Pain exploded behind Kaelen's eyes like a supernova, a white-hot agony that clawed through his skull and shredded his consciousness. This wasn't mere discomfort—this was existence itself rebelling against him, reality rejecting his very presence like an incompatible organ transplant.
He tried to scream, but his body refused to obey, muscles locked in paralysis as the pain carved new neural pathways through his brain. Am I dying? Stroke? Cerebral hemorrhage? The thoughts flickered like dying embers in a hurricane of agony. Medical terms from a life that suddenly felt distant, theoretical—belonging to someone else.
Adrift in this sea of torment, Kaelen fought against the crushing weight of disorientation. The effort was monumental, like trying to swim through concrete. His thoughts—fragmented and slippery—refused to coalesce, scattering like mercury whenever he attempted to grasp them. Time lost all meaning, devoured by the all-consuming pain that had become his universe.
Why this? Why now? Why ME? The questions echoed unanswered in the void of his fractured mind.
Gradually, agonizingly, the white-hot supernova of pain receded to a throbbing, grinding ache—a blunt knife methodically sawing through his brain rather than a nuclear explosion. This slight reprieve allowed a sliver of control to return. With an effort that left him trembling, Kaelen forced his eyelids open.
The world swam into focus, bathed in a pervasive crimson glow that painted everything in the hues of freshly spilled blood. It wasn't the gentle warmth of sunset or the artificial tint of colored lamps—this was wrong, fundamentally wrong, as if reality itself were hemorrhaging.
He was lying on something hard and unyielding, a wooden surface that pressed uncomfortably against his spine. As his vision stabilized, details emerged from the crimson haze. A small, sparsely furnished room materialized around him. Directly ahead, a simple wooden desk stood with an open notebook upon it, its pages yellowed and coarse. To the left, a neat stack of books, their spines unreadable in the dim light. The wall behind them was marred by grayish-white pipes that snaked across its surface, culminating in an antique wall lamp, unlit and silent.
Beneath the lamp, a black ink bottle rested, its surface embossed with a faded angelic figure now bathed in the ubiquitous crimson glow. Beside it lay an uncapped fountain pen, its nib glinting with wet ink, as if recently used. And next to these mundane items, an object so incongruous it sent a jolt of adrenaline through Kaelen's system—a brass revolver, its metal surface reflecting the crimson light like congealed blood.
A gun? Who keeps a gun with their writing materials? The scholar in him recoiled at the juxtaposition, even as the primitive part of his brain registered it as a potential tool for survival.
With mounting dread, Kaelen realized the crimson glow emanated from a window to his right. Some primal instinct warned him not to look, to keep his eyes averted from whatever lay beyond the glass. But curiosity—humanity's eternal downfall—compelled him to turn his head despite the protest of stiff neck muscles.
Against a backdrop of absolute, impossible darkness—a void so complete it seemed to devour light rather than merely lack it—hung a moon. But no moon of Earth or any sane reality could match this
celestial abomination. A perfect sphere of deepest crimson, like a freshly gouged eye weeping blood into the cosmos. It hung silent and watchful, its light not the gentle silver caress of Earth's moon, but a baleful, penetrating glare that seemed to strip away all pretense of safety or sanity.
The sight struck Kaelen with physical force. Primal terror seized him, bypassing reason and clawing directly at his soul. He scrambled to his feet, desperate to escape this impossible vista, but his legs—still weak and unresponsive—buckled beneath him. He crashed back into a wooden chair he hadn't even realized he'd been sitting in, the impact sending fresh waves of agony through his skull.
Gritting his teeth against the pain, Kaelen braced himself against the desk and forced himself upright again. He turned in a full circle, heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped animal, desperate to understand where—or what—he was.
The room was small, claustrophobic. Brown wooden doors stood on opposite walls, their paint chipped and faded. Against the far wall, a simple wooden bunk bed stood with rumpled blankets, as if recently vacated in haste. Between the bed and the left door, a tall, narrow cabinet leaned precariously, its doors hanging open. Next to it, strange grayish-white pipes ran along the wall, connected to a bizarre mechanical device with exposed gears and bearings, its purpose utterly inscrutable.
In the right corner, near the desk, sat items resembling a primitive coal stove alongside a collection of soup pots and iron pans, all coated in a thin layer of dust and grime. Across from the right door, a tarnished dressing mirror with two prominent cracks hung crookedly, its wooden base carved with simple patterns worn smooth by time.
