January 3, 2026 – 47 days after Awakening Day
Hanami Village is no longer on any map.
Officially, the entire valley suffered a "catastrophic landslide."
Unofficially, a 200-meter-high wall of living bamboo and enchanted stone now rings the territory, grown overnight by Sayuri's new Sacred Mother skill: Garden of Eden's Embrace (Rank A).
Anyone below Level 30 who tries to force entry is gently, but firmly, turned around by vines that whisper "wrong way" in their minds.
Inside the wall, the old village of 312 souls has become a fortress-city of 4,800.
Refugees who made it through the chaos (mostly women, children, and low-level crafters who pledged loyalty) now live in new lives:
- Former salarymen farm rice with mana-infused tools that never dull.
- Ex-idols and office ladies train as archers under Mika's brutal regimen.
- Children born after Awakening Day are already Level 1 at birth, thanks to the Ring of Eternal Spring.
The economy inside the wall is simple:
1 core = 1 week of luxury living.
1 day of honest work = food, shelter, and protection forever.
Betrayal = exile into the wasteland.
Outside the wall, Japan has fractured into a hundred warring territories.
Tokyo is ruled by the "Heavenly Kings" – six Level 70+ raid bosses who turned the Imperial Palace into a coliseum where they fight for entertainment.
Osaka belongs to the Iron Oni Syndicate – all former yakuza who Awakened as melee classes and now tattoo their levels on their faces.
Kyoto is a theocracy run by shrine maidens who hit Level 60+ Healer and are declaring a "return to the age of gods."
Every major city has a flag, a tax, and a slave market.
And every single one of them has heard the rumor:
Somewhere in the mountains there is a hidden paradise ruled by a trio called the Harvest Family.
They say the man is a Warrior who was Level 20 before the world even knew levels existed.
They say one woman is a Sacred Mother who can make the land itself fight for her.
They say the other is a Berserker who once killed a Level 55 raid boss with her bare hands while laughing.
They say no army has ever come back from trying to take it.
On this particular morning, Kai stands on the new watchtower (built from dungeon stone that regenerates when damaged), looking out over his domain.
Sayuri is beside him, eight months pregnant now, glowing with power, one hand on the bamboo wall, making it grow another meter taller just because she felt like it.
Mika is below in the training yard, shirtless, sparring with twenty new recruits at once, machete a blur, roaring encouragement and insults in equal measure.
A scout rider comes galloping up the main road (one of the village kids, now Level 18 Ranger).
"Lord Kai! Three thousand men marching from the north. Iron Oni Syndicate colors. They say they're here to 'collect tribute or wives.' ETA three days."
Kai's smile is slow, lazy, and terrifying.
"Tell the wall to wake up," he says. "And tell the fields to sharpen their roots."
Sayuri leans into him, lips brushing his ear.
"After we crush them… I want you to put another baby in me on the battlefield. Right on their banner."
Mika's laugh echoes from the yard below.
"Make it twins this time. I'm getting jealous."
Kai looks out over the empire he never meant to build.
An empire built on love, levels, and the absolute refusal to ever let anyone hurt his family again.
Three thousand men?
They're not an invasion.
They're fertilizer.
And the Harvest Family is very, very hungry.
January 6, 2026 – three days after the Iron Oni scout's warning
The Iron Oni Syndicate arrived at dawn.
Three thousand bodies in black tactical gear, monster-bone armor, and glowing red tattoos that marked their levels.
Twenty war-trucks with welded plating and mounted ballistae that fired explosive cores.
Four Level 60+ officers riding armored dire-boars the size of city buses.
Their warlord, "Red Oni" Takeshi – Level 78 Berserker/Tyrant dual-class – strode at the front, a twenty-foot kanabō slung over one shoulder like a toothpick.
They expected a village.
They found a kill-zone.
The moment the first truck crossed the old village boundary, the ground erupted.
Sayuri's Garden of Eden's Embrace had spent three days preparing.
Roots as thick as a man's thigh burst from the soil, wrapping axles and flipping trucks like toys.
Bamboo spears shot from the walls at supersonic speed, punching straight through enchanted armor.
The rice fields themselves rose up – animated scarecrows made of harvested stalks and monster bones, wielding sickles that ignited with sacred fire.
The Iron Oni lasted eleven minutes.
Kai met Red Oni Takeshi in the center of the carnage.
The warlord swung his kanabō hard enough to crater the earth.
Kai caught it on his shield (dungeon-forged mythril now, after fifty clears), the impact driving him to one knee but not breaking bone.
He looked up and smiled.
"Wrong valley."
Power Strike → Critical → Executed.
His sword took the warlord's head clean off.
The remaining two thousand broke and ran.
They didn't make it far.
Mika led the pursuit on horseback (actual warhorses bred from dungeon stallions), her Berserker aura a crimson storm that made the air itself scream.
Sayuri floated above the battlefield on wings of light, raining healing on her people and holy fire on everything else.
When it was over, the battlefield looked like a red ocean.
