Chương 25: Zoldyck The Covetous

Zoldyck had lived for a thousand years. Then he lived for a thousand more. And then another thousand after that. He was tired of living and living and living. Tired of the endless, identical sunrises, tired of the unchanging sky, tired of existing while empires rose and fell like tides beneath his unmoving feet. He watched mountain ranges erode into dust and oceans shift their beds, yet his own body remained completely frozen in time.

Desperate for something—anything—exciting to break the monotony, he set out to travel the far reaches of creation. He climbed mountain ranges that reached so high their icy peaks stabbed through the sky and went straight to the moon. He dove into ocean depths so profound their pitch-black waters touched the molten core of the planet, swimming through subterranean fires that could not burn his immortal skin.

He traveled from one end of creation to the other, trekking across endless frozen wastes and uncharted continents, only to discover a frightening truth: the world had no end. It was a vast, unbroken sphere. He was the very first human to figure that out. He encountered so many challenges along his journey—monstrous beasts, collapsing earth, and uncharted void—and clearing them was brutally difficult. But for the first time in millennia, he was having fun. Until the fun ran out.

One day, he stepped onto a lonely peak and realized he had done it all. There was nothing left for him to see, nowhere left to explore, no path left untrodden, and no new fun to be had. The entire planet had shrunk into a familiar, predictable cage. He wandered the world with no aim, a hollow shell desperately searching for a new purpose to anchor his mind. Eventually, he found one.

He crossed paths with several other people like him—immortals who had lived for tens of thousands of years, rotting away from the exact same suffocating boredom. Having long since exhausted all honest curiosity, their favorite way to pass the endless time was through conquest and destruction. They banded together in terrible warbands and raided peaceful settlements, slaughtering the men for sport and enslaving the women to construct towering monuments to their own vanity. Zoldyck was fascinated.

The rush of war, the high stakes of realm-shattering conflict, the thrill of putting his life on the line—he wanted it. He wanted to conquer. He took over a small settlement first. Their leader was a mere five thousand years old; Zoldyck had stopped counting his own age after fifty thousand. He slew the leader without breaking a sweat, tore down their flags, and claimed the land as his own.

The second settlement he encountered was far bigger, protected by massive fortifications and ancient armies, but it fell nonetheless. He slew their seventy-thousand-year-old leaders all on his own, stepping over their bleeding corpses to claim the throne. One after another, he took over all the surrounding warlords, breaking their spirits and absorbing their armies into his own. Soon, he controlled a force large enough to wage a true, continent-spanning war, and so he did.

In a mere century of endless sieges and bloody strategic genius, he was the sole ruler of the entire continent. It wasn't enough. He built massive iron armadas, crossed the stormy, impassable seas, and waged war on the adjacent countries. It took him a thousand years of unrelenting bloodshed, siege warfare, and political schemes, but in the end, he was finally the absolute ruler of the entire world. And then, he was right back where he started. Once again, there was nothing left to do.

The only distractions left were the coups that broke out at least once every hundred years as restless immortals plotted against his crown. Fighting off assassins, unraveling schemes, and crushing rebellions was fun the first hundred times, but eventually, even treason became predictable and boring. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it. He wanted it all to end. But he didn't want to kill himself; taking his own blade felt pathetic, weak, and cowardly.

He wanted an end that felt natural—the honorable, quiet decay that claimed the animals in the woods and the trees in the dirt. A thought struck Zoldyck as he sat alone upon his golden throne. Why don't humans age? Why don't we naturally wither and die like every other living thing? What is so fundamentally broken about us? He had to find the answer. Zoldyck abandoned his kingdom overnight, turned his back on his vast empire without a word, and closed himself off from the world in a deep, subterranean sanctum.

He knew no one would ever willingly help him strip away humanity's divine immortality, but Zoldyck believed in his heart that he was bringing them salvation. He was delivering them from the endless nightmare of eternity. He worked for decades, then centuries, isolating himself in pitch darkness, dissecting the fundamental nature of life and soul until he finally found the reason.

Every living organism on the planet possessed a hidden reserve of primal life force inside them, and they naturally burned through it just to exist, slowly consuming themselves until they decayed. Humans had that exact same reserve, but the moment they reached adulthood, their life force entered a state of absolute, unbreakable stasis. They were trapped in frozen perfection. He had to figure out a way to shatter that stasis. Another millennium passed in agonizing solitude before he found a solution.

He couldn't find a way to remove the stasis on life force directly, but he discovered a way to force the body to forcibly expend it. By draining that internal reservoir, a human could manifest miraculous, reality-bending abilities. And Zoldyck had found the perfect, irresistible way to sell it to the world. By the time Zoldyck finally emerged from his dark sanctum, humanity had long forgotten his face.

They remembered the ancient, legendary tales of his vast empire and the conqueror who ruled it, but time had washed away his memory. To them, he was just a stranger. Zoldyck presented himself to the people disguised as a holy priest, walking among the crowded cities and showing them grand, impossible miracles. He floated effortlessly in the sky, moved massive boulders with a flick of his wrist, and flattened mountains without lifting a leg. He showed them his "superpowers."

Bewildered, awestruck, and consumed by envy, the people dropped to their knees, begging to know how he possessed such godlike power. Can we have it too? Zoldyck smiled, answered yes, and blessed all of them with his crafted elixir. Immediately, the miracles manifested across the land. A young boy learned to conjure roaring, golden fire from his hands. Another man became faster than the fastest horse, blurring across horizons. Another could expand his body until he grew as big as a mountain.

All of them gained a unique, intoxicating superpower. With their newfound abilities came an era of absolute, terrifying chaos. Humans were already prone to conflict, but armed with superpowers, the violence descended into total madness. They hunted one another down like cannibalistic bugs, tearing down cities in their arrogance. Kings rose in the morning and fell by nightfall. But after just a single decade, humanity learned the horrific price they had paid for their petty powers. It started small.

People noticed their hair turning grey. Wrinkles carved themselves deep into smooth skin. Joints grew stiff and painful. Lungs burned after a short run. They realized, with mounting horror, that they were decaying. Their eternal youth was gone. The superpower was simply their own life force burning away like fuel in a fire. One after another, the godlike beings collapsed and died of old age, leaving behind withered husks.

There were a few cautious souls who had refused to drink the priest's concoction, and at first, they rejoiced, believing themselves safe from the curse of decay. But the very next morning, they too woke up with silver hair and cracked skin. Zoldyck had not relied solely on his elixir. To ensure no one escaped his gift, he had traveled to the Origin of Aqua—the prime, subterranean source of all the world's freshwater—and poisoned it with his formula.

Every river, every well, and every drop of rain on earth was now laced with his curse. Immortality was shattered forever. A millennium had passed since a new child had been born into the world, for immortals had no need to breed. But now, faced with their own ticking clocks, humans realized with terror that they had to continue their legacy or go extinct. Desperate to keep their bloodlines alive before they rotted, they began to reproduce rapidly. Tens of children became hundreds. Hundreds became thousands.

Soon, the land grew scarce under the weight of fragile, mortal life. Humans cut down the ancient forests, flattened the sacred, overgrown ruins of their past, and rebuilt the world in a desperation. As generation followed short-lived generation, they forgot their roots. They forgot the old world. They forgot that they had once been immortal gods who walked the earth without fear of time. Zoldyck wasn't there to see any of it.

He didn't see the forests burn, nor the new cities rise, nor humanity forget what they once were. Because having burned through his own massive life force to refine the very first superpower, Zoldyck was the very first human to age, decay, and die. He was finally free.