The morning sun rose golden and indifferent, a cruel contrast to the nightmare that had unfolded in the dockside warehouse just hours earlier.
Blood still dried on the cargo bay floor. Somewhere beneath the humming cityscape, rotting things still twitched—part corpse, part command. Death had bloomed down there. A grim harvest.
Now, above it all, I sat in the boardroom of Gilzean Tower. Another battlefield. No screaming. No blood. But in many ways, more dangerous.
We were thirty-five floors above the smogline—too high to hear sirens, too rich to care who bled. The room was a modern mausoleum for wealth and power: polished mahogany, oil-dark walls, an obsidian table stretching endlessly like a ceremonial slab.
Glass surrounded the boardroom on three sides. The skyline shimmered, unaware—or uninterested—in who ruled from this height.
And at the head of the table, I sat. A boy in his father's chair.
That's what they saw.
What they didn't see was that the chair no longer belonged to my father. Or any of them.
It belonged to something else.
Alistair Finch, chairman and monarch of the terminally smug, smoothed his cufflinks and leaned forward.
"Silas," he said, his voice grave with the weight of scripted grief, "we all share your sorrow. Your parents were legends. But Gilzean Industries isn't just a company—it's a colossus. It needs firm, seasoned leadership. Just until you're... ready."
He gestured with priestly hands to the others. Nods followed like ripples spreading through swamp water.
Sterling cleared his throat and spoke up. "There's a motion to establish a temporary executive council. It's standard, really. You'll remain majority heir, but we'd—uh—steer the ship until the transition settles."
They smiled. Kindly. Politely. Carving the knife from fine wood.
I watched them in silence.
They thought this was a lifeline.
No—this was a carcass pit.
I didn't speak. Not yet. Instead, I reached inward and downward.
[Bio-Arcane System Connection Threaded]
Root Access Acquired
The orchids on the windowsill had been planted last week. The ficus in the corner had grown three new leaves since yesterday. They weren't décor.
They were listening.
The plants were my proxies—their roots spread beneath the tiles, feeding on water and wire, absorbing breath and vibration. Every nervous shift. Every lie exhaled. I felt the pheromones spilling off Sterling, sharp and citrusy. I could taste the oily fear in Finch's sweat. I charted the rhythms of every board member's pulse.
All except one.
Edmund Sharpe.
CFO. Perfectly still. No scent of stress. No fear. Watching me like one studies an unpredictable algorithm. Quiet. Unreadable.
He already knew I was not the Silas from the file.
So I answered their proposal—not with rebuttal, but with revelation.
[Skill Activated: Despair Aura Lv.1 – Radius: 8m]
Effect: Induces existential dread, hallucinatory fear, and psychic suffocation
Duration: Sustained
The room shrank.
Not literally. But the pressure dropped. Sound density thickened. Fluorescence dimmed imperceptibly—but the human brain noticed.
Something was wrong.
The ficus recoiled. The orchids curled inward, petals curling like burning paper.
Sterling blinked rapidly. "Is… is anyone else getting that… feeling?"
Finch growled. "Control your theatrics, Silas. This is a boardroom, not your—"
Something changed in his face mid-sentence.
Memory collided with sensation. Visions bloomed on the backs of eyelids.
They were no longer in a corporate tower.
They stood in a graveyard.
Not a normal one, but one defiled—its graves freshly dug, unfilled. The air wet with rot and ash. Roots slithered through puddled earth, slick with the blood of forgotten contracts.
And in the center, I stood: crowned in vines, skin like bark, robed in soil-black sigils and judgment.
I said nothing in the vision.
I didn't have to.
Finch flinched.
Sterling dropped his pen. It hit the glossy table with a dull tap that sounded, in the moment, like a gunshot.
Sterling blinked hard. His eyes unfocused—then widened.
He wasn't in the boardroom anymore.
He stood in a cubicle field of grey, endless and identical, stretching beyond sight. Desks littered with bleeding spreadsheets. Phones rang endlessly with no one to answer. His fingers bled ink. Every mistake printed itself across his skin in red tally marks.
