Chapter 3
“......”
I couldn't count how many times I'd tried to use Undead Rise by now.
Yet from tiny insects to large animals and monsters,
there hadn't been a single target my skill could affect.
But it was bacteria?
I stood there dazed, then decided to try using the skill first.
“Undead Rise.”
Flash! The Petri dish glowed faintly with a blue light.
Just as I began to wonder if nothing was going to happen,
[You have raised 2,889,716,653 corpses of the Perpetuus Exomodulus strain.]
[They will become your loyal subordinates and follow you.]
[You have used Undead Rise (Unique) for the first time.]
[As a reward, your class has changed from ‘Necromancer’ to the unique class ‘Necromancer Who Rules the Microscopic World.’]
[Great achievement! You are the first person in human history to raise 100,000 undead!]
[You have been awarded the title ‘Necromancer Who Leads a Legion.’]
[The title ‘Necromancer Who Leads a Legion’ increases your Control by 15%.]
[Legendary achievement! You are the first person in human history to raise 1,000,000 undead!]
[You have been awarded the title ‘Necromancer Who Leads an Army of One Million.’]
[The title ‘Necromancer Who Leads an Army of One Million’ increases your Control by 35%.]
[Divine achievement! You are the first person in human history to raise 10,000,000 undead!]
[You have been awarded the title ‘One Who Covers the World in Undead.’]
[The title ‘One Who Covers the World in Undead’ increases your Control by 50%.]
.
.
.
[Great achievement! Your Control over the undead has exceeded 100%.]
[You have been awarded the title ‘Perfect Ruler.’]
[The title ‘Perfect Ruler’ increases your Control by 5%.]
So many system messages appeared all at once that I didn't even get a proper look at the ones in the middle.
What on earth had just happened?
I was dumbfounded, but one thing was clear.
My ability wasn't completely useless after all.
“S-Status window.”
In a trembling voice, I opened my status window again.
It had been a month.
[Name] : Kim Segyun
[Level] : 1
[Type] : Magic
[Class] : Necromancer Who Rules the Microscopic World
[Trait] : Infinite Legion Commander (EX)
[Control] : 195%
For starters, the name of my class had changed.
Necromancer Who Rules the Microscopic World...
Speaking of which, what was the microscopic world?
A world where the moms live...? Dongtan?
“...No way.”
I looked it up online, and it said it was the world of things invisible to the naked eye.
Only then did I begin to understand why I hadn't been able to use Undead Rise until now.
From the start, it could only be used on things like bacteria that were invisible to the naked eye.
What was Control, then?
I had a lot of questions, but this wasn't the place to figure them all out.
“For now, let's go... home...”
As I moved, the black cluster of bacteria on the ground began to writhe and follow me.
The bacteria were listening to me?
No, but this was a problem.
If I took them all out like this, I'd be switching careers to industrial espionage in no time.
I glanced around, spotted an empty Petri dish, and placed it where the broken one had been.
I carefully swept up the broken dish and put it in a waste sack.
“You guys stay in there and behave.”
The bacteria slowly wriggled into the Petri dish.
Phew, I could finally relax a little.
Still, just in case, maybe I should take a few with me.
They were technically the first undead(?) I'd obtained as a Necromancer, so it felt a little wrong to just leave them behind.
There were nearly 2.9 billion of them, so taking 100 million wouldn't even be noticeable.
“Just one hundred million of you, come in here.”
A barely visible cluster peeled away from the black mass and went into the sack.
All right. Now I needed to get out of here, fast.
I left the lab without even looking back.
**
As soon as I got home, I went straight to bed.
My heart was pounding so hard it was difficult to fall asleep, but I forced myself to.
I thought if any more dopamine flooded my brain, I might really not be able to sleep.
After sleeping for a while, I woke up in the morning.
Since I'd worked overtime until midnight, I didn't have to go to the company until the afternoon, so I had a bit of time.
I thought I'd feel a little better after sleeping, but my heart was still pounding.
It was hard not to get excited when a dream I'd given up on had become reality in just a month.
Still, this time I had no intention of making the same mistake as before.
I'd embarrassed myself once already by going there without checking what my ability or skill could do.
First, I searched for the keyword Necromancer Control and found a community for Necromancers.
The first post I saw had this title.
Title: Beginner Necro question. How do I raise my Control from 17%?
