Apocalypse: King of Zombies

Nerissa stared at Ethan, speechless. How can someone be this shameless?

In the end, she still nodded. ”I’ll do my best to persuade the Clan Chief.”

Then she added, more carefully, ”But my people have influence in Eldoria’s Southern Region. If powerhouses from the other regions show up… we won’t be able to do anything.”

”Other regions are that strong?” Ethan asked, interest sharpening.

”Yes.” Nerissa’s expression turned serious. ”Eldoria is divided into five major regions: the Eastern Region, Southern Region, Western Region, Northern Region, and Central Region.”

”Among them, the Southern and Western Regions are relatively weak. The Eastern and Northern Regions are much stronger. And the Central Region…” She paused, like the words themselves carried weight. ”That’s where the true top-tier races live. Their overall strength is far beyond the other four regions.”

”The gap’s that big?” Ethan blurted.

Nerissa nodded. ”Most of Eldoria’s resources are concentrated in the Central Region. The mysterious energy there is also the densest. Of course the power difference is huge.”

”In the Southern and Western Regions, the strongest are only Tier 35.”

”In the Eastern and Northern Regions, there are already Stage SS existences.”

”And the Central Region…” Her voice dropped. ”That’s a place where even Stage SSS powerhouses exist.”

Ethan’s eyes widened. ”Stage SSS? Seriously?”

He leaned back, a little stunned. ”Damn. Guess I underestimated Eldoria.”

”You did,” Nerissa said bluntly. ”Eldoria is larger than your world by who knows how much, and it has existed for a very long time. Strong people will naturally appear.”

”Most Stage SSS powerhouses spend their time in deep seclusion, searching for a path beyond Stage SSS,” Nerissa went on. ”Unless something truly important happens, they almost never show themselves. Even we’ve never seen a Stage SSS powerhouse in person, so the chance of one coming here is very low.”

”Beyond Stage SSS…” Ethan’s brow furrowed. ”Then what, Stage EX?”

”Stage EX?” Nerissa’s eyes went wide. ”You… you know there’s a higher stage?”

Ethan blinked. ”Uh. Isn’t there?”

Nerissa looked at him like he’d just casually admitted he’d seen the end of the world.

”No one on Eldoria has ever reached anything higher than Stage SSS,” she said slowly. ”For a long time, every race believed Stage SSS was the absolute limit.”

”But later, we learned something from the human race.”

Her tone shifted—more cautious now, like she was repeating something taboo.

”We learned that above Stage SSS… there is still another Stage.”

”And the human race…” Nerissa’s eyes flicked away for a second. ”They were driven out because a powerhouse above Stage SSS shattered the world they originally lived in. That’s why they ended up drifting into Eldoria.”

”So those Stage SSS powerhouses go into life-or-death seclusion all the time because they’re trying to break through that ceiling,” she concluded. ”If someone really reaches a stage above Stage SSS… they’d become a true ruler of Eldoria.”

”Shattered the world they lived in…?” Ethan latched onto that instantly.

His mind flashed to the ruined Void Realm they’d encountered before.

For a split second, it felt like two separate pieces of a puzzle had clicked against each other.

”Wait,” Ethan said, voice tighter than before. ”These Stage names… you guys came up with them yourselves?”

”No,” Nerissa said. ”There wasn’t a unified naming system at first. Later, the human race reclassified the stages and standardized the names.”

”And even the common language we use now—across the races—was unified into the human language.”

Ethan stared at her, his expression turning strange.

”So humans show up, help you organize your power system, unify language… and then you wiped them out?”

”…” Nerissa’s face stiffened.

”It was other races,” she said quickly. ”Our Azure Nereids didn’t participate. Back then, we weren’t even strong enough to qualify.”

She took a breath, then continued in a low voice.

”Some of the top races felt threatened by humans. They united, pulled in every powerful race they could, and launched a purge.”

”In the end, they paid a huge price… but they still erased the human race from Eldoria.”

”…”

Ethan clicked his tongue.

”Guess being helpful really does get you killed.”

From Nerissa’s words, Ethan suddenly understood a lot more—and the shape of a theory started forming in his head.

If he wasn’t wrong, humans hadn’t originally lived on Earth.

