The vibration in the floor wasn't stopping. It was a rhythmic, subterranean nausea, as if the building itself was shivering from a fever.
Kaelen squeezed his body into the maintenance crawlspace, his satchel scraping against the raw concrete. The air here was hot, choked with the smell of burning dust from the turbine housing. He didn't look back at the crushed spider. He didn't need to. The red afterimage of its dying eye was burned into his retinas, pulsing in time with the headache behind his temples.
Era 4.
The thought was a splinter in his mind. He tried to push it away, to file it under "Later," but the Archivist in him—the part of his brain trained to categorize truth—wouldn't let it go. The Canon stated clearly that history began with the Golden Ignition. There were no previous versions. There was no "Era 4."
If the machine was real, the history books were not just incomplete. They were forgeries.
Thump.
The sound didn't come from below. It came from above.
Kaelen froze, his breath hitching in his throat. He pressed his cheek against the cold stone of the crawlspace wall.
Thump.
It was the sound of a heavy boot hitting the floor of the ventilation shaft he had just exited. Twenty feet back.
They were in the vents.
"Processing," a voice echoed down the metal tunnel. It was distorted by the acoustics, hollow and metallic, stripping away any humanity. "Anomaly signature detected. Sector 4-B. Purge recommended."
Kaelen's blood turned to ice. It wasn't the guards. Guards shouted. Guards swore. This was the flat, monochromatic tone of a Silencer.
He forced his limbs to move. He couldn't crawl; he had to scramble. He dragged himself forward on his elbows, ignoring the skin tearing on the rough concrete. The crawlspace was a dead end for air, looping back toward the main vertical drop—the garbage chute. It was a desperate, filthy route, but it led down.
ZZZZT.
A beam of pale light sliced through the darkness behind him. It didn't illuminate the tunnel; it violated it. The light hit a steel support strut and the metal didn't glow—it simply ceased to exist, dissolving into a shower of white pixels.
[System Warning: High-Density Starlight Detected.]
[Survival Probability: Dropping.]
Kaelen scrambled faster, panic overriding his exhaustion. They weren't checking corners. They were firing blindly down the shaft, sanitizing the area with deletion beams.
He reached the end of the crawlspace. A rusted grate looked down into a vertical abyss—the central waste disposal shaft for the Library. It smelled of rotting paper, ink, and something sweeter, like decayed flowers.
He kicked the grate. It rattled but held.
Thump. Thump.
The footsteps were faster now. Not running, just... accelerating. Gliding.
"Target located," the voice said. It sounded like it was right next to his ear.
Kaelen rolled onto his back and kicked the grate with both boots. He put every ounce of his fear into the strike.
The rusted hinges screamed and gave way.
Kaelen tumbled forward.
He expected the stomach-dropping sensation of freefall. He expected the rush of wind.
He didn't get it.
As he crossed the threshold of the grate, the world lagged.
He hung suspended in mid-air, his body frozen in a falling posture. The air around him turned grey and grainy. He saw dust motes hanging motionless, suspended in a beam of light that wasn't moving.
[Local Physics Error: Gravity Driver Not Found.]
[Loading Zone...]
For three seconds, Kaelen floated in the void of the shaft, staring up.
Through the broken grate above, a face appeared.
It was a porcelain mask, smooth and white, glowing with a faint inner light. The Silencer looked down at him. It didn't raise a hand to strike. It simply tilted its head, like a bird watching a worm fall off a leaf.
Then, the lag spike ended.
Gravity returned—not gradually, but all at once, with a vengeance.
Kaelen plummeted.
The wind roared in his ears, tearing the scream from his throat. The shaft was a blur of dark brick and rusty pipes, streaking past like a corrupted video file. He was falling too fast. The terminal velocity felt wrong, heavier, as if the air itself was pulling him down.
[Warning: Depth Threshold Exceeded.]
[Leaving Canon Reality.]
The air pressure spiked. His ears popped painfully. The smell of the shaft shifted instantly—the rot of paper vanished, replaced by a thick, humid scent of ozone and stagnant water.
The darkness below wasn't empty. It was solid.
He saw the bottom—or what passed for it—rushing up to meet him. It wasn't a floor. It was a surface. A black, oily mirror reflecting the nothingness above.
He tried to curl into a ball, to protect his head, but the G-force pinned his limbs.
I'm going to die.
He hit the surface.
It wasn't water. It didn't splash. It shattered.
Kaelen crashed through a layer of what felt like black glass, plunging into a viscous, freezing cold substance beneath. The impact knocked the wind out of him, driving the air from his lungs in a cloud of bubbles that glowed with a sickly green light.
He thrashed, panic seizing his muscles. The sludge was thick, coating his skin like tar. It tasted of metal and ancient blood. He kicked upward, his hand breaking the surface, clawing at the air.
