Tom was a potential threat to my goals so he had to be eliminated one way or another.

So I killed him, with a simple thought, I had the Soul Virus accelerate [Blight] and [Life Drain] turning him into a corpse and a moment later transformed him into a Lich.

If this world had Gods, I would have been stopped from performing such an immediately effective way of eliminating potential enemies with some kind of divine protection blocking such an attack.

I hated the Gods, instead of letting people earn rewards off their own talents, they interfered by blessing certain people with unnatural luck and charisma so things always worked out for them despite how dumb they were.

There was a wrinkle in the execution so to speak of Tom, while his body did die and animate as a Lich, he had devoured the remnants of the Soul Virus within him. I wasn't exactly sure as to how he had done so.The Soul Fragment inside the Soul Virus was supposed to devour his soul.

Despite the threat posed by this development I was impressed by his achievement. He had overcome my third hand attempt to control his body and soul with a soul fragment and instead overturned it by using it against me. I was amused, this was an intriguing development.

Resistance is rife with danger and potential. Only from competition and adversity can we learn and adapt into better versions of ourselves.

There are only 3 potential threats to my eventual success in this world, those blessed by the Gods, those with powerful fire magic or those with an aptitude for necromancy.

The God touched have unnatural luck and they succeed even if they have no right to, which makes them impossible to defeat through conventional methods.Thankfully it doesn't appear that the Gods pay much attention to this world unless they want to use a soul for an otherworld summoning, so I was fairly safe on that front.

Those with fire magic have the capacity to burn the majority of my minions, limiting the type of minions I can use.There are no mages in this world due to the pitiful supply of mana available, though that might change due to the Soul Virus having people collect mana within them. A mild threat.

Fellow Necromancers can subvert my control over the undead or counteract them with their own. They’re dangerous because they have the same skill sets as myself and know the inherent weaknesses with each spell and strategy. As Tom had devoured the Soul Virus, he had gained a little bit of my knowledge about necromancy. He was a Necromancer adept by default. A dangerous state of affairs.

I [Spirit Walked] over to Tom to deal with him directly.

I manifested in my original form.

“Hello Tom, I think it’s time we have a little chat.”

“So you’re the thing behind all this.”

“That’s a rude way to address your saviour.”

“SAVIOR! You’re a monster. You’re killed thousands already and you’re planning on killing millions more, including women and children.”

“I guess it’s all a matter of perspective, from your limited perspective, I’m a monster for killing people but you simply don’t understand the cycle enough to appreciate it’s cruelty.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s simple, when someone dies, three things will happen. One they will linger as a spirit or possibly cling to their corpse as some kind of undead. This is less than pleasant as being tied to undead flesh means an eternal emptiness, I speak from personal experience on this.”

“Why would you want to be a Lich?”

I continued on “The second thing that happens is that you are chosen by one of the Gods to serve them in one way or another for eternity. The third option is your soul is scrubbed clean of your life experiences and you are reborn in some other body with only a small trace of what made you you. I chose to be a Lich because I had no interest in being a servant or my life’s efforts erased.”

“What does this have to do with you being a mass murderer?”

“I’m not really killing anyone, I’m simply removing them from their mortal shell for a time until I gain the power necessary to break the cycle and grant them an immortal body of one form or another.”

“You’re insane. I’ll stop you!”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea? Do you want your soul to be erased, when you could simply join me in my pursuit.”

“Why in hell would I join you?”

“Don’t you want to end hunger, war and suffering? I can put an end to all of it.”

“By killing everyone.”

“Not everyone, not like how you’re thinking anyway. I just need to gather enough energy to ascend and I can fix everything for everyone. I’ll have the power to finally end suffering.”

He lashes out with the totality of his mind body and soul. It’s not a bad hit. It feels like a stray punch from a child. It smarts but it’s not nearly enough to inflict any lasting damage.

He may be a necromancer but I’ve had centuries of actual experience wielding the power while he’s only got the fragments of a fragment of my soul’s experience. It makes him potentially dangerous but it’s still far too early for him to be powerful enough to actually destroy me.

“I won’t let you win.” He throws himself at me.

I hold him back with the force of my will. It’s a strain on my soul and my mana pool, this world is so limiting.

“I give you one last chance to join me.”

“NEVER!” He yells defiantly.

I sighed “Shame, a useful second would have relieved some of the burden on me but if that’s your choice, so be it.”

I wrapped my soul around his, enveloping him entirely before devouring his soul and archiving it.

I flicked through the pages of his book of experiences and memories. Reliving his life as if it was my own before shelving him to be resurrected later.

In the moment between dying and being animated as a Lich he had seized control of his undead body from the Soul Virus. The Soul Virus appeared to have a critical weakness, as it used a physical virus as a vessel to sap it's host of it's mana, life force and soul energy for my benefit directed by a fragment of my soul, a strong mind/soul can overcome the soul fragment's control and seize control over their undead body.

