Awakening (2)
“......”
I'd lost count of how many times I had strained to use the Undead Rise skill. Yet nothing had ever worked — not on tiny insects, not on large animals or monsters. Not a single target had ever been valid for my skill. And now they were telling me it worked on bacteria?
My mind went blank, but I decided to try the skill first and figure the rest out later.
“Undead Rise.”
With a flash, the petri dish glowed faintly, exhaling a soft blue light. Just when I was starting to wonder if nothing was happening at all—
You have raised 2,889,716,653 corpses of the Perpetuus Exomodulus strain.
They will follow you as your loyal servants.
You have used Undead Rise (Unique) for the first time.
As a reward, your class will change from Necromancer to the unique class, Necromancer Who Rules the Microscopic World.
.
.
.
So many system messages had popped up at once that I couldn't even properly read the ones in the middle. What on earth was going on here? I stood there slack-jawed, but one thing was crystal clear: my ability wasn't the useless piece of trash I'd thought it was.
“S-Status window.”
With a trembling voice, I opened my status window again. It had been a month.
First of all, my class name had changed. Necromancer Who Rules the Microscopic World, huh... But wait, what was the "microscopic world"? The world where microorganisms live...? Dongtan?
“...Yeah, right. No way.”
A quick internet search told me it was the world of matter invisible to the naked eye. Only then did I begin to understand why Undead Rise had never worked before. It could only ever be cast on things like bacteria — things I couldn't see in the first place.
And what was Control supposed to be? I had plenty of questions, but this was neither the time nor the place.
“Let's just go... home...”
As I moved, the black bacterial colony scattered across the floor wriggled and began to follow behind me. The bacteria were listening to me?
No, wait — this was a problem. If I walked out with all of them trailing after me, I'd be a full-time industrial spy in about ten seconds. Glancing around, I spotted the empty petri dish and set it back in its original spot, then swept up the shattered dish fragments into a waste bag.
“You lot, sit tight in there and behave.”
The bacteria slowly squirmed their way into the petri dish. Phew. Now I could breathe a little easier. Still, just in case, maybe I should take some with me. They were, after all, my first undead (?) as a necromancer, and leaving them all behind didn't sit right with me. There were nearly 2.9 billion of them — skimming off 100 million wouldn't even leave a dent.
“100 million of you, in here.”
A colony so small it was hard to make out with the naked eye split off from the black mass and settled into the neck of the waste bag. Done. Time to bolt. Without so much as a backward glance, I walked straight out of the research center.
The moment I got home, I slept. My heart was pounding too hard for sleep to come easily, but I forced myself under anyway. I figured if my dopamine spiked any further, I might genuinely never sleep again. I crashed for the night and woke up in the morning. I'd worked overtime until midnight, so I didn't need to head into the office until the afternoon — I had a little breathing room.
I'd expected to feel better after some sleep, but my heart was still racing. A dream I'd given up on had become reality in the span of a single month; it was hard not to be excited. Still, this time I had no intention of repeating my old mistake. Getting burned by charging in without even checking what my ability or skills could do was a once-in-a-lifetime lesson.
First, I searched for the keyword "necromancer Control" and found a community for necromancers. The very first post that caught my eye had this title:
“17%...? Mine's 195%, though?”
Tilting my head, I scrolled down the list and clicked on a post further down.
Achievements. So that was the reason. Whatever had stacked up in a rush earlier had been achievements, and their rewards were titles. Thanks to the luck of landing some absolutely massive achievements, I'd gotten to start with some incredible bonuses.
“So where does that leave me right now...? Detailed status window.”
[Mana Status]
─ Current natural mana recovery rate: 1% per second.
─ Current mana consumption to maintain units: 0.304% per second (base 28.89%, with 195% Control effect applied).
[Currently Maintained Undead]
(1) Perpetuus Exomodulus
─ Population: 2,889,716,653 units
─ Description: A species of bacterium under development at Seonggwang Biotech Research Center. Consumes both organic and inorganic matter indiscriminately. An obligate anaerobe that would go extinct on contact with oxygen, but its weakness was overcome upon becoming undead.
─ Ability: Decomposes 4.75kg of inorganic/organic matter per second per 100 million units (base 50g, with 195% Control effect applied).
An undead bacterial legion! I couldn't quite grasp how impressive that was, but the effects of Control were, as expected, absurd. My base mana consumption had been pushing 29% per second. Given my low level and correspondingly small mana pool, that was only natural. But it had dropped to 0.3% per second — meaning maintaining an undead bacterial legion of nearly 2.9 billion cost me effectively nothing. With natural mana recovery at 1% per second, anything below that was free.
And the ability enhancement was a bonus on top. A decomposition rate of 50 grams per second had become 4.75 kilograms.
“Might as well run an experiment.”
But on what? I looked around, and what caught my eye was the food waste bin I'd been meaning to throw out.
“Hmm... asking them to eat garbage feels a bit off, though.”
If I thought of them as just bacteria, I'd feel no guilt at all — but thinking of them as undead under my command made me hesitate a little. Still, that was the only thing on hand to test right now.
“Want to try eating that?”
The bacterial colony I'd stashed in an empty 500ml plastic bottle squirmed out, scattered into the air, and drifted toward the food waste bin — where they began devouring it.
“Whoa.”
Before I could even finish saying "started," the food waste was simply gone. Which made sense — a colony of 100 million could decompose 4.5 kilograms per second, so a bin of garbage should vanish in well under a second.
“It said inorganics work too, right?”
My gaze shifted to the pay-by-weight general waste bag. That too vanished in less than a second. All that remained where it had been was a small residue resembling sawdust.
“So that's what the sawdust waste from Seonggwang Biotech was.”
The mystery of the unidentifiable sawdust was finally solved. When I called the bacteria back into the plastic bottle, a message popped up.
Units lost during command execution: 3,041,615
Units newly divided during command execution: 5,094,497
Current total population: 2,891,769,535
“A little bigger, huh?”
Plus five million, minus three million — they'd multiplied by roughly two million. Undead that multiply on their own by dividing.
“Hold on. Isn't this a huge deal?”
I was no expert on necromancers, but securing corpses to raise as undead was famously the hardest part of the job — that much was common knowledge. There was even a saying, "a necromancer without corpses," because without bodies, a necromancer was all but powerless. That was why the fundamentals of necromancy were the snowball: rolling a small snowball into a big one, grinding your small horde of undead through desperate scrapping until it became a massive legion. That was the essence and the foundation of the class.
But if the undead themselves could divide, everything changed. It meant no more toiling to secure corpses at all.
“At this point, I could seriously give being a hunter... another shot, right?”
The place that, a month ago, had ended leaving behind nothing but the worst humiliation of my life. It was time to go back to the Gangnam Assessment Center.