When the world ended, Clayton Hunt was just another street survivor scavenging for scraps, fighting for breath in a crumbling society on the edge of ruin.

Then the sky cracked open, and the Genesis Protocols began.

Dragged into Echoterra, a nightmarish trial world where survival rewrites your very soul, Clayton awakens. Not as a man, but as a seed… a goddamn seed!

Stripped of his body, his memories locked behind suffocating layers, he must claw his way upward from the dirt, evolving into something far beyond human.

The first trial is brutal and simple. 

~----~
[Expand your territory to 100 square meters or die!]
~----~

Facing monstrous rivals, parasitic invaders, and the harsh reality of nature’s cruelty, Clayton battles not only to grow but to dominate; harnessing a feral, plantlike instinct he never knew lurked inside him.

Along the way, fragments of his past leak through, reminding him who he was… and hinting at the terrifying power he might yet awaken.

But survival isn’t enough. In a world where strength writes the law and weakness spells extinction, Clayton won’t just grow. He’ll thrive. 

And when he finally returns to the real world, it won’t be as a scavenger.

It will be as a conqueror.

A Verdant City… what did it look like?


Clayton always had this thought at the back of his mind once he learned of the existence of Verdant Cities.


And finally, he could satisfy his curiosity.


New Phoenix loomed in the distance, like a grotesque combination of the past, the present, and the future all entangled in a single city.


Skyscrapers towered into the sky, fused with gnarled trees, their bark pulsing with Embers, roads writhing like veins under the Nexus's pulse.


Now closer to the Verdant City, Clayton's Territorial Sentience pinged Ashen Covenants' Ember Witches, their matriarchal rituals even more vivid.


Like Clayton hoped for and didn't dare dream of, the Verdant City, New Phoenix was a thriving ecosystem of humans. Not just Awakened.


Chapter 102 - A Verdant City