Chapter 702: 702
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"In order to successfully enter Level 4 (SemiGod), I want to have some quiet time to myself in the south… Ahem, ahem, I mean I need to go to a certain place in the south to search for the Sun God's magic mirror. That's why there's no need to wait for me to come home to eat dinner."
I left behind this slightly confusing letter before I unhesitatingly left my homeland. I wanted to find somewhere quiet to stay at least until the furious Reyne finally calmed down.
Of course, before I left, I still had to perform a certain magic ritual.
Holy Light suddenly lit up the sky in the entire Northlands, yet there were also countless dark clouds created by the shadow element covering the sky.
The Elemental Tide increased at a furious rate. Every single mage tower in the Northlands could sense the huge fluctuation in the Elemental Tide. However, not a single detection magic spell would work on this area I was in.
It was quite evident to everyone that a forbidden spell level magic ritual was taking place here.
"Um, what if we get exposed since we're making such a huge ruckus?" Suana asked me.
At the core of the elemental fluctuation, the archmage who should have been incanting a forbidden spell was actually idly chatting while drinking tea. Meanwhile, my floating Yongye City was actually responsible for spraying all that Holy Light and power of death magic.
I was using a lot of precious mana to put on a meaningless light show performance. It would have been strange if the Elemental Tide still remained normal with how much of a fake show I was putting on.
"It would be more of a problem if we don't make such a big ruckus…"
I could understand why Suana would be anxious, but my explanation was rather vague.
"Miracles can't be seen as too cheap."
Yep, that was how simple things were. Miracles couldn't be seen as too cheap. If a divine miracle like revival from the dead was truly seen as that easy, I would likely be swarmed by countless people who wanted to revive their friends, family, and loved ones. Not only that, not a single God who relied on the power of belief would ever let me go.
In this current generation, the power of belief was 99.9% of the Gods' power. Apart from the current social norms, it was even more because all the Gods taught that "devout believers will enter Divine Kingdoms, while the faithless will fall into the River Styx".
It was human instinct to be afraid of death and the world after death. This was the foundational reason why they worshipped the Gods and provided them with the power of belief. But, if revival could easily take place, humans would be able to obtain an alternate form of immortality. Not only that, it would in a way prove that death wasn't actually that scary, and that believing in the Gods or not didn't actually matter at all. The likely result would then be that a tremendous number of human believers would give up on their faith, causing more than half of all Gods of belief to instantly die, while the remaining Gods would be seriously weakened.
This was why all generations such as the Haletdam generation, which sought immortality and revival after death, had foolishly brought about their own demise as the Gods would personally crush those who obtained such research results. Even I, who was used to the most suicidal of acts, wasn't directly targeted by the Gods for my act of reviving Suana, but this was only because I added on two fake restrictions that "only the natural undead can be revived" and "revival requires an incredible price".
Of course, this was also because I was a well-known individual who would be incredibly difficult to kill. If an ordinary person proved that they had the power of revival, even if their power of revival was incredibly limited, that ordinary person would instantly be slain by the Gods themselves.
I had the black power of death magic on my right hand, and the golden power of Holy Light on my left hand. I lightly clapped my hands and created a crystal-clear white light.
"Eat this, and you shall be revived."
"It's… that easy!?"
I shook my head and didn't respond to Suana's question.
Easy? Casting the revival spell would only take me an instant, yet understanding how to actually perform revival would require more than enough knowledge to fill an entire textbook. Not only that, how many years would it take for someone to master both Holy Light and undead magic, two completely opposing magic types? In addition, anyone else who wanted to replicate my revival magic would also need to surpass me in understanding the soul. This was because it was likely that my System had helped me cheat in being able to succeed at revival magic.
Although I had completely lied when I declared that "only the natural undead can be revived", the second condition I stated wasn't a lie at all. Revival indeed required a great price, and casting the revival spell would require a special resource—souls.
This was equivalent exchange. In order to revive someone who was dead, hundreds or even thousands the number of souls of the living would be required.
Back when I revived Harloys from undeath, my understanding of the revival ability had been incomplete. I used my Divine Sin's soul to revive her. Not only did that successfully help Harloys to become completely living again, it also fixed the incomplete portion of her soul… To put it simply, I cured her of being insane!
Ahem, ahem, allow me to continue explaining after I get a certain cat off of my head. Her attacks were becoming ever more painful. Could it be that she had managed to evolve adamantite teeth!?
It didn't seem like the living and undead were that different, yet they were actually foundationally different.
The undead would be remnants of the living. No matter how much an undead evolved, their soul would only become weaker and more incomplete. But if the undead forcefully devoured other souls in order to evolve their own soul, that would only make their original soul absorb too much trash and become unrecognizable.
The incompleteness of their soul would create insanity. The undead would always become more isolated and crazed in their personality.
As for regular wild undead, no matter what noble reason they might have had originally to become undead and forcefully stay in such a state after dying, after many years passed, the end result would forever be that the undead would end up forgetting about the reason why they didn't want to die in the first place. The undead would truly become undead rather than retain their former allegiances.
Those who had truly strong will and noble personality could slow down this process significantly. Perhaps they would be able to remain as their original selves and retain their original allegiances for several centuries even as an undead. However, the undead could live for several thousands or tens of thousands of years quite easily. After such a long period of time passed, it would be impossible for anyone to avoid the degradation of their soul.
For the living, until their lives were ended, they would forever change and evolve. The living were active and unknown. They were self-sufficient. They would be like a graph with a positive slope. Knowledge and the elements would be nutrition for the living to help them constantly grow stronger. But once a living individual entered undeath, they would completely settle into a permanent form and become a graph with a negative slope.