“17%...? I'm at 195%.”
Frowning, I scrolled down the list and clicked on a post below it.
Title: Control is the most important stat for a Necromancer.
─Beginner Necros usually whine about having a small mana pool, but it's not that your mana pool is small; your Control is low. What happens when your Control goes up? First, your undead get stronger. Their durability, strength, and traits improve. The mana efficiency for maintaining them also improves dramatically. So how do you raise your Control? For starters, you just have to summon a lot. The best-case scenario is getting a title as an achievement reward, if you're lucky, but that's about as likely as plucking a star from the sky, so don't get your hopes up.
Achievements!
That was the reason.
The things that had popped up one after another were achievements, and the rewards were titles.
Thanks to my luck in achieving some incredible feats, I got to start with some great rewards.
“Then what about me...? Detailed status window.”
[Mana Status]
─Current natural mana recovery rate: 1% per second.
─Mana currently being used to maintain your population: 0.304% per second (base 28.89%, with the effect of 195% Control applied).
[Currently Maintained Undead]
(1) Perpetuus Exomodulus
─Population: 2,889,716,653
─Description: A type of bacterium under development at the Seonggwang Biotech Co., Ltd. laboratory. It consumes organic and inorganic matter indiscriminately. It is an obligate anaerobe that dies upon contact with air, but that weakness has been overcome through its undead state.
─Ability: Decomposes 4.75 kg of organic and inorganic matter per second per 100 million units (base 50 g, with the effect of 195% Control applied).
An undead bacterial legion!
I couldn't quite grasp how incredible it was, but at least the effect of Control was, as expected, amazing.
The base mana consumption was nearly 29% per second.
That was only natural, since I was low-level and had a small mana pool.
But it had been reduced to around 0.3% per second, so maintaining an undead bacterial legion of nearly 2.9 billion took almost no mana.
Since my natural mana recovery rate was 1% per second, anything below that basically meant no mana consumption.
On top of that, their abilities had been enhanced.
Their decomposition ability had increased from 50 g per second to 4.75 kg.
“Should I try an experiment?”
But what should I have them dispose of?
As I looked around, my eyes landed on the food waste bin I'd gathered up to throw away.
“Hmm... Is it a bit much to tell them to eat garbage?”
If I thought of them as just bacteria, I wouldn't feel guilty at all, but thinking of them as my undead made me hesitate a little.
Still, that was the only thing I could test them on right now.
“Why don't you try eating that?”
The bacterial cluster I'd put in an empty 500 ml PET bottle slithered out, then scattered in a spray through the air. The swarm flew toward the food waste bin and began devouring it.
“Whoa.”
Well, “began” hardly did it justice; the food waste vanished in an instant.
That made sense: a cluster of 100 million could decompose 4.75 kg per second, so that amount of waste would disappear in less than a second.
“You said you could handle inorganic matter too, right?”
Next, my gaze turned to the bag of regular household trash.
It, too, disappeared in the blink of an eye—less than a second.
All that remained where it had been was a little sawdust-like residue.
“So that's what the sawdust waste from the Seonggwang Biotech lab was.”
At last, the mystery of that unidentified sawdust was solved.
When I had the bacteria return to the plastic bottle, messages appeared.
[Units that perished while carrying out the command: 3,041,615]
[Units that newly divided while carrying out the command: 5,094,497]
[Current total units: 2,891,769,535]
“They increased a little?”
There was a net gain of five million and a loss of three million, so about two million had divided and been added.
Undead that could multiply by dividing on their own...
“Wait, isn't this incredible?”
I didn't know much about Necromancers, but even I knew acquiring corpses to raise as undead was the most difficult part.
There was even an expression, ‘a Necromancer without corpses,’ because Necromancers were utterly powerless without corpses.
That was why the basic principle for Necromancers was snowballing.
Like rolling a small snowball until it grew large, you had to somehow scrape by with a small number of undead and build them into a massive legion.
That was the essence and foundation of being a Necromancer.
But if the undead themselves could multiply on their own, that changed everything.
It meant I wouldn't have to struggle to find bodies to use as vessels.
“At this point, I can really try becoming a Hunter again... right?”
The place where it had ended a month ago, leaving behind the most humiliating memory of my life.
It was time to go back to the Gangnam Awakened Rank Assessment Center.