VILLAIN'S RISING

The instance Sam touched the glowing white sapling, everything blacked out.

Sam was plunged into a seemingly eternal abyss of darkness– void.

He was very familiar with this void. This was death. Or the place one goes after one dies.

Sam always feels a force sucking him deeper into the darkness whenever he comes here. But before that could happen, his body in the real world would start regenerating, and he would be pulled back to life.

Not this time, though.

Nothing happened this time and Sam was sucked into the bottomless pit of the abyss.

No feeling, no sensation, nobody. It felt like he was just ‘there’ with his consciousness getting sucked deeper and deeper.

Seconds passed and turned to hours. Hours turned to days and days turned to weeks.

After god knows how long, Sam finally felt something. He felt his body.

The sensation of being alive returned to him, causing him to abruptly shoot open his eyes.

“Ghaaaaa! Ha ha ha!” After gasping for air a couple of times, Sam greedily breathed in and filled his lungs.

“Wh-What the hell was that?!” He yelled to himself. “Was I dead? A-And now I’m not?”

This feeling was foreign to him. Never in his life did Sam experience death so closely. Not even when he was fighting with Starsuper and decided to turn himself into a dragon.

Scratching his head, Sam finally managed to calm himself down from panicking anymore.

“…Wait”

And only then did he realize where he was standing.

“Where am I…?”

He was not in the underground dungeon. He was someplace else entirely.

A starry night sky above with trails of light scattered all over it to paint an aurora. White sand covered the ground that stretched as far as the eye could see.

On its own, it was a magnificent sight.

But what truly made it extraordinary was a giant pillar of light that stood tall amidst the white desert below the night sky. From its incomprehensible large stem, branches of light protruded out, making it seem like a tree.

One giant tree of light.

For some reason, Sam immediately understood what it was. He glared at the tree with an intense gaze and clenched his fists.

“The Tree Of Life,” he murmured. “It’s the Tree Of Life.”

“It is indeed. It is the Tree Of Life.”

Suddenly, a voice echoes behind Sam, causing him to hastily turn his body around.

“Hello there, Sam. So nice to finally meet you in person.”

Right behind him was standing a tall, broad man with a well-toned body, gray eyes, and shaggy platinum blond hair. He sported a matching mustache that descended down into his beard.

He was wearing no shirt, showcasing his perfectly lean muscles for the world, loose brown pants, and a pair of black combat boots.

“…You are?” After a bit of hesitation, Sam asked for the man’s identity.

He could sense a weird sense of familiarity from this man. It’s like he knew who he was, yet he didn’t.

“Me? Haha! You don’t recognize me, buddy?” The man shot an amicable smile.

“Wait…!” Finally, it hit him. This voice… This tone and this manner of speaking! There was no way Sam could mistake it ever!

His eyes widened in disbelief as he spoke, “You are—”

“Yes,” interrupting him, the man spoke. “I’m your ‘voice,’ Sam. I go by many names, but you may know me as Kale Godhand, the Progenitor.”

Sam narrowed his eyes at those words but almost immediately returned his face to being devoid of any emotions.

“What? Are you not going to say something?” The man claiming himself to be the first Progenitor asked. “I can understand it’s quite a shock.”

After a short moment of silence, Sam started speaking, “What is this place?”

Smiling in reply, Kale dramatically took a good look around their surroundings and answered, “This is not a place. The plane we’re standing on right now is between places. On one side resides the land of the living. On the other side remains the path of reincarnation.

“Where we are standing is the plane where all life in our world— in our universe, diverges from,” as he said that, Kale pointed at the giant tree-shaped pillar of light and continued, “And that… is the origin point of all lives. That is the Tree Of Life.”

Left awestruck, Sam spoke after a few seconds, “All life in our universe?”

“Yes,” Kale nodded. “When people die, they come here before merging into it and getting reincarnated. This is the place where souls rest. One can stay here for as long as possible but of course, if they stay here for too long the tree would forcefully start to merge them with itself.”

Taking in a long, deep breath, Sam nodded, “Is that so? But then, why are you here? Weren’t you killed off centuries ago?”

“Hahaha! And here I thought you would be happy to meet me in person,” Kale laughed wholeheartedly before turning serious. “Actually, I barely managed to resist merging with the Tree for all these years. Through sheer will, I withstood death itself. Years turned into decades, and decades became centuries but I kept on resisting the Tree’s will. I stayed here.”

Understanding what those words truly meant, Sam clenched his fists, “I have a subtle guess what your motivation was. But I’d like to hear it from you, so please, do tell.”

Kale couldn’t help but put on a bright smile as he heard Sam. “My motivation, you ask?”

Slowly, that bright, amicable smile started stretching wider and wider until it began to look like a psychotic grin. His eyes started gleaming with madness as he announced:

“My motivation, you ask?! Isn’t it obvious?! I didn’t want to die because I wanted to live! Before Starsuper killed me, I passed on my ability to one of my illegitimate sons! But that wasn’t all I gave him! No, no no no! I passed him down my consciousness as well! In short, before Starsuper could even kill me, I created a vassal for me to inhabit after my death! The ‘Progenitor’ that Starsuper killed was long dead even before our last fight. All that time, he was fighting a dead body that was moving on instinct while I had already inhabited a new body!