Kaelen caught his reflection in the cracked glass and froze. Black hair, disheveled and matted with sweat. Brown eyes, wide with terror and confusion. A thin, almost gaunt face with sharper features than he remembered, a deeper outline to his jaw. He wore a simple, coarse linen shirt, unfamiliar and rough against his skin.
This isn't me. Or rather, it is me, but... different. Older? Thinner? He gasped, mind reeling as the implications crashed over him like a tidal wave. The revolver on the desk. The classical, almost archaic Western decor. The impossible crimson moon. It all pointed to one terrifying, inescapable conclusion.
Transmigration. The word, a staple of fantasy novels, now tasted like ash in his mouth. He'd often fantasized about such scenarios, escaping the mundane drudgery of his life for a world of magic and adventure. But this? This was no adventure. This was a nightmare made manifest, the crushing weight of its implications far harder to accept than any fictional tale.
Calm down. Think. THINK. He forced several deep breaths, fighting the rising tide of panic. As his mind and body began to settle, something extraordinary happened. Memories—not his own, yet intimately connected to the body he now inhabited—began to surface, flooding his consciousness like a breaking dam.
Klein Moretti. Citizen of the Loen Kingdom, Northern Continent. Awwa County, City of Tingen. Recent graduate from the Department of History at Khoy University...
The name felt alien, yet the memories associated with it were vivid, detailed. Father, a sergeant in the Imperial Army, died in a colonial conflict. Compensation money allowed Klein to attend private grammar school... Mother, a devotee of the Evernight Goddess, passed away the year Klein entered university... Elder brother, Benson, a clerk at an import-export company, supporting the family. Younger sister, Melissa, still in school...
As a history graduate, this Klein Moretti had learned the ancient Feysac language, considered the source of all languages in the Northern Continent, and more pertinently, the Hermes language, often found in ancient mausoleums and texts related to rituals and prayers.
Hermes language? Zhou Mingrui—no, Klein Moretti now, the distinction blurring in his disoriented mind—felt a jolt. His gaze snapped back to the open notebook on the desk. The text on the yellowed paper, which had initially seemed like meaningless squiggles, began to shift and morph before his eyes. The strange, alien symbols rearranged themselves, becoming familiar, readable.
The dark ink, stark against the yellowed page, proclaimed a single, chilling sentence: "Everyone will die, including me."
An involuntary hiss escaped Klein's lips. He felt an inexplicable, bone-deep horror, a primal fear that had nothing to do with his current predicament and everything to do with those stark, ominous words. He instinctively recoiled, nearly toppling the chair in his haste to put distance between himself and the notebook.
The air around him grew colder, more turbulent, filled with faint, almost inaudible whispers that brushed against his ears like ghostly fingers. The previous owner of this body, the original Klein Moretti... what terrible secret had led him to write such a despairing, final message before... before what? Before Zhou Mingrui had somehow taken his place?
Just as the chilling implication of the notebook's message began to crystallize in Klein's mind, a cacophony of new sounds assaulted his ears. It started as a low rumble, a vibration that resonated through the floorboards and up his legs, making the very air tremble. Then came a series of sharp, tearing shrieks, like colossal sheets of metal being ripped asunder, followed by a deafening crash that sounded as if a mountain had collapsed nearby.
The small room shook violently, dust and debris raining down from the ceiling. The ink bottle rattled across the desk, its angelic embossment seeming to grimace in the crimson light. The revolver—that cold, metallic promise of violence—slid toward the edge.
Klein, still reeling from the notebook's ominous message, was thrown off balance, stumbling against the rickety chair. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat against the symphony of destruction erupting outside. Earthquake? Bombing? The end of the world? The memories of Klein Moretti offered no context for such cataclysmic events in the seemingly peaceful city of Tingen.
Driven by a desperate need to understand, to witness the source of this new terror, he lurched toward the window, the one that bathed the room in the baleful crimson glow of the alien moon.
What he saw defied all reason, all sanity.
The world outside was not merely chaotic; it was actively, impossibly unraveling. The crimson moon, larger and more malevolent than before, hung in a sky that was no longer a cohesive canvas but a tapestry of tearing fabric. Great, jagged rents appeared in the inky blackness, revealing glimpses of... something else. Not stars, not void, but swirling vortexes of impossible colors, hues that burned the eyes and twisted the mind, like looking into the raw, exposed guts of reality itself.
Below, the city of Tingen—or what he assumed was Tingen—was a landscape of surreal horror. Buildings, once proud and solid, twisted and warped like heated plastic, their structures groaning and shrieking as they contorted into Escher-esque nightmares. Streets buckled and split open, revealing chasms that pulsed with an oily, internal darkness. A nearby clock tower, a landmark Klein vaguely
remembered from his new memories, tilted at an impossible angle, its hands frozen at a moment that no longer mattered, before it dissolved—not into rubble, but into a shower of shimmering, multi-colored particles that drifted upward, defying gravity, toward the weeping wounds in the sky.