And behind him—looming, slow, inevitable—was a Zomboni. Frost hissed from its blades as it chewed across the floor toward him.
He screamed.
—
Finch gripped his armrests, trying to stand. His breath came shallow. His tailored suit was soaked in sweat.
In his mind's eye, he saw the Gilzean Tower—but toppled, buried in roots, crawling with vines that had swallowed the glass and steel like veins through a cadaver. The boardroom lay in ruins, and he was sealed beneath the rubble, dirt and wood crushing his chest.
The orchids whispered his name. Over and over.
"Finch… Finch…"
He fell back into his chair.
—
Mathers, the logistics VP, whimpered.
A cargo ship drifted into view, broken and aflame, its hull leaking corpses like ballast. Her clipboard burst into worms. They squirmed between her fingers, spelling her name.
"You built the supply lines," whispered the sea.
"Now you feed them."
—
Even the secretary—young, unnoticed—began to cry silently as her tablet screen showed her family home, abandoned, overgrown, her parents and siblings inside—root-bound and unmoving. Their faces twisted into wooden masks.
Only one remained unaffected.
Sharpe. Arms crossed. Unblinking.
He stared not at the illusions—but at me.
Analyzing.
Unsettled, but not broken.
The seed of challenge had not withered in him.
"This… isn't grief," whispered Mathers, the logistics VP. "This is… something else."
I walked, slowly, around the table, letting the aura deepen.
"This company," I said, my voice low, "is no longer a business."
I stopped behind Sterling.
"It is a garden."
I placed my palm on his shoulder—cold with supernatural silence.
"And I—" I whispered, "am the gardener."
He shuttered like a struck tuning fork.
Finch bristled. "This is intimidation," he spat. "You think some spooky tricks make you—"
"I'm not intimidating you," I interrupted. "I'm showing you who already owns you."
[System Notification: Dominion Expansion Detected – Urban Nexus Linked]
Trait Unlocked – Corporate Roots
+0.2 Sunlight Energy/min via financial transactions
+0.1 Grave Energy/min via fraud, laundering, black market bleed
The shift was complete. I felt it flood into me—a web of fiscal arteries stretching across data servers, slums, shell companies, and broken banks. Dirty money fed me now. Each bribe was a calorie. Each embezzled dollar, fertilizer.
I inhaled, and I tasted encrypted accounts in Dubai, silenced payoffs in Panama, tolerable sins in Midtown.
The System whispered in my blood: Grow.
Finch grabbed the arms of his chair hard enough to blanch his knuckles.
"You're bluffing," he snapped.
Sterling looked at him like he'd lost his mind. "Then why won't it stop?"
I smiled thinly.
"Because it's not a bluff. It's roots. And they're already threaded through this building. Through our ledgers. Through our lungs."
Sharpe's voice broke the silence.
Quiet. Clean. "And what is it you want, Mr. Gilzean?"
Finally. The question.
"Growth," I said. "Relentless, amoral, natural growth."
I walked back to the head of the table. Sat back down.
"The motion," I said, "is denied."
Silence stretched. Trembled.
Seconds passed before Finch managed to stand. His movements were stiff. Muscles slow to respond to commands.
The others followed. Sterile, shell-shocked, no longer Board but pilgrims leaving an unfamiliar temple.
Sharpe lingered a moment longer, folder under one arm. His eyes unreadable. Then he turned and left with them.
[System Update: Network Integration at 83%]
Emotion signature: Subordinate fear feeding passive growth
Gain: +15 Grave Energy | +22 Sunlight Energy (session)
Aftermath
Sometime later, in my inner sanctum—private office, burnished obsidian and quiet menace—I submerged into my true interface.
Holographic displays flared like neural echoes. Code pulsed like veins. The System didn't show numbers.
It showed roots.
Offshore investments glimmered like fruit. Automation errors leaked Grave Energy. Payroll anomalies surged with spectral intensity. Every spreadsheet was a stalk. Every server: a stem.
