Michael didn’t realize how dangerous he was, or how cataclysmically destructive his presence was in that world. The blood on his shirt appeared harmless, but in the pure darkness of his room, it was actually glowing brightly.

That crimson liquid turned golden and then silver, before transforming into pure mana and dispersing into the air. There was a massive hole in the fabric as well, which had also been converted into mana.

Fortunately, the majority of it was absorbed back into his own body, or there could have been severe consequences. Half of each breath that he inhaled, was simply ‘devoured’ by his lungs.

The carbon-dioxide and other gases that he exhaled, were infused with small quantities of mana-radiation. It wasn’t as dramatic when he was awake, but in an unconscious state, he was an incarnation of death.

It was very lucky that he lived in a basement, where the airflow wasn’t that great, or his parents in kitchen on the first floor, would have been ‘infected’. However, a certain mouse carcass, was constantly being bombarded with small amounts of ‘Darkness’ aura.

After a few hours, the creature’s flesh had decayed to the point where it could obviously no longer function as a ‘living’ being. Even so, it suddenly started twitching and squeaking, as it ignored its spinal injury.

The rotten flesh smelled terrible, but Michael was sleeping and it wasn’t bad enough to wake him up. That little critter mustered an unreasonable amount of arm-strength, to literally separate its upper-body from the useless bottom half.

Putrid guts and blood acted the same way vegetable oil would, completely cancelling out the adhesive properties of the glue. Then, that undead mouse began slowly heading into the hole in the wall, behind the furnace, searching for ‘sustenance’.

 

Meanwhile, in the small trash can underneath his computer-desk was emitting some rustling noises. It was half-filled with tissues, which had been compacted and hardened by copious amounts of blood, semen and mucus.

After the most recent ejaculations, there was nothing suspicious right away, but once a certain amount of time had passed, the white liquid turned purple. From the hardened violet goop, thousands of unreasonably tiny baby spiders had somehow spawned.

Whether the eggs had already been hidden within the pile of tissues, or the semen itself had created the luminous arachnids, it was a mystery. However, the fact was, a swarm of those strange and terrifying creatures was able to escape from the trash can.

There was a door on the far western side of the white, wooden wall, which led into the space between the ‘room’ and the concrete from the pavement outside. They easily crawled into there, like so many other mice, roaches and other pests, then they were free to go either north or south, into the adjacent houses.

The mutated cockroach, the undead mouse, and all of those spiders had two things in common: They had been created by the mana within Michael’s body and they were instinctively repelled by his aura. Those creatures had two purposes, which were programmed into their DNA; aside from eating and reproducing, they didn’t seem to possess any other desires.

However, they did seem to have a certain level of intelligence and caution. The red-shelled super-roach was venomous and could kill a full-grown mouse with a single bite. After hunting its first prey, it burrowed inside of its carcass and devoured the rodent from the inside.

During the consumption process, it shed several times and managed to grow four inches long in a single night. That little monster was also able to reproduce asexually and lay a few hundred eggs by the next day.

Regardless of the situation though, it never dared to enter the view of humans and avoided creatures that seemed dangerous. Normal roaches typically didn’t have a very strong sense of self-preservation and they also had poor eyesight; they were scavengers… but the ‘Super-Roaches’ were hunters and prefered fresh meat and blood, rather than crumbs or miscellaneous garbage.

 

Then there were the undead rodents. The top half of that zombie-mouse only needed to travel a dozen feet before it encountered other mice.

They obviously weren’t afraid of it, since it just seemed like a dying critter and was rather slow. As a curious brown-furred adult attempted to crawl past it, those tiny teeth sunk into its tail.

It squeaked frantically and sprinted away as quickly as possible, with merely a small injury. That was all that happened; it didn’t transform into a zombie or die from some sort of extremely potent poison.

The undead half-mouse continued to attack any random rodent that came close to it within that cramped and narrow passageway. When it was on the brink of running out of ‘lifeforce’, it finally found a mother who had just given birth to a litter.

She ferociously fought against the zombie and eventually it seemed to have died, but not before mortally wounding her. After a few minutes, the chubby mouse bled-out, but before her tiny white wisp could leave her body, it started turning pitch-black and getting sucked back inside.

Rather than reincarnating, she resurrected as an undead, but unlike the creature that killed her, she hadn’t been corroded by copious amounts of darkness mana. Unfortunately, since she had just died from her grievous wounds, she obviously wasn’t in very good physical condition.

The seven little babies that she had died protecting, became the sacrifice so that she could heal herself and continue living. Perhaps it would have been a moral dilemma for a human, but it was actually fairly common for even ‘normal’ mice to eat their own offspring, if they don’t have enough food.

As she consumed her last child, a faint and mild aura of Darkness started to be released from her flesh. Once she breathed it back inside of her body a few times, her fur turned from brown to pitch-black and her internal temperature was starting to hover just above the freezing point of water. Those formerly obsidian eyes started glowing bright-blue and a single thought was imprinted into her mind: “Eat, grow, infect, kill and… thrive!”

If the ghoulish rodent didn’t have a soul, she would have simply ended up like that ‘zombie’; without any desire to become more powerful or such an intense survival instinct, she wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous.

After she left the area, that mutilated upper-half of a mouse carcass started twitching and used its only remaining arm to pull itself forward. There was plenty of blood and entrails lying around, so it hurriedly began feasting on the remains.

While it couldn’t regenerate the missing body-parts, it was still able to gain plenty of mana, which it used to fuel its broken body. The creature needed to continue onward, infecting as many rodents as possible and sustain what little was left of its undead lifeforce.

 

Out of the three monsters, the most dreadful were those mysterious violet spiderlings. In their infantile stage, it required at least a dozen of them to kill a single adult roach and a hundred of them to actually devour one.

They had venom, but it wasn’t very potent ‘yet’. The most terrifying aspect about them was their sheer numbers and way that they worked together in a single, coherent, ‘army’.

There was no ‘queen’ that controlled the thousands of drones; instead, they seemed to function as a collective ‘hivemind’. Not a single one would ever leave the group and they wouldn’t split up either. They understood their individual weakness and banded together to hunt cockroaches, mice, centipedes and even other spiders.

After a kill, they would all feast just enough so that they could keep moving. The swarm never abandoned a single one of its members, as they continued to consume every form of pestilence that lived within the walls, under the floors, above the ceilings and never entered the sight of any humans.

All three types of monsters had just been created and released upon the world; it wasn’t time for them to be revealed to anyone ‘yet’. That mysterious pitch-black wisp that was floating above Michael’s body, made sure that they were all properly ‘programmed’ and ‘designed’. Otherwise, it was unknown what sort of irritating ‘complications’ might have arisen and disrupted the clueless man’s ‘mission’.

“I already know the outcome, but I am still interested to ‘watch’ this play as it slowly unfolds. These last seventy-seven years, I have eagerly awaited this particular performance… Hopefully, you will sufficiently entertain me, Minari Sarina Jalicia.” That soft and feminine voice had obviously belonged to an Avatar of Arcana and the moment that it finished speaking, it burrowed in between Michael’s shoulder blades and disappeared.