The darkness inside the fissure smelled of ancient dust and copper.
Aryan lay flat on his back, his chest rising and falling in shallow, jagged gasps. Every breath sent a spike of agony through his left side.
Crack.
Click-clack.
Outside, the muffled screams of his former team had ceased. The Obsidian Ants were efficient. They didn't play with their food; they dismantled it.
Aryan pressed his hand against his ribs. The skin was hot, swollen.
'Broken,' he diagnosed, his mind detaching from the pain. 'One rib, maybe two. If I cough, I might puncture a lung.'
He didn't panic. Panic burns oxygen. Panic makes you loud.
He slowly sat up, gritting his teeth until his jaw ached. He leaned against the cold stone wall of the small cavern. It was a dead end, perhaps three meters wide, damp and silent.
He was alive.
But in this world, "alive" was a temporary state. Without medicine, without food, and with internal bleeding, he was just a corpse that hadn't stopped moving yet.
He reached into his pocket. His fingers brushed against the warm, hard surface of the Beast Core.
It was the size of a marble, pulsating with a faint, milky light. It was the only reason he had betrayed them. The only reason he was currently bleeding in a hole instead of sleeping in a bed.
Was it worth it?
'Survival isn't about worth,' Aryan thought, wiping blood from his lip. 'It's about result.'
He needed to know where he stood. He needed to see the truth.
"System," he whispered.
The air in front of him shimmered. The blue light was the only illumination in the cave. It wasn't the standard, generic status screen he had seen in textbooks. It was... different.
Unstable. Glitching slightly at the edges.
[ SYSTEM RECORD ]
[ Name: Aryan ]
[ Rank: F (Evolving) ]
[ Threat Classification: Unregistered ]
[ Control Stability: 92% ]
[ Soul Load: 1% ]
[ Status: Anomaly detected... Observation ongoing ]
[ NO GUIDANCE AVAILABLE ]
Aryan stared at the numbers.
Rank F (Evolving).
That was new. Usually, F-Rank was a dead end. People stayed F-Rank until they died.
"Evolving" suggested a path forward, but the System offered no map.
Control Stability: 92%.
He didn't know what that meant. Was it his sanity? His control over his own body? Or something else?
Soul Load: 1%.
This was the most confusing metric. Most Hunters had "Mana Capacity." Aryan had "Soul Load."
And finally: [ NO GUIDANCE AVAILABLE ]
The System had abandoned him. It wasn't there to help him level up. It was there to watch him, like a scientist watching bacteria in a petri dish.
'Unregistered...'
The voice in his head laughed. It wasn't a happy sound. It was the sound of a king reading a jester's bad joke.
'They don't know what I am. They don't know what we are. Good. Being known is the first step to being controlled.'
Aryan ignored the voice. He focused on the Beast Core in his hand.
Standard protocol said: Sell the core. Buy credits. Buy a Gene-Injection.
But he was stuck in a hole. There were no shops here.
If he didn't heal, the infection or the blood loss would kill him before morning.
He looked at the core. He looked at the System screen.
[ Status: Anomaly detected ]
"If I'm already an anomaly," Aryan muttered, his voice dry, "then standard rules don't apply."
He didn't know if it would work. Humans couldn't absorb Beast Cores directly—the raw energy usually caused organ failure. It was suicide.
But dying slowly was also suicide.
'I can't afford a clean death,' he thought.
He brought the glowing marble to his lips.
'Do it,' The King whispered. 'Do not chew. Swallow it whole. Let it burn. Pain is just the body re-wiring itself.'
Aryan didn't hesitate. He threw the core into his mouth and swallowed.
For three seconds, nothing happened.
Then, his stomach exploded.
"Guh-!"
Aryan curled into a ball, clutching his abdomen. It didn't feel like digestion. It felt like he had swallowed a live coal. The heat traveled from his stomach to his veins, boiling his blood.
His vision went white.
His veins bulged against his skin, turning black.
[ ALERT ]
[ Foreign Energy Detected ]
[ Assimilation Attempt... 12% ]
He gagged, bile rising in his throat, but he clamped his hand over his mouth. He refused to vomit it out.
'Absorb it...' he commanded his own body. 'Take it.'
The pain shifted. It moved to his ribs.
Snap. Crack.
His bones weren't breaking; they were vibrating. The raw energy was brute-forcing the healing process. It wasn't gentle medical magic. It was aggressive cellular reconstruction.
