Alot

Alot had always considered himself lucky.

When he was a child, his village was overrun by bandits. After looting the settlement, they burned it to the ground. Alot survived by hiding in a dry well.

He then wandered through the forest alone. Any ordinary youth would have starved to death or been devoured by wild beasts. But in the forest, Alot always managed to find food by sheer luck—sometimes wild fruit he could pick, sometimes the rotting carcasses left behind by predators.

Once, a pack of beasts cornered Alot into a tunnel. As he curled up waiting to die, he suddenly noticed the beasts hesitating, unwilling to advance. In the end, they abandoned their prey and left. The chilling aura emanating from deep within the tunnel had always stuck in Alot's memory.

Years later, after becoming a necromancer, Alot returned to that place and discovered it was a tomb that had been sealed for who knows how long, housing a sleeping mid-to-high-tier undead creature.

Another time, after fainting from hunger, Alot was found by someone in the forest. That person brought him back to their village. They showed no disdain for Alot's vagrant status and even offered to adopt him. Alot played the part of an innocent, naive child, then a few days later, while the person was asleep, he took their money and food and continued his wandering.

After drifting for a long time, Alot arrived at the gathering place of necromancers: Dya. He happened to arrive just as the Necromancer Academy was recruiting apprentices. Anyone with the heart and will to become a necromancer could join the Necromancer Academy as a Necromancer Apprentice. And so, Alot entered the Necromancer Academy.

Only after becoming an apprentice did Alot realize things weren't as simple as he had imagined. Learning any kind of knowledge at the Necromancer Academy cost gold coins, and the academy would forcibly assign tasks to test the abilities of its Necromancer Apprentices.

With no gold to learn skills and no ability to complete tasks, Alot eventually ended up being sent as a subject for undead modification experiments.

Alot clearly remembered that about a dozen people underwent the modification with him—aside from apprentices who couldn't complete their tasks, there were many others he had never seen before. Alot had no idea what happened during the modification process. He only knew that, in the end, besides himself, only one other apprentice survived.

Alot didn't feel any specific physical changes from the modification. He only knew that after the experiment was complete, he received a bulging pouch full of gold coins.

With that money, Alot learned about meditation at the Necromancy Magic Academy, along with some foundational knowledge of necromancy.

But after learning a few spells, the money was nearly gone. With no other choice, Alot had to find ways to take on tasks to earn more gold.

That was when the tomb he had encountered during his wandering days resurfaced in his mind. A tomb housing a powerful undead creature—if used well, it could produce a great number of undead. Undead creatures had value beyond combat; in any town in Dya, there were places to exchange undead for gold.

Thinking of this, Alot prepared to set out. Because he had wandered for so long, he could only roughly recall the direction. The exact location of the tomb was uncertain—finding it would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

But Alot didn't dwell on that. Just as he had escaped death many times before, he believed his luck would help him find that tomb.

True to his hopes, after several months of searching, he found the tomb in Eri, near the border of Dya.

Then came the slow accumulation. Like any other necromancer, Alot did everything he could to increase his undead forces. Whether it was passing travelers or residents of nearby small villages, Alot killed them with magic and used the tomb to quickly convert them into undead creatures.

Once his strength had accumulated to a certain level, Alot led his undead forces and began slaughtering the surrounding small villages.

To deal with any possible resistance within the villages, Alot always launched his attacks at night. The villagers' ignorance and fear of undead creatures allowed Alot to easily break through their basic defenses.

Even if he encountered a professional capable of fighting undead in a village, Alot, hidden in the darkness, only needed to cast a few Magic Arrows in succession to severely wound them. This was because the professionals in these villages were too low-ranked—in all his village raids, Alot had never run into a seasoned professional.

After raiding a small village, Alot would convert the corpses of the villagers into undead to further strengthen his forces. Then, he set his sights on ordinary villages.

After one successful raid, while his undead were preparing to massacre the villagers, Alot discovered a natural-born hero among them. This hero had received no training and at first was even weaker than a Skeleton Soldier. But just by her heroic potential alone, Alot knew he had struck gold.

Necromancers could turn dead heroes into high-tier undead, but Alot's current skill level was clearly insufficient for that. Reason told Alot that the best course of action was to sell her. A natural-born hero—just her identity and growth potential alone guaranteed a high price.

After disposing of the corpses in the village, Alot went to a nearby town and sold the hero to the largest transport and slave-trading organization on the continent: the Free Professional Merchants Guild. Of course, this town only housed a remote branch of the guild.

With a massive pile of gold coins in hand, Alot once again felt his luck. The wealth gained from destroying five or six villages, along with the value of the converted undead, amounted to only a few hundred gold coins. Selling that hero, however, netted him 4,000 gold.

After that came a round of purchases, converting gold into the items he needed most. On his way back, Alot noticed someone following him, but after seeing his undead forces and being unsure of his strength, they backed off.

"This haul is enough to fund my studies all the way until I become a full-fledged necromancer. I'll dispose of the remaining undead and return to the academy," Alot thought as he neared the tomb.

The warning from his perception shattered Rhode's originally silent and peaceful state of mind. Like a rock plunging into still water, ripples spreading across the surface, Rhode immediately withdrew from his meditation.

Opening his eyes, Rhode knew—the Necromancer Apprentice had returned.