Chapter 28: What Waits Beneath the Black Tree

"250 Evolution Points spent. [Raise the Fallen] (C-Rank) upgraded to [Legion of the Damned] (B-Rank)."

Legion of the Damned: Summon 6 ordinary undead, level-capped to the user, to fight alongside you. 300 mana, 30-minute cooldown.

Kael grinned at the panel. Four risen skeletons had already made the General a small army on its own. Six turned that army into something closer to an occupying force.

The General swept through the outer edges of Ashgrave Cemetery with its new escort trailing behind, spear flashing, bone soldiers filling every gap Kael’s arrows didn’t reach.

Kill speed climbed noticeably enough that within half an hour, his Evolution counter had already stacked back up to a fresh 125.

Fair’s fair. This time the points went to the Behemoth.

"125 Evolution Points spent. [Feast] (C-Rank) upgraded to [Bloodthirsty Feast] (B-Rank)."

Bloodthi

rsty Feast: Bite for 160% → 170% attack, converting 50% → 60% of damage dealt to HP. On kill: +20 → +30 max HP, grows in size. No mana cost. 32s → 28s cooldown.

Kael did the math without even trying. Faster cooldown, bigger payout per kill under perfect conditions, that was two activations a minute, sixty points of max health stacking every sixty seconds.

Thirty-six hundred an hour. If I just let it keep feeding.Its size would keep climbing right alongside that number, and Kael honestly couldn’t picture where the ceiling on that sat anymore. One thing he was sure of.

whatever it became, it was going to be a wall nobody else on this server had an answer for.

A dozen more minutes of steady slaughter, and the last of the outer skeleton horde finally thinned out revealing the map’s first real boss standing in the clearing ahead.

Something that had clearly been dead for a very long time. Skin gone to brittle yellow parchment stretched tight over bone, sagging where the flesh had long since rotted away.

It let out a low, rattling groan and clawed a headstone aside, dragging itself up out of the earth.

It got about halfway free before a purple foot the size of a small car dropped out of nowhere and drove it straight back into the dirt. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ

Level 18, Bronze-tier. Against two Silver-tier companions sitting at level 14 apiece, it barely qualified as a speed bump.

Kael peppered it from range while the Behemoth ground it into the soil, and inside a few minutes its health bar bottomed out completely leaving behind a scattered pile of bone fragments and a genuinely respectable haul, including two Silver-tier drops that outstripped his current level requirement and went straight into storage.

They pushed deeper. The next threat announced itself before it was even visible a low, keening wail drifting between the headstones.

Screaming Wraith. Level 19. A translucent shape wreathed in sickly green flame, drifting rather than walking, its attacks built entirely around soul-piercing screams and ghostfire bursts.

Nasty on paper. Genuinely dangerous against anyone without the stat cushion to shrug it off.

Against Kael’s crew, it barely registered. They cut through the Wraiths in a straight, uninterrupted line, and by the time the last one dissolved into ash, both companions had climbed to level 15 alongside him cross-tier kills paying out experience at a rate that made the grind feel almost unfair.

Loot piled up fast enough that Kael lost count somewhere past the third Silver-tier drop.

With the cemetery finally quiet, he wandered its far edge for a while, searching until a shape ahead caught his eye. A tree, blackened top to root, branches twisted into something that looked more like claws than wood, clearly dead for longer than anything else in this graveyard.

At its base: a tomb entrance, black as the inside of a closed fist.

"There it is."

Something sparked behind his eyes, anticipation he didn’t bother hiding. But the moment he actually looked the opening over, a very practical problem presented itself.

The entrance couldn’t have been more than three meters across.

The Behemoth, after this much feasting, stood somewhere north of seven meters tall.

"...Of course it’s the one time being enormous is a liability."

He almost laughed at himself. Cracked Warden’s Mandate, let the Frostwraith slip back into her true form, and traded her out folding himself into a longbow no longer, but a full set of dark, jagged plate armor instead.

He dug through storage for a matching set of melee gear, swapped out of his leathers, and drew a Bronze-tier longsword that caught the faint tomb-light along its edge like something with a pulse of its own.

Warrior, for the next stretch. Sword in hand, General and Frostwraith flanking him, he stepped into the dark.

The passage beneath the tree sloped down into damp stone, narrow and endless, lit at intervals by guttering bronze lamps that threw more shadow than light a sickly green cast that clung to the walls and did nothing to make the place feel any less like a throat about to swallow him whole.

Kael had lived through worse. Whatever this cemetery had waiting for him, it wasn’t going to touch what he’d already survived once, in a life most of this server would never know existed.

He walked the passage without slowing, sword loose in hand, boots echoing against stone for what felt like several hundred meters before the corridor finally opened out.

A burial chamber, wide and circular, ceiling lost somewhere in the dark overhead.

The floor was marked out in something dried and rust-colored, traced into a sprawling ritual circle too intricate to have been drawn by accident.

At its center stood a wooden framework, crude and deliberate, and bound to it a young woman, barely dressed, motionless.

Five robed figures circled the frame, faces lost inside deep hoods, voices layered together in a low, discordant chant that didn’t sound like it belonged to any language Kael recognized.

Whatever ritual this was, it hadn’t finished yet.

Kael’s grip tightened on the sword, and he stepped fully into the chamber’s light.