parted lips came the faint sound of breathing.
Success...?
Half-doubting myself, I began examining the body before me in exhaustive detail — from trivialities like the fingerprints at the tips of the fingers, to the steady rhythm of respiration, to the pulse I could feel beneath the skin.
It was so flawless I could scarcely believe I had made it. Anyone who saw this would believe it was a living human being.
And frankly, it had turned out far better than I'd expected. I'd assumed I'd have to go back and redo at least one misattached organ, or repair some stray blood vessel here and there. It was a reconstruction from bones alone, after nearly a century.
But the body lying on the magic circle looked as natural as if a living man had simply been laid down in that spot from the very beginning. It had even reproduced his scars.
Which was odd, because those acquired marks were nothing I had made. Had they been engraved into his soul, then?
Well, whatever. Who cares? What matters is that it worked.
"Behold. This is true necromancy. Stitching corpses together like those other fools? That's just barbarism. To restore the original, exactly as it was — this is what perfection looks like."
Thoroughly pleased with myself, I gazed down at his face for a moment.
"Good. From now on, you're my personal bodyguard. And I get to live out my days in peace behind you. Everyone wins."
And then, at that very moment, the eyelids quivered — and slowly opened.
Blue eyes pierced the darkness and fixed themselves on me.
The moment I saw the Hero awaken, I snapped my fingers to trigger the command I had inscribed into the body.
No response.
I snapped my fingers again.
Still nothing.
Huh...? Why isn't the control working...? Did I botch something in the binding ritual?
But no matter how many times I checked, the answer was no. The ritual had functioned perfectly. If something was wrong, it wasn't the ritual — it was the target. To be precise, there was no part of him that accepted my commands at all.
As I met the Hero's unblinking stare head-on, it finally dawned on me.
What is the definition of life?
Composed of living cells. Capable of independent metabolism. Possessed of the capacity to reproduce.
Which meant a perfectly regenerated body could no longer be called a corpse.
Cold sweat trickled down my back as I muttered inside my head:
What... do I do... now...?