My secret technique of revival actually used pure Holy Light's Concepts of Cleansing and Restoring to return a body to its natural state, using the undead's soul shards as the original model to repair and restore their soul to a complete and living state. I would then use my power over souls thanks to undead magic to use high-quality soul shards from the living to repair the undead's soul, thus being able to make up for the undead's incomplete soul.
Indeed, revival was a miraculous feat only made possible by both Holy Light and death magic combined. This was an imitation of the Cycle of Reincarnation created by the Creator Goddesses, as well as a cheating technique which could even retain the soul's memories. In a way, this was an ability that only the Goddesses of Order and Chaos should have possessed, yet I managed to obtain such an ability for myself.
Revival had been a research byproduct of creating the new dimension of Hell. It was an accidental coincidence, but in a way it had also been a definite. The moment that I attempted to find out the secrets of the Cycle of Reincarnation and how it reincarnated souls, it was destined that I would obtain such knowledge.
Suana hesitated for a while, but in the end, she swallowed the white light that I offered to her.
A short moment later, although her body was still that of a banshee's and didn't appear any different, we could all sense that she was now living again.
"This…"
The entire world now appeared different to Suana.
The green grass now seemed to be filled with the power of life. The blue sky now seemed so fresh and alive. Even the humans' bodies now seemed so alluring and brought her joy.
"I'm, alive?"
Her face was filled with rapturous delight, while soul tears started dripping down from her spiritual body without her realizing it. Her tears then vanished into the air. The world hadn't changed. It was the person who saw the world that had changed.
I smiled and didn't say anything else to her.
As for the soul sacrifices required for Suana's revival? Reader of my experimental log, as you might recall, I previously had Suana personally cleanse the moon elf kingdoms of the elders that she viewed as too treacherous to keep. Moon elf nobles would all be related to each other, meaning they were distantly or closely related to Suana as well. That would make them the best possible living soul sacrifices for repairing Suana's soul.
In a way, it wouldn't have been possible to revive Suana so easily without all those moon elf nobles that had been killed and displayed for all to see in their own cities.
Of course, when considering Suana's personality, I hadn't told her the truth about all this. That would only give her unnecessary mental pressure and frustration.
However, the process of revival was currently only half complete. The next part would of course be constructing a new physical body for her.
Actually, the "resources" required for this were quite simple. Any random high-level undead mage would be able to accomplish such a feat. Even if Suana didn't have the help of an undead magic grandmaster like me, as long as she didn't mind the physical body's appearance, she could even just find a random moon elf and forcefully take over the body. Of course, doing such a thing would mean lower compatibility between body and soul.
Suana's corpse from when she had died was still intact. It would be quite easy for me to use that corpse as the model to create a brand-new physical body for her. This way, her new body would also have 100% perfect compatibility with her soul. However, as I was also a grandmaster of undead construction, I felt like it would be such a waste of a great opportunity if that was all I did.
"…Suana, are you certain that you don't want a literally exploding flying fist and magic bullets installed within your body? I will do my best to conceal the weapons. In daily life, your breasts and hands will look quite normal, but the moment that you meet a powerful enemy, all you'll have to do is reach your right hand out and jut out your chest, and you'll instantly kill your enemy in explosions! This will be a top-secret instant-kill technique!"
"…No thank you. I appreciate the thought."
"Then how about installing rockets in your feet? That will give you the ability to fly at subsonic speed for a short period of time. It will be a great lifesaving technique!"
That was also rejected.
"Tsk, you're such a picky customer. Then how about this: a head made out of diamond! Diamonds are a man's romance! You can have three different heads—an adamantite head to use as a weapon, a mithril head for anti-magic, and a diamond head to dig tunnels with when you need to run for your life!"
"I'm a woman…"
Unfortunately, no matter what I tried to recommend to her, including my favorites such as three different transformations, separating into five different fully functioning body parts, or 10,000 tentacles, Suana rejected all of my proposals for modifying her body.
In the end, I could only helplessly design her the most boring body possible of all, a moon elf physical body identical to her original body.
Suana successfully fused with her new physical body. I then calculated the time, and figured that any nearby powerful individuals coming to investigate the phenomenon I caused would likely be arriving soon, so I covered this entire area in explosions in order to create more mysteries for them to puzzle over.
"Alright, you use your own judgement in dealing with the moon elves."
I then said goodbye to Suana as I began a new journey of my own.
"Roland, why didn't you let me chat a while longer with Suana? Just what did you do to her physical body? Aren't you afraid of her discovering what you did?"
"Relax, all of her new physical body's functions are currently in hibernation mode until the red button on her breast is pushed."
Harloys stared in disbelief at me for how I had dared to modify Suana's body without her consent.
"…Just how many did you install in her? Out of all of your ridiculous designs."
"All of them. My techniques are quite good, don't you think? Exploding fist Princess Suana, triple transformation Suana, mecha Suana, tentacle Suana, the mortal enemy of all magical girls… Ahem ahem, ignore the last part. Relax, you should trust in my abilities. Those functions won't take effect unless she makes up her own mind to use them."
I then paused for a moment as I gathered words to defend myself. I truly hadn't modified Suana's body just because I wanted to do so after not getting to practice undead construction for so long.
"Besides, her personal strength is somewhat weak. She's also a really important individual. I truly can't rest assured about her current power level. If she dies again, it's incredibly unlikely that she'll be lucky enough to become a natural undead again."
"…Reputation."
"What?"
"Don't all women consider their reputation to be more important than their life? Who can guarantee that they won't be in danger for all their life? If all those ridiculous things suddenly come out of her body when she's in danger, what is she going to do about her reputation?"
