The Monster of Black Valley
Black Valley.
As its name suggested, it was a ravine where darkness pooled and never seemed to drain away. No light reached it, so anyone entering had to rely on torches.
The moment I set foot at the entrance, even the air felt different against my skin.
Sticky, damp Death Energy pressed in, clawing at my vitality as if it meant to gnaw it away.
“Ugh…!”
The first to react was Lee Cheolgang, the weakest in our group.
He was using his massive axe like a cane, dragging it along as he panted hard. Even with all his internal power drawn up to protect himself from the death energy, he didn’t have enough of it to begin with, so he was already suffering at the very threshold.
“You all right?”
“Y-yeah… I’m fine…”
Even as he said that, Lee Cheolgang’s knees were shaking like leaves in a storm.
The conditioning he’d built up since his trainee days was useless before the pressure of the energy here. Still, he was doing his best to survive among geniuses, and that made the sight of him a little pathetic.
“Don’t force yourself. Wait here. If you burn through all your inner power before we even start, you won’t have enough left to get back.”
“I-I can go too…!”
“If you go any deeper, you’ll just become dead weight. Stay here.”
Lee Cheolgang didn’t dare argue. He was quick on the uptake; there was no way he didn’t understand the reality of the situation.
“Jin Sohee, it’ll just be the two of us.”
“All right.”
I kept going with Jin Sohee. We’d already moved quite a distance from the entrance; by now we were probably around the middle.
When I glanced back, even Jin Sohee had sweat beading on her face.
“…I think this is my limit too.”
She was one of the top five geniuses among the trainees, but the death energy of Black Valley wasn’t something children could endure.
“Fine. I’ll investigate and come back, so wait here.
If I don’t return for too long, go back to Lee Cheolgang and the entrance to Black Valley.”
“But…”
“I’m not saying anything happened to me. Death energy helps me train.
We’ve got ten days anyway, so I can spend that time training here. And if you wait for me, I’ll help you both too.”
“Got it. But if anything dangerous happens, you have to run.”
“Don’t worry.”
I left Jin Sohee behind as well and went into Black Valley alone.
And my honest feeling was…
“Ah. Now I can finally breathe.”
The death energy that had been irritating my skin now flowed through my blood vessels and began to strengthen me.
To martial artists, it would be little different from a deadly poison. To me, though, death energy was no different from the purest medicinal elixir.
I breathed it in deeply and strolled farther into the valley.
That was when I heard it.
“P-please help me!”
From beyond the thick darkness came a voice that was almost a scream.
I extinguished my torch and immediately prepared for battle.
On top of that…
Silence.
Stealth.
Using Silence, which dampened sound, and Stealth, which hid my presence, I slipped into complete concealment.
I moved slowly toward the source of the sound and found a young man in red clothes.
He was drenched in blood and looked like a rag pulled from a gutter.
“Please… save me… please!”
Terror had painted every inch of his face.
“Who are you?”
“I’m part of the recon team that was sent out recently!”
So these were the missing scouts they’d mentioned. He must have been one of them.
I supported him and asked quietly, “What happened to the others?”
“The others… that madman caught them. I barely escaped by myself.”
“Madman?”
According to the young man, an unknown monster was living deep inside Black Valley.
“Whatever he used wasn’t martial arts. It was more like the spellcraft the cult’s sorcerers use.”
I’d heard other trainees mention spellcrafters before. People who didn’t use martial arts, but manifested phenomena through formations and ritual arts.
To put it simply, they were the mages of this world.
The young man clutched at my sleeve and begged, “He didn’t kill my comrades. He took them away. We have to save them!”
Frankly, working alone was easier, but if I solved everything by myself, I’d stand out.
Using this guy as a guide would be more convenient in every way, even if it meant dealing with the inconvenience of carrying someone dead weight.
“Lead the way.”
Following the young man, I went deeper into the valley.
Not long after, we reached a bizarre chamber whose walls were decorated with bones. At least this place was lit by torches, so the visibility was much better.
At its center stood a man in tattered clothes, muttering a grotesque incantation toward the empty air.
“Heh-heh-heh… I need more souls. Fresher sacrifices!”
Dark red flames writhed around him, and geometric patterns had been drawn on the floor in blood.
It looked similar to the magic circles from my previous life, but the structure was different enough that I couldn’t make sense of it.
The man’s head twisted at a grotesque angle as he looked at us and grinned.
