I rested comfortably on a metal slab in the morgue. According to the memories within the fragmented souls, I was technically alive again. It was weird having a mortal body again.
I breathed, blinked & blood pumped through me. A surge of emotions briefly overwhelmed me. I had been distracted by my urge to gather soul energy & mana and a little confused by the journey and possibly injured by the state of the body I possessed.
I formed a bone knife out of my arm & slit my own throat. I didn't want to live in this world any more.
I bled out in a few seconds and the body died.
I possessed the corpse, which was much better, no stray emotions, no confusing rush of random people's memories to try and assail me with guilt.
Now I could focus on what I needed to do.
I split myself into three.
I focused my mind on sorting through the fragments of souls, organising them each into books, according to the person they came from. I archived their Autobiographies into my existing Library of Souls along with all the others.
I could be considered a cruel man but as long as I existed in one form or another, everyone who died at my hands or as a result of my actions, they would be enshrined in my Soul Library. Once I ascended to my rightful position as the God of Death, they would find eternal life as an immortal, instead of being forced to suffer through the cruel cycle of rebirth.
I read through the memories of these humans, learning more about their world, their science, their technology, their very way of life.
My newly acquired body was set on automatic mana absorption duty. It would take a while but eventually I would fill this vessel. As an undead, it wouldn't be burdened by the normal capacity limits that plagued mortals, which was why Demons, Dragons & Liches were equally feared.
A large fragment of my soul flew upwards to get a bird's eye view of my minions in action.
The swarm of zombies rushed through the five or so SDF officers who tried to stop them. The zombies were shot, but only a few of them fell, the rest passed through the officers, with my Liches devouring their souls and using the soul energy to animate their corpses.
Each of the Liches were given a piece of my soul, gifting them some of my knowledge and experience in exchange for some of the soul energy they collected. According to the memories in the Library, this would be akin to a franchise. They worked for themselves, with my knowledge and gave me a portion of the profits.
Each of the 5 Liches moved in different directions in search of prey.
One went north, south, east & west.
One stayed within the centre to serve as guard for the hospital with a hundred Zombies serving him.
The Central Lich cast Blight on the area focusing his soul energy to better fortify this position.
North Lich traveled to Shimatakamatsu with his team.
South Lich traveled to Minami
West Lich travelled to Nagisa
East Lich travelled into the mountainous areas to the east.
Since it was night time, there weren't too many people about.
Those who got in the way were quickly killed, souls drained & Animated to serve.
I sent an order through the soul fragments, that they should do their best to avoid killing those under 16.
No I did not preserve their lives out of some moral obligation or for some belief that they are special due to their youth. I actually did it for the opposite reason, children are practically worthless, their bodies are useless for making undead as they're too undeveloped & their souls are weak from lack of experience.
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Children have only one useful property, they can be sacrificed to summon demons as Demon's find their unrefined souls a culinary treat.
I don't have the soul energy or mana necessary for controlling demons. Not yet anyway.
After an hour all 5 of my Liches had reached their destinations and started full scale operations.
The Zombies scattered smashing through glass windows & breaking down doors to enter people's houses.
The older more traditional style houses were the easiest to break into and the most rewarding as they were often populated by elderly asians with a rich supply of soul energy.
Pockets of resistance formed with the SDF officers who responded to the calls of distress from panicked populace.
It was interesting seeing the use of technology to transmit information. What I achieved through a combination of [Spirit Walk] & [Spirit Communication] they achieved with phones. Fascinating stuff.
It didn't really help them much. The Liches used [Soul Drain] on the officers & used [Animate Dead to create Revenants armed with guns. It's unprecedented to have my minions equipped with something other than swords but the third hand feel of a gun reaping the lives of civilians was novel & entertaining.
I would have to get one & shoot it myself.
The citizens of this country were generally unarmed, with only a very small minority having swords or guns. Thanks to 1958 law against person's owning guns or swords.
They were sheep ready to be herded for the slaughter.
I had my Cardinal Liches refrain from using Blight for now, my Central Lich would slowly spread Blight on it's own.
East Lich had very slim pickings in the mountainous regions, forced to devour the souls of animals along with the rare human. His profits were minimal.
A plane from one of the nearby air bases passed through my soul. It was an odd experience, I briefly passed through the pilot, just long enough to feel his warmth but not enough to gain anything of value from him. Rude.
I guess they were investigating the situation.
It was time to spread death more thoroughly. I had each of the Cardinal Liches appoint a secondary Lich & split their forces.
The 4 Cardinal Liches became 8 mobile zombie army making generals. With the 9th Lich, remaining in the center of my little web, focused on creating a powerful Blight. These new Liches used all their power to make more zombies.
The Zombies killed at the command of the Liches, systematically worked their way through their targets from oldest to youngest (16).
It was only when a sniper killed one of newest Liches with a head shot that the zombies being controlled by him, went wild, going from systematically killing people to indiscriminate slaughter.
The Lichless Zombies grew much stronger, much faster as they simply ate their victims, instead of landing a killing blow & moving on so that they be animated by their lich. Despite that they progressed slower as a group due to their frequent meal breaks.
The news of the 'zombie outbreak' spread quickly through 'social media' it produced contradictory results. A lot of civilians were evacuated out of the area, while a lot more civilians wanted to get to the outbreak sites to see 'live zombies'. Mostly of the younger generations, they all had 'smart phones'.
The humans of this world had no sense of danger.
It didn't matter, they had some strong guardians in the form of the SDF & the US military stationed throughout the country.
US troops backed in part by the SDF started a campaign to kill off the zombies.
They were successful in eliminating 6 out of 9 of my Liches and their zombies but the Lich in the central district & the 2 Liches travelling through the mountain survived the first wave of counter attacks.
The armed forces travelled inwards after building a cordon around where the last zombie fell. As they progressed, they worked systematically with the SDF in charge of evacuating civilians from their homes if they hadn't while the US troops were in charge of eliminating the zombies.
In less than an hour, they had worked their way back to the hospital where my Central Lich was pouring all it's mana & soul energy into empowering the Blight, ensuring that it was self sustaining and self propagating.
It was shot in the head & killed along with all it's zombies.
It was a somewhat disappointing opening gambit.
This area, had over 200000 souls and I only managed to collect a little over a tenth of that. I only had two remaining Liches with about 300 Zombies hidden in a mountain’s forest. Those Zombies had gained Bestial traits from eating animal flesh.
The souls of the dead fed me with more soul energy and memories.
The soldiers cleared the hospital making sure there weren't any more undead roaming about.
Then they instituted a quarantine procedure.
A couple of weeks went by as the corpses were collected and examined for risk of contagion. Normally most corpses would be cremated as per Japanese custom but the US army had collected the corpses for examination and direct disposal.
I was dissected, or the body housing me was dissected. It was interesting, watching these people at work as they cut me open and weighed the organs of my vessel.They didn't discover my attempts at gathering mana and after their 'autopsy' they put the 'hero's' corpse into cold storage.
I hadn’t succeeded in my first attempt. I had acted with insufficient information. Next time would be far more effective.
The Blight around the hospital had steadily spread, producing an increasing amount of death energy. The only thing that could counter it was Holy magic, which this world seemed to lack. Instead their scientists had collected samples with their hazmat suits and were trying to counter the ‘unknown pathogen’ with science.
They were doomed to fail.
I made use of my spare time in cold storage in the US military base to spy on the soldiers & fully understand all the information in my new books.
Next time I’d make my zombies less obvious, more virulent & make use of the wonderful thing called technology to make it truly apocalyptic.