"Woman…? Haha."
"…What else did you do to her?"
"I didn't do anything else to her, I swear."
"You didn't do anything else?"
Harloys paused in surprise for a moment as she sensed from our soul connection that I was telling the truth about not making any additional modifications to Suana's body. All I had done was not modify her physical body, allowing it to keep Suana's soul's current trait of changing gender whenever she touched water!
"Hey, don't you know how incredibly difficult and advanced the technique of making a physical body change gender when coming in contact with water is? Even I had to spend so much effort on creating a physical body for her which had such a trait… Ahhhh! Silly cat, stop biting me! I wasn't intending on making her suffer! Let me explain! This is for the sake of the entire Elven Empire! Do you really think I would do this only out of boredom?"
"Yes! You're completely inhuman when you're bored!"
After much fighting, I finally managed to explain to the silly cat that I truly hadn't done this out of boredom.
"You see, while it's still fine for the other elven species, the moon elf royalty are all dead. Additionally, the moon elf nobles are so incredibly foolish. I really can't rest assured about them… See, I'm thinking about the sake of the inheritance of all elves."
"…Aren't you just worried that another group of bastards who want to secede from our Northlands Elven Empire will appear? The moon elves still have other royalty members alive, right? I think it's more that you only trust Suana, so you intend on having Suana's descendants become the only royalty of the moon elves. With the 'mother' of the moon elf royalty watching over things for you, that will stabilize the moon elves in the Mist Alliance, isn't that right?"
I fell silent as I tacitly admitted this. I was in fact worried that Suana would do something like never get married in her life, meaning that one day the moon elf royalty I trusted would come to an end, and moon elves would stir up trouble for me yet again.
"Political marriage?"
"Yep, political marriage."
In a way, although political marriages were considered outdated relics in my original world, they were highly useful and meaningful in this world. If Suana was male, no matter how many factions there were in the moon elves, they would all likely offer their moon elf princesses to Suana.
If Suana was a female, she could only get married once, yet men were able to get married many times in this world by having concubines. The more moon elf factions that could be stabilized via political marriages, the more stable that royal authority would be, and the faster that descendants would arrive. I was looking forward to the reign of the new moon elf royalty.
And if moon elves, who could stir up more trouble than any other elf species, were stabilized, the entire Northlands Elven Empire would also be far more stable. My time was limited. I definitely didn't want to have to deal with a moon elf rebellion once every few years.
As for what Suana personally wanted… In most cases, political marriages wouldn't care about what the married couple actually wanted. I didn't need to personally order Suana to marry herself off for political reasons. When it was time, plenty of moon elves would step up and play the role of villain for me. Suana was the leader of all moon elves, and she was the type who would be willing to "sacrifice" herself for the cause of the greater good.
"…I used to have a headache about the moon elves, but this coincidence gave me this great idea."
Harloys remained silent for quite a while. Finally, she looked directly at me and spoke in a serious tone. "You're truly a bastard. You will go to Hell."
"Ha, even devils get to dance freely in the mortal plane right now. Does that mean we're in Hell right now?"
I had to scheme against the pure and naïve Suana, which put both of us in a bad mood. However, Harloys finally broke the silence.
"…Then, with your abilities, it shouldn't actually be that difficult to resolve the gender change physical problem for Reyne and that fatty Kakagar, right? Could it be that you were hoping to entrap Reyne as a man in countless political marriages as well? This means that Kakagar was simply unlucky, and will be stuck like this because you don't want to cure Reyne?"
"What? I don't understand what you're saying!"
I did my very best to look at the sky and not listen to what she said.
As for whether I had the abilities to cure them or not? Like I said back at Sulfur Mountain City, this was simply a small surgery that was quite easy.
"Roland, you're truly a bastard!"
"Tsk, silly cat, do you know why the cat died? Because the cat said too much!"
Please report us if you find any errors so we can fix it asap!
"In order to successfully enter Level 4 (SemiGod), I want to have some quiet time to myself in the south… Ahem, ahem, I mean I need to go to a certain place in the south to search for the Sun God's magic mirror. That's why there's no need to wait for me to come home to eat dinner."
I left behind this slightly confusing letter before I unhesitatingly left my homeland. I wanted to find somewhere quiet to stay at least until the furious Reyne finally calmed down.
Of course, before I left, I still had to perform a certain magic ritual.
Holy Light suddenly lit up the sky in the entire Northlands, yet there were also countless dark clouds created by the shadow element covering the sky.
The Elemental Tide increased at a furious rate. Every single mage tower in the Northlands could sense the huge fluctuation in the Elemental Tide. However, not a single detection magic spell would work on this area I was in.
It was quite evident to everyone that a forbidden spell level magic ritual was taking place here.
"Um, what if we get exposed since we're making such a huge ruckus?" Suana asked me.
At the core of the elemental fluctuation, the archmage who should have been incanting a forbidden spell was actually idly chatting while drinking tea. Meanwhile, my floating Yongye City was actually responsible for spraying all that Holy Light and power of death magic.
I was using a lot of precious mana to put on a meaningless light show performance. It would have been strange if the Elemental Tide still remained normal with how much of a fake show I was putting on.
"It would be more of a problem if we don't make such a big ruckus…"
I could understand why Suana would be anxious, but my explanation was rather vague.
"Miracles can't be seen as too cheap."
Yep, that was how simple things were. Miracles couldn't be seen as too cheap. If a divine miracle like revival from the dead was truly seen as that easy, I would likely be swarmed by countless people who wanted to revive their friends, family, and loved ones. Not only that, not a single God who relied on the power of belief would ever let me go.
