Chronicles of The Demon Lord's Return

A crow's cry split the silence, dragging me back to consciousness.

I shot up, then looked around my surroundings. A dark sky with a giant, radiant moon, underneath the darkness were graves sprawled all around and covered by moss. Returning my gaze to where I stood, I was naked, and I could smell the stench of rot and decay assaulting my nostrils.

A strange sense of disassociation crept over me, as if my mind hadn't caught up with reality. This was not me, nor had I ever been familiar with a cemetery such as this.

I looked at my body, taller than usual, pale, soil-covered with maggots crawling on it. I looked further down; it was a pit. Strangely enough, making conclusions came rather immediately to me.

A reincarnation scenario.

Or rather transmigration? Possession? Resurrection?

The word to describe this didn't matter, but this pattern was a familiar trope in entertainment media.

But… What was this bizarre situation? How could something like this be logically understood?

Not only did I find myself standing from a grave of some foreign, demonic-looking world,but I was also in the body of a corpse that wasn't even mine. Had someone transplanted my brain into it? Some sort of necromancy? But then, how was my brain able to even transfer to this place? My soul then? They were real after all?

Or maybe this was some sort of Matrix-like scenario? Where my body was actually in a tank and I was currently plugged into wires and a VR headset drilled to my head? Upon that terrifying thought, I tried to punch, bite my tongue, and attempt various other techniques for waking up, unfortunately to no avail.

For now, whatever the situation was, it seemed fascinating enough to immerse myself and just do something instead of just being a still, rotten zombie.

I dragged my feet forward, moving out towards the cemetery gate as I wasn't really interested in exploring graves under such an atmosphere. Thankfully, there was no one here to bother me or get weirded out by a corpse that walked out of its grave and was now walking.

As I approached the inky black, Victorian-Gothic-But-Not-Quite steel gate, I could see someone sitting on a chair and looking towards the other side, which meant so far they had not noticed me yet—seemed like an attendant here.

However, the strange thing about this person was that they weren't quite the image of someone with such a profession in my head. Instead of an old, gaunt, and depressive-looking man, it was actually a young woman holding a frilly, black umbrella over her head and wearing a 19th-century-type matching corseted dress. Her dress had the modest frugality of a Victorian widow's mourning gown, but its silhouette, with corset-tightened curves and layers of dark lace, hinted at something more decadent, almost like a restrained Gothic Lolita aesthetic. It really added to her otherworldly and inhuman charm.

Within the distance of around 50 meters, she turned around and gasped in surprise. Aside from her beautiful facial features, what especially stood out were her curved goat-like horns and completely dark sclera. There was no doubt about her nature—it was a demonic archetype to the core.

"What the fuck…??!!" she gasped at the sight of the corpse coming towards her and quickly shot up from her seat. In an instant, she appeared before me but didn't attack me right away.

"Y-you're actually alive…? B-but!! No necromancer could slip into the Detection Array!" She paused, staring at my eyes deeply, then a second after jumped into another expression of surprise. "I can see that your expressions aren't stiff and you're actually conscious… is this an actual reanimated corpse…? Very strange…" At that expression, I knew that I had to say something to alleviate her danger senses.

"Yes!! I'm alive, lady!!" Rapidly continuing before getting attacked, "I found myself waking up here all of a sudden from my grave, then started walking up towards the gate." Somehow, this only made it worse as she widened her eyes in shock and instinctively grabbed my neck with superhuman force, raising me up into the air then slamming me down.

I gargled a bunch of words of protest, but the impact alongside having my throat choked left me barely conscious. She glared at me dangerously, not knowing what to do in this scenario. A sharp energy emanated from her hands towards my body suddenly as she kept sharply staring at me.

After thirty seconds, she muttered to herself, "Strange… his body is alive.". At that point, she began to calm down and let go of me. "But how come you died and came out of the grave alive again?"

"I'm not exactly sure either," I replied.

"Show me where your grave is located," she demanded, and I quietly turned back and began walking, signaling her to follow.

Strangely enough, after reaching the spot, however… she looked at it, then at me, shaking so intensely while muttering something resembling "Demon King…" and "my Lord," then fainted.