Prologue: The Seed and the Grave
The air in the penthouse hung thick with the ghost of a life I had no intention of honoring. Sunlight, fractured by the towering skyscrapers, painted long stripes across the expensive, impersonal furniture. Silas Nemorath. The name meant nothing to me. A vessel. A shell. A mask. He was twenty. Wealthy. Recently orphaned. A quiet rich boy who had no business being in a world filled with gods, monsters, and cosmic horror.
He died.
I lived.
That's all that mattered.
They called it transmigration. An accident. A hiccup in the machinery of a vast, uncaring universe. One moment I was dying in my own world—a blur of blood, darkness, and silence—and the next, I was inhaling the stale scent of synthetic leather and citrus polish in a stranger's luxury apartment. I didn't ask for this second chance. I didn't earn it. But I wouldn't waste it.
His life wasn't tragic. It was hollow. His parents had died just weeks before—some high-speed car crash, if I had to guess. I didn't care enough to read the obituary. The grief, the isolation, the purposeless drifting... those were his burdens. They died with him. What he left behind was useful: a penthouse, a legal identity, assets, and a certain social invisibility that came from being a rich nobody. That, I could work with.
Then came the system.
> [PvZ Dominion System Activated]
Welcome, Commander.
Primary Functions: Life, Death, Control.
Initial Gifts Unlocked:
[🌻] Basic Plant Arsenal
[💀] Tier-1 Necromantic Control
[🌿] Chlorokinetic Instinct
It hit me like code injected straight into the brainstem. Concepts unraveled. Interfaces burned themselves behind my eyes. Terminology I shouldn't have known became familiar. And somehow, impossibly, it all made sense.
Plants vs. Zombies. A game from another world. Once a childhood distraction—now the framework for a terrifying reality-bending power. The Sunflowers weren't smiling caricatures here. They were radiant conduits of living energy. The Peashooters didn't chirp—they hissed, their stalks flexing like loaded weapons. The Wall-nuts? Living bulwarks, capable of stopping vehicles in their tracks.
Then there were the undead.
The zombies came not from cartoon graves, but from the spaces between life and entropy. The system granted me necromantic dominion over the lingering essence of the dead, their bones and memories intertwined like vines. I could feel their whispers, taste the cold silence that clung to forgotten burial grounds.
> [Grave Energy Accrued: 4 Units] [Corpse detected. Raise Conehead Zombie? Y/N]
Yes.
Its form twisted up from the tile floor in the penthouse's bathroom—the echoes of a maintenance worker who'd died months ago in a hidden accident. Flesh reformed in layers. Limbs cracked into obedience. Eyes stared forward with blank allegiance. It waited for my command. It didn't question. It didn't think. It simply obeyed.
Life and death. Sunlight and soil. Bone and bloom.
This was mine now.
The system's resources divided neatly:
☀️ Sunlight Energy for plants, generated by Sunflowers or absorbed from natural light.
💀 Grave Energy for zombies, drawn from corpses, trauma-soaked environments, or the resonance of mourning.
The balance was elegant. Efficient. Strategic.
In the days that followed, I didn't play hero. I didn't rush into the streets in costume. I didn't seek out the Avengers or knock on the Sanctum Sanctorum's door. I simply observed. Learned. Calculated.
The world was noisy, chaotic. Superpowered beings punched each other through buildings. Alien invasions blurred across time zones. Mutants argued for recognition. Sorcerers whispered across ley lines. And beneath all that, the Earth breathed in a rhythm older than magic and louder than machinery.
I walked the streets of New York in Silas's skin. I wore his clothes. I accessed his accounts. I signed his name. But inside, I was something else entirely. Something watching. Planning.
I found hidden spots—abandoned subway tunnels, overgrown graveyards on the edge of the city, rooftop greenhouses long forgotten. I seeded them, carefully. Sunflowers in forgotten atriums. Wall-nuts in underground entrances. My first Peashooter guarded a tenement basement with a growing rat infestation. My second Conehead patrolled an alley no one dared walk after dark.
It wasn't conquest. Not yet. It was cultivation.
While the world screamed, I planted. While it burned, I grew.
They wouldn't see me coming.
They never do when it comes from beneath.
> [New Trait Acquired: Root Spread] Your dominion passively expands within planted zones.
The system fed me tools. But it also adapted. It evolved. As I experimented, it unlocked new possibilities. Grave Diggers—zombies that unearthed old corpses and relics. Exploding Shrooms that acted like proximity mines. Vine Lashes, a chlorokinetic upgrade that turned living plants into hunting whips.
None of it felt strange.
If anything, it felt… natural.
Perhaps the most surprising part of transmigration wasn't the powers, the body, or the Marvel setting—it was how little I missed my old life. That world had grown stale. A cycle of working, eating, dying in slow motion. Here, I felt alive. Every morning brought a new discovery. Every night echoed with the subtle hum of the system growing stronger.
Silas's death had opened a door.
And I was walking through it, boots caked in dirt and bone dust.
The heroes would fight threats too big to contain. The villains would chase power too volatile to control. I would do neither. I would root myself into the forgotten edges of this world. The places too mundane for gods and too broken for cameras.
Let the world think Silas Nemorath had withdrawn into grief.
Let them believe he was just another sad, rich orphan.
They didn't need to know I had already seeded the underworld with tireless sentinels, my undead patrols crawling through the city's veins. That I was harvesting sunlight like a god, stockpiling radiant energy from rooftop-grown Sunflowers. That I was bending moss and root to my will, embedding silent surveillance in the very skin of the city.
Dominion doesn't roar.
It takes root.
Silently. Patiently. Without permission.
And by the time anyone notices… it's already everywhere.
Let Stark run his simulations. Let Strange chase celestial patterns. Let Wakanda refine its vibranium.
They all dream in straight lines—of order, of resolution, of neat endings.
But I'm not interested in their binaries.
Heroes want peace. Villains want power.
Me?
I want permanence.
Something that doesn't need to shout to be heard. Something that endures long after monuments fall and names are forgotten.
A garden no one can burn.
Not for justice. Not for conquest.
Just because it should exist.
And it will.
Whether the world wants it or not. it or not.
End of chapter.