In this current generation, the power of belief was 99.9% of the Gods' power. Apart from the current social norms, it was even more because all the Gods taught that "devout believers will enter Divine Kingdoms, while the faithless will fall into the River Styx".
It was human instinct to be afraid of death and the world after death. This was the foundational reason why they worshipped the Gods and provided them with the power of belief. But, if revival could easily take place, humans would be able to obtain an alternate form of immortality. Not only that, it would in a way prove that death wasn't actually that scary, and that believing in the Gods or not didn't actually matter at all. The likely result would then be that a tremendous number of human believers would give up on their faith, causing more than half of all Gods of belief to instantly die, while the remaining Gods would be seriously weakened.
This was why all generations such as the Haletdam generation, which sought immortality and revival after death, had foolishly brought about their own demise as the Gods would personally crush those who obtained such research results. Even I, who was used to the most suicidal of acts, wasn't directly targeted by the Gods for my act of reviving Suana, but this was only because I added on two fake restrictions that "only the natural undead can be revived" and "revival requires an incredible price".
Of course, this was also because I was a well-known individual who would be incredibly difficult to kill. If an ordinary person proved that they had the power of revival, even if their power of revival was incredibly limited, that ordinary person would instantly be slain by the Gods themselves.
I had the black power of death magic on my right hand, and the golden power of Holy Light on my left hand. I lightly clapped my hands and created a crystal-clear white light.
"Eat this, and you shall be revived."
"It's… that easy!?"
I shook my head and didn't respond to Suana's question.
Easy? Casting the revival spell would only take me an instant, yet understanding how to actually perform revival would require more than enough knowledge to fill an entire textbook. Not only that, how many years would it take for someone to master both Holy Light and undead magic, two completely opposing magic types? In addition, anyone else who wanted to replicate my revival magic would also need to surpass me in understanding the soul. This was because it was likely that my System had helped me cheat in being able to succeed at revival magic.
Although I had completely lied when I declared that "only the natural undead can be revived", the second condition I stated wasn't a lie at all. Revival indeed required a great price, and casting the revival spell would require a special resource—souls.
This was equivalent exchange. In order to revive someone who was dead, hundreds or even thousands the number of souls of the living would be required.
Back when I revived Harloys from undeath, my understanding of the revival ability had been incomplete. I used my Divine Sin's soul to revive her. Not only did that successfully help Harloys to become completely living again, it also fixed the incomplete portion of her soul… To put it simply, I cured her of being insane!
Ahem, ahem, allow me to continue explaining after I get a certain cat off of my head. Her attacks were becoming ever more painful. Could it be that she had managed to evolve adamantite teeth!?
It didn't seem like the living and undead were that different, yet they were actually foundationally different.
The undead would be remnants of the living. No matter how much an undead evolved, their soul would only become weaker and more incomplete. But if the undead forcefully devoured other souls in order to evolve their own soul, that would only make their original soul absorb too much trash and become unrecognizable.
The incompleteness of their soul would create insanity. The undead would always become more isolated and crazed in their personality.
As for regular wild undead, no matter what noble reason they might have had originally to become undead and forcefully stay in such a state after dying, after many years passed, the end result would forever be that the undead would end up forgetting about the reason why they didn't want to die in the first place. The undead would truly become undead rather than retain their former allegiances.
Those who had truly strong will and noble personality could slow down this process significantly. Perhaps they would be able to remain as their original selves and retain their original allegiances for several centuries even as an undead. However, the undead could live for several thousands or tens of thousands of years quite easily. After such a long period of time passed, it would be impossible for anyone to avoid the degradation of their soul.
For the living, until their lives were ended, they would forever change and evolve. The living were active and unknown. They were self-sufficient. They would be like a graph with a positive slope. Knowledge and the elements would be nutrition for the living to help them constantly grow stronger. But once a living individual entered undeath, they would completely settle into a permanent form and become a graph with a negative slope.
My secret technique of revival actually used pure Holy Light's Concepts of Cleansing and Restoring to return a body to its natural state, using the undead's soul shards as the original model to repair and restore their soul to a complete and living state. I would then use my power over souls thanks to undead magic to use high-quality soul shards from the living to repair the undead's soul, thus being able to make up for the undead's incomplete soul.
Indeed, revival was a miraculous feat only made possible by both Holy Light and death magic combined. This was an imitation of the Cycle of Reincarnation created by the Creator Goddesses, as well as a cheating technique which could even retain the soul's memories. In a way, this was an ability that only the Goddesses of Order and Chaos should have possessed, yet I managed to obtain such an ability for myself.
Revival had been a research byproduct of creating the new dimension of Hell. It was an accidental coincidence, but in a way it had also been a definite. The moment that I attempted to find out the secrets of the Cycle of Reincarnation and how it reincarnated souls, it was destined that I would obtain such knowledge.
Suana hesitated for a while, but in the end, she swallowed the white light that I offered to her.
A short moment later, although her body was still that of a banshee's and didn't appear any different, we could all sense that she was now living again.
"This…"
The entire world now appeared different to Suana.
The green grass now seemed to be filled with the power of life. The blue sky now seemed so fresh and alive. Even the humans' bodies now seemed so alluring and brought her joy.
"I'm, alive?"
Her face was filled with rapturous delight, while soul tears started dripping down from her spiritual body without her realizing it. Her tears then vanished into the air. The world hadn't changed. It was the person who saw the world that had changed.
I smiled and didn't say anything else to her.
