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Chapter 634

Miki didn’t have to resurrect everyone based on just her own power. Since I could copy any skill my girls had, I could copy Miki’s power. Much like experience, there was a limitation of distance. I couldn’t use Lydia, or Celeste’s abilities right now. If I could, I might have considered building a wall around the city. Actually, even if I had Terra’s ability, my control of Earth wasn’t to the point that I could ever accomplish such a feat. That was the difference between possessing a skill and having the knowledge of a job. I wasn’t an Earth Manipulator, and even if I can emulate an Earth Manipulation skill, I’d never have the free and fluid control of it that Terra did.

The same could be said about every girl. They all had their strengths, and those strengths were a part of them. Their individual skills could be used for an occasional boost, but Celeste’s ability with wind was not just the sum of all of her wind skills. She was so much more than that. It was same for the rest. We were all just the best at what we were good at. My skill was always support. However, I was a White Mage, so I already had a good affinity for Resurrection.

I actually thought I’d unlock Resurrection already, but apparently not. If White Mage didn’t eventually unlock Resurrection, I’d definitely be shocked. I guess it was a pretty high-level skill for most people. Only Priests got it at a relatively low level. I guess that’s the gift you get for worshipping god. Seems like he’s playing favorites, but I guess I couldn’t complain.

After all the bodies had been gathered up, Ruby was watching anxiously while Shao and Carmine appeared unaffected. Raissa had ended up getting sick and was now on the outside of town near Salicia, who seemed to be strangely contemplative after seeing the carnage earlier. I wanted to ask her about it, but I also didn’t want to waste daylight while we had people to bring back. While we supposedly had weeks to do this, I felt a certain rush to bring people back. They probably wouldn’t notice the time difference, but I felt like delaying resurrecting people was a bit disrespectful.

I put my hand on the first corpse. I picked an adult male. I worried about resurrecting children before their mothers, as they may be genuinely scared. It was the same for women, who might feel threatened given the last few things they had seen before death. I had already prepared a bunch of waterskins filled with waters of life for them to drink so that they could recover quickly. Of course, as we resurrected people, we would need to be replenishing our own mana as well.

I began the Resurrection spell. Everyone was just a bit tense. It was unlikely even bandits this organized were using soul-reaping weapons that would prevent Resurrection, but you could never be too careful. Until we brought someone back, there was no telling what might have happened.

The Resurrection spell existed in two parts. Part one restored the body. This was the stage where if the body existed anywhere else in the world, it would turn to dust. According to what I’ve read, this effect seems to be universal. No matter where the body was, even in a dungeon, this held true. It was like an immutable law that only one body could exist at a time. You couldn’t create backups and just leap to the next body when the last one died. As soon as one body was created, the one most suitable for housing the soul would survive, and the other would degrade.

Sometimes, this spell worked more like restoration, bringing the body back to its original state. Other times, it’d be like a summon, bringing the body from its resting spot to where you were resurrecting it. Finally, it could be like building a new body from scratch. The second part was summoning, reassembling, and then inserting the soul in the body.

This all sounded very complicated, but all you did was say the chant, send out the mana, and then everything else was automatic. It took anywhere from one to ten minutes based on the difficulty of the host. This person only took about one minute.

His eyes snapped open, and he let out a gasp of air. One down, three hundred to go.

Chapter 635

“Wh-what happened?” The man asked, his eyes slowly opening.

“Do you remember dying?” I asked, not trying to be crass, but also not wanting to waste my time beating around the bush.

“Dying? R-right… the bandits… wait… my wife!” He tried to stand up, but with my hand on his chest, it was more than enough force to keep him on the ground.

“We will be resurrecting everyone. Just be patient. Actually, I resurrected you first for a reason.”

“R-reason.”

“If there is anyone not here, we need to know. We will continue to resurrect people, but we don’t want to miss anyone whose body we couldn’t find or something like that.”

“I see…” He sat up a bit slower this time, needing some of my help.

As he glanced around the town, his eyes lowered. “They… they burned everything.”

“I’m sorry…”

“No, the fact that you’ve already chosen to help us resurrect, we owe you our lives literally. We’ve seen Bandits before, but never like this. They usually still fear death. They have an ounce of humanity still in them. These guys… they just killed everyone, even the children.”

“Murdering a child is a taboo.” Carmine explained. “Even if you’re resurrected, trauma is harder to fix.”

“That’s assuming there isn’t any developmental issues.” I added.

