Lord of the Undead
The cold earth trembled.
As if nine suns had risen in the heavens, the great sorceries
I suppose it was something to be proud of, being targeted by spells powerful enough to blow a mountain to dust.
“Damn, that’s a sight.”
Who could ever see a sky so wildly colored as this?
Anyone who looked up would have gasped.
I almost did, too.
“If only they weren’t all coming at me.”
I let out a dry laugh and looked around.
A mountain of corpses lay piled at my feet. The continent’s most renowned holy knights, proud mages, and hot-blooded adventurers among them.
The ones who had come to kill me had instead become batteries feeding my power.
“No, seriously—what the hell did I even do?”
At first, I had simply lived quietly, slipping away with corpses and conducting my research.
But somehow word got out, and when those fools came charging in at me, I killed them. Then their comrades came for revenge, and after that more men arrived calling me an evil black mage.
I killed every last one who came at me, and now they called me the enemy of the continent, the Lord of the Undead. As if I’d done anything more than kill the idiots who attacked me.
Far off, the continental allied army was still tightening its encirclement. There were easily hundreds of thousands of them.
Even what I could see stretched on forever—a ring of enemies without end.
“You’ve got the whole continent gathering just to kill one person. Does that even make sense?”
Then a hero in shining armor raised his sword and shouted, “Evil necromancer! Your days of growing stronger through human sacrifice end today!”
“No, a necromancer uses corpses, not living people.”
There was no point talking sense. The hero’s holy sword blazed brighter than the sun, and at that signal, the attacks of hundreds of thousands all came crashing down on me at once.
“Well. I’m dead no matter what I do.”
The layered barrage was so dense the sky turned white.
If I tried to block it, not even the grandfather of a nine-circle mage’s grandfather could have stopped it.
If I ran, I’d still have hundreds of thousands surrounding me.
And if I just stood here and took it, I’d die feeling outrageously wronged.
“I’m not the only one going down.”
There were countless corpses spread across the ground. Tens of thousands, at least.
What would happen if I used corpse explosion, the most basic of black magic?
And if I used my soul—the soul of the so-called Lord of the Undead—as the fuse?
At the very least, everything within sight would vanish in a single blast.
“All right. Let’s all explode together.”
KUUUUUUNGG!
Tens of thousands of corpses detonated in a chain reaction.
The mana left clinging to the bodies resonated all at once and burst apart, completing an unprecedented catastrophe of magic—one that erased a third of the continent from the map.
Kairam, the Lord of the Undead.
He was recorded as the worst enemy the world had ever known, and as the man who developed the most disastrous spell in history.
The magic he cast was designated a forbidden spell, and afterward it became the reason necromancers were hunted to extinction.
.
.
.
“Snap out of it, you bastards! Do you want to die that badly?”
The sharp crack of a whip jolted me awake.
A rancid smell of blood, damp mold. When I opened my eyes, all I saw were stone walls and rusted iron bars.
Where am I? I should be dead.
Something was wrong with my body. The black mana I’d honed for centuries was nowhere to be found, and instead I saw the bony limbs of a scrawny boy, all knobby joints and stick-thin flesh.
“Aah!”
A short scream burst out beside me.
A burly man was mercilessly kicking a child who looked to be five or six years old in the side.
“From today on, you’re no longer human. You are the assets of the great Blood Cult, tools to invade Zhongyuan as Blood Slaves!”
Blood Cult? Zhongyuan?
Unfamiliar memories came surging into my head like a wave.
The owner of this body had been a war orphan, kidnapped by the Blood Cult and dragged here, to the Blood Cult’s Valley of Despair.
Reincarnation. And into the really lousy kind, too.
One moment I’d been fighting an army of hundreds of thousands as the world’s enemy, and now I’d been reduced to a victim of human trafficking, treated like disposable merchandise.
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it.
“Hey!”
The man who’d kicked the boy beside me barked out, “You there! Standing around like a fool!”
He strode toward me with a vicious expression.
“I’m talking to you, idiot.”
“What, are you saying I’m a moron because I look like a flounder?”
“You little bastard—have you lost your mind?”
Thud!
The man’s heavy boot slammed into my stomach.
“Ghk!”
My gut spasmed, and my breath vanished in an instant.
It hurt. God, it hurt.
So this wasn’t a dream after all.
“For centuries, they’ve said that a whip is the cure for disobedient beasts.
“I’ll make an example of you so the rest of them learn their lesson.”
The man came closer, ready to trample me again.