As for the soul sacrifices required for Suana's revival? Reader of my experimental log, as you might recall, I previously had Suana personally cleanse the moon elf kingdoms of the elders that she viewed as too treacherous to keep. Moon elf nobles would all be related to each other, meaning they were distantly or closely related to Suana as well. That would make them the best possible living soul sacrifices for repairing Suana's soul.
In a way, it wouldn't have been possible to revive Suana so easily without all those moon elf nobles that had been killed and displayed for all to see in their own cities.
Of course, when considering Suana's personality, I hadn't told her the truth about all this. That would only give her unnecessary mental pressure and frustration.
However, the process of revival was currently only half complete. The next part would of course be constructing a new physical body for her.
Actually, the "resources" required for this were quite simple. Any random high-level undead mage would be able to accomplish such a feat. Even if Suana didn't have the help of an undead magic grandmaster like me, as long as she didn't mind the physical body's appearance, she could even just find a random moon elf and forcefully take over the body. Of course, doing such a thing would mean lower compatibility between body and soul.
Suana's corpse from when she had died was still intact. It would be quite easy for me to use that corpse as the model to create a brand-new physical body for her. This way, her new body would also have 100% perfect compatibility with her soul. However, as I was also a grandmaster of undead construction, I felt like it would be such a waste of a great opportunity if that was all I did.
"…Suana, are you certain that you don't want a literally exploding flying fist and magic bullets installed within your body? I will do my best to conceal the weapons. In daily life, your breasts and hands will look quite normal, but the moment that you meet a powerful enemy, all you'll have to do is reach your right hand out and jut out your chest, and you'll instantly kill your enemy in explosions! This will be a top-secret instant-kill technique!"
"…No thank you. I appreciate the thought."
"Then how about installing rockets in your feet? That will give you the ability to fly at subsonic speed for a short period of time. It will be a great lifesaving technique!"
That was also rejected.
"Tsk, you're such a picky customer. Then how about this: a head made out of diamond! Diamonds are a man's romance! You can have three different heads—an adamantite head to use as a weapon, a mithril head for anti-magic, and a diamond head to dig tunnels with when you need to run for your life!"
"I'm a woman…"
Unfortunately, no matter what I tried to recommend to her, including my favorites such as three different transformations, separating into five different fully functioning body parts, or 10,000 tentacles, Suana rejected all of my proposals for modifying her body.
In the end, I could only helplessly design her the most boring body possible of all, a moon elf physical body identical to her original body.
Suana successfully fused with her new physical body. I then calculated the time, and figured that any nearby powerful individuals coming to investigate the phenomenon I caused would likely be arriving soon, so I covered this entire area in explosions in order to create more mysteries for them to puzzle over.
"Alright, you use your own judgement in dealing with the moon elves."
I then said goodbye to Suana as I began a new journey of my own.
"Roland, why didn't you let me chat a while longer with Suana? Just what did you do to her physical body? Aren't you afraid of her discovering what you did?"
"Relax, all of her new physical body's functions are currently in hibernation mode until the red button on her breast is pushed."
Harloys stared in disbelief at me for how I had dared to modify Suana's body without her consent.
"…Just how many did you install in her? Out of all of your ridiculous designs."
"All of them. My techniques are quite good, don't you think? Exploding fist Princess Suana, triple transformation Suana, mecha Suana, tentacle Suana, the mortal enemy of all magical girls… Ahem ahem, ignore the last part. Relax, you should trust in my abilities. Those functions won't take effect unless she makes up her own mind to use them."
I then paused for a moment as I gathered words to defend myself. I truly hadn't modified Suana's body just because I wanted to do so after not getting to practice undead construction for so long.
"Besides, her personal strength is somewhat weak. She's also a really important individual. I truly can't rest assured about her current power level. If she dies again, it's incredibly unlikely that she'll be lucky enough to become a natural undead again."
"…Reputation."
"What?"
"Don't all women consider their reputation to be more important than their life? Who can guarantee that they won't be in danger for all their life? If all those ridiculous things suddenly come out of her body when she's in danger, what is she going to do about her reputation?"
"Woman…? Haha."
"…What else did you do to her?"
"I didn't do anything else to her, I swear."
"You didn't do anything else?"
Harloys paused in surprise for a moment as she sensed from our soul connection that I was telling the truth about not making any additional modifications to Suana's body. All I had done was not modify her physical body, allowing it to keep Suana's soul's current trait of changing gender whenever she touched water!
"Hey, don't you know how incredibly difficult and advanced the technique of making a physical body change gender when coming in contact with water is? Even I had to spend so much effort on creating a physical body for her which had such a trait… Ahhhh! Silly cat, stop biting me! I wasn't intending on making her suffer! Let me explain! This is for the sake of the entire Elven Empire! Do you really think I would do this only out of boredom?"
"Yes! You're completely inhuman when you're bored!"
After much fighting, I finally managed to explain to the silly cat that I truly hadn't done this out of boredom.
"You see, while it's still fine for the other elven species, the moon elf royalty are all dead. Additionally, the moon elf nobles are so incredibly foolish. I really can't rest assured about them… See, I'm thinking about the sake of the inheritance of all elves."
"…Aren't you just worried that another group of bastards who want to secede from our Northlands Elven Empire will appear? The moon elves still have other royalty members alive, right? I think it's more that you only trust Suana, so you intend on having Suana's descendants become the only royalty of the moon elves. With the 'mother' of the moon elf royalty watching over things for you, that will stabilize the moon elves in the Mist Alliance, isn't that right?"
I fell silent as I tacitly admitted this. I was in fact worried that Suana would do something like never get married in her life, meaning that one day the moon elf royalty I trusted would come to an end, and moon elves would stir up trouble for me yet again.
