Chapter 151: 151. I Raised an Army of Undead, Told Them to Sleep, Then Got Tackled by Lily

Rex looked at the grave that was in the middle of the section. The marker was the biggest in the room.

It was a single piece of the Underlayer’s native stone with symbols carved into it that covered the whole surface. The thickness of the marking showed that the life it recorded was important enough to fill the space available.

Rex asked, “How many are there in this section?”

“Forty-seven,” said Mordecai.

“And in the broader chamber?”

“Three hundred and twelve, from the last count.” Mordecai looked at him. “You really intend to raise all of them, huh?”

“Yeah… It’s about getting the job done better.”

For a moment, Mordecai was quiet. He was not arguing or anything but just being there with the answer’s weight.

Rex moved to the center of the section and assessed the space. The ritual he needed to run was simpler than elaborate magical workings.

It did not require specific components or geometric precision, because Sovereign Necromancy was not precise magic. It was direct.

It ran through him and into nearby biological material, and the energy he put into it determined its power at a single activation.

He took the energy from his current reserves, which included the five hundred base and what the necrotic channel had been quietly building up since he bought the skill, and sent it to the whole room.

Not just the eastern section, but all of it.

The Sovereign Necromancy activated in a way that was different from his previous uses; those had been small workings, single nests, a handful of constructs. This was the skill that operated at a scale it was designed for but had not yet been tested at.

Rex placed both of his hands on the stone floor of the burial ground, and a wave of energy emanated from him due to his energy manipulation. It traveled through the substrate of the Underlayer itself, following the biological material in the graves with the precision of something that knew exactly what it was looking for.

First… came the symbols.

His hands shaped the necrotic energy, which spread in patterns that showed where every grave was in the room.

The symbols weren’t random or just for show; they were a map of what was being reached, and they burned with the steady light of something that was working instead of performing.

The floor of the room shook once, and then the first one stood up.

The energy that connected the graves to the necrotic channel, not the graves themselves, brought the biological material together in the way that the skill was meant to do.

The previous Demon King came first because he was the oldest and strongest. The Sovereign channel naturally pulled the highest-tier constructs to the surface of the work first.

Mordecai was impressed seeing it really close. “Holy shit… that’s actually amazing.”

“I didn’t know you had such power like this.”

“I bet the Goddess of Life is going to get pissed at reanimating the dead.”

He was tall, even as a zombie, and his bones were like those of a demon family that had been gaining power for generations. When his eyes opened, they glowed with necrotic energy instead of the darkness that dead eyes have.

He turned to Rex with the blank look of a soulless vessel that was just getting its first connection to the command channel.

Rex sent the message through the channel, “Stand and pay attention.”

As the former Demon King stood up from his crouch, the other three hundred and eleven followed in a wave. The sound of stone shifting and the soft light of three hundred and twelve pairs of necrotic eyes opening in the dark filled the burial chamber.

They stood up and turned to face him. The weight of all their attention was significant.

Rex had made constructs before. At least on this scale or with the soul-layer residue that the Sovereign Necromancy briefing said was a property of high-tier raises, he hadn’t raised constructs that had been something else before they were constructs.

They were not mindless. They existed in a state of partial awareness, neither entirely conscious nor totally free, yet still retaining some semblance of thought.

They knew something, whether it was who they were, who they had been, or just that the necrotic channel connected them to whoever was on the other end. This awareness gave their attention a quality that his goblin and wolf constructs did not have.

Rex stood in the middle of three hundred and twelve undead demons. The Demon King stood at the front of them, having died four hundred years ago while serving a civilization that was still ongoing.

Rex looked at the whole group and said through the channel, “Stay until you are needed for my mission.”

The instruction was sent out through three hundred and twelve connections at the same time and was received.

He looked at Mordecai, who had stopped moving at some point during the work and hadn’t moved since.

“Alright, it’s done.” Rex said, “That covers the cost of those failures.”

Mordecai stared at the army of the undead for a long time. “Yes,” he said, and his voice was somewhere between grief and awe.

“I believe it does.”

