NOVEL NEXT Chapter 214: Core
Shua.
The stem gave way effortlessly. No resistance. No weight. No curse.
No effort.
Strangely, none of the muck of the swamp clung to it. The petals were perfectly clean and unblemished. They shimmered faintly in the dim light, each blade-like petal a dark velvet black with a silver sheen that danced like moonlight over still water. The glow was subtle, not showy. But undeniable. The flower didn't feel magical. It felt fundamental.
As if the concept of death had sprouted its own emblem and chosen this single, fragile-looking blossom to carry it.
Damien turned it over in his palm, slowly.
The lotus was smaller than it had any right to be. A little larger than a human heart. Soft, weightless, deceptively delicate. Yet it had just been the anchor for a legion of undead horrors that could have slaughtered armies, creatures that even dragons avoided.
So much power.
In such a small vessel.
Damien could still feel traces of death energy in its stem, simmering, sentient, pulsing with secrets. But it wasn't fighting him. It had recognized him. Bent for him. Yielded to him without protest.
He held the flower a little longer, letting its presence settle into his hand. His fingers didn't tremble, but the awareness was there, clear and sharp.
This wasn't just a treasure.
This was a relic. A truth. A key.
"Such a fragile-looking flower," Damien murmured. "Holds the power to command legions."
He wasn't being poetic. It wasn't a metaphor.
It was a reminder.
The things most feared in the world didn't roar. They didn't blaze with fury or announce their arrival.
They waited. Quiet. Still.
And when the time came… they consumed everything.
He looked down at the lotus once more and gave the faintest smile.
No one should ever judge a book, or a flower, by its appearance.
And then, as he did the Supreme Starstone Lily, he swallowed it whole.
The others could only blink and sigh deeply.
Another treasure had briefly seen the light of day and then disappeared into Damien's stomach.
At that moment, his system pulsed quietly in his mind:
[Deathroot Lotus Absorbed]
[One of Nine Supreme Flora]
[Effect: Deepened Affinity – Death Energy]
[You can now detect, interpret, and interact with death signatures across organic and spiritual lifeforms. Passive effect activated.]
The Deathroot Lotus tasted of forgotten graves.
Damien had expected bitterness, the acrid sting of necrotic herbs, the chalky residue of bone-powder tinctures.
Instead, the petals dissolved like ash on his tongue, weightless and dry, carrying a whisper of silt from riverbeds where civilizations had drowned.
He swallowed, and the world stilled.
No explosion of agony. No convulsions. Only silence, thick, suffocating, as if the swamp itself had drawn a breath and held it.
Then came the stirring.
Deep within him, behind the veneer of skin that still flushed with human warmth, something ancient shifted. His Necromantic Core, which was spinning very slowly, trembled once, as if it was shuddering awake.
Ancient Runes began to appear on the Necromantic Core's surface.
And as it did so, it began to spin faster.
All of the devouring, refining and amplifying functions of the Necromantic Core experienced a massive qualitative leap in that instant.
Again, and again, and again, and again!
The Lotus's energy seeped into him, patient as groundwater.
This was no ordinary death energy.
This was the rot that had felled primordial leviathans, the entropy that had hollowed mountains into dust. It carried the cadence of endings that transcended flesh, the death of seasons, the death of stars.
Damien's Core recognized it. Resonated. And as the two forces merged, he understood: the Lotus wasn't a mere catalyst. It was a key to his Necromantic Core!
Strange images surfaced in his mind, unbidden.
"Memories of previous Sovereigns." Damien instantly realized.
A vision struck like a spear through Damien's mind, sharp and cold.
The first memory unfolded in flickering black and gold, set beneath a sunless sky over the ruins of a city he somehow knew as Dhal-Morath, a city of towering obsidian spires and spiraling bone towers.
A woman stood at its highest parapet, barefoot, her long silver robes fluttering in windless air. She was ancient, beautiful in a way that hurt to look at, her skin translucent, her eyes endless voids. In both hands she held a chalice of pure onyx, filled with swirling silver flame.
Deathroot Lotus extract. The words appeared in his mind unbidden.
She did not hesitate.
She drank it.
At first, nothing. Then her body jerked backward violently, veins igniting with spectral fire. The Core inside her pulsed once… Then shrieked.
Her body collapsed.
But her soul remained.
And Damien saw what followed.
Her consciousness stretched, dragged deep into the Core's spiraling abyss, judged by laws older than the sun. Her power had been great. Her will, greater still. But it was not enough.
The Core twisted her form, drained her of self, and then…
Oblivion.
No scream. No struggle.
Just silence.
Her name was Erivai. She had called herself the Death God of the Screaming Moon.
The Core had disagreed.
The second memory came less violently, like a dream remembered while bleeding out.
A battlefield. Not one of men, but gods.
Damien stood, no, HE stood, on a wasteland of shattered starlight, facing down a being wrapped in flame and crown.
The Sovereign of Death here had been a Warlord Emperor of the Last Circle, a realm where mortals could not tread. His armor was made of screaming soulsteel, his eyes twin eclipses. Around him floated his court, thirteen deathknights bound to his will, and behind them, the chained spirits of thousands of broken enemies.
He did not kneel before the Core.
He challenged it.
"I will not be ruled," he said aloud, voice ringing like cathedral bells in an empty void as he chomped down a Deathroot Lotus.
The Core did not answer.
It simply opened.
And in the end, his court burned first. Then his armor cracked. His name, Varthan, was unmade letter by letter, memory by memory, until he was nothing but a smear of ancient arrogance wiped clean from the ledger of eternity.
His final thought, just before the Core consumed him, burned into Damien's mind:
So this is what it means to be forgotten.
The third memory came slowly.
Not as a vision, but as a weight settling across Damien's shoulders, heavy, dignified, eternal. It wasn't pain. It was recognition.
Then the vision bloomed.