"Political marriage?"
"Yep, political marriage."
In a way, although political marriages were considered outdated relics in my original world, they were highly useful and meaningful in this world. If Suana was male, no matter how many factions there were in the moon elves, they would all likely offer their moon elf princesses to Suana.
If Suana was a female, she could only get married once, yet men were able to get married many times in this world by having concubines. The more moon elf factions that could be stabilized via political marriages, the more stable that royal authority would be, and the faster that descendants would arrive. I was looking forward to the reign of the new moon elf royalty.
And if moon elves, who could stir up more trouble than any other elf species, were stabilized, the entire Northlands Elven Empire would also be far more stable. My time was limited. I definitely didn't want to have to deal with a moon elf rebellion once every few years.
As for what Suana personally wanted… In most cases, political marriages wouldn't care about what the married couple actually wanted. I didn't need to personally order Suana to marry herself off for political reasons. When it was time, plenty of moon elves would step up and play the role of villain for me. Suana was the leader of all moon elves, and she was the type who would be willing to "sacrifice" herself for the cause of the greater good.
"…I used to have a headache about the moon elves, but this coincidence gave me this great idea."
Harloys remained silent for quite a while. Finally, she looked directly at me and spoke in a serious tone. "You're truly a bastard. You will go to Hell."
"Ha, even devils get to dance freely in the mortal plane right now. Does that mean we're in Hell right now?"
I had to scheme against the pure and naïve Suana, which put both of us in a bad mood. However, Harloys finally broke the silence.
"…Then, with your abilities, it shouldn't actually be that difficult to resolve the gender change physical problem for Reyne and that fatty Kakagar, right? Could it be that you were hoping to entrap Reyne as a man in countless political marriages as well? This means that Kakagar was simply unlucky, and will be stuck like this because you don't want to cure Reyne?"
"What? I don't understand what you're saying!"
I did my very best to look at the sky and not listen to what she said.
As for whether I had the abilities to cure them or not? Like I said back at Sulfur Mountain City, this was simply a small surgery that was quite easy.
"Roland, you're truly a bastard!"
"Tsk, silly cat, do you know why the cat died? Because the cat said too much!"
"In order to successfully enter Level 4 SemiGod, I want to have some quiet time to myself in the south Ahem, ahem, I mean I need to go to a certain place in the south to search for the Sun God's magic mirror. That's why there's no need to wait for me to come home to eat dinner."I left behind this slightly confusing letter before I unhesitatingly left my homeland. I wanted to find somewhere quiet to stay at least until the furious Reyne finally calmed down.Of course, before I left, I still had to perform a certain magic ritual.Holy Light suddenly lit up the sky in the entire Northlands, yet there were also countless dark clouds created by the shadow element covering the sky.The Elemental Tide increased at a furious rate. Every single mage tower in the Northlands could sense the huge fluctuation in the Elemental Tide. However, not a single detection magic spell would work on this area I was in.It was quite evident to everyone that a forbidden spell level magic ritual was taking place here."Um, what if we get exposed since we're making such a huge ruckus?" Suana asked me.At the core of the elemental fluctuation, the archmage who should have been incanting a forbidden spell was actually idly chatting while drinking tea. Meanwhile, my floating Yongye City was actually responsible for spraying all that Holy Light and power of death magic.I was using a lot of precious mana to put on a meaningless light show performance. It would have been strange if the Elemental Tide still remained normal with how much of a fake show I was putting on."It would be more of a problem if we don't make such a big ruckus"I could understand why Suana would be anxious, but my explanation was rather vague."Miracles can't be seen as too cheap."Yep, that was how simple things were. Miracles couldn't be seen as too cheap. If a divine miracle like revival from the dead was truly seen as that easy, I would likely be swarmed by countless people who wanted to revive their friends, family, and loved ones. Not only that, not a single God who relied on the power of belief would ever let me go.In this current generation, the power of belief was 99.9% of the Gods' power. Apart from the current social norms, it was even more because all the Gods taught that "devout believers will enter Divine Kingdoms, while the faithless will fall into the River Styx".It was human instinct to be afraid of death and the world after death. This was the foundational reason why they worshipped the Gods and provided them with the power of belief. But, if revival could easily take place, humans would be able to obtain an alternate form of immortality. Not only that, it would in a way prove that death wasn't actually that scary, and that believing in the Gods or not didn't actually matter at all. The likely result would then be that a tremendous number of human believers would give up on their faith, causing more than half of all Gods of belief to instantly die, while the remaining Gods would be seriously weakened.This was why all generations such as the Haletdam generation, which sought immortality and revival after death, had foolishly brought about their own demise as the Gods would personally crush those who obtained such research results. Even I, who was used to the most suicidal of acts, wasn't directly targeted by the Gods for my act of reviving Suana, but this was only because I added on two fake restrictions that "only the natural undead can be revived" and "revival requires an incredible price".Of course, this was also because I was a well-known individual who would be incredibly difficult to kill. If an ordinary person proved that they had the power of revival, even if their power of revival was incredibly limited, that ordinary person would instantly be slain by the Gods themselves.I had the black power of death magic on my right hand, and the golden power of Holy Light on my left hand. I lightly clapped my hands and created a crystal-clear white light."Eat this, and you shall be revived.""It's that easy!?"I shook my head and didn't respond to Suana's question.Easy? Casting the revival spell would only take me an instant, yet understanding how to actually perform revival would require more than enough knowledge to fill an entire textbook. Not only that, how many years would it take for someone to master both Holy Light and undead magic, two completely opposing magic types? In addition, anyone else who wanted to replicate my revival magic would also need to surpass me in understanding the soul. This was because it was likely that my System had helped me cheat in being able