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Volume 01 | Chapter 02: Echoes of the Iron Flesh
When the fall finally ended, there was no sound. No sickening crunch of bone, no dull thud against the mud—nothing. It was as if Elias Arkham had been spat out of a cosmic void and thrust into an entirely different dimension. As the world stabilized, he found himself sprawled on the muddy banks of the Pashur River. But this was no ordinary silt; it was a viscous, midnight-blue fluid that reeked of overheated circuits and toxic ozone.
As Elias tried to sit up, a harsh, metallic grinding sound echoed from the joints of his wrists and elbows. He clamped his teeth together in agony. The pain was no longer confined to the tearing of muscle; it felt as if someone had poured molten lead directly into his marrow. He stared at his hands. His skin was a pallid grey, like the flesh of a corpse, but beneath that surface, a brilliant blue geometric pattern pulsed. His veins were no longer simple vessels for blood; they had become living fiber-optic cables, surging with billions of terabytes of data every second.
The 'Laptop'—that digital entity fused to his nervous system—was now humming in perfect synchronization with his heartbeat. He realized with a jolt that his brain was no longer just an organ of thought; it was a massive processor. Whenever he looked around, a digital overlay flickered across his retinas. He no longer saw trees as flora; he saw their carbon density, molecular structure, and their capacity to receive signals from Global-Connect.
With trembling hands, he pulled Arian's diary from his jacket. The chilling message on the first page—"Wake it. Or destroy it"—throbbed in his mind like a living wound. As he placed his blue-tinted fingers on the yellowed parchment, a sharp static erupted at the base of his skull. It wasn't mechanical; it was the echo of every stroke of Arian's pen from three centuries ago vibrating through Elias's nerves. Arian's preserved consciousness resonated from within his very bones:
> "The year is 1726. I know you are confused, my son. You think you have arrived in Hell. You are wrong. You have spent your life within the illusions of Hell; only now are you seeing the hideous truth behind the veil. The universe does not run on gears and clockwork; it moves on 'Rhythm' and frequency. This blue rot is not limited to my flesh; it is a primordial shriek rising from the depths of the Earth itself."
>
Elias felt the blue veins in his body move of their own accord. Stepping forward, he spotted a rusted, abandoned boat half-sunken in the sludge. The moment Elias touched it, the impossible happened. Threads of blue Aether slithered from his fingertips like glowing serpents, burrowing into the rotted wood. The boat let out a roar like a primitive beast. The rusted iron turned translucent as glass before solidifying into a living black metal. Without an engine, the vessel cut through the river water at terminal velocity, carrying him toward the outskirts of Mongla Port. This was not science; it was the ancient Arkham Alchemy that erased the boundaries between matter and energy.
Upon reaching the station, Elias was met with a grotesque paradox. To his mechanical eyes, the sky was shattered glass, leaking Aether. A red warning flashed on his retina: Visual Overlay: Active. He watched as invisible blue waves descended from the sky like silk threads, striking the nerves of every person in the station.
The scene on the platform was harrowing. Hundreds of passengers stood waiting—reading newspapers, drinking tea, chatting. But through his 'Arkham Eyes,' Elias saw the truth. These people were rotting. Their skin hung in tatters; flesh had sloughed off cheeks and foreheads to reveal bare bone. Their clothes were filthy, matted with dried blood. Yet, behind every one of their ears, fused to the skin, was a small blue chip.
Global-Connect had lowered a massive Augmented Reality veil from the sky. These people saw themselves as healthy, beautiful citizens of a bright future. They inhaled the stench of putrefying flesh, but their brains translated it into the scent of expensive French perfume. They laughed, but in reality, their jaws were snapping like rusted hinges.
Elias pushed through the crowd, the sharp scent of burnt iron and ozone trailing behind him, yet no one noticed. Among these mesmerized corpses, he felt like a lonely planet. Suddenly, an elderly porter—Karim Chacha—approached him. One of the man's eye sockets was empty, with white maggots crawling out of the void. Yet, he smiled a hideous, mechanical grin.
"Son, your veins are bulging and blue! What has the sun done to you?"
Hearing the man's regional Bengali dialect sent Elias into a trance. His neural link activated instantly. Without effort, he understood every word as a digital translation in his mind. But a greater shock followed. When he looked at his own metallic chest, he saw he was bare, yet the chip in Karim Chacha's brain projected a holographic image of a fine blue silk shirt onto Elias's frame.