“I’ll keep them dormant.” Rex said, “They stay here until I turn them on.”

“After that, they work for me. Unless I have a specific operational need that comes first, I’ll use them to help you reach your goals as well.”

Mordecai nodded.

Rex sent the order to dismiss through the channel and saw three hundred and twelve constructs go back to sleep. They would stay that way until he needed them.

The burial chamber looked the same as it had before: the same graves, the same markers, and the same pale light that glowed in the dark. When the work was done, the symbols on the floor faded away, leaving the stone blank.

Cassandra had been standing at the door of the chamber since they got there, and she had been watching the whole thing with a look that Rex could read pretty well from this distance.

It wasn’t what he had thought it would be.

He had thought that she would show controlled anger in the throne room or give a professional assessment, which was more like her usual style. Instead, he saw something that didn’t fit into any clear category, something that was still working through several conflicting responses.

He put it away and walked back to the door.

“Thank you for your cooperation… I’ll be taking my leave now.”

…

He came back through the teleportation channel and arrived at the hilltop north of Aethelgard in the full dark of early evening. The city’s lights spread out below him in a pattern he had memorized by now, with the Silver Rest’s district somewhere in the middle.

The work had cost him, but not too much. He felt the effects of the cost to his body in the way he always did when he used high-output skills: not tiredness, but more like his body knew it had been asked to do something that was at the outer limit of its current ability.

The Infinite Regeneration was already doing its basic work, and by the time he got to the capital, it would be something he was aware of in the background rather than the foreground.

He stood on the hilltop for a few minutes and looked at the city. It was rare for him to let his mind wander, so it was worth taking a moment to do so.

He takes a deep breath and lets out all the stress that’s finally been dealt with. “Glad that worked out well…”

The plan was going well. The pieces were shifting.

Kaelira had made it out alive; it was an incomplete outcome, but it was still a success. The damage to Apollo’s mental state, his understanding of the game he was in, and the rules it followed were real, no matter what happened to Kaelira in the secondary chamber.

Tomorrow is the Apostle gathering, and he already knows that he’s going to be even busier for the planning.

He had three hundred and twelve undead demons sleeping below the surface of the world; a sovereign necromancy working that was bigger than anything he had done before; and five hundred desire points saved up for whatever tomorrow needed.

“Time to start a normal day like it usually is…” He walked toward the capital.

…

The city’s evening was in a lovely middle phase. It was busy enough to feel alive, but not so busy that the main streets were loud from the dinner rush.

For the first ten minutes, Rex walked through it without any specific goal.

Instead, the destination found him.

He turned a corner onto one of the wider streets in the middle of the district and almost ran into Lily, who was walking with Diana. They were engrossed in a conversation about something that had occupied so much of Lily’s time that she hadn’t noticed the corner.

Lily was the first to notice him. She abruptly halted in the middle of a word, and her expression mirrored the same reaction she had whenever she saw him after a period of separation.

A series of reactions, lasting about half a second, included relief, warmth, and a specific territorial awareness that formed part of her maximum desire baseline. Then the last reaction faded away, leaving the first two intact—this was the version of her response that he had been hoping for.

Suddenly, she was in motion, and Rex had roughly three-quarters of a second before she reached him. This brief moment was not enough time for him to do anything but brace for impact as she wrapped her arms around him, fully committed, like someone who had been worried about him since the dungeon report became public.

“REX…!”

Rex caught her weight and held them both steady.

“You need to stop worrying too much about me.” He said, “As you can see yourself, I’m fine.”

“I know,” she said, leaning against his shoulder. “I was just—”

“I know,” he said, the same thing.

Diana had stopped a few feet away and was watching this with an expression that had changed from amusement to something more complicated. It was now somewhere between fond recognition and the look of someone who was doing emotional math in their head.

“So,” Diana said. “You two really are one, huh? There’s no need to hide it anymore.”

Lily pulled back far enough to look at Rex, and her face said that she was definitely going to confirm this and he should get ready.

Rex said, “We are not.”

Lily said, “We are.”

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