‹ Mass Combat Victory ›
‹ Iron Oni Syndicate destroyed ›
‹ Territory Annexed ›
Kai → Level 27 Warrior
Mika → Level 24 Berserker Chieftain
Sayuri → Level 22 Sacred Mother Empress
New Title for Party: Harvesters of Empires
All stats +30 | All skills +2 ranks | New territory skills unlocked
They took no prisoners.
But they took everything else.
- 3,000 sets of armor and weapons
- 48 war-trucks (now being refitted with dungeon engines)
- 200,000+ lesser cores
- 47 slave-collared women and children freed and brought inside the wall
- One intact Level 75 dire-boar that Mika immediately claimed as her new mount and named "Breakfast"
That night the victory feast was held in the new great hall (built from the bones of the tower they'd cleared last week).
Kai sat at the head table, Sayuri on his right (nine months pregnant now, glowing like a goddess), Mika on his left (still covered in blood she refused to wash off because "it smells like winning").
The freed slaves (now citizens) wept and cheered.
The original villagers raised cups of sake brewed from sacred rice that got you drunk and healed wounds at the same time.
Kai stood.
His voice carried without effort, Warrior presence making the air itself vibrate.
"We didn't ask for this world," he said. "But it's ours now. Tomorrow we start building roads. The day after, we clear the next dungeon. The day after that, we take the next territory that thinks women and children are currency."
He raised his cup.
"To the Harvest."
Four thousand voices roared back:
"TO THE HARVEST!"
Later, in the master bedroom (now the size of a small house, built around the Bed of Endless Night), the three of them celebrated properly.
Sayuri went into labor on the battlefield banner of the Iron Oni, right in the middle of the great hall while the feast was still going.
Twin boys.
Both born Level 10.
Both already smiling.
The new world bowed that night.
Because the Harvest Family had just become inevitable.
And empires fall when the farmers decide they've had enough.
February 14, 2026 – Valentine's Day in the new world
The Iron Oni warlord's head had been on a pike at the northern gate for exactly five weeks when the blizzard came.
Not a normal blizzard.
A white-out that dropped visibility to zero and temperatures to −30 °C in minutes.
The kind that killed livestock, froze engines solid, and turned refugees into statues.
Then she walked out of it.
Alone.
A woman wrapped head-to-toe in white fox fur, silver hair whipping like a battle standard, dragging a sled piled with frozen monster corpses the size of cows.
Six-foot-two in her boots, body carved from years of arctic survival: broad shoulders, heavy breasts that strained the fur cloak, waist thick with muscle, hips and ass that looked like they could crush steel.
She stopped at the gate, looked up at the warlord's skull, and laughed: low, smoky, the sound of cracking ice.
"I heard this is where you bring trophies," she called in perfect Japanese with a faint Hokkaido accent. "I brought mine."
The guards (all Level 20+ now) didn't know whether to bow or raise weapons.
Kai, Mika, and Sayuri came to the wall themselves.
The woman looked up at them, pale blue eyes locking on Kai like a predator spotting a worthy rival.
Name: Yumi Kurogane
Age: 47
Former occupation: Ice-fishing village chief / widowed hunter
Current level: 39 Frost Reaper (unique hidden class)
Titles: Widow of the White Death, Slayer of the Polar Leviathan, Lone Wolf of Hokkaido
She had survived the collapse alone.
Her village wiped out by a roaming S-rank ice-dragon dungeon break.
Her husband and two sons eaten in front of her.
She killed the dragon.
Solo.
At Level 28.
Since then she'd wandered the frozen north, hunting anything that moved, growing stronger on pure vengeance and grief.
Until she heard rumors of a place where women weren't property.
A place ruled by a man who fucked like a god and protected what was his with apocalyptic violence.
She came to see if the stories were true.
Kai opened the gate himself.
Yumi stepped through, dropped the sled (the corpses alone worth a fortune in high-rank cores), and looked at the three of them.
At Sayuri, glowing and radiant even in late pregnancy.
At Mika, arms crossed, smirking like she'd just found a worthy sparring partner.
At Kai, shirt open despite the cold, muscles etched from months of war and love.
Yumi's eyes lingered longest on him.
"I don't kneel for anyone," she said, voice like winter wind. "But I'll fight for someone who's worth it."
Mika grinned, stepping forward. "Prove it."
They fought in the training yard for twenty minutes: no weapons, just fists and fury.
Yumi was a blizzard given form: fast, brutal, every strike laced with frost that bit deep.
Mika laughed the entire time, bleeding from the lip and loving it.
They ended in a stalemate: Yumi's hand at Mika's throat, Mika's knee buried in Yumi's solar plexus.
Both women were breathing hard, eyes wild, lips inches apart.
Then they kissed: hard, hungry, teeth clashing.
Sayuri watched from the sidelines, one hand on her belly, the other between her thighs, biting her lip.
Kai's cock was already straining his pants.
That night the four of them disappeared into the master bedroom.
Yumi stripped with the same efficiency she hunted: fur cloak dropped, leather armor peeled away, revealing a body built for survival and sin.
Pale skin marked with old scars and new frost tattoos that glowed faintly.
Breasts heavy and pendulous, nipples pierced with bone from the leviathan she killed.
Ass like two perfect snowdrifts.
