The Regressed Necromancer Prepares for the Apocalypse - Chapter 1

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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The Necromancer Who Returned Prepares for the End — Episode 1

“Hah……!”

For a moment, his breath had stopped.
Do Jin inhaled slowly, deeply, then exhaled.
The rust-tinged stench of iron pricked at his nostrils, but Do Jin no longer registered such things. He was used to it.
Corpses.
Everything within reach was either bodies or ruins.

“……Am I the only one left?”

Even if his comrades were still alive, it wouldn’t change much about the situation. Perhaps for them, dying now would be a mercy.

“…….”

Do Jin looked up at the sky.

— Kiiiiiiiii——!
— Shaaaaaaaaaa——!

The sky had lost its blue tint, fractured and fissured across its expanse.
It sounded absurd to say the sky was cracked, but that was exactly what Do Jin saw. A sky like glass, ready to shatter and collapse at any moment.
And through every fissure, creatures poured in without ceasing.
These monsters bore no resemblance to the common orcs and trolls Do Jin had encountered before.
They were like massive slimes—formless, writhing and twisted.
Yet these amorphous creatures were studded with countless eyes and mouths.
Those countless eyes never stopped searching for humans.
And those countless mouths devoured every human they found without exception.
And now—
only one monster and one human remained.

“……!”

Do Jin’s Aura resonated through the spear as it cried out.
Every ounce of power from all the Skills and items he had acquired thus far converged at the tip of the Trident Spear—
Kiiiiing——!
The concentrated mana began to spin with terrifying ferocity.

‘And……!’

Do Jin began to awaken a new force he had only recently mastered. His proficiency was not yet sufficient, but…….
This alone was the only method that could fell the monster before him.

‘Nngh……!’

The golden mana inherent to the spear itself mixed with Do Jin’s characteristic emerald Aura, joined by a black energy distinctly foreign to both.
That black energy.
It was a force Do Jin had awakened over ten years of walking the razor’s edge between life and death.

‘Death Aura.’

Having slipped through the cracks between death and life countless times, clawing toward survival and victory, Do Jin had grown naturally intimate with death itself.
And at some point, he had reached the level where he could perceive the aura of death, harbor it in his body, and command it by his own will.
That had been the decisive reason why Do Jin could reign as humanity’s strongest.
Yet the monster did not remain idle.
From the moment it first appeared, it had methodically hunted and devoured Do Jin’s comrades with overwhelming numbers.
But as time passed and Do Jin’s companions fell one by one, with no survivors left for the creatures to devour, the monster revealed a response it had never shown before. Was it because the creatures sensed a threat in Do Jin, who alone turned the tables and destroyed them in return, unlike the other humans?
The other monsters scattered in all directions, busy consuming human corpses, all converged on the green creature and clung to it with a wet, squelching sound.
They fused into a single, colossal being.
Yes—that thing standing before Do Jin’s eyes right now.

“What is this—Phase Two?”

Do Jin’s gaze pierced through the amorphous monster toward the countless fractures in the sky above. Creatures continued to pour through them.
The difference from when the battle began was that now the monsters emerging from the rifts did not scatter—instead, they merged with the survivor that remained before Do Jin.

“…….”

Watching that sight, Do Jin clenched his teeth.

“……All right. Let’s see how far this goes, you bastards.”

Do Jin turned his head sharply, taking in every detail of the landscape before him.
Comrades abandoned and torn to shreds, their eyes wide open in death, and the blackened earth beneath.

“……Come on!”

His Aura was depleted, but there was one force he could draw upon without limit or restraint.
All the more freely and infinitely because reality itself was spiraling toward annihilation.
That force was the Death Aura.
With the entire world saturated in death, the Death Aura alone had become boundless and unshackled.
At Do Jin’s will, the Death Aura began to move around him—through Do Jin himself, toward the spear gripped in his hand.

– Kiiiiiiiiiiii!!!!!