"This... this can't be..." Klein whispered, his voice a dry, cracked rasp. His mind, already reeling from the personal horror of his transmigration and the ominous notebook, struggled to comprehend the sheer scale of the cosmic insanity unfolding before him. This wasn't a localized disaster. This was the end of a world. Or perhaps, the birth of something far, far worse.
His horrified gaze swept across the unfolding panorama of destruction, and then he saw them. People. Or what had once been people. Figures stumbled through the distorted streets below, their forms flickering like faulty holograms. He saw a man in what looked like a nightshirt run out of a collapsing building, his face a mask of pure, unadulterated terror.
As Klein watched, frozen in horrified fascination, the man's form began to... unravel. It wasn't a violent explosion, nor a bloody disintegration. Instead, his edges seemed to fray, his substance becoming translucent, like old parchment held against a flame. Wisps of him, like smoke or steam, detached and drifted upward, dissolving into the crimson-tinged air. His silent scream was etched onto his rapidly fading features, a rictus of unimaginable horror, before he was simply... gone. Erased. Not even dust remained to mark his existence.
Klein recoiled from the window, bile rising in his throat. This was death, but not death as he understood it. This was something far worse—the complete erasure of being, the unmaking of existence itself. And it was happening everywhere, to everything.
A new sound cut through the cacophony of destruction—a high, keening wail that seemed to emanate from everywhere and nowhere at once. It resonated at a frequency that made Klein's teeth ache and his vision blur. And with it came a pressure, a force that pushed against him like an invisible tide, seeking to unravel him as it had unraveled the man in the street.
But something strange happened. As the force touched him, it seemed to... hesitate. To recoil. Klein felt a cold, empty void open within him, a stillness at his core that repelled the unmaking force. It was as if he contained a pocket of absolute zero within his being, a place where entropy itself froze and shattered.
The pressure increased, the keening wail rising to a shriek that threatened to split his skull. The very air around him began to shimmer and distort, objects in the room starting to fray at the edges—the bed, the cabinet, the stove, all beginning to unravel like the man in the street.
But Klein remained solid, untouched by the unmaking. The void within him expanded, a cold, empty space that consumed the entropic energy without being consumed by it. He gasped, clutching at his chest, feeling the strange, impossible stillness spreading through him like ice in his veins.
And then, cutting through the shriek of unmaking, a new sound reached his ears. A deep, resonant pulse, like the heartbeat of some colossal entity. Thoom. Thoom. Thoom. It called to him, drew his gaze back to the window, to the horizon beyond the dissolving city.
There, rising above the chaos, stood a structure that hadn't been there moments before—or perhaps it had always been there, and he was only now able to perceive it. A tower, impossibly tall, its surface a perfect, light-devouring black that made the night sky around it seem pale by comparison. It pulsed in rhythm with the sound, veins of crimson light running up its sides like arteries, pumping some unknown substance into the wounded sky.
The Bleeding Tower.
The name came to him unbidden, implanted directly into his consciousness like a splinter of alien knowledge. And with it came a certainty—this was the source of the unmaking, the epicenter of the reality-dissolving force that was erasing the world around him. Yet even as he recognized it as the architect of this apocalypse, he felt a strange, disturbing pull toward it, a compulsion to approach, to understand, to... join with it somehow.
The Tower was a focal point of his dread, a monstrous enigma that dominated the ruined horizon. Part of him, a morbid, self-destructive curiosity, wanted to understand it, to approach it, to unravel its secrets. But a far stronger, more primal instinct screamed at him to flee, to put as much distance as possible between himself and that terrifying, obsidian monolith.
Survival. That was the only thought that mattered now. He had to get away from this room, away from the immediate chaos, away from the all-seeing, all-consuming presence of the Bleeding Tower.
But where? In which direction did safety lie, if such a concept even existed anymore in this unraveling world? He scanned the devastated landscape visible from the window, searching for any sign of hope, any path that didn't lead to immediate oblivion. There was none. Every direction seemed to promise only more horror, more destruction.
He glanced back at the notebook on the desk, its ominous message a stark reminder of the original Klein's fate. "Everyone will die, including me." Was that his fate too? To succumb to this madness, to be erased from existence?
