....
The Hollow District was a wound in the city's skin. Refugee shacks built from war salvage leaned against ancient stone like supplicants, their roofs patched with canvas and rusted shields. The air stank of unwashed bodies, stale urine, and the sharp tang of cheap gin—the scent of people who'd given up on tomorrow.
Caelan and Seraphine slipped through the predawn gloom like ghosts, the commander's sword wrapped in scavenged burlap. The stolen armor they'd left behind, but the blade was good steel, and steel meant survival.
"There's an abandoned apothecary on Thorn Street," Seraphine murmured, her eyes scanning the shadows. "The owner died when the plague hit last season. We can hide there."
Caelan nodded, his Temporal Sight flickering with each step. Possibilities branched and collapsed: a starving dog attacking, a refugee spotting their fine boots, a Kuron patrol turning the corner. The ability was becoming easier to control, the Orochi's Spiral digesting the commander's essence with brutal efficiency.
Orochi's Spiral [ATAVISM] – Level 0 [907/3000] → [1150/3000]
Power for nothing. The thought should have satisfied him.
It didn't.
They passed a makeshift market where refugees traded what little they had. A woman with hollow cheeks offered a silver locket for a loaf of bread. A one-legged veteran displayed medals from a war that had erased his homeland. Children with eyes too old for their faces huddled around a fire that gave more smoke than warmth.
This was what war looked like when you weren't a prince. When you didn't have a Codex to steal second chances.
In his previous life, Caelan had watched the news from his hospital bed—footage of bombed cities, refugee columns, children pulled from rubble. He'd felt pity then, a distant ache that cancer had made sharp and personal. Now, with Frozen Soul (Level 2) muting his emotions, he observed their suffering with clinical detachment.
Was this what he'd become? A machine that harvested power and filed away pain as inefficient data?
"Don't," Seraphine said quietly, mistaking his gaze for guilt.
"Don't what?"
"Don't let it touch you. The Hollow District breaks people who still feel." She squeezed his shoulder, her grip firm. "Your Frozen Soul is a blessing here."
Caelan almost laughed. Almost. "You think I should be grateful for becoming a monster?"
"I think you should be grateful for surviving." She pointed to a collapsed building where bodies were stacked like cordwood—plague victims, left to rot because no one could afford to bury them. "Those people felt everything. Look where it got them."
The apothecary was a narrow building squeezed between a tanner's shop and a burned-out tavern. The door hung crooked on one hinge. Inside, dust motes danced in the faint light, and the shelves were bare except for broken bottles and mouse droppings.
Seraphine barred the door with a fallen beam. "Rest. I'll scout the perimeter."
"Wait." Caelan moved to the back room, where the owner's corpse still sat in a chair, mummified by dry air and time. The man's shrunken face was peaceful, his hands folded over a ledger. A suicide, based on the empty laudanum bottle on the desk.
The soul wisp was faint, barely there after months of decay. But it was something.
Soul Harvester – Level 0 [18/1000] → [22/1000]
Soul Point: 363.0749
Seraphine watched from the doorway, her expression unreadable. "Even the dead serve you now."
"The dead have no use for their souls." Caelan closed the ledger. The last entry read: Creditors sworn to House Kuron took my daughter. I have nothing left.
House Kuron again. They weren't just usurpers—they were creditors, slavers, monsters who wore the mask of civilization.
Caelan's hands trembled. Not from weakness, but from something the Frozen Soul couldn't fully suppress: anger.
The apothecary's upper floor was a single room with a straw mattress and a window overlooking the market. Caelan sat cross-legged on the floor, the Codex materializing before him. The black pages absorbed the morning light.
Records Available for Activation:
- Scion of Dawn – Level 0 [500/500]
- Scion of Dusk – Level 0 [500/500]
- Orochi's Spiral Level 1 – [Requires 3000]
- Soul Harvester Level 1 – [Requires 1000]
He had enough for one of the Scion bloodlines. Dawn or Dusk. Opposite aspects that should annihilate each other.
The boy I swore to protect would have wept for that man's soul.
Seraphine's words echoed. But the boy she swore to protect had been poisoned into complacency, taught to accept his own death. Caelan had refused death once already, in that hospital bed. He'd chosen to die rather than become something else.