to succeed at revival magic.Although I had completely lied when I declared that "only the natural undead can be revived", the second condition I stated wasn't a lie at all. Revival indeed required a great price, and casting the revival spell would require a special resourcesouls.This was equivalent exchange. In order to revive someone who was dead, hundreds or even thousands the number of souls of the living would be required.Back when I revived Harloys from undeath, my understanding of the revival ability had been incomplete. I used my Divine Sin's soul to revive her. Not only did that successfully help Harloys to become completely living again, it also fixed the incomplete portion of her soul To put it simply, I cured her of being insane!Ahem, ahem, allow me to continue explaining after I get a certain cat off of my head. Her attacks were becoming ever more painful. Could it be that she had managed to evolve adamantite teeth!?It didn't seem like the living and undead were that different, yet they were actually foundationally different.The undead would be remnants of the living. No matter how much an undead evolved, their soul would only become weaker and more incomplete. But if the undead forcefully devoured other souls in order to evolve their own soul, that would only make their original soul absorb too much trash and become unrecognizable.The incompleteness of their soul would create insanity. The undead would always become more isolated and crazed in their personality.As for regular wild undead, no matter what noble reason they might have had originally to become undead and forcefully stay in such a state after dying, after many years passed, the end result would forever be that the undead would end up forgetting about the reason why they didn't want to die in the first place. The undead would truly become undead rather than retain their former allegiances.Those who had truly strong will and noble personality could slow down this process significantly. Perhaps they would be able to remain as their original selves and retain their original allegiances for several centuries even as an undead. However, the undead could live for several thousands or tens of thousands of years quite easily. After such a long period of time passed, it would be impossible for anyone to avoid the degradation of their soul.For the living, until their lives were ended, they would forever change and evolve. The living were active and unknown. They were self-sufficient. They would be like a graph with a positive slope. Knowledge and the elements would be nutrition for the living to help them constantly grow stronger. But once a living individual entered undeath, they would completely settle into a permanent form and become a graph with a negative slope.My secret technique of revival actually used pure Holy Light's Concepts of Cleansing and Restoring to return a body to its natural state, using the undead's soul shards as the original model to repair and restore their soul to a complete and living state. I would then use my power over souls thanks to undead magic to use high-quality soul shards from the living to repair the undead's soul, thus being able to make up for the undead's incomplete soul.Indeed, revival was a miraculous feat only made possible by both Holy Light and death magic combined. This was an imitation of the Cycle of Reincarnation created by the Creator Goddesses, as well as a cheating technique which could even retain the soul's memories. In a way, this was an ability that only the Goddesses of Order and Chaos should have possessed, yet I managed to obtain such an ability for myself.Revival had been a research byproduct of creating the new dimension of Hell. It was an accidental coincidence, but in a way it had also been a definite. The moment that I attempted to find out the secrets of the Cycle of Reincarnation and how it reincarnated souls, it was destined that I would obtain such knowledge.Suana hesitated for a while, but in the end, she swallowed the white light that I offered to her.A short moment later, although her body was still that of a banshee's and didn't appear any different, we could all sense that she was now living again."This"The entire world now appeared different to Suana.The green grass now seemed to be filled with the power of life. The blue sky now seemed so fresh and alive. Even the humans' bodies now seemed so alluring and brought her joy."I'm, alive?"Her face was filled with rapturous delight, while soul tears started dripping down from her spiritual body without her realizing it. Her tears then vanished into the air. The world hadn't changed. It was the person who saw the world that had changed.I smiled and didn't say anything else to her.As for the soul sacrifices required for Suana's revival? Reader of my experimental log, as you might recall, I previously had Suana personally cleanse the moon elf kingdoms of the elders that she viewed as too treacherous to keep. Moon elf nobles would all be related to each other, meaning they were distantly or closely related to Suana as well. That would make them the best possible living soul sacrifices for repairing Suana's soul.In a way, it wouldn't have been possible to revive Suana so easily without all those moon elf nobles that had been killed and displayed for all to see in their own cities.Of course, when considering Suana's personality, I hadn't told her the truth about all this. That would only give her unnecessary mental pressure and frustration.However, the process of revival was currently onlyhalf complete. The next part would of course be constructing a new physical body for her.Actually, the "resources" required for this were quite simple. Any random high-level undead mage would be able to accomplish such a feat. Even if Suana didn't have the help of an undead magic grandmaster like me, as long as she didn't mind the physical body's appearance, she could even just find a random moon elf and forcefully take over the body. Of course, doing such a thing would mean lower compatibility between body and soul.Suana's corpse from when she had died was still intact. It would be quite easy for me to use that corpse as the model to create a brand-new physical body for her. This way, her new body would also have 100% perfect compatibility with her soul. However, as I was also a grandmaster of undead construction, I felt like it would be such a waste of a great opportunity if that was all I did."Suana, are you certain that you don't want a literally exploding flying fist and magic bullets installed within your body? I will do my best to conceal the weapons. In daily life, your breasts and hands will look quite normal, but the moment that you meet a powerful enemy, all you'll have to do is reach your right hand out and jut out your chest, and you'll instantly kill your enemy in explosions! This will be a top-secret instant-kill technique!""No thank you. I appreciate the thought.""Then how about installing rockets in your feet? That will give you the ability to fly at subsonic speed for a short period of time. It will be a great lifesaving technique!"That was also rejected."Tsk, you're such a picky customer. Then how about this: a head made out of diamond! Diamonds are