Derek staggered to his feet and hurled the Bone Spear Bomb with everything Bloodburst had left to offer.

His body strength had enhanced several times, and now the bone spear, thrown. out was more efficient and destructive than a grenade launcher.

The spear spun through the smoky air—

SCHUN!

Dead centre. Right into the exposed core of the Knight's chest.

For one heartbeat, everything was still.

Then—

BOOOOM!

The explosion didn't just echo—it rippled, a concussive pulse that tore through the chamber like a shockwave of death. The detonation erupted in a bloom of orange fire, cursed green flame, and shrapnel. Heat blasted outward in a wave that charred the walls and sent clouds of bone dust spinning like ash in a volcanic storm.

Derek was thrown off his feet again, landing on his back, the wind knocked clean from his lungs. His ears rang—no, screamed. His body felt like it was vibrating from the inside, as though something had come unmoored.

The Skeleton Knight didn't scream. It didn't fail.

It simply froze—runes all over its body glowing violently, flickering—

And then, one by one, they shattered.

A spiderweb of cracks formed across its armour, racing outward from the spear's point of impact. Its helm is split down the middle. Its ribs collapsed inward. The soul flame in its eyes flickered once—

Then died.

With a final shudder, the Knight collapsed to its knees. Soulreaver slipped from its fingers and struck the floor with a dull clang. The skull crumbled in two, and the rest of its body followed, collapsing into a heap of cursed bone and scorched steel, dust rising from the ruins.

Silence.

Derek lay on his back, chest heaving, vision swimming.

Smoke wafted through the chamber in lazy spirals, stinking of sulfur, burnt ichor, and ozone. The floor beneath him was hot, cracked. His HUD blinked and glitched in his peripheral vision.

Then—ping.

[Target Eliminated: Skeleton Knight – C-Class Undead]

[EXP Gained: 4000]

[Item Drop: Soulreaver Fragment – Cursed Weapon Component]

[ Level Up ]

[Level Up ]

[ You have levelled up to level 20 ]

[ All attributes...] A wave of system information rang, but he could not hear them all.

He coughed, and blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth. His left arm was limp, broken. His ribs weren't just fractured—they were stabbing into things that shouldn't be stabbed. The adrenaline had burned off. Pain returned in waves.

He was dying.

But he wasn't dead yet, he could feel the essence of the level up flowing into his body, his HP bar was rising slowly.

He rolled to his side—gritting his teeth hard enough to draw blood—and dragged himself forward inch by inch.

And then, through the rising smoke and flickering firelight…

He saw it.

Across the field of broken bone and smouldering ruins, past the shattered altar and melted glyphs…

The Nether Flowerbud.

Nestled in a tangled nest of rune-rooted bone and glowing softly, pulsing in sync with something deep beneath the world. A bud of petals, each tipped in iridescent hues. Its stem looked like a twisted spinal cord and luminous veins, and the aura it gave off was otherworldly.

Fortunately, it had not been destroyed in the mess and chaos of the battle just now

Still salvageable.

Derek exhaled something like a laugh—a raw, choking wheeze.

Then began to crawl.

Every motion lit his nerves on fire. His vision pulsed with darkness around the edges. Bones grated. Muscles threatened to tear. He left a blood trail behind him—sticky and wet, spattered with ash.

But he didn't stop.

He dragged himself forward with one arm, one ruined leg pushing behind him. A desperate crawl across the wreckage of the fight. Past the remains of the Knight. Past the fallen Soulreaver. Toward the pulsing, alien glow of the flower that might just save the world… or at least make this pain mean something.

He reached the base.

Fingers trembling, Derek reached out—skin brushing against the cold stem.

The flower twitched.

[Main Objective Reached: Nether Flowerbud Located]

The flower twitched.

[Main Objective Reached: Nether Flowerbud Located]

Derek's trembling fingers closed around the Nether Flowerbud.

And instantly, he stilled.

There was no warmth. No rush of healing light. No divine choir rising in his ears to celebrate his pain and suffering.

No. What surged through his arm was cold. A deep, biting, marrow-chilling cold that raced up his fingers, through his wrist, and sank into his bones like liquid frost. It wasn't painful. It was worse. It was familiar. A coldness that reminded him of waking up alone in the winter mornings back in the ghetto, when the heating had been cut off again and the blankets were too thin, and he had to breathe into his cupped hands just to move.

