Undead.
For most people, the immediate response to such a term was evil.
Darkness.
Unclean.
Michael had been no different before he became a Necromancer.
A part of him had once thought he’d be stuck with rotting, foul-smelling corpses and brittle skeletons.
Fortunately, that wasn’t the case.
His undead weren’t decaying husks that looked like they’d fall apart at any moment.
To be honest, all of them exuded a certain kind of strange beauty.
Like the black griffin soaring through the sky now.
Under the moonlight, it looked exceptionally picturesque.
“I must have been too close to nothing but corpses these past few days to think like this,” Michael muttered.
And it wasn’t like he was wrong.
If there was one thing he had been far too familiar with this past week, it was dead bodies.
Hundreds upon hundreds.
Until they reached thousands.
If his pre-Awakening mindset had remained the same despite everything he had witnessed in such a short amount of time, that would have been the real surprise.
Since he had already decided to ride the undead griffin, Michael wasted no time.
Adding strength to his legs, he launched himself forward.
His first step took him onto a tree branch.
Using it as a foothold, he propelled himself again, soaring toward the highest branch of another tree.
And with one final push, Michael burst out of the dense forest canopy and into the night sky—
—where he landed gracefully on the griffin’s back.
The body of the undead griffin was massive.
Even with his tall frame, Michael felt small on its back.
Since this was his first time riding a flying creature, it took him a few seconds to adapt to the up-and-down movement of the griffin’s flight.
However, once he did, Michael no longer hesitated.
He gripped the griffin’s neck area tightly with both hands and gave it a mental command.
“Fly up!”
The moment the griffin received the command, it reacted instantly.
It dashed straight into the night sky.
The speed was incredible.
Michael was caught off guard as everything below blurred past him in an instant.
Before he knew it, he and his undead had already soared above the clouds.
“Stop here,” Michael commanded, and the griffin obeyed immediately.
Michael wasn’t a genius in science, but he still knew a few things.
The higher the altitude, the thinner the oxygen.
And right now, above the clouds, it should be nearly nonexistent.
At first, Michael thought he would be affected.
He was about to order his undead to descend immediately
Then he paused.
He took a breath.
He felt nothing.
Not in the sense that he was suffocating, but rather…
He didn’t feel the need to breathe at all.
A realization dawned on him.
“I guess it’s to be expected. I’m not exactly an ordinary human anymore.”
If someone with more than 30 times the constitution of a normal human still had the same limitations, then the supernatural world would be nothing but a scam.
Since he could breathe just fine— or rather, didn’t need to breathe at all— Michael was in no hurry to descend.
As for his undead?
It was a dead being. Oxygen was irrelevant.
And even if it had been alive, at this level, it likely wouldn’t have been affected either.
Now that he was high above the ground, Michael could see much farther than he ever could from the surface.
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“This world is huge.”
Honestly, he would have thought the same even if he were still on Earth.
At a certain point, everything just looked endlessly vast.
But what truly caught his attention were the traces of civilization in the distance.
Beyond the walled gathering near where he had left his undead, he could now see even more settlements.
Clearly, he was no longer outside of civilization.
He was heading deeper into it.
Michael recalled something and turned to look behind him.
In the direction he was looking, far in the distance, lay the ruins that had served as his initial arrival point in the Land of Origin.
Due to the vast distance, he couldn’t see anything, but he knew the direction was right.
A thought came to Michael.
For a moment, he considered flying there.
But just as quickly as the thought appeared, it vanished.
“It seems I might have gotten myself a heart demon.”
Michael called it that because it felt like the perfect term for his situation—rather than PTSD.
There were two times Michael had felt the presence of death since he became an Awakener.
And surprisingly, both had been in the Land of Origin.
The first was his very first battle.
The second was his encounter with the corrupted being in the Black Tower.
The latter had left a much deeper impact.
Because unlike the first…
Even his system had warned him that he would truly die.
Several system panels, which were usually calm blue, had turned blood-red, signaling imminent death.
That incident had left a mark on Michael.
And it wasn’t until now that he realized—
What he thought he had moved past…
Was merely forgotten.
Perhaps this was his way of coping.
Then again, it had only been a day since the incident.
If he had truly been unaffected, that would have been remarkable.
But the fact that he wasn’t…
It simply meant he wasn’t that mentally strong.
Still—
“It doesn’t matter if I have to do it scared. I will do it.”
For personal reasons, Michael knew he would have to face that monster one day.
Unfortunately, he was too weak right now.
But not for long.
At first, he hadn’t been sure if that corrupted monster was truly a Rank 2 creature.
But after witnessing the strength of a King-rank cultivator in the real world—who was said to be comparable to a Rank 3 Awakener—
Michael was now certain.
That monster was Rank 2.
What he didn’t know was how strong it was within that rank.
But in the end, that didn’t matter.
Because Michael had never stopped growing stronger.
And he had no intention of slowing down now.