Rose Town was a place where flowers made the Karosen Kingdom remember its name, a town whose hands knew soil like old friends and coaxed petals open like dawn.
Especially roses—their roses ranked near the top of the human realms, each bloom like a little red sun cradled in green.
Lately, fewer travelers came, and some homes shuttered like eyes too tired to wake; a strange pall settled like mist over gravestones, and the air tasted of stillness.
The main street, once a river of footsteps, lay cold and empty; no young faces, only elders pacing like slow cranes by a winter pond.
Most of the town’s youth had left this uneasy place, while the old stayed with roots sunk deep; half their bodies already belonged to the earth, and they’d rather return their bones to hometown soil than drift like leaves to a foreign ground.
“Sir, would you like a bouquet of roses?”
At a small flower shop, a girl of sixteen or seventeen cupped a cluster of blooms like holding warm light, her bright voice ringing like a bell in clear air.
Her smile tugged at a passerby the way sunlight draws shadows, and he slowed, coming to a halt beneath the shop’s awning.
It was a curious meeting, like spring and winter shaking hands; the girl offered roses, yet the passerby exuded decay like damp rot under fallen leaves.
At first glance, anyone would think of rot—decayed body, decayed soul—like a coffin lid nudged open by a hand from below.
To ask a man like that if he needed roses?
As for the girl—she looked fresh as morning rain, full of breath and color, yet she couldn’t bounce or run; she sat in a wheelchair, wheels glinting like silver halos.
Flowers and the passerby were a contradiction, and her lively eyes clashed with a lower body stilled like a frozen stream.
“Roses…” The man’s pale face carried a ghost of memory, his clothes plain as dust, nothing to mark him out.
On the street, he didn’t fit the living like a crow among sparrows; it was mismatch born of a deeper layer, life’s very fabric torn, like a corpse climbing from its tomb.
The girl seemed blind to the smell of rot on him; in her eyes, he was just another person, a leaf among leaves.
His dead-fish eyes slid like dull coins, leaving the roses to rest on the girl’s face.
“How strange you are… Do you think someone like me has any need for roses? Time has rotted everything—lovers, friends—everything’s soft and brown like fruit gone bad.”
She didn’t quite follow, but her smile held, gentle as a lamp in fog.
“Maybe you don’t need them now. But what about the next moment? Maybe a lady worthy of your roses will step out like moonlight.”
“Is that so?” He smiled with skin but not with heart, a mask stretched tight.
“Bless your words. I’ll buy this bouquet. May the next heartbeat bring someone worthy of these flowers.”
From nowhere, he drew a fist-sized lump of gold, bright as a trapped sunrise in his palm.
The sight made the girl flustered; their little shop couldn’t make change for a chunk that big, like trying to pay for a one-dollar trinket with a bill the size of a house.
“No need for change. Consider the rest a gift. Few humans have talked with me through these long years.”
He didn’t wait for her answer; he took the bouquet in one smooth motion, petals whispering like silk.
“Then I suppose the person worthy of receiving this bouquet has appeared.”
He pressed the roses into her hands and turned, his back a shadow peeling away from the light.
“Sir, my name is Caro. How should I address you?”
As his figure neared the corner, she gathered courage like a tight breath, calling after the only stranger who’d ever given her roses.
Caro wasn’t beautiful; she was ordinary, a clear feeling like a white ribbon tying back her gold hair.
But her paralyzed legs had written solitude into her fate; no one in this town would marry a woman whose steps were forever still.
Today, a man had given her roses, though he looked eerie, though he was a passerby.
They would meet once and never again, two lives like parallel lines that never cross, rails stretching into dusk.
“Jue. That’s my name…”
His hoarse voice drifted from the corner like wind from a grave, and a chill gust blew as if the night breathed.
Caro felt no unease; she stared at his vanishing back, small face dazed and bright, and touched a happiness that felt like legend.
Soon after Jue disappeared, an old man with hair white as frost came out, leaning on a cane, his back bent like a bow.
Caro saw her grandpa and spoke, happy as a sparrow on a branch.
“Grandpa, someone bought the roses—and he gave them to me. It’s my first bouquet!”
The old man saw the roses in her hands and the gold blazing on the counter like a fragment of sun.