“But unfortunately, I miscalculated and the consciousness I passed down to my son stayed in a passive state. I wasn’t able to take over the body. No, I was forced to spectate. Generation after generation of my descendants was hunted down by Starsuper. My hope of coming back to life started to seem grim.

“I needed a vassal that would be not only strong enough to fight against Starsuper but also smart enough to be sneaky about it. After all, hiding from the world’s strongest hero was no easy task. But even though I wanted my vassal to be smart, I also wanted him to be gullible enough for me to manipulate so that I would guide him into acquiring the Branch Of The Tree Of Life.

“But all of the vassals I inhabited were too busy running from Starsuper than trying to get strong. And just as I had almost lost hope, you were born. Your father passed down my ability to you, and I took over you as my vassal. It was then I realized that you were just everything I needed!

“I started grooming you from a young age to become the vassal I needed you to become! Manipulating your immature mind into believing that the ‘voice’ you were hearing was your own creation. Over the years, I turned you into the perfect pawn!

“But I couldn’t steal all the credits! You surprised me from time to time. Like just the other day when you killed Starsuper! Although you endangered both you and me, you achieved a feat that even I couldn’t in my lifetime! Not only that but you attempted full biology transmutation on yourself and succeeded on your first try!

“Even though it’s my power that you used, it was something even I couldn’t have done on my first try and that too at such a young age! And your battle sense is incredible! So is your planning and strategy creation! You, Sam, are incredible! Out of all my descendants, you were the only one who surpassed me in more than one way!”

As soon as Kale said all that, the grin on his face started to diminish and slowly faded away altogether. With a dead serious look, he spoke:

“But you are far too stupid with your ambitions. Uniting humanity? Oh please! You could do so much more with your power yet all you want to do is help those creatures?! Why don’t you just become a hero?! And besides, you overestimate your ability. You can’t create a hive mind.”

Out of all the things Kale spoke, Sam only reacted to the last part.

“What?” He said, putting up a frown on his face. “I can’t?”

“No, of course not,” Kale replied matter-of-factly. “If you use yourself as a coordinate and connect every single human mind to yourself, you would experience millions and billions of human consciousness all at once! Your mind would break!”

Putting a hand to his chin, Sam pondered. What Kale said was true. Sam never thought of the backlash of connecting every human mind to himself.

After a bit of thought, Sam pulled back his chin and answered, “Then I’ll just use force. I’ll use force to unite the world like Dragonhearts tried to do.”

“You’re not getting the point!” Kale snapped as if he had reached his patience. “There are billions of trillions of worlds out there! And with the Branch Of The Tree Of Life in your possession, no one would be able to stop you! Why do you insist on being a king when you can be a god?! Not the god of just one world but the god of multiple worlds?!”

“Wait, what do you mean with Tree Of Life in my possession? Isn’t it only power to revive the dead?” Sam immediately shot a question.

At that point, Kale looked at Sam as if he was looking at a monkey. A stupid, unintelligent, brain-dead monkey.

“No, you retard. That’s only the power that others can use. But you, with [Biology Manipulation], could interfere with the Tree Of Life and thus manipulate the concept of life itself! You can erase people’s existence and make it so that they never existed while keeping everything else the same! You can kill the unkillable! You can kill anyone in this universe!”

“Ohhhh!” Sam widened his eyes as he understood what Kale was trying to tell him. “You mean to say that the Tree Of Life is a living thing? That’s why I can use [Biology Manipulation] on it?”

Kale silently shook his head, “No, it’s not exactly a living thing. I’ve tried studying it, and it’s both inanimate and alive at the same time. It’s weird but I think [Biology Manipulation] could work on it.”

“Huh?” Genuinely amazed by the discovery, Sam said: “Is that why you wanted a ‘vassal’ of yours to acquire the Branch Of The Tree Of Life?”

“That’s part of it. The Branch Of The Tree Of Life is an anchor through which souls of the dead pass to get here. Using that anchor, people could also summon the dead back into the world of the living. If the departed soul has already moved on and reincarnated, they would die in their reincarnated life and get back to the life they’ve been summoned with the memories of both lives intact. That’s why most of the people revived using the relic came back insane.

“Now I don’t know how, but when abilities started appearing on Earth, the anchor was discovered and hailed as a relic. And around the same time, I was born with the ability to manipulate biology. It’s almost as if I was destined to acquire this relic. Like I was fated to come here! It’s almost as if the universe itself wanted me to be a god!” Kale replied with a satisfactory smile on his face.

Nodding, Sam spoke, “Cool, cool. What’s the other part?”

Silence.

Utter silence.

As soon as Sam asked that question, a deafening silence enveloped the world covered in the white sand.

The first one to break the silence was Kale.

“The other part is that only consciousness can enter this realm. That means if I kill you here, I will get your body. I will be alive once again.”