And then, the ping:
[Summon Unlocked: Zomboni – Cryo-Carriage Variant Z]
Status: 1 Activation Charge
Driver: Torq (Deceased)
Role: Corpse retrieval | Public intimidation | Cold logistics
I chuckled softly.
A reanimated ice resurfacer. Cold-engineered. Barbed snow blade at the front. Coolant tubes exhaling frost. A frozen corpse smirking from the cockpit like a chauffeur from hell.
Elegant. Tasteless. Perfect.
My first cavalry.
The Snake in the Garden
Then came the tremor.
A flag in the data noise.
[Intercepted Comms: Encrypted Outgoing | Source: Edmund Sharpe]
Target: Kratos Securities Ltd. → Proxy Terminal
Keywords Flagged: "Changed… Demon… Roxxon… Fisk…"
Audio crackled live.
Sharpe's voice: "He isn't the boy from the file. Finch saw it too. It's not grief—it's transformation. Controlled from the inside. If Roxxon still wants leverage, now's the time. He's untethered."
I tapped a prompt.
[Prompt: Mark Target – "Edmund Sharpe" for Surveillance?]
Sub-Selection Enabled: Data-Tethered Resurrection Minion
Status: Unaware Access Available – Accept?
Yes.
Green script unraveled like vines across his terminal tree.
What seeded now beneath his login DNA wasn't malware.
It was a whisper of undeath.
The tendrils of the Data-Tethered Resurrection slithered invisibly through the backbone of the Gilzean mainframe. Not a virus—too crude. Not spyware—too mundane. This was something else.
A ghost with roots.
Its presence didn't trip firewalls—it integrated with them. It didn't log keystrokes—it read intention in the neural cadence of Sharpe's typing. It drank heat signatures, gaze angles, breath patterns recorded from the boardroom's security system.
It whispered to me through pulses, vibrations, emotional telemetry.
Sharpe didn't know it yet, but his office had become a terrarium. And I was the sun.
> [Surveillance Seed Active – Host: Edmund Sharpe] Observing: Emotional shifts | Financial transfers | Outbound communications Current Emotional State: Calculated Tension | Cortisol Spikes: Controlled Notable Event: Firewall anomaly deflected secondary trace. Note: Subject has advanced cyber-defense proxies. Resistance Level: Moderate-High
Interesting.
Sharpe wasn't just an observer. He was preparing a counter-play.
A flicker of code crawled across my vision—subtle, like a feather on a blade.
> [Incoming Probe Detected – Origin Masked via Proxy Chain: FiskNet / Roxxon Node 12]
He was already calling in favors.
He wasn't just watching.
He was digging.
Sharpe had laid his own network into the bones of this city. And now, he was prodding mine like a shark nudging a submerged predator—testing my perimeter. Not out of recklessness.
Out of respect.
I let him look.
I let the Surveillance Minion dim its presence, just enough to give Sharpe the illusion of stealth. I wanted him confident. Bold. Convinced that he could still outmaneuver me.
Let him feel clever.
Let him feel safe.
> [Surveillance Directive Updated: Adaptive Deception Mode – Active] Simulated System Vulnerability Injected
A false vulnerability was embedded in one of the old Gilzean server logs. A honeytrap.
It would show incomplete behavioral logs of my warehouse… omitting just enough truth to invite deeper investigation.
Because when he finally steps into my garden?
He won't realize he's already fertilizer.
Sharpe would never notice it until it bloomed behind his firewalls.
Surveillance Binding Complete.
Root Access Threaded: Moderate. Elevating...
A whisper buried itself beneath Sharpe's login key.
It would listen.
And wait.
And grow.
I stood at the window, watching clouds crawl past skyscrapers like indifferent gods.
Let them admire the skyline.
Let them marvel at the glass.
Let them think they understand what casts the shadow.
They don't.
Not yet.
But they will.
Because what grows in the dark...
Always reaches for the light.
End of chapter.