Rise of the Darkness Tycoon

Chapter 2- The Shadow Reborn

Public Hospital

Dand City

Edgard Country

May 1st

Year 2020

In one of the wards of the government hospital, there were two dozen beds, but only the right one closest to the window was occupied.

On the bed was a slim youth who’d just turned 18 less than a month earlier, his head wrapped in bandages.

He had messy black hair with long bangs covering the top of his eyes, and his thin lips were pressed into a deep frown.

Behind the round glasses resting on his face was a pair of obsidian black eyes fixed on the news being played on the TV.

It was reporting how a corpse had washed up on the shores of Elverta City, a popular coastal city often called the ‘Beach City’.

The dead man had been identified as a 35-year-old company CEO who owned several businesses in Edgard’s capital, Aegall. Police were investigating the case seriously, not only due to the man’s identity and background, but also because on a night several days before his body washed ashore, dozens of his company buildings had been bombed.

Since the bombings happened at night, long after work hours, there were no deaths, but the number of injured people who were in the streets and some who were on lower floors of the bombed buildings was in the hundreds.

One warehouse bombing even had a blast strong enough that a nearby ship was nearly toppled by the shockwaves.

Considering that the dead man was a rising star in the business world, rumoured to have climbed his way to success without the support of his powerful family, many on the internet were already theorising that he might have been assassinated by his competitors and rivals, given the extensive wounds found on his body.

They also theorised that the ones behind his death must be very powerful and mysterious, after all, the dead man wasn’t just from any random powerful family, but one of Elementalists renowned across the continent, the Osborn Family.

The young man watching the news silently clenched his fists as he saw the lines of text run across the screen, deep rage and resentment welling in his dark eyes.

No one, not even the nurse who walked past the ward, could have known that the young man’s soul had been replaced by that of the man on the news.

Indeed, Calvin Osborn had been reborn.

It was a surprise, but not an unexpected one.

‘I was worried about the possibility of it failing, but thankfully, it didn’t.’

Calvin had prepared a failsafe for the possibility of his death during a mission, a little something created using the power of the Dark Elemental King’s Core he’d gained before his death.

The true level of power of the Dark Elemental King was mysterious and seemingly endless, even to Calvin, who had been an S-Rank Elementalist.

It made him wonder just how such a powerful entity had met death for its core to be extracted.

With its power, Calvin could even touch the domain of souls and find a way to preserve his soul from being taken into the cycle of reincarnation after death.

‘My body was too damaged for it to return. My soul must have likely wandered about while I was unconscious and entered into this body.’

A body couldn’t host two souls without there being problems, so the fact that Calvin could now exist in this body with barely any complications meant one of two things.

‘Either I absorbed this young man’s soul, or…’

Calvin raised his hand and touched the bandages on his head, his frown deepening as he spoke of the second possibility.

“He was dead.”

Thinking about the new set of memories Calvin felt slowly bleeding into his mind, he was certain the second possibility was the reality.

This young man, also named Calvin, had been dead on this hospital bed.

He was an 18-year-old youth born in a one-parent family, and lived alone with his mother. Because he was born out of wedlock, he and his mother had been disdained by their relatives for as long as he could remember, and he’d always been called a bastard.

In their small section of the city, stories like this spread like wildfire due to gossiping housewives.

Calvin Carter’s schoolmates had mocked, isolated and bullied him as well, which was the reason why he’d been a self-abased, introverted and inarticulate young man.

His mother, Martha, worked as a cook in an average restaurant, earning around several thousand dollars a month. But most of her money was spent on rent and other utility bills, leaving them with little money left to improve their living conditions much.

Calvin Carter was a senior in Dand City’s Public High School, just a term away from the National College Entrance Examination.

Introverted, he might be, Calvin wasn’t an ungrateful child who didn’t know how hard his mother worked for his sake, so he worked hard to at least do well in school to avoid wasting her efforts.

But between the bullying and the increasing difficulty of their syllabus, it was easier said than done.

As he was, Calvin Carter would have been hard-pressed to get into a third-tier college.

Just as Calvin recovered the memories of the body up to that point, his dark expression became even worse as the reason why this body had ended up in the hospital was revealed to him.

‘A construction site accident!’

The original Calvin had been called by his bullies to a construction site abandoned due to legal issues, and while they were trying to extort him for the little money his mother had worked for, one of them had hit a metal scaffold with an iron pipe to intimidate him.

That impact, however, had made the scaffold vibrate, and the loosely fitted and rusted structures began to crumble above the teens.

All of them naturally ran, but just when they were almost at safety, one of the bullies who had tripped earlier and fallen behind Calvin had grabbed him and pulled him back so they could reach the exit first.

Calvin fell on his back due to the impact, and some of the scaffolding pipes landed on his head, knocking him out instantly. He was found by a passerby who came over after hearing the commotion and was then rushed to the hospital.

After recovering all these memories along with the memories of the faces of all the bullies, Calvin pressed his fingers to his temple.

‘One of them was even his cousin! His uncle’s daughter and her stupid boyfriend!’

That cousin, Florence, had grown up being told by her parents that Calvin Carter was a bastard. As for the boyfriend, Isaac, he had discovered that if Calvin Carter had taken the time to care for his appearance and gotten better-looking glasses, he would actually be a catch that girls would be all over, and that realisation had left Isaac jealous of him.

For Calvin, who had grown up in a world where people schemed and conspired against one another for elemental cores worth millions and company shares and resources worth billions, the reason why these teens had bullied Calvin Carter seemed stupid to him.

Just then, the sound of two female voices came from outside the door, pausing Calvin’s thoughts.

He turned his attention towards the door, just in time for one of them to say something that made him freeze.