Brand New Life Online: Rise Of The Goddess Of Harvest Chapter 2015: Norman

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Norman, the slowest member of the group, was caught completely off-guard when the chaos erupted. A dark vortex suddenly swallowed everyone around him. In his shock, it took him far too long to process what was happening. By the time he tried to move, he had already been transported elsewhere, finding himself in a strange and twisted village.

The once-peaceful settlement now featured eerie gardens filled with flowers that had blinking eyes, a warped and unnatural sky above, and monstrous aberrant creatures wearing white masks. These horrors chased him relentlessly while laughing with vicious glee and carrying the impaled corpses of innocent villagers on their spears.

It did not take Norman long to realize that everything had gone terribly wrong. The people he had hoped to find were already dead, slaughtered without mercy. The entire village had been twisted into a bizarre and nightmarish domain by some powerful force. As Elayne and the others had speculated earlier, whatever was responsible had to be as strong as a Death Apostle.

But how could he make sense of what was happening? He was not the brightest of the group, and right now, there was nobody else around him.

Norman did what he knew best. He ran.

He had spent his entire life running away, and even now in this undead state, he continued to run. There had been a time when he grew exhausted of it, but he had long since accepted it as his norm.

He felt deep sadness and frustration toward this cruel world that had brought such a horrific end to an innocent village. The way these monsters delighted in eating and tearing people apart piece by piece was beyond anything he had witnessed. Not even the subordinates of the Demon King of Death had seemed this vicious, at least from what he had seen.

"How long have I been running?" he sighed, glancing back over his shoulder. The monsters were still rapidly closing in, their masked faces stretched into wide, sickening grins as their glowing eyes burned with malice.

"How long will I have to keep running?"

He continued forward, his stamina as an undead essentially infinite as long as he had sufficient mana and nether energy. Yet even then, he occasionally looked back, feeling how pointless it all seemed in the end.

"Do I really have to run?"

Norman finally stopped. He turned to face the approaching monsters, whose grins widened even further as dark death power surged around their claws.

"This body is too big and too heavy," he muttered.

He clenched his massive bear paws, now transformed into large skeletal claws capable of tearing through anything in his path.

"Like before… I have to eventually stop running."

He let out a deep sigh and stared at the monsters. For some reason, he saw a reflection of himself in them.

Memories flooded his mind as Norman recalled his past life.

He had been born in a small, peaceful village of Werebears. His father worked as a woodcutter and often joined the other men on hunts to provide for the family. His mother loved taking him to the river to catch fresh salmon whenever the seasons changed.

He could still vividly remember those warm, sunny days. The sun shone brightly overhead, a gentle breeze rustled through the trees, and the sky stretched out in a perfect blue dotted with soft white clouds. The loud singing of cicadas filled the mountain forests where their village lay, far removed from any bustling civilization.

Norman recalled laughing joyfully as he jumped through the river, swimming with all his might and trying to catch fish with his small jaws. Sometimes the slippery creatures would escape, costing him a big catch, but those moments still brought a smile to his face even now.

Those precious days remained deep within him. Even in the underworld, inside a body made entirely of bones that bore little resemblance to who he once was, those memories endured.

When someone becomes an Undead, it is far more than simply a reanimated corpse with a soul trapped inside. Undead are special beings in their own right, though most never truly realize it.

One of the things that made them special was their memories. To an Undead, their cherished recollections and precious emotions — everything they once were in life — served as their greatest source of strength.

He remembered returning home wet from the river with his mother, proudly carrying fish for the family to eat together. He recalled his father teaching him how to grill fresh fish, how to hunt rabbits, and how to cut wood properly. There were quiet evenings spent together around a warm fireplace, sharing stories of what each had done that day.

He thought of playing with the other bear children in the village, playfully biting and tumbling together on the soft grass. He remembered chasing bugs through the fields and once disturbing a nest of stinging ants, returning home with a swollen face that made his mother worry.

He could still hear his mother's gentle songs in his mind.

And then the memories turned darker.

The scent of blood that had suddenly filled the entire village. The desperate cries for help. The overwhelming fear and agony. The feeling that everything they had built was being torn apart piece by piece.

That tragedy had marked Norman's life forever. His simple yet peaceful existence was ripped away in a single evening. He had returned late that day after spending too much time catching critters in the forest. The village was already burning when he arrived. Paralyzed by fear, he could not find his parents anywhere.

The attackers were not undead or wild monsters. They were members of a so-called civilized race of people. Their empty, cold stares still haunted him.

Norman had always been afraid of fire. He lacked the strength and courage to rush into the burning houses to search for his family.

Instead, he ran.

He clenched his teeth and sprinted as fast as he could while arrows rained down through the forest. Three of them struck his robust back, the stinging poison making him cry out in pain. Yet his survival instincts took over, and he did not stop running.

He kept running and running until his pursuers finally gave up, believing him to be dead.

When he found himself alone inside a dark cave, the young Werebear had been overwhelmed with questions, pain, and sorrow. At the tender age of ten, Norman had lost everything.

His paw covered his face as he cried for an entire day and night, until hunger and thirst brought on hallucinations. Afraid of the outside world, he eventually crawled out to drink from the river, though he could no longer catch fish as skillfully as before.

Since that day, Norman had lived a life defined by running.

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