It began two days after the monolith rose in the scholar's quarter—a pulse without sound, a ripple that skipped along the arcane strata beneath the land.
Alucard first felt it as a distortion behind his breath.
Not pain.
Not dread. Just… displacement.
A tremor in the mana web, like a violin string plucked in another world.
The Arcanum called it a leyline stutter.
Portals misfired.
Glyphs delayed, echoed, or reversed their effects.
One mage attempted a basic fire conjuration and found herself speaking in an ancient dialect, the flame arriving hours later in a sealed jar beside her bed.
Lucien pieced the anomalies together, following threads of broken cause and effect across arcane fault lines.
Everything converged toward a point deep in the Weeping Pines—an abandoned village near no modern trade routes, erased from most maps.
Hollowmere.
Alucard remembered that name.
Not from his current life.
From before.
The name had flickered once in a corrupted grimoire retrieved from the Old Demon Realm—a place said to "exist in story but not in time."
He hadn't understood then.
He did now.
______________________________________________________________________________
They traveled light and without heralds, through fog-choked pine trails that seemed to lean and breathe.
The trees whispered with languages that hadn't yet been spoken, and the shadows turned slightly too late when the sun shifted.
When they reached the edge of Hollowmere, the world paused.
Not in a dramatic halt, but in a subtle stutter—like a thought forgotten mid-sentence.
Alucard stepped forward first, and the village greeted them with layered truth.
The sign at the entrance read Hollowmere—but in five languages.
Each inscription is identical in meaning, carved by the same hand, in the same space.
None of those languages should have coexisted.
One was dead.
One was unborn.
Lucien adjusted his glasses and muttered, "Chrono-lexical overlap. This isn't just space distortion. Time itself is unbraiding."
They passed into the crooked village, where homes leaned away from each other like siblings after an argument.
Roads looped subtly.
Chimneys exhaled smoke without fire.
A well's reflection showed a blue sky despite the overcast heavens.
The stone underfoot hummed faintly, not with magic, but with memory.
"This place…" Alucard murmured.
"It isn't decaying. It's trying to remember what it's supposed to be."
Lucien pointed to a cottage where a shutter banged open, revealing an empty room.
Then closed.
Then opened again, with a candle now lit inside.
Then again, now the table was set.
"Temporal recursion,"
Lucien said, voice low.
"These aren't ghosts. The village is rerunning itself, piece by piece."
The pull grew stronger as they reached the town's center, where a chapel rose in architectural defiance—its walls twisted into spirals that reached sideways into the horizon.
The steeple didn't aim at the sky, but curved as if it bent toward something just outside perception.
Runes pulsed along the steps—not glowing, but shivering.
Like memories refusing to settle into shape.
Alucard placed his hand on the chapel's outer wall.
It felt like pressing against thin ice, something vast and terrible on the other side.
Lucien crouched beside the door, brushing snow away from a sigil.
"These match the glyphs from the Spire's First Ring—the same ones etched in the monolith."
Alucard didn't respond.
His senses strained.
The air around the chapel resisted him, the pressure of a gaze behind a veil.
And then—
The sky broke.
It didn't shatter.
It peeled, fracturing like cracked oil on water.
The clouds above the chapel spiraled inward, revealing a sliver of something deeper.
She arrived not from the forest, nor the trail, but from that gap in reality.
Elysia.
She descended, weightless, as if the laws of this place parted for her.
Her armor shimmered with hues not native to the material realm.
Her presence bent the distortion, not with force, but with precedence.
The glitch recoiled from her.
Lucien stepped back instinctively.
"She's inside the breach, and it's not affecting her."
Alucard remained still.
He felt it—that same recognition from the monolith.
Elysia's eyes locked with his.
"You came early. The breach hasn't completed its convergence."
"You knew," he said.
"And you didn't warn anyone."
"I suspected much," she replied calmly.
"The pattern matched the monolith's harmonic resonance. Hollowmere was next."
Lucien's voice tightened.
"There were still people here."
"They were already gone," Elysia said.
"Taken when the time fold struck three nights ago."
That was when it pulsed.
A deep surge—without light, without sound.
Not an explosion, but a recognition.
It swept through Alucard like a tide pulling inward.
And something buried in him responded.
________________________________________
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION
› ALERT: Recognition by the Veil has triggered a system reinitialization.
› Dormant interface forcibly resumed.
› Status concealment lifted under anomalous pressure.
› Identity synchronization in progress...
________________________________________
> STATUS DISPLAY — USER: ALUCARD
Race: ??? (Veil-Bound Hybrid)
Primary Class: Hero (Lv. 12) — Active
Secondary Class: Demon King (MAX — Hidden)
Class Conflict: Bypassed — Dual Identity Registered
Hidden Class: [REDACTED] — Veil-Aligned Entity
Titles:
– Reincarnated Sovereign
– Balancer of Threads
– The Unforgotten Flame
– Anchor Between Worlds
- ???
Affinity: Shadow | Arcane | ???
Status Effects:
– Veil-Touched
– Rift-Aware
– Class Concealment (Previously Active)
Remark:
The Veil acknowledges you. You are no longer hidden. You are now anchored.
________________________________________
Alucard staggered.
Lucien stepped toward him.
"You alright?"
Alucard straightened slowly.
"Just… a pull."
But inside, his mind spun.
The System had gone silent when he left the Kingdom.
It had never been meant for this story.
Now it returned—not as a guide, but as a consequence.
He could feel the convergence locking into place.
The world was not repelling him.
It was centered on him.
Elysia watched him quietly.
"The Veil recognized you. You've crossed into alignment."
Alucard met her gaze. "Even that thing couldn't ignore me."
"No," she said.
"You're not just here now. You're part of the mechanism."
The chapel pulsed again.
Space bent.
A scream echoed—not from a throat, but from the bones of the world.
The spiral above twisted once more.
And something looked back.
It did not see him with its eyes.
It saw him as a statement in a sentence still being written.
And in his mind, without sound or language, the meaning came:
"You are not its enemy. You are its shape."
Reality strained.
The air folded.
Colors whispered.
And in that moment, Alucard understood:
The Will wasn't growing stronger.
It was growing closer.
And Hollowmere was not the end.
It was the first place that remembered what the world used to be—and what it was becoming.