“A, a sacrifice! Fresh sacrifices!”
He brought his hands together, and black chains shot out of the air, lashing toward us.
“Watch out!”
The young man shouted, and we both dodged, but the chains didn’t stop at simply extending.
They turned in the direction we’d evaded to and came at us again. I slapped them away with a palm infused with death energy, but the young man couldn’t even manage that much.
“Ghk!”
Bound by the chains, the young man was lifted into the air as dark red smoke rose from his body and began siphoning away his life force.
“A-ahh! Help me!”
“Dragging him along only to be useless…”
I triggered Blood Vein Acceleration and darted toward the chains, striking them with a hand packed full of death energy.
The chains instantly lost their strength and scattered. The young man crashed to the ground and lost consciousness.
The surroundings fell silent. Lee Cheolgang was at the entrance, Jin Sohee was somewhere near the middle, and the young man lay unconscious on the floor.
The bastard seemed to think he had the upper hand, because he cackled as he walked toward me.
“Now it’s your turn! Hand over the fresh vitality in your body! Eh… wait a sec!?”
The monster’s head snapped in the opposite direction with a twitch, and his eyes flew wide open.
“Wh-what are you?
Why is there death energy in you? Why are you still fine if there’s death energy in you?
Why is there death energy in you? Why are you still fine if there’s death energy in you?
Why is there death energy in you? Why are you still fine if there’s death energy in you?”
He kept repeating the same words over and over before grabbing his own head tightly.
“Th-this is weird. Weird! I hate weird things!!!”
His eyes bulged as he drew his hands together again. He was probably about to attack once more.
I looked at the fallen young man, then slowly raised my head to stare at the spellcaster.
A much wider smile than before crept across my lips.
“W-why are you smiling!?”
It was a battle where defeat meant death. He must have been wondering why I was smiling when I was about to die.
“Because I finally don’t have to keep hiding what I can do.”
“Huh?”
I released the spell I’d been maintaining and, at the same time, unleashed the death energy I’d hidden from the eyes of the strong until now.
Originally, my energy contained not only death energy but also the blood qi I had absorbed through Blood Pill consumption.
Of course, I’d accumulated so much death energy that the blood qi was practically a drop in the bucket, but it still existed, clearly enough to be felt.
But now that I had released all of my death energy, my body held nothing at all except for the reddened pupils in my eyes.
“Ha…”
A sense of fullness, of omnipotence, flooded my body. For a moment, I found myself wondering how my past self had managed to live at all.
This feeling was nothing compared to the time when I’d built up power so vast I couldn’t even compare it to now.
“Y-you… what are you… this energy…”
The bastard staggered back in panic. He had realized it instinctively.
Before him stood the true user of death energy, someone whose crude little tricks could never hope to raise their head.
I reached out toward the air.
“The conditions are perfect. A land overflowing with death energy, and offerings in abundance.”
This was the ideal environment for a necromancer.
In my previous life, I had never once been defeated on ground like this.
Call of the Dead.
The pitch-black death energy that began at my fingertips spread across the ground in ripples.
Clatter. Clatter. Clatter.
Clatter. Clatter. Clatter.
Clatter. Clatter. Clatter.
The bones hanging on the walls began to rattle as they struck the floor.
Before long, they had surrounded the man and formed a standoff.
“W-what!? Y-you did this!?”
His face twisted in panic as his body trembled violently. Then, with a grin, he suddenly went rigid.
“You’re really fascinating.
He lifted the flute hanging at his throat and blew into it.
Peeeeeep!
The sound rang out, and from the darkness behind him came pounding footsteps.
“What’s that?”
Something strange emerged behind him.
A corpse with a bizarre scrap of paper stuck to its face, its body frozen with postmortem rigidity and its arms thrust straight out in front of it.
And yet, seeing it leap around on two feet at once made it clear that it wasn’t postmortem rigidity at all.
“I’ve finally got a chance to test the Jiangshi.”
So that was a Jiangshi. If he was using corpses, did that mean necromancers existed in this world too?
Well, there were martial artists who manipulated death energy, so it wasn’t as if necromancers had any reason not to exist.
“Now I’m curious too. Which one of us will win.”
Bones shaped into soldiers. Skeletons.
Soldiers that wouldn’t die unless their bones were shattered or their death energy was purified.
Just how long could the necromancers of this world hold out against soldiers who didn’t die?