The feeble light of dawn had not yet managed to fully pierce the gloom of The Ash House shack before Sister Lana's sharp screech, like a cold chisel striking the air, split the murky silence.
"Lazy bones! You Cinder-Dregs! Out of bed! Does the Fuel-Stone move itself? Are the pipes unclogged? Do you all wish to starve?!"
Elara Thorne rose silently from the cold pallet, tucking The Rotting Earth Codex deeper into the straw mattress's seams. The retreating fever, the influx of fragmented alien memory, and the sharp realization that she was a Stellar Core Reject had fundamentally changed her perception of this world. Where Sister Lana's voice once evoked fear and bitter resentment, Elara now felt a detached, almost pitying aloofness. These people, trapped like gears in the engine of 'Fate,' were utterly oblivious to the true shadows gathering outside their perimeter.
The day's endless labor began with scrubbing the mountainous pile of work uniforms, thick with grease and coal dust. The communal wash trough, situated near the edge of the town square, was filled with frigid, lye-mixed water that quickly soaked through Elara's coarse sleeves, stabbing at the criss-crossing network of chilblains on her hands. Cinder Town fully awoke to the deep, resonant drone of the Steam Core and the metallic, panting roar of the smelters. The thick haze of smoke and dust settled over the crooked chimneys and rusted tin roofs like a gigantic, polluted shroud, making every breath feel like chewing on grit.
Through her downcast eyes, the brutal, industrial logic of the world—forged by iron, gear-teeth, and collective despair—unfolded in excruciating detail.
As she struggled to scrub a miner's tunic, the low-pitched conversation of two adjacent, gaunt women reached her, blending with the sound of rushing water.
"...Did you hear? Over at the Obsidian Quarry... another 'Energy Leakage' two days ago." One woman's voice carried an involuntary tremor.
"Hush! Keep it down! The patrols will seize you for spreading panic!" The older woman nervously scanned their surroundings, lowering her voice to a tense whisper. "My man's an auxiliary in the Garrison. He said… the Association's 'Gray Robes' brought a squad of Vigils and simply 'Melt-Sealed' the entire mine entrance with raw Aether... No one inside made it out."
"The horror… how many does that make now?"
"What choice do we have? We live to work. Just stay far from the unclean places…"
Their exchange was full of terror, yet laced with a chilling sense of habit. The unseen threat—the constant seepage of the Deep Abyss's Corruption—was as ubiquitous as the coal dust, woven into every inhale of Cinder Town's air. The events the official reports euphemized as 'Energy Leakage' often masked the silent disappearance of entire communities. Elara recalled the abstract descriptions of 'The Blight' from The Rotting Earth Codex; those terrifying words now merged with this palpable, immediate fear, giving her knowledge a concrete, disturbing context.
In the afternoon, she was tasked with disposing of the filthy water near the town market. In a dark corner by the square's edge, she spotted a furtive vendor. He had laid out a greasy oilcloth covered with small bundles of "Exorcism Talismans," little charms made of the finger bones of unknown creatures and rags stained with dark brown crud.
"Young lady, take one?" The vendor grinned, revealing tobacco-stained teeth, his eyes shifty. "Genuine, procured from the edge of the Silent Wastes! Soaked in a Guardian's blood! Stops the Whispers, repels the Blight! Only two Black Iron Tokens!"
A man in patched work clothes hesitated, his face a painful mix of paralyzing fear and grinding poverty. Finally, he bit down on his lip, pulled out a few polished coins, and traded them for a charm, clutching it tightly as if it were his sole anchor to hope. Elara knew it was likely a scam, a cruel exploitation of the common people's terror. But the sheer desperation in the man's eyes stung her consciousness more sharply than any vision of the Abyss.
Just then, a slight ripple of movement passed through the market entrance. The crowd parted instantly, as if brushed aside by an invisible force, creating a clear corridor. A patrol marched through—two tall, sharp-looking junior adepts draped in Silver Star Academy cloaks, led by an Association official in a crisp black-and-silver uniform, whose eyes were as sharp as a hawk's. Their polished boots clicked a steady, regular rhythm on the muddy ground, a stark, commanding contrast to the surrounding scrape and shuffle of the peasants' worn straw sandals.
The noisy market fell into an instant, profound quiet. Heads bowed, eyes avoided contact, faces bearing a complex mixture of reverence, reliance, and a deeply suppressed, unspoken resentment. These Aether-Adepts and Association officials, armed with the power of the Stellar Core, were the shield protecting them from the Abyss. Yet, they were also the absolute authority that levied the crushing Screening Tax and held the power of life and death. This tangled emotion was as heavy and viscous as Cinder Town's air itself.
While emptying the last of the dirty water in the market's filthiest corner, Elara heard the slurred, bitter grumbling of two old miners from within a low, ramshackle tavern window.
"...Bullshit 'Screening Tax'! I've mined Fuel-Stone my entire life, and all the profits feed those noble bastards and their damned shield!"
"Ah… the veins are deeper now, and wilder… You feel something watching you down there, that constant buzzing in your ear…"
"Nostalgia? Nostalgia for the bloody 'Age of Forging'? The books say before the Great Sundering, the sky was blue! The water was clean! No damn Whispers drilling into your bones! Now? Hah… The Association? The Royals? All the same… nobody cares if we 'Ash' live or die…"
Their drunken words were a silent rebellion against the official narrative, full of the bottom layer's impotence, yet hinting at a vague, lost memory of a better, purer "Old Era." This realization struck Elara: she was not the only 'anomaly' fighting this world; countless souls were being crushed under its relentless gears.
The day's labor finally ended. Elara dragged her leaden legs back toward The Ash House. The rare sunset that managed to penetrate the thick haze stretched the shadows long and ominous, making Cinder Town's twisted outline look like a gigantic, sinister cage.
All she had witnessed—the citizens' numbness, the fear of the Abyss, the cheap superstitions, the complex emotion toward authority, and the deep, buried resentment—rained down on her psyche. The alien memory allowed her to understand the structure of this world's suffering from a higher, colder dimension. Despair was no longer an abstraction; it was every numb face in the square, every fearful whisper in the market, the biting chill of the trough water.
She now saw her choices with chilling clarity: she would either rot quietly in the mud as a Soulless husk, becoming 'fuel'; or she would, if she was lucky, awaken and become a slightly cleaner gear in the same brutal machine, forever shackled by Kaelan's 'protection,' stripped of any true freedom.
She touched the outline of the hardback notebook beneath her clothes. The cool, firm presence of The Rotting Earth Codex felt like the only cold, honest response to this world's despair. A precarious path, hidden in the rot and shadow, filled with unknown madness and destruction, yet one that might lead to a sliver of… her own light of freedom.
Her gaze swept over the rusted pipes, the shuffling figures, and the town shrouded in smoke like a colossal prison, becoming utterly serene, utterly resolute.