No! I don't want to be a Super Necromancer!

Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. At first, they emerged from the forests, drifting like fog toward the outskirts of critical cities. Then they rose from mass graves, crawling free of the very soil where the dead had been burned and buried.

Their armor was rusted. Their bodies pale. Their eyes cold.

But they did not attack.

They walked the perimeters. Stood at the edges of cities like silent guardians. Patrolled roads leading into border zones. Created rings around agricultural sectors and hydroelectric plants.

Wherever the beast waves tried to push inward, the undead met them first.

And held.

They didn't speak. They didn't rest. And they didn't lose.

No human command directed them. No flags were flown. But they moved with clear purpose, intercepting beast hordes before they reached the population centers. When an attack breached a sector, the undead simply rose in greater numbers.

It was unnatural and terrifying.

And it saved them.

China found itself with breathing room. For the first time in a year, the beast waves began to slow. Border towns that had been evacuated were reoccupied. Roads were reopened. Trade began again in patches. Even the air felt lighter.

And yet, no one could claim credit. Not the military. Not the sects. Not the new provisional government.

So the rumors began.

They whispered of a necromancer, a shadow who walked the dead roads alone. They spoke of the God of Death, whose power had grown beyond human measure. They said he had built an empire in the ruins. That the land itself obeyed him.

That he was no longer man, but something more. Something old.

And the beasts…

The beasts had changed too.

Their waves became disjointed. Slower. Less organized. As if something was keeping them back. As if something, or someone, was turning them against each other.

Whispers grew of a young demon fox. A creature of illusion and charm who had begun to consolidate power within the awakened beast horde. A trickster. A manipulator. An heir to an ancient bloodline.

Internal strife had erupted in the beast hierarchy.

And thus China survived, and began its long road in rebuilding.

Damien Bloodbane stood atop a desolate mountain somewhere in the northern stretches of China.

The wind howled around him, sharp with frost and ash, tearing through the skeletal remains of pine trees long burned or withered away. The sky overhead was grey with soot, casting the landscape in lifeless shades of stone and shadow.

Below him stretched a broken world.

Valleys scarred by craters, plains littered with shattered bone and rusted steel, and entire towns reduced to sunken outlines of blackened ruin.

It had taken him a full year.

A year of walking alone.

A year of silence and storm.

He had completed what no one else could endure, a brutal, unending pilgrimage through every major battlefield across the nation, from the drowned cities along the eastern coast to the blood-drenched mountains of the southern frontier.

But it was the west… the west that took the longest.

That region had become a grave with no name.

Entire provinces where not a single civilian had survived. Cities erased from maps. Rivers running black with decay. The death energy there was thick enough to choke the air, and

Damien had absorbed it all.

Every scream, every echo, every last whisper of agony carved into the mana of the land.

At one point, as if drawn by fate, he had stumbled upon his old friend's dead body, one among thousands encased in unmelting ice in a random city.

Harry Shadowfang.

Damien buried him gently, and mourned by his grave for half a day.

Then he moved on, his heart frozen and flaming hot at the same time.

And now, at the edge of that long journey, he had become something else.

His body, once human, had refined itself beyond ordinary comprehension.

He had reached Silver Grade.

His bare skin was tougher than triple-folded steel, hard enough to deflect blades and withstand the direct blast of a heavy bomb without injury. His bones no longer cracked under pressure. His muscles no longer fatigued. He moved like a phantom and struck like a divine calamity.

Every stat, Strength, Vitality, Agility, Intelligence—had stabilized at 750, each one an overwhelming force by itself at a ridiculous 750x stronger than the average man. His Sense stat had solidified at 75, allowing him to hear breath shifts and to feel the rustle of mana from miles away.

He had lost count of how many spells he now knew—death curses, soul chains, necrotic storms, blood constructs, spectral forges. Each one etched into his soul, each one honed through battle and understanding.

His Deathfield had expanded to a radius of 2 kilometers. Within that zone, every shred of death energy belonged to him. Passive absorption was constant. Active devouring could strip the battlefield bare in seconds.

And his Necromantic Core, once a fragile shard, had long reached full formation.

Now, it pulsed like a second heart, crystalline and perfect, housed deep in his spiritual body, burning with cold violet light.

That completion of the Necromantic Core had triggered the System Upgrade, pushing his abilities into an entirely new class.

[Necromancer System: Intermediate Tier Activated]

New Functions Unlocked:

Soul Ledger: Automatically catalogs devoured souls, storing their essence, skills, and memories for potential resurrection or fusion.

Undying Command: Grants command over undead across vast distances, issue psychic directives, and merge consciousness with elite undead generals.

Gravewalk: Teleport to any battlefield where death energy exceeds a minimum threshold. Requires no portal, no chant—only intent.

Black Throne Dominion (Locked): ???

Deathfield Devour (Passive): Devours death energy within a 2 kilometer radius automatically.

At that moment, Damien was no longer just another S-Ranker.

He was the S-Ranker.

The strongest awakened being in China. Undisputed. Unchallenged. Unrivaled.

His cloak billowed behind him in the wind, threads of mana trailing like ribbons of black fire. He looked out over the landscape, this broken, half-dead country, and his eyes narrowed.

The time for reckoning had come.

The beasts would be first.

Damien raised a hand, his cloak whispering in the wind like a funeral shroud.

His finger extended slowly, pointing toward the vast, shadowed forest sprawling across the northern horizon, an endless sea of twisted trees and lurking horrors.

"Kill them all."

Behind him, the earth trembled.

A hundred thousand undead beasts stirred as one.

Fanged wolves with hollow eyes, skeletal drakes stitched with mana bindings, towering gorillas of bone and sinew, insects the size of trucks with carapaces split by old scars.

And then they began to march forward.

With no roar. No war cry.

Only the promise of death.