In the emptiness of his cell, Alaric was left to his thoughts alone.
Flashes of people he had grown up with, of people he had loved, streaked across his mind.
An image of his sister, smiling and happy. An image of his sister, bloodied and cold.
His father, proud and strong. Then, twisted into a body buried in death.
His mother, with a loving smile. Gone.
All of them.
The winds shifted in the stone cell, snuffing out the candles just outside.
The air whipped.
Darkness grew darker, light increasingly faint.
'Death.'
The concept of life and death, perhaps nothing more in this world than a cosmic balance.
Yet…
'Why?'
For him. Again and again. World after world.
'Why?'
The stone cracked.
'Why?!'
The cell door was forcibly opened, the steel bars bending in ways unnatural.
Yet Alaric remained still, unmoving.
Every second, tears threatened to leak out beneath his eyes. His face remained dry.
They would never come.
Mechanically, almost artificially, a single thought echoed within the depths of his subconscious.
'So be it.'
Alaric was a deeply introspective man. Even in this moment of grief, of frayed sanity, he contemplated that single thought.
Was it a defense mechanism put up by his mind? A symptom of mental illness? A side effect of his nen now tainted by cold death?
Like a puzzle, factors around him were arranged. Emotions dulled, put out like the candle flames beyond his cell.
Nothing mattered, except perhaps solving this particular problem.
Alaric remained silent and calm. He was unmoving, and with his post-mortem nen, almost dead-like.
Steps echoed in the distant corridor. They were hurried, clearly leaning on one side more than the other. Heavy on the front, weak in the back. The delta of time between each step was too long for a woman, or unlikely at least.
A man, cultist most obviously, with a weak left leg.
Alaric continued analyzing in silence, long after the man found the broken cell door and the prisoner still inside, long after he left to report whatever he had found.
He lowered his gaze to the floor.
Thin fractures spidered out from where he sat. The stone beneath him had split along a rough circle, hairline cracks branching toward the walls.
He hadn't moved.
He pressed his palm flat against the cold surface. The fissures followed the shape of his hand, as though something had pushed outward from his body and into the ground.
'So be it,' he thought again.
The words felt alien and familiar at once. Detached. As though another part of his mind had spoken first and he was only catching up.
He traced the edges of that thought in silence.
A childhood memory surfaced—the puzzle on the living-room rug, the satisfaction of putting the last piece in its place. His parents watching, proud and unaware of what was coming.
That boy had tried to understand the world so he could belong to it.
This man tried to understand the world so he could survive it.
The gap between the two felt irreparable.
He sat cross-legged on the cracked stone and closed his eyes.
***
Grief was not a single feeling. It came in waves depending on where his attention fell.
When he thought of his sister, there was a hollow warmth and a lingering ache.
When he thought of her corpse in the pile, there was only cold.
His parents were worse. They had already died once in his arms. He had spent years making peace with the fact that he would never see them again.
The village family had reopened something he had buried. Now, they too were gone.
He let the thoughts move through him without trying to stop them. There was no point in turning away. His mind would circle back regardless.
'They're dead,' he told himself. 'Again, I am not.'
The statement was simple. It refused to soften.
He exhaled slowly.
If he wept, nothing would change. If he didn't, nothing would change either. The difference would only exist in his perception of himself.
His hands curled loosely on his knees.
'Being alive has never been my choice,' he thought. 'What I do with it is.'
The idea slid into place with the clarity of a puzzle piece fitting an empty gap.
So be it.
If something wanted him alive—if whatever twisted law or power kept sending him back insisted on it—then it would have to live with what he chose to become.
***
He adjusted his breathing.
In through the nose, slow and controlled.
Out through slightly parted lips.
He recalled the way the Cantor's presence had weighed on the room. How the air had grown thicker around her, pressing on his skin and lungs.
Aura.
Nen.
He knew the word from a fiction now made reality. Life energy shaped by will, trained through specific principles. The details he remembered were incomplete and likely inaccurate, but the core was there.
He let his awareness sink inward.
There was something around him. Not air, or temperature. A faint pressure clinging to his skin like a second surface. When he focused on it, it slipped away. When he relaxed, it settled again.
He changed his breathing pattern, slower now, and imagined that invisible layer drawing closer, sealing against him.