It felt like emptiness. Like loss. Like something ancient, broken, and still awake.

Derek's grip tightened, despite his instincts screaming at him to let go. The flower pulsed once in his hand, slowly, like the heartbeat of something that shouldn't have survived—and yet had. Each petal shimmered with subtle iridescent hues, shifting unnaturally in the low light. They looked… delicate. And utterly alien. Like reality didn't fully know how to contain this thing.

He took a shaky breath. "No pressure, right?" His voice was hoarse, barely more than a whisper.

He had almost died for this piece of crap.

The twisted stem of the flower coiled loosely in his grip, slick like sinew, its texture somewhere between plant and something else—something wrong. Derek stared down at it for a long moment, his body shaking not from adrenaline anymore, but from exhaustion, shock, and whatever this damn flower was doing to him.

He blinked sweat out of his eyes.

No more stalling.

Without even trying to pull up the system screen —he didn't trust his vision right now anyway—he mentally commanded the system to store the flower.

The flower vanished from his hand in a flicker of static and mist, like a glitch being folded out of reality.

Gone. Into his inventory. Thank God.

Derek exhaled and collapsed forward onto the cracked stone floor, resting his forehead against the cool rock. For a few seconds, he just stayed there, heart hammering, mind blank.

And then—

[Dimensional Transition Initiated]

The words weren't spoken aloud. They weren't even seen. He just knew them, felt them settle deep into his skull like an inevitability. Like fate reaching down with one giant, pixelated finger to pluck him out of this nightmare realm.

A numb sensation crawled up his spine. His surroundings began to dissolve at the edges—first the colours faded, then the shapes. The stench of scorched bone, sulfur, and blood was replaced with sterile cold.

Weightlessness.

A disembodied drift.

Then—impact.

Soft.

Too soft.

Derek landed on something plush. A mattress. No—his mattress.

He groaned as he flopped face-up, blinking blearily at a white ceiling bordered with handcrafted crown moulding and accented with floating projection lights.

The silence here was obscene. Too clean. Too... fake.

Luxury.

He tilted his head to the side and squinted through one swollen eye. Velvet blackout curtains framed floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Paleview City's skyline. A wall-mounted flatscreen slowly came to life, and the latest entertainment news began to play. The air smelled like linen, a faint breeze carrying synthetic pine and wealth.

Derek laughed. Just a low, broken chuckle at first, then something uglier, bitter, dripping with the kind of sarcasm only someone who'd almost bled to death could muster.

"Oh, yeah," he rasped. "This is normal."

He shifted slightly and winced so hard his soul nearly left his body. His ribs weren't just broken—they were wrong. Bent inward. Cracked like eggshells. His arm hung limp at his side. Blood crusted his lips. And yet here he was. Back in his oversized bedroom. Egyptian cotton sheets beneath him. State-of-the-art everything surrounds him. The kind of wealth people died chasing.

And he'd earned it by crawling through blood and death and corrupted dungeons filled with things that shouldn't exist.

"I used to eat reheated gas station noodles three times a week," Derek muttered, his voice a dry rasp. "Now I've got a f**king gold bidet."

He turned his head and stared at the polished dresser across the room. His reflection stared back—half-dead, one eye swollen shut, bruises blooming across his jaw. Blood on his shirt, crusted black at the edges.

A billionaire with broken ribs. A mansion owner with a fractured skull. A soon-to-be saviour of the world who still smelled like burnt flesh and bone ash.

Beautiful.

He gritted his teeth and forced himself to sit up—bad idea. Pain exploded down his side, white-hot and sharp enough to make him gag. But he forced it. Because he had to. Because no one was coming to coddle him. And because—

The apocalypse was coming.

His voice cracked.

He stared out at the night skyline, lit with neon lights and oblivious joy. Somewhere out there, people were partying. Watching shows. Hooking up. Buying coffee. Living.

They had no idea what was coming.

But he did.

Derek Carter—former nobody, ex-ghetto rat, current billionaire, dimension traveller, and now flower-thief of the most cursed relic in the netherworld —was back.

And the world?

It had no idea what it was in for.

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