NOVEL NEXT Chapter 168: Undead
He walked through the outer perimeter of Pearl, and the flow only increased. The courtyard still carried the echoes of battle. Hundreds of thousands had died there in the last few days, soldiers, students, beasts, strangers who had wandered into the fight and never left.
He breathed it all in.
The death energy surged into him in waves.
Each inhalation flooded his senses. His mind danced with flickers of last memories, dying oaths, desperate screams, quiet regrets. He didn't flinch. He didn't turn away.
He accepted them.
His core grew.
Visibly.
In his inner world, the orb of obsidian-black mana at his center pulsed with dark brilliance.
Cracks of violet light formed across its surface. Alive, shifting, reshaping itself into something greater.
It had been a fragment before. A cocoon.
Now it was becoming a star.
[Necromantic Core: 42% Formation Complete]
[Passive Devour Function Unlocked: Deathfield Radius—200 meters]
Damien exhaled slowly, and the shadows seemed to pulse outward with his breath.
He had only wandered the perimeter of Pearl. He hadn't even left the valley yet.
And I'm already nearing halfway.
His thoughts turned dark, calculating.
If this much death energy could be drawn from a single institute and its nearby battlefield, then what of the entire nation?
What if he walked the ruins of every fallen city?
Every broken outpost.
Every beast battleground and abandoned village.
What if he consumed it all?
The mana of every soldier. Every civilian. Every beast that had fallen in the war.
The entire land was a graveyard.
And Damien was the heir to its silence.
If I devoured the death energy of all of China...
He felt his core pulse again, deeper this time, like a heartbeat echoing across eternity.
I would ascend beyond S-Rank.
I would become something that couldn't be measured.
The Sovereign of Death wasn't a class.
It was an inevitability.
And Damien Bloodbane had finally stopped running from it.
He looked up at the night sky. The stars were obscured by ash, the moon pale and cold.
He began to walk again, farther from Pearl, deeper into the dead lands.
Each step was steady. Silent. Absolute.
With every footfall, the dead whispered louder.
And they began to feed him.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
One year later.
They say time heals all things.
But for China, time had not been a healer.
It had been a witness.
A long, silent observer to grief, to struggle, and to a nation clawing at the edge of extinction.
Twelve months had passed since the fall of Blackthorn and almost all of China's greatest cities.
Since the great betrayal. Since the Sovereign of Death had vanished into the country.
And in all that time, the horror had not faded, not in the slightest.
The anguish remained.
Rebuilding had begun almost immediately, because what else was there to do?
The survivors cleared rubble, raised tents, constructed crude shelters where great cities once stood. They buried the dead. Burned them by the millions to stop the spread of rot and disease.
But how do you rebuild when over seven hundred million people are gone?
Entire provinces were wiped from the map.
Megacities reduced to silent wastelands.
Families turned to ash.
Genealogies ended in a single night.
The living built monuments they couldn't afford to mourn a past they no longer recognized.
And the bodies.
The bodies never seemed to end.
For months, they hauled corpses from the rubble. Stacked them in cargo trucks. Dug mass graves in fields once used for rice and wheat. When they could, they marked names. When they couldn't, they offered hurried prayers and moved on to the next.
In the north, brutal winter storms froze entire burial convoys on the highways. Soldiers were found stiff and silent in the driver's seats, hands still gripping steering wheels long after their hearts had stopped.
In the south, warmth bred rot. Disease swept through refugee camps with terrifying speed. Cholera, plague mutations, aggressive mana-reactive infections. Entire shelters became tombs overnight.
Doctors were few. Supplies, fewer. The overwhelmed hospitals became triage mills, patch up those who might live, let the others go quietly. People died waiting in lines that stretched across blocks.
The beast waves never stopped. They no longer surged with the same manic fury as before, but they struck just enough to keep the population off balance.
A city would rebuild for two months… then vanish in a night.
Villages fortified by volunteers would be found days later, every defender ripped apart, the walls broken and burnt.
Military bases collapsed under constant attrition. Squads stopped reporting in.
The people didn't break—but they bent. Hard.
They grew lean, hardened by desperation, their eyes rimmed with hunger and anger. Bitter jokes replaced laughter. Hope became a currency rarer than food.
Parents dug graves for children.
Children learned how to fire weapons before they could finish reading.
And still, they endured.
But just barely.
Amid the chaos, one name remained steady.
President Jiang Meilin.
Grieving her daughter. Surrounded by a broken nation. Yet she stood. She rallied what remained of the S-Rankers, pulled together scattered military leadership, and fought tooth and nail to preserve the core of the government. It wasn't unity, far from it.
But under her command, the flame of structure survived.
She had no choice but to grant unprecedented autonomy to the provinces. Cities and governors operated like independent nations. Her authority stretched thin across a broken land. But it held.
Barely.
She stabilized what little she could with the only thing that mattered.
Power.
The remaining S Rankers of China solidified under her leadership, understanding the desperate need for unity.
But even then, it was a mess.
The economy crumbled. Currency lost meaning. The black market flourished. Mana stones became the new measure of wealth. Gold couldn't buy rice. Clean water was traded like sacred relics. Cities struck deals with private sects and rogue cultivators just to secure food and mana batteries for heating.
The world watched, and many tried to help.
The United States sent carrier fleets loaded with supplies, medics, food, energy equipment. Korea and Japan dispatched elite mage-surgeons and emergency logistics battalions. Even India opened its airspace to send daily flights of mana tech and portable shield generators.
The help mattered, but it wasn't enough.
How do you stabilize a nation when more than half its population, seven hundred million people—are dead, and the rest are dying, grieving, and broken beyond repair?
The foreign aid fed a fraction of the starving. Treated a fraction of the sick. Shielded a few cities for a few weeks longer.
But the spiral continued. The scale of the disaster had passed the point of response. No amount of crates and goodwill could refill the veins of a bleeding country.
The system groaned under its own weight.
And everyone knew.
It wouldn't take much. Just one more push. One more coordinated beast wave. One massive natural disaster. And the entire structure would collapse. Not just in the wild zones. Not just in the provinces.
All of it.
China stood on the edge of the abyss, and the wind was rising fast
And then, something changed.
Without warning. Without explanation. Without fanfare.
The undead appeared.