The sensation grew clearer.
A light buzzing under his skin. Heat at the edges of his shoulders and chest. A weight over his head that wasn't physical.
He held it.
It trembled, then scattered like dust in water.
He opened his eyes.
The torch near the door flickered. The cracks under him had deepened by a fraction.
It wasn't anything dramatic, but the lines were no longer as sharp as before.
He tried again.
***
Time thinned inside the stone room.
He had no sun or shadows to track. Only the slow melting of torch wax and the rhythm of his own breaths.
He worked through patterns the way he used to work through equations.
Focus. Release. Then, focus again.
He pictured his aura as a membrane, something meant to cling to the surface of his body and seal it off from the world. That was the easiest image to hold.
Sometimes it slid away from his grasp, dispersing into the air.
Sometimes it pressed inward until his chest tightened.
Once, it condensed so sharply that the torchlight dimmed for a heartbeat, the shadows tightening around him as though the room had pulled back.
He held for as long as he could.
Seconds stretched.
Then his concentration broke and the sensation faded, leaving him sweating lightly despite the cold.
'It's there,' he thought. 'I just… don't know the rules yet.'
The aura felt wrong in texture.
It was thick and heavy. Not like a free-flowing stream, but more like mud that had been loosened with water. It clung, resisted dispersion.
Every time he pushed it outward in his mind, something pulled it back into place.
Post-mortem nen, the Cantor had called it.
A layer of death that refused to leave.
He let the idea sink in.
If ordinary aura flowed along the edge of life, his had already crossed a line and come back. The residue was still attached.
'Fine,' he thought. 'If it insists on staying, I'll use that.'
He pushed again, gently this time.
The membrane slid across his skin.
His senses sharpened.
The chill of the stone, the flicker of the torch, the faint trace of incense in the air.
Noise from the corridor grew clearer for a moment, footsteps and distant chanting overlapping.
Then it all softened again as his focus slipped.
He exhaled slowly.
Not even close to perfect.
But he was learning.
***
Voices bled through the stone.
He ignored them at first, until a particular word caught his attention.
"…Cantor-sama said the Association won't interfere…"
"Hunters don't bother with villages like this…"
"…remote border… cheap offerings…"
The sentences came in fragments, distorted by the distance, tone, and overlapping speech.
Association.
Hunters.
He closed his eyes.
The fiction in his memory had named them the Hunter Association. A global structure of licensed individuals who dealt with threats, exploration, and whatever else fell between the cracks of normal authority.
That much, at least, seemed to hold true in this world.
And they would not come here.
He did not feel disappointed. He had never placed his hopes on being rescued. If anything, the confirmation simplified things.
No hunters, and no help.
Only the Cantor. Her cult. And him.
He adjusted the problem in his mind.
One month. A single lunar cycle, following the fact that the "Hymn" had taken place on a full moon.
He had that long before the next ritual night, before more marks and more corpses.
She wanted to train him in that time. To shape him.
He allowed himself the faintest curl of his lips. It never reached his eyes.
'Then I will learn as much as I can from you,' he thought. 'And when the Hymn comes, I'll decide what remains.'
This wasn't vengeance. Not even justice.
He simply wanted to remove variables that produced predictable patterns of death around him.
The cult was one such variable.
***
He lay back on the stone, hands folded over his chest.
The posture resembled a corpse more than a resting man, but it allowed him to focus.
He drew in a breath, then another, and called his aura again.
The membrane formed more easily now. It was thin and unstable, but present. It wrapped around his limbs and torso like invisible cloth, sealing him from the outside.
His thoughts slowed.
He recalled being surrounded by monsters in the Backrooms. By corridors that shifted, and entities that did not obey physical rules. He had survived that by cataloguing each threat and adjusting his behavior.
This enemy was different.
The Cantor had rules.
Her ritual functioned on a monthly cycle.
Her power required prepared marks.
Her followers could not use their own abilities; they were tied to hers. That restriction alone hinted at the structure of her hatsu; or nen ability.
She also had weaknesses, even if he did not know them yet. Everything did.
He let his aura hold.
His chest tightened, strained.
He held until his lungs burned, then let the aura go and inhaled sharply.
The pressure dissipated.
