Alot

Alot had always thought of himself as a lucky man.

When he was a child, bandits overran his village. After looting it, they burned the entire place to the ground, but Alot escaped by hiding in a dry well.

After that, he wandered through the forest. An ordinary boy would probably have starved to death or been eaten by wild beasts. But Alot always managed to find food, whether it was wild fruit he could pick or the rotting remains of a beast's meal.

Once, a pack of beasts drove Alot into a tunnel. As he curled up and waited to die, he suddenly noticed the beasts hesitating, afraid to come closer. In the end, they even abandoned the meal right in front of them and left. The chilly aura coming from the tunnel had stayed fresh in Alot's memory ever since.

Years later, after becoming a necromancer, Alot returned to the place and discovered that it was a tomb that had lain there for who knew how long. A mid- to high-tier Undead Creature slept within.

On another occasion, after Alot had fainted from hunger, someone found him in the forest and took him back to their village. The man didn't show any disdain for Alot's status as a vagrant child. He even offered to adopt him. Alot acted like an innocent boy who knew nothing of the world, then waited until the man was asleep a few days later, took his money and food, and continued wandering.

After wandering for a long time, Alot arrived in Dya, a gathering place for necromancers. He happened to arrive just as the Necromancer Academy was recruiting a large number of apprentices. Anyone with the desire and will to become a necromancer could join the Necromancer Academy and become a Necromancer Apprentice. That was how Alot entered the academy.

Only after becoming an apprentice did Alot realize that things weren't as simple as he'd imagined. At the Necromancer Academy, learning any kind of knowledge cost gold coins, and the academy also assigned tasks by force to test its apprentices' abilities.

Without the coins to learn skills or the ability to complete tasks, Alot eventually ended up being sent to undergo an Undead Modification experiment at the Necromancer Academy.

Alot clearly remembered that around a dozen people had taken part in the modification alongside him. Besides apprentices who, like him, couldn't complete their tasks, there were many people he had never seen before. Alot didn't know what had happened during the modification. He only knew that by the end, he was the only survivor apart from one other apprentice.

Alot hadn't felt any specific changes to his body as a result of the modification. He only knew that when the experiment was over, he had received a bulging sack of gold coins.

With that money, Alot learned about meditation at the Necromancy Magic Academy, along with some basic knowledge required of a necromancer.

But after Alot learned a few spells, he had little money left. With no other choice, he had to find a way to take on tasks and earn coins so he could keep studying.

At that point, the tomb he had encountered while wandering came to mind. A tomb containing a powerful Undead Creature could, if used well, produce a large number of undead. Undead Creatures were valuable in their own right, aside from their use in battle. Every town in Dya had places where they could be exchanged for gold coins.

With that in mind, Alot set out. He had wandered for so long that he could only remember the general direction. The tomb's exact location was unknown, and finding it would be like searching for a needle in the sea.

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

As Alot had hoped, after spending several months searching, he found the tomb in Eri, near Dya.

After that, he slowly built up his strength. Like other necromancers, Alot did everything he could to increase his number of Undead Creatures. Whether travelers passing by or residents of nearby villages, he killed them with magic and used the tomb to quickly turn them into undead.

Once he had amassed enough strength, Alot took his Undead Creatures and began slaughtering the small villages around him.

To deal with any resistance that might be present in a village, Alot always attacked at night. Because the villagers knew so little and feared Undead Creatures, Alot could easily overwhelm the village's basic defenses.

Even when he encountered professionals capable of dealing with Undead Creatures, Alot, hidden in the darkness, usually only needed to cast Magic Arrow in quick succession to grievously wound them. The professionals in the villages were simply too low-ranked. During his attacks, Alot had yet to run into a seasoned professional.

After each attack on a small village, Alot turned the villagers' corpses into Undead Creatures to further increase his strength. Then he set his sights on ordinary villages.

After one successful attack, Alot found a natural-born hero among the villagers his Undead Creatures were about to slaughter. She had never been trained and, at first, was even weaker than a Skeleton Soldier. But just from her heroic potential, Alot knew he had struck gold.

Necromancers could turn dead heroes into high-tier undead, but Alot clearly wasn't capable of doing that yet. Reason told him the best option was to sell her. A natural-born hero's status and potential for growth alone guaranteed her a high price.

After dealing with the corpses in the village, Alot went to a nearby town and sold the hero to the largest transportation and slave-trading organization on the continent, the Free Professional Merchants Guild. Of course, the branch in that town was only a small outpost of the guild in a remote region.

With a huge sum of gold coins in hand, Alot felt lucky once again. The valuables and undead he had gained from wiping out five or six villages were worth only a few hundred coins, but selling the hero had earned him 4,000.

After that, he went on a shopping spree, exchanging his coins for the things he needed most. On the way back, Alot noticed someone following him. But after seeing his Undead Creatures, and realizing they didn't know how strong he was, the pursuer eventually withdrew.

This haul will be enough to let me study until I become a full-fledged necromancer. I'll deal with the last of the undead and then return to the academy, Alot thought as he prepared to head back to the tomb.

The warning brought by his perception shattered Rhode's previously calm and peaceful state of mind. Like a rock falling into water and sending ripples across the surface, Rhode immediately emerged from meditation.

As he opened his eyes, Rhode knew the Necromancer Apprentice had returned.