Who knew if a body reassembled from magic could just jump back into adolescent development as smoothly as the original? Copying a grown body is one thing, but copying a body that hasn’t finished growing, and then expecting it to continue was another. Well, child murder was rare enough in this world that this was a question no one had previously had to answer.

“I have kind of been skimping on the subject, but what about rape?”

“It happens.” She shrugged. “Most women would kill themselves to keep it from happening, but if they are restrained, it can happen.”

The man on the ground lowered his head. “My wife… I gave her a knife before I went out. I told her that if anyone but me enters the door, to plunge it into her throat immediately.”

“Isn’t there a poison for that?” Ruby asked and then looked over at me. “It’s a common threat for all female warriors, so there are fast acting, supposedly painless poisons that women can buy to avoid such things.”

“It was too expensive.” The guy let out a half-cry, half-sob. “Bandits around here don’t usually attack villages. I told her I didn’t think it was necessary since we never left town.”

It was clear by the tone of his voice he no longer saw things the same way. It really was strange, the ways that being able to resurrect yourself changed your way of thinking. The best thing for a commoner to have wasn’t safety and security, but a quick way out and a reliable person to resurrect you.

Furthermore, the Bandits around here had become bolder and more aggressive. They could resurrect seemingly instantly too. It definitely left me worried about what was to come.

Chapter 636

While I got as much out of him as I felt comfortable, Miki went on and started resurrecting more and more people. As more people sprung back to life, the once dead landscape began to fill with the sounds of life. Most of those sounds were mourning, though. Women and men would let out wailful moans and cries as they looked over their destroyed city. Even if they were all brought back to life, they could still vaguely recall their last moments of life surrounded by fear and pain. If that wasn’t enough to cause them to break down, the sight of an entire life they had built turned to ashes would.

It seemed like they mostly had the same opinion as the first guy. The bandits usually didn’t attack their village. They had a small patrol that protected it, but for a direct attack that wiped it out, this was the first. They were as far out as the other village, but they were still on the border of what could be called the current Bandit Country, so they had likely been ignored until resources were needed. Then, they were wiped out in a single night.

That meant I needed to move faster, as many of the towns inward might have been ransacked earlier. There might be people who had already died a month or longer ago, and if I didn’t get to them soon, they would truly become lost souls. We continued on, both working in tandem.

It got to the point where who we could resurrect was no longer an option, as crying women would shove the corpse of their children on us to resurrect as soon as possible. I had originally planned to have us both resurrect as many as we could so that we would go as fast as possible, but I realized that there was no way we could keep going without breaks.

Those breaks meant time in which a husband held the body of his deceased wife and a mother looked over the crispy body of her burnt child. We found the best way was to take turns, so one of us was resting while the other resurrected. That way, someone was always going and we didn’t just sit there while facing the longing and desperate stare of the villagers. What started out as a simple means to an end ended up as a mentally exhausting activity that left me feeling just as emotionally drained as magically exhausted.

Even downing waters of life and taking turns, we still plowed through our mana quickly. Resurrection was no joke of a spell. It ate up a lot of mana, and even people with multiple jobs and hero levels of mana couldn’t keep up for long. My dreams of doing two or three towns a day was clearly a pipedream. The night was already coming by the time we resurrected the last few.

I felt rather lucky at who I had with me during this. Lydia, Celeste, and Terra weren’t the right girls for this kind of scene. Their hearts would assuredly break. Shao, Carmine, Salicia, and even Raissa were made of harder stuff. The only reason Miki held on was because she was too busy resurrecting people, but she had tears in her eyes too. I hoped she wouldn’t have to see this kind of ugliness either, but a strong mind was important for a Spiritualist and Psionic.

We had found bodies for the vast majority of people, only having to recreate the bodies of four of the citizens. That was when we faced the next challenge. Everyone who was now alive in the village was not everyone. There were still more people missing. One man grabbed my shirt, begging me to resurrect his wife who wasn’t there. However, after using the item he gave me, nearly passing out in the process, the Resurrection failed.

“I’m sorry… I’m just tired.” I apologized, not meaning to yawn and come off as inconsiderate. “Miki…”

Miki’s eyes jerked open. “M-master…”

She was nearly asleep on her feet. I shook my head. I’d make it work. Just as I stepped forward to do it, Shao put her hand on my shoulder.

“Master, it’s not that. You cast the spell correctly. The problem is… that woman is alive!”

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