A dangerous potential within each infected, the risk made this conquest more thrilling.

It was beyond time to fortify my position, I needed more powerful minions on my side to counteract any potential problems from any deviant humans.

I reclaimed the hero’s vessel and broke out of containment to the consternation of the medical personnel of the base’s makeshift laboratory.

I didn’t care for subtlety any more. I reached out and used [Life Drain] on each of them, feeding off their life energy before devouring their souls through [Soul Drain] and archiving them. I turned their corpses into zombie minions.

It didn’t take me long to exit the makeshift hospital and with a single thought I killed all staff on the base. They had all been effected by the Soul Virus and it only took a thought to trigger [Life Drain] and crank up the intensity to lethal levels and end their lives.

Thousands dropped to the ground, limp and lifeless like discarded dolls. The [Blight] they had been breathing for the past week had increased the potency of death and poison magic exponentially.

I drained their bodies of the mana they had collected. The vast majority of them only collected a hundredth of the mana I had collected over the last week but with a few thousand mana collectors, the mana gathered was significant. More than 30 times my previous mana pool.

I finally had enough mana to use a higher order necromancy spell. I cast [Bone Dragon] and immediately the bones of the recently deceased started flying towards the designated location directly in front of my outstretched hand.

It used a lot of magic to create a Bone Dragon, because it’s creation required lots of sub spells to be activated, [Bone Mastery] [Bone Shaping], [Bone Strengthening], [Mana Heart], [Levitation] and the transferal of a copy of a dead dragon’s soul stripped off will and loyal solely to me.

Now I had a mount and a mana source. Even a low level Bone Dragon like this would pump mana out into the air with every breath. Admittedly since it was a Bone Dragon it would mostly pump out corrupted Mana that was only useful to necromancers that used death and poison magic.

I didn’t have the requisite skills to create a dungeon capable of purifying the corrupted mana into it’s purest form for general magic use but it’d still be an improvement on this world’s current scarce mana supply.

I animated some of the corpses of the remaining personnel, creating enhanced Revenants, with the memories gathered from a selection of the deceased.

I made ten Death Knights to serve as my Generals and Commandos, with the memories of how to wield these new weapons of mass murder and destruction. They knew how to fly jets and drive jeeps and fire guns and throw grenades.

They lacked the standard armor I usually created for my Death Knights. This was a new world and I would have to fight using different methods. I had them visit their armory to pick up their their bullet proof vests, helmets and various weapons.

I created 2 Liches, one to protect this base and another to join me in purging this country of the living. I upgraded one of the Zombie Doctors with a fragment of my soul, including memories of basic necromancy and military tactics. The other Lich was a former soldier with a strong soul who I gave a larger soul fragment to including memories of more advanced necromancy, how to create undead in greater numbers and with greater potential.

The Death Knights were given their own missions to complete, based on their particular aptitudes and my need for the country's military forces to be substantially weakened.

I increased the intensity of [Life Drain] used by the Soul Virus to the next level.

It was time to cull some of the weak so I could proceed.

It wasn’t long till some of the hosts started dying, victims of the negative effects of Life Drain, the first victims were the very young and very old. The death toll was only in the hundreds.

The Death Toll kept rising as the elderly and the young died in greater numbers, taking it up to the low thousands.

I gathered their souls, draining their soul energy to increase my power and supply me with new memories to sift through for useful information.

Normally it would be hard to do so at such a distance but since they had been infected with a fragment of my soul, it amplified my range explosively. Allowing me to collect souls from all around the world.

My ultimate goal wasn’t simply to kill but to turn this world’s population into mana farms for my own benefit. However in the short term, I needed to kill some of the weaker members of this world for a short boost.

Gathering the required mana to ascend would take centuries at my current rate of mana absorption but spread across 7 billion people. It would only take months if that.

I travelled on the back of my Bone Dragon with Arnie as my accompanying Lich. It appealed to my dark sense of humour to turn a potential protagonist’s best friend into one of my undead servants.

As we flew across the sky, I collected my soul fragments from those below, it was much faster than individually draining them of soul energy and mana.

This way I could collect from millions of infected, the various energies surged into me, increasing the strength of my magic, vessel and my soul explosively.

Meanwhile Arnie animated the dead into zombies, death knights and Liches, increasing the amount of minions under my dominion.

Orochi my new Bone Dragon simply breathed out corrupted mana, increasing the potency of all necromancy over Japan.

My Death Knights were busy causing chaos as they drove jeeps into American bases killing their former country men in cold blood. Other Death Knights flew jets over the nation and rained down bombs on the major cities of Japan.

From the Japanese perspective the Americans were bombing Japan again. Unfortunately I lacked access to nuclear weapons at the moment but it was only a matter of time until I got what I needed.

For now, I was one step closer to developing a nation of undead under my command. It would serve as an important foothold on this world to advance my agenda further and faster than before.