I crashed into the sealed reactor like a meteor. The impact was loud enough to echo across the entire exclusion zone.
My radiation-enhanced body tore straight through the outer shell, smashing through thick layers of reinforced concrete and rusted steel, leaving a perfectly me-shaped hole in the containment structure, making a beeline straight for the exposed core.
The impact was catastrophic.
Everything hurt. My ribs shattered on impact. My left arm snapped like a dry twig. Something deep in my spine cracked with a wet, sickening pop that I felt much more than I heard. Blood instantly filled my mouth, hot and tasting heavily of copper, so much blood I couldn't breathe without choking on it.
'Master!' Nakime's mental scream tore through my splitting head. I could feel her panicking, trying to forcibly open a tatami gate directly to me.
"No... no, don't," I managed to choke out through the blood. "You're not... protected from heavy radiation... like me or that... fucking demon butler."
I ended the mental sentence in a raw, agonizing scream as my body became a bottomless well.
The Glowing One trait activated fully.
But instead of the gentle warmth I'd felt before. This was a flood … no, a goddamn tsunami.
Every single broken bone, every torn muscle, every ruptured organ started aggressively pulling in the ambient radiation to fuel the healing process. And I was sitting in the middle of the mother-fucking elephant's foot itself, the failed nuclear reactor core.
The ambient radiation levels here were completely off the charts. Over 10,000 roentgens per hour, more than enough to melt a normal human's DNA into soup in minutes.
My body drank it in like a dying man in the desert.
Cells that should have been dying were instead gorging themselves, mitochondria going into overdrive and DNA that should have been shredding itself was instead being reinforced.
After a few minutes of choking and gurgling on my own blood, I finally opened my eyes to see a literal torrent of green radiation forming around me in the darkness of the core.
Wisps and heavy streams of sickly emerald light converged on my body from every single direction.
I screamed at the top of my lungs. "AHHHHHHH!"
'Too much! It's too much! I can't handle all this energy!'
Heat. It was so much heat.
Every nerve in my body felt like it was being dipped in boiling acid. Not metaphorically. I was literally on fire from the sheer, overwhelming volume of raw radiation I was absorbing.
My skin started to glow. A soft green luminescence that grew brighter, and brighter, until it was blinding. The light filled the reactor chamber, painting the rusted metal and crumbling concrete in sickly emerald.
Steam hissed and rose from my body as all the moisture in my clothes evaporated instantly as they blackened and charred, falling away in burning fragments.
The twisted metal debris around me began to warp and melt from the ambient heat my body was giving off.
Then suddenly, cutting through all the chaos and my own agonizing screams, I heard a calming voice.
"Master, let it go."
Sebas stood at the jagged edge of the reactor core hole I'd made, completely unaffected by the lethal atmosphere. His ki aura formed a dense protective barrier around him, the purple light actively pushing back against my blinding green glow.
"Your body is too weak to hold all this stellar energy at once. Let it all out now!"
"I'M GONNA KILL YOU, YOU BASTARD!!" I roared.
But even as I screamed it, the survival instincts kicked in. I understood exactly what he meant.
I activated Orchard on pure, desperate instinct.
It was the ability that let me convert my own energy into plant matter. And right now, I had more energy than any human body was meant to contain.
'You can do it Jhonny!' I heard a familiar voice calling out.'
All the ambient radiation, all the nuclear fire burning through my cells, I forced it out into the ability.
Every erg, joule, particle of gamma radiation, everything.
OUT.
OUT.
OUT.
The explosion of energy was borderline biblical.
A blinding wave of green, life-giving light erupted from my body like a supernova. It flooded through the shattered reactor, surged through the surrounding abandoned buildings, and spread across the dead, irradiated ground in massive, pulsing waves.
Everywhere the energy touched, life violently bloomed.
Thick, vibrant grass burst straight through the concrete. Massive trees erupted from the cracked asphalt, their roots shattering the pavement. Flowers blossomed in impossible, radiant colors.
Fruit trees grew to full, heavy maturity in mere seconds. Their branches sagged, heavy with apples the size of actual basketballs, peaches that gleamed like polished gemstones, and watermelons so massive they could feed a family for a week.
The exclusion zone of Chernobyl, dead, toxic, and irradiated for decades, transformed into a literal Garden of Eden in less than a minute.
And then, finally, blessedly as the agonizing pain stopped.