Fine. If this was reality, then I’d just have to live hard all over again.
There was no such thing as mana in this body. But a necromancer didn’t need mana.
Death Energy—for a necromancer who wielded the force of death, the absence of mana wasn’t a problem.
Besides, I didn’t know exactly what this place was, but whatever it was, so many people had died here that Death Energy was not merely abundant—it overflowed.
The residue of decades of resentment gathered at my fingertips.
“Come.”
“So you really are insane. Fine—day one, and the dogs already get a feast.”
The man approached with mocking amusement and lifted his foot to kick again. I lowered my body and swept his ankle out from under him.
“Hrk!”
As he lost his balance and toppled over, I drove my fingertip toward his throat.
The cold Death Energy gathered there, condensed from the surroundings, sharpened to a point like an awl.
Fwip.
My hand pierced his throat cleanly. Even with the weak strength of a child, a finger laced with Death Energy was no different from a spear.
“Ghh...k...”
He clutched at his neck, trying to stop the bleeding, but it was useless. His throat had already been pierced; there was no way he would survive.
If this had been my previous life, I would have brought this whole place down already.
My strength was still too incomplete, and my entire body trembled from the strain. Thankfully, this land was overflowing with Death Energy, so if I had enough time, I could recover at least some of my power.
Just as I was about to begin drawing the Death Energy from the floor in earnest, a storm of killing intent crashed down on me from behind.
“A Blood Slave dares overpower an instructor?”
A middle-aged man walked forward at an unhurried pace. He was on a different level from the thug before. At my current strength, I couldn’t even hope to touch him.
He looked at his fallen subordinate and gave a cold smile before kicking me in the pit of the stomach.
“Ghk!”
I slammed into the wall, and my vision flooded red.
Dammit. My body was far too weak. Even with Death Energy reinforcing me, I couldn’t withstand the impact.
To think I’d be humiliated like this by a pest I could have ripped the soul out of with a glance in my previous life.
What angered me more than anything was how useless this pitiful body was.
“Should I kill him?”
One of the instructors seemed about to draw his sword, but the middle-aged instructor seized me by the hair instead.
“No. A mere Blood Slave killed an instructor. That kind of talent is rare.
“If we train him well, he’ll make a fine hunting dog for the cult.”
“But that look in his eyes doesn’t seem easy to tame...”
“Heh. That’s why he needs training.
“Throw him in the underground prison and don’t give him even a drop of water for three days. Hunting dogs don’t just appear out of nowhere. You make them into dogs that obey only their master.”
Even as my consciousness began to fade, I burned the instructor’s face into my memory.
So that once I recovered my strength, he would be the first one I killed.
So that I could make him into a corpse first and add him to my army.
I’ll remember you. Later, I’ll turn your corpse into a soldier with special care.
And then my vision went black, and consciousness cut off.
.
.
.
The underground prison was a cold cave.
I was locked in a cramped space so narrow I couldn’t even stretch properly.
Rumble.
My stomach was screaming for food, but I couldn’t stop laughing.
This land was definitely cursed.
So many children had died here, and with them an enormous mass of resentment and Death Energy had accumulated.
A normal person would have nightmares just from passing through this place.
Was there any greater blessing for a necromancer than this?
It’s all mine.
They had said three days. I would be trapped here for three days straight, which also meant no one would lay a hand on me for three days.
In the darkness, I began to breathe slowly and evenly.
Deep resentment seeped into my body from the prison floor and walls.
“I’ll take your revenge for you.”
At those words, the Death Energy seemed to rush toward me all the more eagerly.
Three days. Until I was taken out of the underground prison, I would absorb every last ounce of this Death Energy.
.
.
.
Three days later, when I was dragged back into the world, I stood in the training yard with hundreds of other children.
The instructor on the raised platform shouted, “There are too many worthless ones here. I’m cutting the number in half. Kill each other!”
When the children stood there, dumbfounded, I alone smiled faintly and picked up a worn iron sword.
Corpses that would pile up through competition, the resentment saturating this land, and the Blood Cult itself—the enemy who had kidnapped me.
Could there be a more perfect treasure vault?
A necromancer grew stronger the closer he came to death.
And the Blood Cult, having kidnapped me, was the place closest to death.
Here, I could grow stronger faster than anyone else.
“Fine. I’ll play along until I get my strength back.”
Until I recovered my power, I would belong to the Blood Cult. And the day I reclaimed everything would be the day the Blood Cult fell.