He didn’t smile; his brow knotted like a dry field’s cracked earth.
“Good girl, tomorrow’s the last group leaving. You should go with them.”
He sighed, breath heavy like smoke.
Not long ago, the nearest big city to Rose Town was leveled overnight, a million souls gone like embers snuffed in rain.
When people reached the ruins, a giant wooden tombstone stood stabbed into the land like a spear.
On it was written: Nether City.
Everyone in that city was dead, the whole place turned into a Nether City, a name like a cold bell.
At first there was fear, then worse came creeping.
Recently, some travelers said that by night they found the city as if reborn—walls still standing, lamps like stars, crowds flowing like tides.
From far off, voices poured from the gates like rivers of sound.
So those travelers stayed the night, broke bread with townsfolk, traded stories, and forgot the city had already vanished like smoke.
At dawn, they woke on weed-choked ground; no inn, no street, no people—only the empty field, green as neglect.
After that strange event, stranger tales followed like shadows chasing light.
Rose Town sat closest to the vanished city, and many here had kin who’d lived there.
At midnight, the ones who’d “disappeared” knocked at doors like rain tapping shutters.
At first, folks thought their kin had simply survived, missed the disaster.
But daylight arrived, and the visitors had no trace; beds lay smooth, blankets flat as water, untouched by any sleeping weight.
Night came again, and they knocked once more like moths to a lamp.
Someone finally noticed—in lamplight, those people cast no shadows.
Some said the vanished city had become a true Nether City, a land of the dead with silence like ice.
As time wore on, the dead spread like winter across the map, pushing toward human settlements.
The rumor bit deep, fear thickened, odd sights grew common, and nightly sounds scraped at the dark; people trickled away from this once-flourishing town like leaves riding a stream.
“I won’t go. I want to stay with Grandpa.”
Caro’s voice held a stubborn tremor, a feeling first, as if clinging to a warm stove in snow.
She knew her situation; on the road, people might care for her like carrying a fragile cup.
But at another town or city?
How would a woman with quiet legs feed herself, with no one and nothing?
The old man sighed again, a long ribbon of breath fading into the evening.
He knew her plight; she was still young, and a year more of life, a sip more of joy, might mend a regret like a tear stitched neat.
But leaving with the crowd could be suffering, a long path full of stones.
He lifted his eyes to the blood-red sunset hanging like a wounded coin, and he knew night was about to fall like a heavy curtain.
“Girl, we have to close. If knocking comes in the night, don’t get up. Stay in bed like a seed under snow.”
Fear pinched his heart; his years were near their end like a candle burned low, two or three left at most.
But for his granddaughter, he wished long life—a river with many bends.
Caro turned the wheelchair’s rims, palms whispering over metal, and she gathered the flowers like rescuing stars before rain.
When darkness covers this town, it turns into a ghost place, an alley maze for wandering dead, a wind full of whispers.
A road ran from Rose Town to the big city—that city now the Nether City.
On that path, Jue walked slow, each step like a rotten leaf sinking, every motion breathing decay like the breath of old tombs.
Night fell like ink spilling; on the road he saw many “people,” small groups drifting, talking and laughing like warm illusions, heading toward Rose Town.
Under moonlight, they cast no shadows; they were smudges of night without weight.
An ordinary man would be startled, might shout, might run.
But he was Jue—the fifth seat of the Demon King Council, the Undying, Jue.
“Go back.”
His voice was quiet, but it carried a command like a crown’s weight, an emperor speaking to his subjects under a cold sky.
At his words, the “people” slackened, spirit gone, eyes dull as dead pearls, and they floated upward like mist.
“Go back.”
Jue’s voice sounded again, and the dead turned as one, drifting toward the Nether City, the place from which they’d just come like a tide reversing.
“The Undying, Jue. Cursed, they say, his soul locked in a decayed body—thousand years, hundred, ten thousand—all the numbers blur like sand.”
“They say his origin is ancient as a buried root. Because his soul is chained to rot, he holds only divine-level strength; without that curse, his peak would’ve climbed higher than clouds.”
On the high tower of the Nether City, Cataclysm and Sword Demon looked down at the far horizon like hawks over a silent field.
Cataclysm spoke again, voice low as thunder in distant mountains.
“So, we need to stay wary of that one.”