She took Kai first: pushed him down on the Bed of Endless Night and mounted him like she was claiming territory.
Slow, deliberate, every roll of her hips grinding her clit against him while she stared into his eyes, daring him to break first.
He didn't.
He flipped her, spread those powerful thighs, and fucked her until the ice in her veins melted and she screamed his name in a language older than Japanese.
Mika and Sayuri weren't idle.
Mika took Yumi from behind with a strap carved from dungeon ivory while Kai filled her mouth.
Sayuri rode Yumi's face, pregnant belly glowing faintly, hands in that silver hair as the Frost Reaper devoured her like a starving woman.
They rotated for hours.
Yumi came so hard she left frost patterns on the sheets.
Sayuri squirted enough to soak the mattress twice.
Mika roared through three orgasms that cracked the headboard.
Kai filled every hole offered until cum and feminine release painted them all white.
When it was over, Yumi lay tangled between the three of them, silver hair fanned across Kai's chest, one hand resting on Sayuri's belly, the other laced with Mika's.
"I came looking for a place to die fighting," she whispered, voice raw. "Found a place worth living for instead."
Kai kissed her forehead.
"Welcome to the Harvest, Yumi."
Outside, the blizzard finally broke.
Inside, the family grew by one more unbreakable queen.
And the new world learned another lesson:
Even the frozen north melts for the Harvest Family.
Her name was Kurogane Yumi, and for twenty-seven years she was the unchained heart of a tiny Ainu-Japanese fishing village on the eastern tip of Hokkaido.
Born in 1978 to a father who hunted seal and a mother who read the ice the way priests read scripture.
At sixteen she could already spear a 300 kg Steller's sea lion through the eye from a moving umi-dug kayak.
At nineteen she married Takeshi Kurogane, the village's best hunter, a quiet giant with hands gentle enough to braid his daughter's hair and strong enough to wrestle polar bears.
They had two sons: Ren (the serious one) and Haruto (the laughing one).
Life was hard, cold, and perfect.
Every winter the village survived on what the men pulled from under the ice and what the women preserved in snow cellars.
Yumi became the unofficial chief after her father froze to death in a white-out when she was thirty-two.
She led the hunts, settled disputes with a look, and every night crawled into a warm futon between her husband and her boys, smelling of salt and woodsmoke and love.
Then Awakening Day came.
The sea cracked open like God himself had punched it.
A colossal ice-dragon (later classified S-rank "Jörmungandr-class") erupted from the drift ice, drawn by the sudden surge of global mana.
It froze the entire village in a single breath: 187 people turned to statues of red ice, mouths still open in screams.
Yumi was out on the ice alone, checking nets.
She came home to silence.
She found her husband first: standing in the doorway of their house, one arm outstretched to shield the boys behind him.
All three flash-frozen mid-scream, faces she kissed every morning now blue and crystalline.
Something in her died that day.
Something else woke up.
The system offered her a class as she stood over their bodies, tears freezing on her cheeks.
‹ Unique Hidden Class Offered: Frost Reaper ›
Accept? Y/N
She accepted.
The dragon came back at dusk, circling like it owned the sky.
Yumi met it with her husband's old bear spear and a heart full of nothing but hate.
She was Level 1.
The fight lasted three days.
She harpooned its wings, climbed its back while it thrashed in the frozen bay, buried the spear in its eye again and again until the shaft snapped.
When she ran out of weapons she used her bare hands, her teeth, her screams.
On the third dawn the dragon crashed into the ice, dying.
Yumi stood on its corpse, covered in its blood, and screamed until her voice gave out.
‹ Solo Kill: Jörmungandr-class World Threat ›
Level 1 → Level 28
Unique Title: Widow of the White Death
Skill gained: Winter's Widow (Passive) – All cold damage converted to healing. The colder the environment, the stronger you become.
She buried what was left of her family in the traditional way, under cairns of whale bone and ice.
Then she walked south.
For seventy-three days she survived alone in the new wasteland:
- Hunting mutant walrus packs that grew armor plates.
- Sleeping inside the frozen carcasses of monsters to stay warm.
- Killing Awakened raiders who thought a lone woman was easy prey (she left their bodies for the crows, took their gear, and kept moving).
She never cried again after that first week.
She told herself she was already dead; the body just hadn't caught up.
Until the rumors reached even the frozen north.
A hidden valley where women walked free.
Where a man protected what was his with god-like strength.
Where no one was ever cold, or hungry, or alone again.
Yumi looked at the bone piercings in her nipples (taken from the dragon that killed her family) and made a decision.
If there was still a place on this broken earth where a woman could be more than a ghost…
She would find it.
Even if she had to freeze the world to get there.
She arrived at Hanami's gates on Valentine's Day with a sled of trophies and a heart armored in ice.
Kai melted it in a single night.
And for the first time in months, Yumi dreamed:
Not of frozen screams and dragon blood…
But of warm hands, soft breasts pressed against her back, and a man's voice whispering "You're home" while he filled the emptiness inside her with something that felt dangerously like hope.
The Frost Reaper had come south to die.
Instead, she learned how to live again.