(A/N: Make sure to throw a few nice words in the comment section. I want to know what you guys think.)
Titan City, a metropolis that houses 20 million living souls.
To a Necromancer, he's in the free market.
But it would take days for Balefire to realize what kind of world he is in. Right now, he is staring dumbly at the knife he extracted from his own chest and the TV where colors and images overwhelmed him to no belief.
If that isn't one of the most insane hallucinations he has ever been through, then he has no idea what else it can be.
Rewinding his memory for a bit, all that he could remember is his fight against the Heroes then his escape from the Underworld. If nothing else happened midway then he should have been done being reborn by now.
The plan was to revive himself, live a normal life as an infant to any loving family and then chase the path of magic as a respected member of the community. In short, Balefire wanted what he missed on during his past life to be acquired in this life. He didn't set the bar too high even, he would have been satisfied with any humble results anyway.
But…
No, that can't be hallucinations… Can it?
The world looked vivid, the knife really hurt, and his head was still unbalanced.
He can't stab up, not just yet.
This body lost a lot of blood already and feels lightheaded. He can't think straight easily.
It took him a while to finally push himself up but another hurdle met him. The body is really heavy and inconvenient. If he leans on one leg too much, it starts to hurt.
It was obvious since this body is fat and overweight. Quite large in stature but still overweight.
"So it is not me hallucinating. What fault have I fallen into?" Balefire groaned from pain as he reached, "My successful rebirth is no longer an option."
Stuck in the body of an obese person wasn't fun and his abilities are now nonexistent since he didn't reincarnate with his phylactery which holds all his Mana. Nevertheless, he wanted this life he was given no matter what color, shape, or form he gets.
He can get through it all and achieve the life he wants even without Magic.
He just needed to get familiar with things and so he stood up despite being completely out of balance.
Looking left and right, he realized that he is in one closed room with three doors and a wide window. The room was cramped up with all sorts of wonders
There was that portrait-like artifact that showed images and made voices like a magic crystal or an enchanted mirror. It kept going from one topic to another without stopping.
There were more versions of that mirror around the room in various sizes. One had a strange board of unfamiliar runes and another was wired to the wall beside the bed.
Once Balefire touched the bed, it felt very cushioned like the bed of a king but it was kinda smelly and unclean. The entire room felt smelly and unclean… Well, it isn't worse than his dusty tomb in the graveyard where he used to dwell.
Aside from that, the room was messy and some parts of it felt chaotic as if it was pushed around violently. Judging by the knife that was in his chest, Balefire deduced that some struggle happened with the assassin who claimed this man's life.
"This… ehem… this…" Balefire wanted to use the voice but it wasn't something he was familiar with.
In his head, his voice was always strong and would send shivers down the bones of the cowards but the body's voice is relatively young. He can't even take it seriously but it is not the first time he speaks in the voices of others.
"This is… bound to be… an eventful second life…" He spoke slowly while adjusting his manner of speech.
Despite being an outsider to this world, Balefire managed to understand what he heard on TV even though it was his first time coming into contact with that language. This was no strange to him since once he takes over the body of another, he can also take a portion of their memories.
The memories which he usually inherits are incoherent and vague for the most part. What he relies on is what is called "Muscle Memory" and it is way more helpful than any would expect.
It is not his first time in a different body, he traveled through the bodies of men, women, and children all of which were dead of course. The only difference is that this time he has a body with a beating heart.
He smiled.
No matter what, he has to gain power in this world once again and take the pleasures of life which he was denied. This place is strange but who knows how many ages have passed or how much the world has developed since he was defeated.
Balefire didn't realize it yet but he was in for a surprise once he walked to the wide window of his room.
What he saw was something… incredible.
The horizon was dark with thick clouds which lazily moved, carrying in their midst the chemicals and the fumes which are the waste of what seemed to be an endless field of stars lying on the ground.
As the clouds moved, high rises would emerge as if pillars to a starless sky of an orphaned moon.
What was supposed to be up there was down here and the towers only increased the more he looked.
The knife which he was still holding fell on the ground and he remained silent, opening his mouth in awe, and sweating coldly.
Balefire didn't know how to describe the most beautiful thing he saw and in this time, his heart started to beat with life and he no longer thought this would ever be an illusion for his imagination was not as vivid as this city's appearance is and his imagination wasn't as wild as its beauty.
The towers in the far distance were decorated with stars of myriad colors and the field of buildings beneath the towers had stars as well. These stars were formed in lines, blocks, or even chaotically yet they all were beautiful and wonderful.
"What beauty was my damned soul led to?" He asked.
A civilization that captured the stars and built towers of crystals, a civilization that made the magic mirrors and beds for kings.
Such a fantasy exists?
Such a place would make the most knowledgeable of wizards (and Balefire is the most knowledgeable of death wizards) fall on their knees in awe and worship the builders of this city like Gods. In his mind, he would look for the most prestigious Wizard of this city and offer himself as a disciple if he even fulfilled the qualifications.
Slowly, he backed away from the window and sat on the bed.
It was a lot to take in and he needed time.
Is this a different world or is this way beyond the age he came from?
