Chapter 23 – Whispers in Stone
The world had turned to twilight.
Even though the sun still lingered above Ignis Prime, its light no longer reached the north. A dull copper glow spread through the sky, thick as rusted blood, and the winds carried the scent of scorched iron.
The trio descended the black slope in silence.
Below them, the crater opened like the wound of a dead god — an abyss rimmed with obsidian ridges, each layer pulsing with dim, molten veins that looked less like rock and more like flesh. The ground hummed softly beneath their boots, a low vibration that crawled up their spines.
> "No signal from the outer camps," Shin muttered, glancing at his communicator. "Even satellite pings are bouncing back. Like the air itself's blocking it."
Alicia didn't reply. She was staring at her scanner — a sleeker model, the replacement for the one she'd broken. Its glass screen flickered, numbers jumping violently between readings that made no sense.
> "Negative… no, infinite…" she whispered. "Qi flux is reversing polarity every three seconds."
Vaibhav crouched near a ridge of obsidian that glittered faintly. He pressed his palm against it.
A shiver rippled through his body — not pain, but rhythm. Expansion. Contraction.
The Qi here breathed.
> "It's alive," he murmured. "The land's inhaling and exhaling."
Shin snorted, forcing a grin that didn't quite reach his eyes.
> "Yeah? Let's hope it doesn't sneeze."
No one laughed.
The slope narrowed into a spiraling path cut from black stone. Around them, the crater walls pulsed with faint light — symbols etched deep into the rock, not carved but grown. They shifted subtly whenever someone looked away, rearranging themselves in ways the human mind refused to track.
Alicia aimed her scanner again, her brow furrowing.
> "These aren't ordinary Qi patterns. They look like… Codex fragments, but older. Pre-Genesis era."
> "Pre-Genesis?" Shin echoed. "You mean before even the Codex Keepers?"
> "Yes," she replied, voice distant. "Language from when the Genesis Nexus was still—" She stopped mid-sentence, eyes wide.
There it was again — the faint hum, louder now. The symbols pulsed in unison, a heartbeat echoing through the stone.
Vaibhav's gaze followed the motion, tracing a spiral formation that led deeper into the crater's belly.
Every instinct screamed at him to stop.
And yet, something inside him wanted to listen.
Alicia approached the wall slowly, fingertips glowing faintly with her Qi.
> "If these are Codex runes, they might contain memory traces," she said, mostly to herself. "Echoes of whatever happened here."
Vaibhav frowned. "Be careful—"
Too late.
Her palm brushed against the surface.
A sudden chime rang through the crater — soft, melodic, yet wrong in pitch. The symbols flared crimson. Alicia's body jerked as if struck by lightning. Her eyes rolled white.
> "Alicia!" vaibhav lunged forward.
He grabbed her wrist, yanking her back. A ripple of energy surged from the wall, throwing both of them to the ground. Shin caught them mid-roll, sliding a few meters down the slope before halting.
Alicia's breath came in sharp gasps. Her eyes darted wildly — not seeing them, but something else entirely.
And then she spoke, her voice not her own:
> "The Sleeper stirs beneath the blood of the sun…"
The air froze.
A faint tremor passed through the ground, like a giant heartbeat answering her words.
Vaibhav's hand tightened on his blade. "What did you see?"
Alicia blinked, her pupils slowly refocusing. "I… I don't know. Voices. Dozens of them. They weren't speaking in one tongue — they layered over each other. Like echoes of thoughts bleeding through time."
> "Yeah, well, tell them next time to use subtitles," Shin muttered, trying to mask the shake in his hands.
She gave a weak laugh that didn't last long. "It said something about… the Sleeper. And blood. I think it's tied to this region's Qi corruption."
They continued their descent in silence.
The air thickened — every breath felt like inhaling molten dust. Shin began to slow down, pausing frequently to press his fingers against the ground.
> "You hear that?" he said after a while.
> "Hear what?" Alicia asked.
> "That thud. Like… heartbeat."
He closed his eyes. The sound grew clearer — slow, rhythmic, deep enough to rattle his bones.
"It's coming from below. Like the planet's heart's still beating."
Vaibhav sat cross-legged near the edge, closing his eyes to meditate. The world dimmed. For a moment, he saw — not with eyes, but through the rhythm of Qi — the outline of something buried beneath the molten crust.
It wasn't a beast.
It wasn't even alive in the way life was known.
It was something older.
Massive, coiled beneath the magma like a forgotten deity — its shape blurred, its presence radiating quiet hunger.
His breath caught.
Then it was gone.
> "You okay?" Shin asked, noticing his stiff posture.
> "Yeah," Vaibhav murmured. "Just… confirming this place shouldn't exist."
> "Great," Shin replied dryly. "And here I thought we were here for a picnic."
By the time night fell — if it could be called night under the rust-colored sky — they made camp on a ledge overlooking the crater's interior.
Alicia's scanner rested beside her, still glitching, numbers looping endlessly.
Shin roasted a ration pack over a faint crimson flame, muttering to himself about "ghost signals" and "horror movie lighting."
Vaibhav sat apart, staring into the abyss below. The mist rising from the crater shimmered faintly red, forming thin tendrils that drifted toward the stars — if there were still stars left to see.
Alicia finally broke the silence.
> "Those runes — they moved when I touched them. Like they were responding."
> "Responding?" Vaibhav asked.
> "To me. Or maybe to the Qi inside me. They were… hungry."
Shin leaned back against a boulder. "If they're hungry, then tell them dinner's canceled."
Alicia half-smiled despite herself, then pulled a notebook from her pack — old-fashioned paper, the kind she'd started using after her tablets failed near high-Qi zones.
She began sketching the patterns she'd seen, lines of light and curve, tracing every memory of the symbols before they faded.
The night was silent except for the scratching of her pencil.
But as she worked, faint wisps of smoke began to curl from the page.
Neither of them noticed.
The symbols on the paper glowed faintly — just for a second — before the center of the page burned from within, leaving a dark spiral.
A wind swept across the ridge, cold and carrying whispers that weren't quite wind.
Shin shivered. "Tell me I'm not the only one hearing that."
Vaibhav didn't answer. His gaze stayed fixed on the crater below, where the red mist churned slowly like living smoke.
It wasn't rising anymore.
It was watching.