I passed out.
I drifted in an endless, comfortable darkness.
It was peaceful. Quiet. Empty. Just what I needed after getting kicked into a nuclear reactor.
Then I heard a distant wail pulling me back toward the waking world.
"Ma... ma... Master!"
I focused on that sound, following it like a lifeline dragging me out of the deep end. The sheer desperation in it. The loudness.
"MASTER!!"
I opened my eyes with a violent gasp, my chest heaving as I sucked in all the fresh air I could.
The air was clean and oddly sweet. Smelled like flowers and fruit. Completely at odds with the radioactive death-zone this place should be.
Nakime was hovering right over me, checking my face and arms frantically, her single eye wide with panic, her hands trembling as they patted me down looking for injuries, while Sebas was currently kneeling beside me, his hands pressed against my chest, pumping it. He had his purple ki focused directly on his palms, literally trying to jumpstart my heart like a defibrillator.
"Yes... yes, Master, please wake up!" Nakime's voice cracked, thick with an overwhelming relief.
She was crying. I'd never seen her cry. Didn't even know if demons could cry.
I blinked, looking around, and was immediately surprised by the crispness of my vision.
Everything was so sharp. I'd honestly forgotten how good normal vision looked without the constant, annoying blur of myopia.
"Nakime?... What are you doing here?" I coughed, trying to push myself up. "Run! Go back! You can't handle all this rad—"
"Master, look around you," Nakime interrupted gently, her single eye shining with awe and relief in her voice. "There is none left."
"Now's not the time! Hurry and—"
I stopped mid-order as I finally took in my surroundings.
Words just left me entirely.
All around me, the reactor buildings were gone. The concrete sarcophagus, the rusted metal, the crumbling Soviet infrastructure, all of it had been completely consumed and overgrown.
The New Safe Confinement? Buried under fifty feet of vegetation. The old reactor building? Couldn't even see it anymore. The entire industrial complex had been swallowed by green.
In their place were apples. Peaches. Watermelons. Wait... is that a mango? An entire grove of them. In Ukraine? In April?
All around me, a thick, vibrant jungle of fruits and vegetables was growing in absolute abundance, turning the most toxic place on earth into a literal fantasy land for vegetarians, fruititarians and vegans maybe.
[Image Here]
And it wasn't just the sheer quantity that surprised me. It was the quality.
'Wait... why are they the size of basketballs?'
The fruits were huge. Impossibly large, perfectly ripe, and practically glowing with vitality.
[Feat Achieved! Turn a radioactive hellhole into a paradise]
[Reward: +1x Gold Random Gacha Ticket]
[Feat Achieved! Cure your 'Four Eyes' Curse]
[Reward: +1x Silver Random Gacha Ticket]
The notification chimed in my head but I barely registered it. I was too busy staring at the impossible garden I'd created.
And I could see every single leaf clearly. Crystal clear. Perfect, high-definition detail. Like the individual fucking seeds inside a strawberry.
'Wait... I can see them clearly? My glasses?'
I quickly reached up for my face, only to find bare skin. The glasses were gone. But I could see perfectly.
"How?" I muttered aloud.
Nakime smiled. She actually smiled, a rare, beautiful expression breaking through her normally stoic face.
"Master, it looks to me that your body converted all the excess energy to elevate and heal all your physical irregularities. Like your eyes."
I pumped my hand just a bit, testing my grip, and then pushed off the ground to try and stand up.
I bounced instead and landed perfectly on my feet, my balance barely adjusting.
I felt incredibly light, yet dense with power.
I looked upon my body each muscle defined with rock hard abs but more importantly, I had no clothes on, only their patchy soot over my neithers.
"Whoa... this is gonna take some getting used to..."
I turned around to show Nakime my new strength and maybe ask for some clothes, only to freeze.
Sebas Tian was kneeling on the grass. His head was bowed completely, his forehead practically touching the dirt. His white hair, once perfect, now fell forward, hiding his face. His entire body language screamed contrition.
"Master," Sebas said, his voice heavy with solemn conviction. "I have committed the gravest sin of putting your life at extreme risk. Please, kill this traitor to bring justice to our bond."
[A/N]: And with this, we have our long-awaited power-up is here with a dash of character growth.
Now, if you don't wanna be kicked by Sebas, you'd better drop them Stones and get us to top spot!
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