If this is another world then his reincarnation is almost meaningless as he can no longer see the fruits of his hundreds of years of fighting.
And if this is way beyond the era he came from, then the fruits of his fight with the living should have long since perished.
Balefire was a realist, he knew he would spend years fighting the Holy Knights Order and the Temple of the Light in order to eradicate them and rid the world of their lies but one day, the cowards would return to the world as he would do and they would organize themselves in secret societies and evil orders to take away the people's freedom.
He hated the cowards. He is one of them but he knows that he must eradicate them for the brave ones to live in peace.
Once upon a time, Balefire was born in the shadows of cowardness and he drank from its unholy chalice. He was a disciple of a great court necromancer in a kingdom torn by politics and struggles.
As the schemes reached an all-time high between the holders of power, the Temple of Light managed to acquire a royal decree that would outlaw the practice of Necromancy. Since then, all the Necromancer Shrines were torn and the Holy Inquisition burned every Necromancer they got their hands on.
God never dictated that Necromancy was evil. The Necromancers were the ones who dealt with life and death thus they prepared funerals, performed exorcism rituals, and summoned the ancient heroic spirits of the ancestors to guide and share their wisdom even after death.
It was no dark art… until the zealots of the Light made it one.
Balefire was the last to survive and was hunted by every person on the land until he reached the edge of the realm where a small village of nomads welcomed him. Even though he stayed with them one night, the inquisition branded them as heretics and burnt them from the feeble and old to the young and infants.
Even the dogs and cattle were slaughtered.
It was there when Balefire knew what evil is and how it spurts in the hearts of the cowards. How the cowards intend to eradicate everything brave for their cowardness to fester.
It was there when Balefire truly embraced Necromancy as a dark art and sacrificed his mortal body to the forbidden path of Lichdom.
If this world is not the world he came from, then he will never know the result of his war with the humans and he is now no longer the Lich who declared war upon the world. He is just a gut, a face in the crowd.
Will he be able to find peace with that? Who knows? He wasn't even sure this whole rebirth thing would work in the first place.
Yet now everything feels too hollow.
He took his revenge on the cowards and set that world free. Maybe he should have just moved on to the next life quietly.
"What do I do? I wonder…"
Suddenly losing all his desires after coming to such a fantasy world is the last thing he expected.
"At least I should stand and wash the blood away else I would be inconvenienced by its reek."
It was the time to rely on that muscle memory of this body. Once he thought about cleaning, his eyes moved towards one of the doors in the room.
He walked to the door and slowly touched it to see what lies beyond. The door didn't open but after checking closely, it turned out to be a door that slides.
"What a world!" Balefire wondered.
Before looking into the other room which was much smaller. He recognized the toilet to be a modern version of the garderobe and relied on the body's muscle memory to figure out what does what.
In the corner of the bathroom, he found a picket and a few rags that he can use along with other tools that he also figured out how to handle. It didn't take him 15 minutes afterward to clean the pool of blood in the room.
Some of the furniture was having some blood stains as well but he didn't care about that now. He still had a lot to figure out.
"What a mess?"
He threw the bloody rags in the bathtub and opened the water before he turned around to see what else he could figure out.
As he was doing that, his eyes landed on the inconveniently small bathroom mirror. Once he stood in front of it, however, he didn't like what he saw.
"As fat as a troll."
Balefire touched his sides and discovered that the clothes he was wearing were also bloodied. Nothing he could do except figuring out how to get out of them before throwing them into the bathtub as well.
And from the smell, he went into the bathtub too.
Something about the cold water falling on his head made his thoughts clearer by the second. He had plans for his second life but they all went down the drain anyway.
He can live in this world. He can do it.
A happy life was something he couldn't achieve back in the day but now, he may actually find something to do.
He can just drown himself in pleasures, find his way to those carnal desires which the kings and the lords used to indulge themselves in.
What kind of desire should he pursue? Fame? Gold? Glory? Women? … or was it Men? Balefire casually smiled since he didn't remember what he used to like.
When he looked up at the opposite wall, he could see a picture of a woman pasted on the wall… it is called a poster as far as he knows. The woman took a sexy pose and exposed her upper half as she held her breasts seductively. Her skin was tan, her hair was black and wavy, her eyes were hazel, she had a mole above her full red lips, and her neck was long and shapy.
It seemed that the fellow who used to inhabit this body had a thing for such women. It somehow pleased Balefire how beautiful that woman on the poster is.
Instinctively, he realized that something between his legs was reacting to his thoughts. Looking down made him smile wryly as a penis he wasn't used to having started to get erect.
"Well, hello to you too." Balefire held the thing as he liked the texture of having a man part after many years of being a skeleton.
This is his key to pleasure from now on… but it felt strange to have.
Balefire possessed the bodies of both men and women back in his worlds and was on both sides of the penis many times but as an undead, he was only a visitor who didn't feel anything.
Come to think of it, was he a man back when he was alive, or was he a woman? He can't really remember.
Well, that at least sets a goal for him.
(A/N: Make sure to throw a few nice words in the comment section. I want to know what you guys think.)