702 Revival (1/2)

”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.