Sensing something amiss, the creature shrieked in a desperate howl. It too began drawing power, swallowing everything around it and swelling its grotesque mass.
Fragments of fallen comrades’ remains, corpses of monsters Do Jin had slain, even the earth and debris tainted by their lingering magical essence.
Do Jin was certain of one thing: this would be his final battlefield.
Humanity was already finished. What use was it for him alone to survive?
No matter how he clung to life, he would simply die alone on this blackened, lifeless earth.
So then!

“……Die!”

He would take at least one more with him.
Reflecting his master’s singular intent, the Death Aura and Aura scraped together from all directions resonated with Do Jin’s spear.
The savage, ravenous power that yearned to devour its prey at any moment swirled like a vortex, ready to burst forth.
The creature before him no longer expanded. It had consumed everything around it that could be devoured.

Kree-kreeek-
Thousands of eyes and thousands of mouths turned toward Do Jin in unison.
On the mottled, flesh-covered surface, eyes of different colors and sizes rolled and tumbled, all bloodshot and fevered.
The scattered mouths gaped open, baring revolting teeth, their tongues licking greedily as they shrieked in incomprehensible cries.

Whiiiiiiing-
With a transcendent sound of colliding and swirling magical particles.
The creature began to concentrate its power.
The force accumulated and gathered—
Then erupted toward Do Jin in a violent surge.
In that instant, Do Jin launched himself skyward.

Crack-!
He drove his spear down upon it like a thunderbolt.

– ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■!!!!!!!!!!

A shriek so grotesque and piercing that no human ear could quite comprehend it tore through the air.

* * *

The creature, unable to withstand Do Jin’s blow—a strike that had drawn forth every ounce of his strength—dissolved into nothingness.
And above the barren, lifeless ground, Do Jin, having spent the last reserves of his power, plummeted like a discarded doll.
Soon enough, he would follow his companions into oblivion.
But he didn’t mind. Better to become ash than to leave that monster alive.

“…….”

The sky, crisscrossed with fissures that still refused to close, spawned no more creatures—yet. The corrupted earth.
Dead earth.
The death of land was not metaphorical; it was literal.
No plant could take root here. Not a single insect could survive.
Monster or Player.
Neither could endure without Mana—without a life force suffused with magical power—not even for a moment.
And it wasn’t only this patch of cursed ground where Do Jin lay sprawled. Every inch of soil on Earth had been poisoned this way.
The Dungeons had vanished, and when those accursed, shapeless creatures emerged, the world had become this: a wasteland.
If you didn’t kill the monsters, they killed you. If you did kill them, the profane Mana they spewed as they died contaminated the earth.
Anyone nearby—human or otherwise—could not escape the consequence.
Victory assured, yet dying all the same. Like Do Jin now.

Warning.
Debuff: Primordial Chaos.
If not dispelled within 30 seconds, you will become part of the chaos and cease to exist.
Dispel immediately.

The same state as his comrades had been in—those who had slain countless monsters, yet still perished.
But Do Jin, having already glimpsed the fate of those who had gone before him, knew what awaited. His mind, however, dwelled on something else entirely.

“If humanity had only cleared the Tutorial properly…….”

Perhaps it was the aftermath of victory, the crash that follows fierce battle.
Burnout, or simply the process of accepting death—gripped by a numbing despair, Do Jin muttered endlessly to himself.
Memory flickered before him like a lantern show, each scene burning bright then fading.
The Great Upheaval on Earth had begun roughly…….

‘Ten years ago.’

In the beginning, it had not seemed dire. If anything, humanity had faced only favorable changes.
Thanks to two new resources—Mana Stones and Gold—mankind had entered a second golden age.
A handful of chosen Players had grasped wealth and glory.
And so, in those days, a common refrain echoed through the mouths of people everywhere.

– The Great Upheaval is a gift from God to humanity!

That paradise became hell five years later.
Those first five years had merely been the Tutorial. The Main Scenario had only just begun.

“Not knowing it was just a Tutorial, everyone spent five years chasing Gold and Mana Stones…….”