Elias tried to speak, and his voice came out as a melodic, mechanical whistle: "I am fine, Uncle. Has the Mongla Express arrived?"
"Aye, it's just pulling in!" Karim Chacha clapped his skeletal hands in delight. "Thanks to Global-Connect, there are no more delays. Look, what a beautiful train! A chariot from Heaven!"
The entity pulled into Platform 3. While the porter saw a 'Chariot from Heaven,' Elias saw its true form. It was no train. It was a massive, infinite bio-mechanical entity. It had no wheels. Instead, thousands of tiny mechanical legs gripped the rails, moving like a gargantuan centipede. The carriages were not steel but made of a translucent, sticky membrane, through which the skeletons of the passengers inside could be seen hanging like fuel cells.
The engine didn't emit black smoke; it released a mechanical wail that sounded like human lamentation. The word GLOBAL-CONNECT was embossed on the side, but in Elias's eyes, fresh blood leaked from the letters. The train bit into the molecules of the air as it surged forward. Mongla faded behind them—a massive digital graveyard bathed in blue light.
As Elias stepped toward the dark, slippery door of the train, someone grabbed his hand. The touch was ice-cold, yet it held the throb of life. Elias spun around.
A girl. She couldn't have been more than twenty-three. She wore a Global-Connect lab coat, torn in several places. Her hair was disheveled, and dark circles shadowed her eyes, but her gaze was clear—and filled with terror. Most importantly, there was no blue chip behind her ear. She was somehow free from the veil.
"Do you see it too?" she whispered, her voice trembling. "The crack in the sky... and the train... it has no wheels. It's alive!"
He noticed her digital watch spinning backward in his presence. The display didn't show the time; it simply blinked a single word: HELP. She had likely never seen someone whose body glowed with blue light, but in this moment, Elias was her only refuge.
Elias reached out and pulled her inside. As her skin touched his, she recoiled—Elias's hand wasn't skin; it felt like a shard of frozen steel. Though Elias spoke, his neural link broke the language barrier, making his voice clear to her.
"Get inside," Elias said, his voice sounding like a whistle of wind. "If you stay on the platform, you'll become food. Inside this train, at least we can stay awake."
03:14 AM. As the train roared into the air like a mechanical serpent, Elias collapsed onto the metallic floor of the carriage. The interior was bizarre. The seats were made of a soft organic substance resembling human muscle. The girl—Sara—tried to open her laptop, but the screen only displayed a blood-red message: ERROR: Reality Synch Failed.
Elias stared out the window at the horizon. On the map inside his brain, the coordinates for Tibet glowed like a North Star. He realized he was no longer just Elias—he was a living weapon of Arian Arkham's three-hundred-year-old revenge. His retinas showed the train's speed exceeding 450 km/h, yet the world outside seemed frozen.
Suddenly, a low vibration hummed through the carriage. Slender mechanical vines began to descend from the ceiling toward the passengers. The mesmerized travelers embraced them with affection, as if feeling the touch of a loved one. But Elias saw the truth: the vines were burrowing directly into the passengers' spines, siphoning their life force.
"What are they doing?" Sara shrieked, huddling in a corner.
Elias stood up, the blue veins in his arms burning like fire. "They are refreshing their servers," Elias said calmly. "These people aren't people anymore, Sara. They are memory banks. Global-Connect uses their memories to fuel the engine."
Sara recoiled in horror. Elias placed his hand on the carriage wall. He could feel every circuit, every vessel of the train. With a surge of will, he forced the vines away from their section.
03:15 AM. Elias noticed his digital watch was stuck at 03:14. Time had paused, yet the cosmic rot was consuming the world. The train screamed through the darkness, heading North. The white peak of the Himalayas was no longer a distant dream.
Elias saw his reflection in the window glass. His pupils were no longer black; they were swirling with blue mists of infinite nebulae. He knew that by the end of this journey, he might never return as a man. But to stop this mechanical decay, he had to walk to the very end of this Hell.
As the train approached the misty border of Nepal, a voice crackled through the carriage speakers. It wasn't a mechanical command. It was the voice of Elias's father—the man who had vanished twenty years ago.
"Elias... come to Carriage Number 07. A gift is waiting for you... one that can delete the Global-Connect servers themselves."