But the cracks did not deepen this time.
He took that as a good sign.
***
The door did not open again for some time.
When it finally did, the hinges gave a low, tired sound. Torchlight spilled in from the corridor, followed by the shape of a familiar silhouette.
The Cantor stepped inside alone.
Her gaze went first to the floor, lingering on the cracks beneath him.
Then her attention shifted to him.
Her eyes sharpened.
She stepped deeper into the cell, bare feet silent on the stone, hands folded behind her back. Her posture remained straight, but something about her attention had changed.
It was less casual curiosity, and more focus.
"Did you try to feel your aura?" she asked.
"Yes."
She nodded, as if he had given the only sensible answer.
"Describe it."
"Thick," he said. "Slow. Heavy."
Her eyes narrowed in interest.
"Does it want to disperse?"
"No."
"Then good."
She seemed pleased.
"Nen that likes to cling is very stubborn. It's harder to push, and even harder to remove. Difficult to work with, but it holds shape well once trained." She paused. "If you live long enough to train it, that is."
She came to stand a step away from him.
"Stand up."
He rose.
Their eyes met at almost equal height. Up close, he saw the signs of strain on her that he had missed before—faint shadows beneath her eyes, the slight dryness of her lips, a thin tremor in her fingers that she controlled by keeping them behind her back.
Her aura was restrained. A thin field around her body, compact and suffocating. It pressed on him even when she wasn't trying.
"Again," she said. "Feel it."
He drew his breath in and let his awareness sink outward. The membrane settled over him more quickly this time, responding to a pattern that was starting to solidify.
He did not know the term for it.
The principle remained clear enough.
The Cantor watched him. For a moment, she said nothing. Then her own aura thickened.
It did not explode outward, nor did it flare dramatically. Instead, it increased in density around her, a weight being added gradually to the air.
The room grew heavier.
The torch flame tilted.
The pressure reached him and slid along the surface of his aura. But it did not pierce or shatter immediately.
He focused on keeping the membrane intact. The heavy, post-mortem quality of his nen helped. It stayed glued to his skin even as the Cantor's presence pushed against it.
A slow breath.
Then another.
The weight only increased.
His muscles tensed, but he refused to step back. The effort dragged at his ribs and shoulders. His vision blurred faintly before clearing again.
The aura around her shifted, adapting, as though probing for a gap.
It did not find one quickly.
The Cantor's eyes widened by the smallest margin.
"Interesting," she murmured.
She pulled her aura back with a simple breath. For her, the pressure vanished completely. For him, it lingered a moment longer before bleeding away.
His lungs burned. Sweat dampened the back of his neck.
He did not let it show more than a slight quickening of his breathing.
She regarded him in silence.
"You're not trained," she said. "But you resist as if you were."
She seemed content to leave it there for now.
"Good," she said. "You will not die from aura pressure alone. That will save time."
She stepped back toward the door.
"Tomorrow we start with the basics. Flow, containment, shutting off. You'll learn my way. You have a month until the next Hymn. Whether you crawl or stand by then is up to you."
She placed her hand on the frame.
"Sleep," she added. "Or don't. It changes nothing. You will still be here when the training begins."
The door closed.
The lock clicked.
Silence returned.
Alaric lowered himself back to the floor. His body ached slightly now that the pressure had lifted. His pulse still raced from the strain.
He lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling.
This world had hunters. It had nen. It had monsters that wore human faces and built choirs of corpses.
It had given him a family and taken them away.
His fingers curled against the stone.
Enough had been enough long before this night. He had tolerated his curse because he had no way to direct it. Now, for the first time, he saw a clear path.
Nen was not just power. It was a language of life. If he learned to speak it well enough, he could start editing the script that kept repeating around him.
He slowed his breaths again.
Aura gathered.
The membrane settled over his skin, this time steadier than before. It was faint, imperfect, yet still present.
He closed his eyes.
'You want me alive,' he thought to the nameless force that had dragged him through worlds. 'Fine.'
"I'll live," he whispered to the empty cell.
Long enough to learn.
Long enough to break this choir apart.
Long enough to decide, finally, what his existence would cost others.
The torch flickered.
The cracks under him held.
And in the thin, unseen layer between his skin and the cold air, his aura stayed.