The Necromancer Who Was Despised

In fact, they were the only humans who had died recently in this vicinity.

Tilly did have some of their body parts.

However, most of their flesh had exploded and scattered around this area.

‘Come to think of it, I’ve been resting here for a day.’

To be exact, only I had rested, and Kayla and Athena stayed behind to protect me.

Anyway, I didn’t clean up because it was funny to clean up a place that was going to be destroyed.

Honestly, I didn’t have much of a grudge against the rest of the party members except Cereo.

They had tried to escape, but now they were all dead as a result.

However, I was going to retrieve them since they were useful.

‘Now I can start to increase my size.’

Once you reach Class 5, you start to see the true value of a necromancer.

You won’t be able to fight a country alone, but you will be able to wipe out a rural territory by yourself, even though you are called a one-man army.

Of course, it takes time to reach that size, and even if you do, you should never actually wipe out a territory because it will become a public act.

It takes a lot of resources to increase your size, and human souls are one of the good resources for increasing your size.

‘The best is still a corpse, though.’

The corpses of monsters that were powerful during their lifetime or humans and heterogenous races that reached a high level are the most useful.

However, since those are not easy to obtain, souls are the safest ingredients.

They don’t disappear immediately after death, and even if you take them, there is not much trace left, so there is no need to worry about being caught.

If a high-level priest performs the funeral, the soul cannot be retrieved, but Tilly was low-level, so the soul was still there.

I immediately started drawing a small magic circle on the spot where Cereo and his party had died.

Originally, souls tend to hover around their own flesh during their lifetime, but since most of their flesh had been lost, the souls were still hovering around the place where they had died.

‘It’s been a while. It’s been a while since I’ve dealt with souls directly.’

I had dealt with them indirectly when I created specters. However, that was dealing with the shadows of souls that had already been created. This is the first time in this turn that I have dealt with raw souls directly.

The feeling of a soul.

It is a sensation that priests and black magicians above a certain level can easily feel.

It takes training, but everyone easily opens their senses as long as their compatibility with the soul system is not bad.

I heard that there are people who shouldn’t die, but even that is not a big problem because there is auxiliary magic.

Auxiliary magic allows you to deal with souls even in much lower classes… but instead, the efficiency drops so much that it’s better not to do it.

For your information, I didn’t need such a process.

‘It was the same in the past.’

As soon as I became a Class 5, I was able to feel the presence of souls naturally.

It’s the same this time.

I feel once again how great my body is.

‘If I leave it like this, it will naturally disperse.’

It takes a short period of a few days to a long period of 50 days. However, I had no intention of leaving it like that.

I completed the magic circle and immediately trapped the souls in it.

The souls that had lost their flesh couldn’t resist.

No, I couldn’t have any reaction to begin with.

If anything, Carreo’s soul seemed to be struggling a bit, but even that was easily suppressed by my hand.

Then their souls were soaked in magic.

[Solidify]

-Uwaa!

Tick, tick…

Along with the horrible screams that ordinary people couldn’t hear, the souls fell to the floor one by one, turning into gray beads.

There were four in total.

One of them was a bit larger than the other four.

Of course, it was still honestly too small.

It felt like a small glass bead. It was incomparable to the size I used when I created the previous specter.

‘That means the quality of the soul is low.’

That’s why it didn’t take long to crystallize. I didn’t need much preparation either.

If it had been a powerful soul when it was alive, the difficulty level would have been different.

Priests say that the souls of humans have incomparable value, but from the perspective of a black magician, it was a funny thing to say.

Especially from the perspective of a necromancer, souls are just a resource, and their value varies from person to person.

‘…Well, it’s not like black magicians are devaluing souls themselves.’

It’s not called the ‘shadow’ of the soul for nothing.

They say that even though they use it as an energy source, they still respect it in their own way.

‘I can’t help but think it’s just a deception.’

With that thought, I collected the shadows of the souls.

They were so small that I could hold all four in one hand.

As soon as I finished, Kaila came up to me.

“Shall I call Atina?”

“No, there’s no need. I can open it too.”

It was hard to find, but the opening method was so old that it was quite outdated.

“It could be dangerous, so please be careful.”

But it was a needless worry.

There were no traps inside the secret door I opened.

‘Honestly, I thought it would be something like an underground prison.’

A place for interrogating heretics.

But it wasn’t.

Funnily enough, this place used to be a prayer room used by priests.

‘No, maybe a private room would be closer?’

It was presumed to have been used by a priest of very high rank.

‘After all, it’s the space right below the sacred object. If you think about it….’

It was definitely something that a high-ranking person would have used.

“…It seems like a very old place, but it’s amazing that it still remains.”

Kaila seemed quite surprised.

“…Is this the Bible?”

As expected of a prayer room and personal room, it was disappointing that it had nothing special.

Just an altar and two books, that’s all.

‘Well, I also got a robe that I don’t know if it’s a relic or a holy relic.’

It was quite a satisfactory result, so I was a little disappointed when I picked up the book.

But the moment I opened the book, I started concentrating on it without a word.

Kayla called me, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the book.

‘This… is history?’

I thought it was the Bible because it was in what was supposed to be a prayer room.

But only half of it was correct.

One of them was the Bible.

However, the other one was a diary and a kind of history book at the same time.

The contents written in it were.

-In the end, we were driven out to here due to the endless oppression of the Church of Light.

It was a history of the Church of Light, or rather the Church of Goddess, hunting other religions.