During those five Tutorial years, humanity had been blinded by the System’s rewards—the Mana Stones and Gold it dispensed as prizes.
Tutorial-era Players performed brilliantly within the Arena, putting on dazzling shows of power, yet in reality they were little different from ordinary people.
What could they actually do outside the Arena? At best, bend a spoon or summon some pathetic low-grade spirit familiar?
And though they wielded strength that seemed superhuman, a gun or blade could still subdue them once they logged out of the Arena. These Tutorial Players were no exception.
Mana Stones and Gold, by contrast, were tangible boons to real-world science and economic growth.
The Mana Stone alone had sparked a revolution in human civilization greater than any innovation since the age of iron.
Gold wasn’t merely an incredibly efficient energy source for humanity struggling with energy depletion — it supplied unlimited power without the pollution of oil or nuclear energy, a resource that embodied humanity’s very ideal.
It was far more profitable to steadily gather Mana Stones and Gold in easier Arenas than to recklessly challenge dangerous ones, fail, and suffer humiliation.
And so humanity postponed the Players’ leveling as a secondary concern.
Only later would they realize: this had been a fatal mistake.
When the Main Scenario began and dungeons opened everywhere, as difficulty climbed, humanity found itself slowly pushed into a defensive position.
At last, Monster Waves erupted indiscriminately across the globe, and as humanity hemorrhaged knowledge, technology, and lives, their civilization collapsed.
The Players hadn’t merely been idling. The moment the Tutorial ended and they understood that their suppressed powers were fully unleashed in reality, they too fought desperately to level up and face the monsters.
But it was too late.
No matter how fiercely humanity struggled, they could not keep pace with the monsters’ growing strength.
Only then did humanity realize that the squandered five years had been their golden window—and they wept, though everything was already far beyond salvation.
In the end, only five survived to stand in the final confrontation: Do Jin and four others.
And after that last battle was over.
Do Jin had finally become the last human being left on Earth.

“…….”

It was then that a notification window materialized, unbidden.

Quest Complete.
Victor: Player Do Jin
Searching for rewards desired by the Player.

“……A reward. They give rewards even to the dying.”

The instant Do Jin’s lips twisted in bitter mockery at a System that saw paperwork through to the end with such precision.
The reward window that followed froze his face like stone.

<Quest Reward – Choice at the Crossroads>
Player Do Jin may select one of the following two options to proceed in the game.
1. Elevation to Higher-Dimensional Being
2. Reset

He didn’t know precisely what “Higher-Dimensional Being” in the first reward meant.
But Reset? If it meant Reset?

“……Could I go back to the past?”

Thump!
Thump!
On this Earth where no living thing existed but Do Jin himself, such a sound should have been impossible.
Yet he heard it unmistakably—the beating of his own heart.

“If I could only start again, then……!”

Do Jin’s trembling fingers reached toward the reward to select it.
No—reached to select it in that very moment.

“Ugh……!”

A pain that suddenly flooded his awareness—or rather, that he was only now acknowledging—lashed across his entire body like a whip.
In the same instant, his Health began draining away moment by moment.
A debuff effect flagged by the warning window!

“Gah……!”

It’s draining so fast!
Do Jin ground his teeth. A terrible pain unlike anything he’d ever experienced was consuming him whole.

“Damn it!”

Just before his posture crumbled, his fingers twitched—barely in time.

Player Do Jin has selected as a reward.
A game reset will proceed according to the player’s choice.
The reset time is August 25th, 2026—eight years ago, the day the player awakened.
Earth’s timeline is being rewound to August 25th, 2026.

A Necromancer Returned Prepares for the End

Author │
Dal Georuk-i
Publisher │
Choi Won-young
Editorial Director │
Lee Ho-jun
Editor │
Kim Si-eon
E-book │
Kim Ji-su

Published by │
D&C Media Co., Ltd.
Registration │
April 25th, 2012 Registration No. 20-260
Address │
Unit 1301-8, Coloron Digital Tower Brillant 1st, 30 Digital-ro 32-gil, Guro-gu, Seoul
Main Phone │
(02)333-2513 Fax (02)333-2514
Email │
[email protected]
Website │
blog.naver.com/gnpdl7

UCI G720:N+A092-20260812030

*This book is published by D&C Media Co., Ltd. (Papyrus) under contract with the copyright holder. No part of this content may be used in any form or by any means without the express permission of the publisher and author.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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