They’d come from another world.

A world that had been shattered by a terrifying existence.

And after that disaster, humanity had been forced into the void passages—scattered, washed up across countless worlds like survivors clinging to wreckage.

Earth was probably one of the places humanity had washed up.

But before the apocalypse, Earth didn’t have mysterious energy at all. Which meant the humans who settled here never awakened a real cultivation—or power—system.

Meanwhile, the humans who drifted into other worlds revealed terrifying talent. The native races grew wary… and in the end, those humans were wiped out.

What happened on Eldoria had probably happened elsewhere too.

And those shattered pieces of the Void Realm they’d run into before… they were likely fragments of that original destroyed world. The things Ethan had found inside them were probably leftovers—traces the humans from back then had left behind.

Once that chain of logic snapped into place, a lot of questions Ethan had been carrying around suddenly cleared.

No wonder some Void Realm creatures could speak pieces of the human language.

No wonder the Stage system matched humanity’s.

It all came from the same source.

As for those other humanoid races… they were probably either descendants of humans who’d scattered to other worlds, or native creatures on Earth that had evolved down a similar path after the mysterious energy appeared.

And once he reached that conclusion, Ethan’s mood sank.

If that was true, then humans really were the public enemy of countless races. If he handled this wrong, history could repeat itself—clean and brutal.

Who even knew if there were any other surviving human enclaves out there besides Earth?

If there weren’t…

Then humanity really would be extinct.

I won’t let history repeat itself, Ethan swore to himself.

Before long, the barbecue was ready.

The Glacial Bear and the white-furred apes each hugged a massive slab of roasted meat and went to town like starving monsters.

Ethan and the others sat in a loose circle, eating and talking as they went.

The feast dragged on until deep into the night—mostly because the Glacial Bear could eat like a bottomless pit. Toward the end, it was basically an entire group of people working like staff just to keep the meat coming.

Still, the bear looked genuinely satisfied, and its attitude toward Ethan’s group softened noticeably.

Which was exactly what Ethan wanted.

As long as it was happy—and willing to stay in Fallen Star City—then the whole ”feeding a Stage SS disaster on a daily basis” thing was worth it.

When the feast finally ended, Miles arranged extremely comfortable places for both the Glacial Bear and the roc, sending them off to rest.

Only then did Ethan and the others finally have time to use crystal cores to upgrade themselves.

They were just about to start swallowing the cores when something hit Ethan.

”Wait—hold up,” he said quickly, stopping everyone.

Then he went to find Nerissa again and asked if the Azure Nereids had any other way to use crystal cores.

Nerissa didn’t hold anything back. She told him their method.

They didn’t eat them.

They extracted the energy from the crystal core and guided it into their bodies.

The advantages were obvious: it was gentler, it didn’t waste as much energy, and even high-Tier crystal cores could be used this way.

But the downside was just as clear—it was much slower than swallowing a core outright.

Especially with high-Tier cores. The energy quality inside was too dense, too ”heavy.” You couldn’t absorb much at once. You had to take it little by little.

And it wasn’t as simple as ”any core works.”

If a crystal core’s Tier was too far above your own, you couldn’t absorb it casually at all. One tiny strand of energy could be enough to make your body burst.

After hearing all that, Ethan felt a wave of disappointment.

He’d learned from the roc that absorbing high-Tier crystal cores was possible, so he’d been imagining something else entirely—like once he learned the trick, he could crack open those black crystal cores in his spatial ring and have everyone’s strength rocket upward overnight.

Now it was obvious he’d been dreaming.

If they touched those black cores, they’d explode on the spot.

According to Nerissa, even with this ”safe” absorption method, you still couldn’t exceed your own Tier by more than six.

For example, Ethan was Tier 26 right now, which meant the highest he could absorb was Tier 32. Anything beyond that, and the risk of his body exploding became real.

And unlike swallowing—where the increase was immediate—absorption required a full process. Time, control, patience.

Still, no matter how limited it was, this method had opened a new door for them.

It was far better than breaking the crystal cores down for energy.

For one thing, they didn’t even have the technology to process crystal cores of that tier yet. And even if they did, the energy loss during decomposition was painful enough to make Ethan’s head hurt.