It was written in an ancient language, but I could read it. In order to read old magic books or interpret the contents of ruins, wizards tend to learn about the words of the past, and I had also learned them in order to loot the dungeons of old black wizards better.

‘…These bastards were real trash.’

The contents of the book were quite shocking.

-Bishop Minor, who was a candidate for the Pope, was possessed by a demon. It’s absurd that he, who refused the offer of a cardinal and took care of many orphans as a priest, ate a child. He even raised a saint….

-However, he never got the chance to prove his innocence. The head of the Fromm family didn’t even listen to his excuses and executed him publicly.

-Paladin Palmoel died. Some believe that he died in his sleep and that God took him, but he wasn’t the kind of person to leave like that.

-The investigation found no poison or trauma. His death was a mystery, but it could not be proven. After his death, the Saint locked herself in her room. She seems to know something, but she doesn’t say anything.

-Priest Vladina, who was guarding the Saint, was accused of being a witch. Motitus, the Pope of the Church of Light. He, who received God’s revelation, personally identified her as a witch, and the kings of Maladin and Malicos did as he said.

-An emblem depicting a demon was found among Priest Vladina’s belongings. Priest Vladina claimed her innocence, but she was executed on the spot.

-They began to officially suppress the Great Earth Church. Because of the recent circumstances, they began to distrust us. They began to expel believers and priests from the country.

-Other kingdoms are silent. They don’t seem to react at all, thinking that we don’t have enough justification to ask for help.

-The Kingdom of Maladin announced that it would no longer recognize the Great Earth Church as a religion.

-The Kingdom of Malicos declared the Great Earth Church to be a devil-worshipping cult. The two kingdoms have publicly declared us on the continent. It is said that some bishops confessed to devil worship.

-The other six kingdoms did not agree, but they did not defend us under the pressure of the Church of Light.

-Numerous temples and believers were massacred. Just as many apostates appeared. It hurt, but there was nothing we could do.

-The Saint has disappeared. Is she alive?

-The Kingdom of Shupetran offers us a way to survive. They told us to create a sect and change our symbols. We couldn’t accept it.

-There was some secret help from the six kingdoms, but it came to an end. The paladins and inquisitors of the Church of Light managed to find the priests of the Great Earth Church and secretly dealt with them.

-We are no match for them. Alas. Who will be next after we fall?

-We accepted the proposal of the Kingdom of Shupetran. We changed our symbols and created a section. We changed our name from the Great Earth Church to the Earth Church and changed the affiliation of the young priests. They will be under the protection of the Kingdom of Shupetran.

-Following our Great Earth Church, it seems that the Cheonghae Church and the Church of Struggle have become targets. Endless investigations, suspicions, and battles have begun to take place frequently.

-There was a situation where several churches tried to join forces, but it ended in failure.

-Evidence of connections to demons, black wizards, and demons is pouring out from numerous churches. Something is strange. Maybe….

-Many churches have collapsed. The holy places of those collapsed churches have come under the Church of Light, and the Holy Kingdom has been declared an empire, with the kingdoms of Maladin and Malicos under it.

-There was no other way. We wandered around looking for the Saint, but we couldn’t find her in the end.

Eventually, it was written that the owner of the diary abandoned everything and fled to this place, the last remaining temple.

Most of the following content was stained with regret and self-reproach.

It seems that the last remaining holy relic of the sect was guarded by the Guardian…

‘In the end, it all fell into my hands.’

The Great Mother Church. It seemed that this place was the origin of the Earthly Church.

Looking at the date, it seemed to be a story from about 200 years ago.

‘Demonizing, assassination, witch hunt…’

They openly suppressed other religions by joining hands with nobles and kingdoms.

Even the difference in strength seems to have been quite large. Seeing that the bishop who raised the saint was publicly executed without a proper trial and the saint’s aide, who was accused of being a witch, was killed on the spot…

Still, it seems that other kingdoms did support them from behind, but it seems that they could not do so openly.

‘Well, considering that they declared an empire right after the suppression, they would have been finished if they had just come out.’

Considering that the union of the six kingdoms was declared after the Holy Empire, I thought that this might have been the trigger.

‘Should I… take this with me?’

I will take the Great Mother Church’s bible and diary.

To be honest, I’m not really interested in the bible.

‘I’m a warlock, not a priest.’

It might be useful in the future.

The diary was definitely something I had to take because it was practically useful.

Aside from the behind-the-scenes stories of history, the locations of some of the holy places were marked.

The funny thing is that one of them is a place I know well.

‘The Shield of the Earth was one of the Great Mother Church’s possessions…’

The Shield of the Earth, one of the artifacts I was going to take in the future. It was one of the Great Mother Church’s properties.

‘A mana-based artifact is kept in the temple…’

It’s not impossible. There were paladins appointed from outside who used mana.

Aside from their skills, it was not strange for them to turn to religion.

It was also common for entire families to believe in a religion.

In the first place, religion is also a form of power, so the nobles had no choice but to be somehow connected to religion.

There was also mention of the robe and the golden chalice I had obtained this time.

‘Both of them were sacred objects.’

The robe I got this time was a sacred object, just like the golden chalice.

‘The Mother’s Embrace and the Chalice of Abundance, was it?’

The robe had the effect of blocking external attacks and putting the wearer in the best possible condition, and the golden chalice was said to have the ability to create an infinite amount of holy water that could make the land fertile.

‘What will happen if they become corrupted…’