The stillness within him, the strange void that had repelled the unmaking force, offered a sliver of hope, a fragile defiance. He was different. He had survived what others had not. Perhaps... perhaps he could keep surviving.
With a surge of adrenaline born of pure, unadulterated terror, Kaelen made his decision. He wouldn't go toward the Tower. Not yet. He would try to find shelter, to find other survivors, if any still existed. He would try to understand what was happening, what he had become.
He snatched the brass revolver from the desk, its cold, metallic weight surprisingly reassuring in his trembling hand. He didn't know if it was loaded, or even if he knew how to use it properly—Klein Moretti's memories were hazy on such practical matters—but it was a weapon, a symbol of resistance, however futile.
He also grabbed the notebook, a morbid compulsion driving him to take the original Klein's final words with him. Then, he turned toward the least damaged of the two brown doors, the one that seemed to lead deeper into the building rather than directly out into the maelstrom, and, with a deep, shuddering breath, he pulled it open.
The corridor beyond the door was dark and narrow, the air thick with the smell of dust, ozone, and something else... something sweetish and cloying, like rotting fruit mixed with burnt sugar. The crimson light from the outside world barely penetrated here, casting long, dancing shadows that seemed to writhe with a life of their own.
The floor was littered with debris—fallen plaster, shattered glass, and dark, unidentifiable stains that Kaelen desperately tried not to examine too closely. The building groaned around him, the sounds of tearing metal and crumbling stone a constant, unnerving symphony.
He moved cautiously, the revolver held tightly in his hand, every sense on high alert. He could hear scuttling sounds from the shadows, the faint, high-pitched whimpering of what might have been a small animal, or perhaps something far worse.
As he rounded a corner, he stumbled upon his first encounter. A figure huddled in a doorway, rocking back and forth, muttering incoherently. It was a woman, or what had once been a woman. Her skin was a patchwork of sickly greens and purples, and one of her arms had elongated, a grotesque, boneless appendage that twitched spasmodically. Her eyes, wide and vacant, stared at something only she could see, her lips drawn back in a silent, lipless snarl.
As Kaelen watched, frozen in horrified fascination, a tremor ran through her, and her form began to shimmer, the edges blurring, before she dissolved into a shower of iridescent, oily particles that clung to the walls and floor like malevolent dew.
Kaelen recoiled, a choked gasp escaping him, the sweetish, cloying smell intensifying in the air. He didn't dare breathe, didn't dare make a sound. He pressed himself against the opposite wall, his heart pounding, and waited until the last of the shimmering particles had faded before inching forward again.
Each step was a torment, each shadow a potential threat. He saw more horrors. A man fused halfway into a wall, his face a mask of frozen terror, his outstretched hand still clutching a tarnished silver locket. A child's doll, its porcelain face cracked and weeping tears of what looked like black tar, sitting in the middle of the corridor, its head slowly turning to follow him as he passed.
He saw strange symbols scrawled on the walls in a substance that looked disturbingly like dried blood, symbols that seemed to pulse faintly in the dim light, their meaning unknown but undeniably malevolent.
He realized, with a dawning, chilling certainty, that the Entropia—the unmaking force—wasn't just a destructive power; it was a transformative one, a creative one, in its own horrifying, twisted way. It was birthing new realities, new forms of existence, from the wreckage of the old. And he, Kaelen, was somehow immune to its most immediate, erasing effects, a stable point in a sea of entropic flux.
But for how long? And at what cost?
Kaelen eventually found himself in what might have once been a small, enclosed courtyard, now a debris-strewn pocket of relative silence amidst the cacophony of the dying city. One wall had partially collapsed, offering a jagged view of the crimson-streaked, wounded sky, but the remaining three offered a fragile illusion of shelter.
He sank to the ground, his back against a cold, damp stone wall, the revolver still clutched in his hand, the ominous notebook tucked hastily into the waistband of his unfamiliar trousers. His breath came in ragged, shuddering gasps, each one a painful reminder of the horrors he had witnessed, of the sheer, overwhelming terror that had become his new reality.
For a long moment, he simply sat there, trembling, his mind a maelstrom of disconnected thoughts and searing images. The crimson moon. The unraveling buildings. The dissolving people. The terrifying, obsidian Tower. His own strange, unsettling immunity.
This isn't real. It can't be real. The denial was a fragile shield, already cracking under the weight of undeniable, horrific evidence. His world, the world of Zhou Mingrui, was gone. Annihilated. Replaced by this nightmare made manifest.
He thought of his family—Benson, Melissa. Were they gone too? Erased from existence like the figures he'd seen in the street? The thought was a fresh stab of agony, a grief so profound it threatened to drown him. He squeezed his eyes shut, hot tears tracing burning paths through the grime on his cheeks.
