NOVEL NEXT Chapter 213: Wildflower
It began with fingers.
Thin, splintered bones, some too long to be human, pierced the surface of the black water and clawed at the air with slow, deliberate purpose. Rotten torsos followed, dragging themselves upright, limbs jerking in unnatural rhythms. Armor clung to some of them, ancient, corroded, yet still whispering of long-dead empires.
Dozens emerged.
Then hundreds.
They came in waves, endless soldiers, beasts, hybrids of both.
Some had rusted weapons still fused to their skeletal hands, others held blades crackling with faint necrotic sparks, preserved by the death energy that had steeped into their marrow. One dragged a rusted siege hammer with a crater still lodged in the head.
Then came the twisted horrors.
One creature crawled out sideways, its spine contorted like a scorpion's tail, bone legs scraping against stone. Another was shaped like a gorilla but stood twice the size, its skull elongated and split down the middle like a blooming flower, filled with needle-like teeth. Glowing remnants of old runes clung to its ribs.
And in the distance, a shape rose from the swamp's deeper center.
The water parted like it feared what came next.
A Zerg Hydra skeleton. Sixty meters long. Seven heads, each one wearing fragments of a crown. The skulls were cracked, but their empty sockets pulsed with a soft, blue hate. Its bones clacked together like dry wood in a storm, dragging with it the remnants of the civilization it had once destroyed.
It was a horrifying sight, one that was truly hard to believe that it was brought to be by a little flower!
General Hei Tian took an instinctive step back, blade half-drawn. His breath caught in his throat.
"Impossible." he whispered. "We won't survive this. We must flee! We must flee right away!"
But the debilitating death aura had reached him and reduced his wits to mush and his legs to jelly.
Blackie didn't speak, but compared to the Black Dragon General, she fared much better.
She was, afterall, an undead herself, resurrected by Damien's death energy.
Her claws were already extended, and her stance was low. Her eyes scanned the swarm with the cold recognition of someone who had read about these things in grim old scrolls and prayed never to see them come to life.
"These aren't your normal undead, Master." she murmured. "They're deathbound guardians. Soul-tethered to the treasure. They are completely sentient and mindful. Let us retreat."
"Yes. Mom is right." Rage Monkey was so scared that he even agreed with his mother.
All around them, the swamp changed.
The stench of decay was replaced by something heavier… Undeath.
Not written in books, but etched into the bones and buried in the cries that never left these creatures' hollow throats.
The Zerg Hydra lifted two heads toward the sky and loosed a voiceless roar. The shockwave blew back the mist. Water exploded outward, revealing more Zergs beneath the surface…
Entire formations still in perfect military alignment, as if they had been waiting beneath the mire for the command to rise again!
Rage Monkey gritted his teeth. "Even the strongest dragon wouldn't last three minutes here. One step inside that basin and you're torn apart, then added to their numbers."
Damien took another step forward.
"Master!" Blackie's voice rose to a crescendo.
The flower pulsed again.
The undead surged.
Dozens charged in perfect synchronicity, skeletal legs pounding the swamp, leaping over roots and water like a tidal wave of bone and shadow. Some hurled weapons. Others simply roared without sound, but the vibrations struck the chest like a drumbeat from the grave.
TheZerg Hydra began to move.
The ground trembled beneath its approach. Each step it took left behind a deep, bubbling cavity of blackened swamp water. Its heads twisted and weaved through the air with snake-like fluidity, fangs glistening with old venom. It didn't roar again. It didn't need to.
It had killed cities.
It had ended legacies.
And now it was here to protect a single flower.
Blackie leapt to Damien's side, voice low and urgent. "We need to fall back. Even you can't handle all of them at once. Not yet."
But Damien didn't move.
He reached out his hand.
The flower pulsed one final time.
And then… everything stopped.
The undead halted mid-stride.
One beast froze with its claws stretched out towards Damien's throat. Another had just begun to leap, jaws wide. The hydra's forward lunge stalled mid-air, its heads twisting in confusion.
In a flash, Damien's Timespace energy had covered the whole swamp and fused with the death energy in the very air itself.
It was able to fuse so seamlessly and so easily because the death energy that was released by the flower recognized him.
And instead of resisting…
It submitted.
Like iron to a magnet. Like rivers to gravity.
The pulse of power that had animated the swamp, that had kept these creatures alive for centuries, began to pour into Damien's body without protest.
The Deathroot Lotus' curse didn't attack him.
It joined him.
The skeletons buckled.
One by one, the ancient soldiers collapsed into heaps of bone and armor. Their weapons fell beside them, silent.
The gorilla-beast shuddered, spasmed, and fell face-first into the mud, its body crumbling into dust before it even hit the ground.
The Zerg Hydra took a single faltering step back, its seven heads twitching erratically, then its ribs caved in like brittle glass.
It dropped like a mountain giving up.
The entire swamp was silent once more.
"Um. Okay… I guess." Blackie blinked once and tried to deal with the emotional rollercoaster that just hit her.
One second she was in full fight-or-flight mode, and the next, the danger was simply gone.
No enemies.
No resistance.
No sound, except the faint bubbling of the swamp.
Damien stepped forward, calm and silent, and bent down before the stone cradle where the flower had rested for who knew how many centuries. He didn't summon mana. Didn't activate a spell.
He simply reached out and, without any fanfare, plucked the Deathroot Lotus from its resting place as casually as if he were picking a wildflower from the edge of a dusty road.