Brand New Life Online: Rise Of The Goddess Of Harvest

The aberrant tree suddenly grew twice as large and completely consumed the glowing crystal. -----Thanatos watched in silence as the crystal’s contents rapidly moved upward through the twisted branches and flowed straight into the flower at the top.

The flower’s single eye slowly bloomed open, shifting and changing forms until it finally revealed a clear human face.

”A-Ahhh...”

He muttered in pure disbelief. Black miasmic tears began falling from his empty eye sockets as he reached out and gently touched the petals, only to pull his hand back a moment later.

That face reflected so clearly in the flower was...

”My beautiful... Eleanora...”

His dear wife, long dead after the Four Kingdom Alliance stormed his Kingdom and destroyed everything he held dear.

When he lost everything and everyone that day, he had sworn to the heavens themselves that he would take revenge for her and for every single person he had lost.

His Fallen Kingdom, now nothing but ruins, lay right where he currently stood — deep within the Netherworld itself, inside the Labyrinth Region. Over countless years it had created its own pseudo-layer of reality.

It had existed there for eons. Nobody even knew it was still present until it was suddenly unsealed. When the world itself was destroyed and later repaired, the Netherworld remained completely unaffected by that ”reset.” Instead it became an even more warped and twisted place, a mismatch of long-lost epochs and forgotten eras piled on top of one another.

In a sense, nothing made any real sense anymore. The more one thought about the Netherworld’s nature, the more bizarre and impossible everything felt.

But none of that mattered to him anymore. This warped world, whose times, eras, and history had been destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed again over and over, had finally made the impossible possible.

He, who had been lost for so long amidst time and space, was finally going to reunite with his beloved family.

Nothing else in existence mattered except the fulfillment of this single wish.

He watched her face slowly emerge more clearly from the flower. His empty sockets flickered with faint violet light until, suddenly—

She slowly opened her eyes!

”Ah! E-Eleanora...! Eleanora!”

He called out her name and raised both trembling hands toward her face.

Eleanora slowly opened her eyes and looked around in confusion. Her expression was filled with pain and exhaustion.

”Where... what... What... am I...? Where... where is... this...?”

Black tears started falling from her eyes as well, warping the very reality around them with every drop.

”WHERE AM I?! WHO ARE YOU?! WHAT IS THIS?! AAAH...! MY CHILDREN...! AAAAAHHHHH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!”

”Ugh?!”

Thanatos suddenly felt his soul tremble in sharp pain as her agonized cry echoed through the endless dark halls of the ruined kingdom.

He tried to reach her again, but her face twisted further in agony and despair. Black tears continued falling from her eyes without end.

”E-Eleanora! It is me! Eleanora!”

He called her name over and over, but she did not respond kindly. Instead she only cried harder in pure agony and despair, unable to hear or understand a single word he was trying to say.

Eleanora was clearly no more. She had been lost for far too long!

Or... was she?

”Who... who are you...?”

She suddenly stopped crying. Her eyes blinked once, then twice.

Hope bloomed inside Thanatos’s heart for that brief, fragile moment as he carefully approached her to speak.

Eleanora’s eyes gleamed with shifting colors — red, blue, violet, green, and black. Her form remained twisted, her body still incomplete and unfinished.

”E-Eleanora...! It is me... your husband... it is me! Thanatos! I am a monster now. I have been warped... by this world, by those that hurt us! But I will bring you back! I will bring our children back!”

”T-Than... Thanatos...?”

Her eyes widened as countless memories suddenly flooded through her newly formed mind. She gasped sharply as she began to recall him.

She remembered a beautiful young man with long white hair, pale skin, a slender body, and deep red eyes.

He had been the heir of the Midnight Family, the royal family of the Dark Kingdom — a young cripple with a heart of pure gold.

And she, Eleanora, had been the disgraced heiress of the Scarlet Garden Family of nobles, a girl everyone believed possessed no magic at all.

Both of them had been disgraced, weak, crippled, and hated by nearly everyone around them.

And yet, through that shared weakness, they had formed an unbreakable connection, a bond deeper than any other.

Through that beautiful bond of friendship they grew together and fought against destiny itself, persevering through the centuries while never leaving each other’s side.

Destiny had always been cruel and so had the people who hated them. Those people constantly tried to pull them apart, to force them to hate one another, to destroy each other completely.

But they never faltered.

That weak young man whom she had once saved and helped rise had become a King who tried to change his Kingdom’s dark and bloody history.

It had been a place where every noble family was raised as assassins, threatening other kingdoms with their massive military force. He did everything in his power to improve that horrible and miserable land.

He tried to form new alliances and new bonds with people outside their borders. Slowly, through intelligence, charisma, a bit of help from those he hired, the magic he learned, and her unwavering support as his everlasting star, he won the throne.

Alas, it had all been nothing more than a cruel joke from destiny.

When they had finally been together, when their Kingdom had chosen him as true King, when they prospered and began to move on from their dark past, when new alliances were formed...

It was discovered that everything had been fake.

The Four Kingdom Alliance unleashed an all-out attack, taking advantage of the weakened military forces of the new king’s peaceful reign.

He had invested most of his resources in tourism and agriculture, foolishly deeming that the times of war were finally over.

Foolishly indeed.

-----