But then, the memory of the stillness within him, the cold, empty void that had repelled the unmaking force, resurfaced. He was different. He had survived. Why? The question burned in his mind, a tiny spark of defiance against the overwhelming darkness.
As Kaelen wrestled with his despair and burgeoning resolve, a subtle shift in the atmosphere of the small courtyard caught his attention. The air, already thick with the scent of ozone and decay, seemed to grow heavier, colder. The faint, almost inaudible whispers he'd heard earlier, the ones that had seemed to emanate from the very fabric of this dying world, grew slightly louder, coalescing into something that was almost... speech.
It wasn't a voice he heard with his ears, but rather a series of impressions, of concepts, forming directly in his mind, cold and alien.
"Anomaly... seed of change... the Tower bleeds... a new song in the silence of the end..."
The "words" were fragmented, disjointed, their meaning obscure, yet they resonated with a chilling familiarity, echoing the strange, implanted knowledge of the Bleeding Tower's name. Kaelen looked around wildly, his hand tightening on the revolver. Was someone there? Was this another survivor? Or was it the Entropia itself, a sentient, malevolent force, toying with him before his inevitable demise?
"You are not of the unraveling... you are of the becoming... a broken cog in the great machine of dissolution... or perhaps... a new gear..."
The impressions faded as quickly as they had come, leaving Kaelen trembling, his mind reeling. He was alone in the courtyard. There was no one there. Had he imagined it? Was he finally succumbing to the madness that had claimed so many others? Or was this a genuine communication, a message from... something?
The cryptic phrases offered no comfort, no answers, only more questions, more mystery. A seed of change? The becoming? It sounded less like a promise and more like a terrible, inescapable destiny.
The unsettling "whispers" had one undeniable effect: they shattered Kaelen's fragile sense of momentary respite. He couldn't stay here. He was exposed, vulnerable. And the Tower... its oppressive presence seemed to loom even larger in his mind, a silent, obsidian sentinel observing his every move.
The fear it inspired was a cold, physical thing, urging him to run, to hide, to escape its unseen gaze. Yet, intertwined with that fear was a morbid, almost irresistible pull. The whispers, the name, his own anomalous nature... it all seemed connected to that monstrous edifice. If there were answers to be found in this dying world, he suspected they lay in the shadow of the Bleeding Tower.
His internal conflict was a silent, agonizing battle. Flee, and perhaps survive a little longer in ignorance and terror? Or approach the source of his dread, and risk immediate annihilation for a chance, however slim, at understanding?
The memories of Klein Moretti, the scholar, the seeker of knowledge, warred with the primal instinct for self-preservation. But Zhou Mingrui, the man who had dreamt of escaping the mundane, who had devoured tales of adventure and mystery, felt a flicker of something else: a desperate, almost reckless curiosity.
He looked down at the revolver in his hand, then at the notebook. Symbols of a past life, of a desperate end. And then he looked towards the partially collapsed wall, towards the sliver of crimson sky and the distant, impossible silhouette of the Tower. The whispers had called him an anomaly, a seed of change. Perhaps it was time to find out what that meant.
With a newfound, albeit terrified, resolve, Kaelen pushed himself to his feet. His legs still felt weak, his body ached, but his mind was clear, focused. He would not run blindly. He would not cower in the shadows, waiting for the end. He would seek answers, however terrifying they might be.
He took one last look around the small, debris-strewn courtyard, a fleeting sanctuary in a world gone mad, then stepped out through the jagged opening in the wall, back into the heart of the unraveling city.
As he emerged, the crimson moonlight seemed to intensify, casting his long, distorted shadow before him. He took a tentative step, then another, his gaze fixed on the distant, menacing silhouette of the Bleeding Tower.
He didn't know what he would find there, or if he would even survive the journey. But as he walked, a strange sensation began to spread through him, starting from the cold, empty void within his core. It was a faint, almost imperceptible vibration, a resonance with the chaotic energies that pulsed through this dying world.
He looked down at his hand, the one not clutching the revolver. As a shimmering, multi-colored particle of dissolving reality drifted past, he reached out, not in fear, but with a strange, instinctual curiosity.
The particle, instead of passing through
him or causing him harm, seemed to... hesitate. It swirled around his outstretched fingers, drawn to him, before being absorbed into his palm, vanishing without a trace, leaving behind only a faint, tingling warmth and a single, chilling thought that was not his own, yet resonated with the core of his new, terrifying existence:
"The hunger begins."