Look where that got him.
He selected Scion of Dawn.
The Codex flared. Aether poured through his veins like liquid sunlight, burning away the Orochi's cold temporal energy. For a moment, the two bloodlines warred—time versus light, stasis versus genesis. His bones felt like they would shatter.
Then the Codex forced them to coexist, rewriting the rules of reality with the indifference of a scribe correcting a ledger.
Primordial Codex
Aspects: Temporal Sight (Tier 1), Dawn's Grace (Tier 1)
Records:
- Scion of Dawn [HARMONY] – Level 0 [0/2000]
- Orochi's Spiral [ATAVISM] – Level 0 [1150/3000]
- Soul Harvester – Level 0 [22/1000]
Soul Point: 313.0749
His body changed. The wasting sickness retreated further. Muscles filled out, skin lost its corpse-pallor. His Constitution ticked upward:
Constitution: 112.4 → 127.4
He was still a child, but no longer a dying one. Dawn's Grace accelerated his healing, mending the years of poison damage in minutes.
Seraphine returned as the sun crested the horizon. She froze in the doorway, seeing him in the light. "Your hair..."
Caelan touched it. Strands came away in his hand—not fallen out, but changed, silver at the roots like the Orochi's image in the Codex. The convergence of bloodlines was rewriting his body.
"Side effect," he said. "We need to leave the district. The Kuron patrols will sweep here by noon."
"And go where?" Seraphine's frustration finally surfaced. "Every exit is watched. Every sympathetic house was purged with ours. We have no allies, no coin, no—"
A scream cut through the morning air. Not the scream of the dying, but the scream of someone watching death approach.
Caelan was at the window before Seraphine could stop him. In the market below, a Kuron patrol had cornered the woman with the silver locket. She'd tried to sell it to the wrong person—a Kuron informant. Now three soldiers were dragging her toward a waiting wagon, her child clinging to her leg.
"Smuggler's brand," Seraphine said, her voice tight. "They're taking her to the pens. She'll be sold by dusk."
The child was maybe six, all bones and defiant eyes. When a soldier backhanded the woman, the child bit his hand. The soldier drew his sword.
Caelan's Temporal Sight showed him the future: the blade falling, the child's head hitting the mud, the mother's scream turning to silent horror.
Dawn's Grace (Tier 1) pulsed in his chest, an Aspect that wasn't just about healing. It was about potential. The potential for life, for growth, for salvation.
The Frozen Soul passive urged him to turn away. Efficiency. Survival.
But the Scion of Dawn record whispered something else: What is dawn but the light that banishes shadows?
"Cover the alley," Caelan said, his small hands gripping the windowsill.
"What are you—"
He jumped.
Three stories. His child's body shouldn't have survived it. But Orochi's Spiral dilated time, giving him seconds to think in the span of heartbeats. Dawn's Grace flooded his legs with regenerative Aether. He hit the ground rolling, the impact crushing but already healing.
The soldiers turned, shocked by the suicidal child who'd dropped into their midst.
Caelan rose, his eyes molten gold, his hands marked with spirals that caught the morning light. The smallest soldier died first—Caelan's borrowed blade snapping up through his jaw before the man could draw. The other two had time to scream.
They shouldn't have.
Soul Harvester – Level 0 [22/1000] → [89/1000] → [203/1000]
Soul Point: 436.0749
The mother and child stared at him, the silver locket forgotten in the mud.
"Run," Caelan told them, his voice layered with harmonics that weren't entirely his own. "House Kuron is hunting. Don't stop until you reach the border."
They ran. In the distance, Seraphine was already cutting down the informant.
Caelan stood alone among the ash, the Codex humming in his chest. The Orochi's Spiral had gained another hundred points from the two Mortal State souls. He was still so weak.
But for the first time since waking in blood, he didn't feel like a monster.
He felt like a prince. One who could protect something, even if it was just one child in a district of thousands.
Above, Seraphine appeared at the window, her expression a mixture of fury and reluctant pride.
"Next time," she called down, "warn me before you take a leap off a building."
Caelan looked up at her, his child's face streaked with ash and blood. "Next time," he said, "try to keep up."