Then, the world tilted.
Not physically.
Gravity seemed to shift to the right. A wave of vertigo hit him so hard he grabbed the floor to stop from falling, even though he was already lying down.
[ Control Stability: 91%... 89% ]
The number on the screen dropped.
And as it dropped, the presence in his mind grew heavier. Before, The King was a shadow. Now...
Now it felt like an invisible figure was standing directly behind him, breathing down his neck. The wall between his mind and the entity had thinned.
'Yes... surrender the order. Embrace the chaos.'
"Shut... up," Aryan hissed through clenched teeth.
He forced his breathing to stabilize. He visualized the energy not as a fire, but as a tool. A hammer fixing the cracks in his frame.
Slowly, agonizingly, the heat began to fade.
Aryan lay panting on the cold floor. He was drenched in sweat.
He touched his left side. The sharp, stabbing pain of the broken ribs was gone, replaced by a dull, throbbing ache. Not fully healed, but functional.
He checked the System again.
[ SYSTEM UPDATE ]
[ Attributes Increased: Constitution +2, Strength +1 ]
[ Soul Load: 1% ➔ 1.2% ]
[ Control Stability: 89% ]
He had survived. He had eaten raw power and lived.
But the cost was clear. Control Stability: 89%.
Whatever lived inside him... it had just taken a little more territory.
Aryan stood up, testing his limbs. He felt lighter. Stronger. The hunger in his stomach was gone, replaced by a strange, cold emptiness.
He looked toward the darkness at the back of the cave.
Now that his own heartbeat wasn't deafening him, he could hear something else.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Water?
No. The rhythm was too irregular.
Aryan stood up, grabbing the loose rock he had used to kill the wolf. He didn't have a torch, but his eyes seemed to have adjusted to the gloom. The "Evolution" was enhancing his night vision.
He walked deeper into the cave.
Ten steps in, the air grew colder.
Twenty steps in, he saw it.
It wasn't a water source.
It was a corpse.
An old skeleton, clad in rags that might have once been tactical armor, sitting against the wall. The armor style was obsolete—early Earth designs from the First Awakening era, decades ago.
And in its lap, resting on the dusty bones of its hands, was a book.
Not a digital tablet. Not a hologram.
A physical, leather-bound book.
In a universe of Systems and digital interfaces, paper was rare. Paper was ancient.
Aryan approached cautiously. He checked the corners for traps.
'No tripwires. No pressure plates.'
He reached out and took the book. The leather was cold, cracking under his touch.
He opened the first page.
His eyes narrowed.
The script.
It wasn't Universal Common. It wasn't Alien Runes.
It was Devanagari (Hindi).
A survivor from Earth. Someone who had been here before him. And had died here alone.
The handwriting was jagged, frantic, as if written by a shaking hand.
Entry 1:
"The System lies."
Entry 2:
"The Safe Zone is not safe. It is a farm. And we... we are the crops."
Aryan's blood ran cold. He looked back at the cave entrance. The concept of "Safe Zones"—the only sanctuaries humanity had in this universe—was the foundation of their hope. If they were farms... then who was the farmer?
He turned the page.
Entry 3:
"If you are reading this... The King must have awakened. Do not run. Control him. Or he will eat you. He is not a skill. He is a curse."
Aryan slammed the book shut.
The silence in the cave suddenly felt very loud. The hair on the back of his neck stood up.
'Interesting,' The King mused, his voice sounding horrifyingly clear, as if he were whispering directly into Aryan's ear. 'It seems we have a fan.'
Aryan gripped the book tighter. "You knew him?"
'I know many. They come. They break. They die. He was weak because he chose morals over survival. He tried to save others.'
The spectral voice chuckled darkly.
'Tell me, Aryan. Will you be different? Or will your skeleton sit next to his?'
Aryan didn't answer. He looked at the skeleton, then at the book—The Kingfall Codex—in his hand.
He stripped the skeleton of a small pouch attached to its belt. Inside, he found a rusted compass and a small, sealed vial of blue liquid—a low-grade Antidote.
Practical loot. No sentimentality.
"I won't be different," Aryan whispered, pocketing the Codex and the loot. "I'll be worse."
He turned away from the dead man and walked back toward the entrance.
The rain outside had stopped, but the forest was not quiet. It was screaming with life.
The world was hostile. The System was a lie.
And the thing inside him was waiting for him to slip.
Aryan stepped out of the cave.