a man's romance! You can have three different headsan adamantite head to use as a weapon, a mithril head for anti-magic, and a diamond head to dig tunnels with when you need to run for your life!""I'm a woman"Unfortunately, no matter what I tried to recommend to her, including my favorites such as three different transformations, separating into five different fully functioning body parts, or 10,000 tentacles, Suana rejected all of my proposals for modifying her body.In the end, I could only helplessly design her the most boring body possible of all, a moon elf physical body identical to her original body.Suana successfully fused with her new physical body. I then calculated the time, and figured that any nearby powerful individuals coming to investigate the phenomenon I caused would likely be arriving soon, so I covered this entire area in explosions in order to create more mysteries for them to puzzle over."Alright, you use your own judgement in dealing with the moon elves."I then said goodbye to Suana as I began a new journey of my own."Roland, why didn't you let me chat a while longer with Suana? Just what did you do to her physical body? Aren't you afraid of her discovering what you did?""Relax, all of her new physical body's functions are currently in hibernation mode until the red button on her breast is pushed."Harloys stared in disbelief at me for how I had dared to modify Suana's body without her consent."Just how many did you install in her? Out of all of your ridiculous designs.""All of them. My techniques are quite good, don't you think? Exploding fist Princess Suana, triple transformation Suana, mecha Suana, tentacle Suana, the mortal enemy of all magical girls Ahem ahem, ignore the last part. Relax, you should trust in my abilities. Those functions won't take effect unless she makes up her own mind to use them."I then paused for a moment as I gathered words to defend myself. I truly hadn't modified Suana's body just because I wanted to do so after not getting to practice undead construction for so long."Besides, her personal strength is somewhat weak. She's also a really important individual. I truly can't rest assured about her current power level. If she dies again, it's incredibly unlikely that she'll be lucky enough to become a natural undead again.""Reputation.""What?""Don't all women consider their reputation to be more important than their life? Who can guarantee that they won't be in danger for all their life? If all those ridiculous things suddenly come out of her body when she's in danger, what is she going to do about her reputation?""Woman? Haha.""What else did you do to her?""I didn't do anything else to her, I swear.""You didn't do anything else?"Harloys paused in surprise for a moment as she sensed from our soul connection that I was telling the truth about not making any additional modifications to Suana's body. All I had done was not modify her physical body, allowing it to keep Suana's soul's current trait of changing gender whenever she touched water!"Hey, don't you know how incredibly difficult and advanced the technique of making a physical body change gender when coming in contact with water is? Even I had to spend so much effort on creating a physical body for her which had such a trait Ahhhh! Silly cat, stop biting me! I wasn't intending on making her suffer! Let me explain! This is for the sake of the entire Elven Empire! Do you really think I would do this only out of boredom?""Yes! You're completely inhuman when you're bored!"After much fighting, I finally managed to explain to the silly cat that I truly hadn't done this out of boredom."You see, while it's still fine for the other elven species, the moon elf royalty are all dead. Additionally, the moon elf nobles are so incredibly foolish. I really can't rest assured about them See, I'm thinking about the sake of the inheritance of all elves.""Aren't you just worried that another group of bastards who want to secede from our Northlands Elven Empirewill appear? The moon elves still have other royalty members alive, right? I think it's more that you only trust Suana, so you intend on having Suana's descendants become the only royalty of the moon elves. With the 'mother' of the moon elf royalty watching over things for you, that will stabilize the moon elves in the Mist Alliance, isn't that right?"I fell silent as I tacitly admitted this. I was in fact worried that Suana would do something like never get married in her life, meaning that one day the moon elf royalty I trusted would come to an end, and moon elves would stir up trouble for me yet again."Political marriage?""Yep, political marriage."In a way, although political marriages were considered outdated relics in my original world, they were highly useful and meaningful in this world. If Suana was male, no matter how many factions there were in the moon elves, they would all likely offer their moon elf princesses to Suana.If Suana was a female, she could only get married once, yet men were able to get married many times in this world by having concubines. The more moon elf factions that could be stabilized via political marriages, the more stable that royal authority would be, and the faster that descendants would arrive. I was looking forward to the reign of the new moon elf royalty.And if moon elves, who could stir up more trouble than any other elf species, were stabilized, the entire Northlands Elven Empire would also be far more stable. My time was limited. I definitely didn't want to have to deal with a moon elf rebellion once every few years.As for what Suana personally wanted In most cases, political marriages wouldn't care about what the married couple actually wanted. I didn't need to personally order Suana to marry herself off for political reasons. When it was time, plenty of moon elves would step up and play the role of villain for me. Suana was the leader of all moon elves, and she was the type who would be willing to "sacrifice" herself for the cause of the greater good."I used to have a headache about the moon elves, but this coincidence gave me this great idea."Harloys remained silent for quite a while. Finally, she looked directly at me and spoke in a serious tone. "You're truly a bastard. You will go to Hell.""Ha, even devils get to dance freely in the mortal plane right now. Does that mean we're in Hell right now?"I had to scheme against the pure and nave Suana, which put both of us in a bad mood. However, Harloys finally broke the silence."Then, with your abilities, it shouldn't actually be that difficult to resolve the gender change physical problem for Reyne and that fatty Kakagar, right? Could it be that you were hoping to entrap Reyneas a manin countless political marriages as well? This means that Kakagar was simply unlucky, and will be stuck like this because you don't want to cure Reyne?""What? I don't understand what you're saying!"I did my very best to look at the sky and not listen to what she said.As for whether I had the abilities to cure them or not? Like I said back at Sulfur Mountain City, this was simply a small surgery that was quite easy."Roland, you're truly a bastard!""Tsk, silly cat, do you know why the cat died? Because the cat said too much!"