He gasped, sucking in a lungful of humid, heavy air. He coughed, hacking up the black bile, and wiped the slime from his eyes.
He was alive. Broken, bruised, but alive.
He paddled frantically, his boots heavy with the muck, until his hand struck something solid. Rough stone. He hauled himself out of the sludge, collapsing onto a cold, hard surface.
He lay there for a long time, shivering, waiting for the Silencers to follow. Waiting for the beam of white light to erase him.
It didn't come.
Silence stretched out, heavy and oppressive. The only sound was the drip, drip, drip of the black liquid falling from his clothes.
Kaelen forced his eyes open.
He wasn't in the Library anymore.
He was in a cavern, but it wasn't natural. The ceiling was lost in shadows miles above. The "ground" he was lying on was a floating island of cracked stone, suspended over an endless sea of the black sludge he had fallen into.
But it was the ruins that stopped his heart.
Jutting out of the black sea were towers. Not the geometric, white-marble spires of Oakhaven. These were jagged, organic structures made of green stone that seemed to twist and grow like petrified trees. They were shattered, broken, leaning at impossible angles.
And they were floating.
Massive chunks of rock drifted lazily through the air, defying gravity. Waterfalls poured from floating islands into the void, turning into mist before they hit the sludge.
[Zone Entered: The Shattered Sect (Ruins)]
[Origin: Era 6 (The Celestial Ascension)]
[Status: DELETED.]
Kaelen stared at the blue box. Era 6.
Another number. Another impossible history.
He looked at his hand. The black sludge wasn't drying. It was soaking into his skin. Where it touched the blue veins of his corruption, the skin hissed.
[Corruption: 2.8%]
[Environmental Hazard: Stagnant Qi.]
He scrambled back from the edge of the island, wiping his hands on his tunic. The sludge stained the fabric permanently.
"Where am I?" he whispered. His voice didn't echo. The air felt thick, heavy, as if it was resisting the sound waves.
He stood up, his legs trembling. The island he was on was small, maybe fifty feet across. In the center stood a broken archway covered in moss that glowed with a faint, bioluminescent purple. The stone was carved with intricate, flowing script that looked nothing like the blocky text of the Canon.
It looked... elegant. And violent.
Kaelen approached the archway. At the base, half-buried in the dirt, was a skeleton.
It wasn't human. Not quite. The bones were translucent, like jade. And it was wearing robes that hadn't rotted, silk that shimmered even in the dark.
Kaelen knelt, his archivist instincts overriding his terror for a split second. He reached out to touch the silk.
[System Alert.]
[Lootable Object Detected.]
He hesitated. Looting the dead was a crime in Oakhaven. But Oakhaven was a mile above him, behind a barrier of lies and deletion beams.
He reached into the skeleton's robe. His fingers brushed against something cold and hard.
He pulled it out.
It was a stone. A small, hexagonal crystal the size of a walnut. It pulsed with a soft, rhythmic light—green, like a heartbeat.
[Item Identified: Spirit Stone (Low Grade)]
[Era: 6]
[Description: Solidified spiritual energy. Used as currency and fuel by the Cultivators of the Sixth Era.]
[Warning: Highly volatile in the presence of Starlight.]
Kaelen gripped the stone. It was warm. It felt alive.
A sound echoed across the cavern.
It wasn't the mechanical whir of the drone. It wasn't the static of the Silencers.
It was a roar.
It came from the darkness beyond the floating islands. A sound of pure, biological rage that shook the dust from the floating rocks. It sounded like a tiger, but magnified a hundred times, layered with the sound of wind howling through a canyon.
[Threat Detected.]
[Entity: Spirit Beast (Corrupted).]
Kaelen looked up. Far in the distance, soaring between the shattered towers, a shape moved against the gloom. It was long, serpentine, and moved through the air as if it were swimming.
It wasn't a glitch. It wasn't a machine.
It was a dragon. A rotting, skeletal dragon made of jade and shadow.
Kaelen backed away until his back hit the stone archway. He clutched the Spirit Stone to his chest, his breath coming in short, terrified gasps.
He had fallen out of the frying pan and into the graveyard of the gods.
"Okay," he whispered, his voice cracking. "Okay. Survival first. Analysis second."
He looked around the island. There was a bridge—a series of floating stepping stones leading toward a larger landmass where the ruins were denser. It was the only path forward.
He took a step toward the bridge.
The skeleton at his feet twitched.
Kaelen froze.
The jade skull turned. Empty sockets stared up at him. A voice, dry as old parchment, whispered into his mind—not through his ears, but directly into his thoughts.
"Junior... dare you disturb... the Patriarch's meditation?"
The bones began to rattle, knitting themselves back together.
Kaelen didn't wait for the zombie to stand up. He ran for the floating stones, jumping into the void, praying that the gravity glitch held long enough to catch him.