The grey residue from the void thing didn't vanish completely.
Rynn noticed it as he pushed himself upright—faint sparkles clinging to his clothes, his skin, the places where the lightning had touched. Most faded within seconds, but a few remained, sinking into him like water into sand. With each one that disappeared into his flesh, the emptiness in his chest filled slightly. Imperceptibly. But there.
[CHAOS CAPACITY: 0.3 UNITS]
The notification appeared unprompted, then vanished just as quickly.
Rynn stared at the space where the creature had been. The grey sparkles were gone now, absorbed or dissipated, but their meaning lingered. He could take from things he unmade. Could replenish himself from their remains. It made a terrible kind of sense—Chaos consuming Chaos, possibility feeding on possibility.
He filed the information away and started moving.
The side street was relatively clear. Most of the crowd had dispersed during the chaos—some running, some walking in that strange compelled march, some simply gone, replaced by empty space and unanswered questions. The creatures that had emerged from the dimensional tears seemed focused on the main thoroughfare, drawn by the concentration of people. Here, in the margins, Rynn had a chance.
He stuck to the alleys.
His city wasn't large—maybe two hundred thousand people, the kind of place that prided itself on being "safe" and "affordable" and other words that meant nothing when reality broke. He knew these streets. Had walked them at all hours during his worst insomnia, mapping the city in his head because maps were controllable in ways his life wasn't. That knowledge might save him now.
An alley connected to another alley. Another opened onto a service road. The service road ran behind a strip mall that Rynn had passed a thousand times—laundromat, dollar store, pawn shop, the pizza place that stayed open until 3 AM and asked no questions.
The pizza place's back door hung open.
Rynn paused. Listened. Heard nothing but distant screams and the omnipresent rumble of things breaking. The door swayed slightly in a breeze that smelled like smoke and something else. Something sweet. Chemical.
He went in.
The kitchen was empty. Not abandoned—a pot of sauce still simmered on the stove, its surface bubbling gently. A half-rolled pizza waited on the prep table, toppings scattered where the cook had dropped them mid-application. Phones rang somewhere in the front, their electronic bleats muffled by distance and the thicker sounds of destruction outside.
Rynn grabbed a knife from the magnetic strip on the wall. Not for fighting—he had no illusions about his ability to fight anything—but for utility. For cutting. For the illusion of control.
He moved through the kitchen, past the walk-in cooler, into the dining area.
Bodies.
Three of them. A family, from the looks of it—parents and a teenage girl, still seated in their booth, still holding menus, their eyes open and fixed on nothing. No wounds. No blood. Just... empty. Like someone had reached inside them and removed the part that made them people.
Rynn backed away slowly, his newly acquired knife held out like it could protect him from whatever did this.
His heel hit something that squeaked.
He looked down.
A toy. Small, plastic, shaped like a dinosaur. It lay on the floor beside the booth, knocked from some child's hand when... when whatever happened, happened. But there was no child. Just the toy, and the family, and the silence that pressed against Rynn's ears like water pressure.
He left through the front.
The street outside was worse.
More bodies. Dozens of them, scattered across the pavement like leaves. Some looked peaceful—seated, standing, frozen mid-conversation. Others looked like they'd tried to run, their final moments etched into frozen expressions of terror. All of them empty. All of them hollowed out in ways Rynn couldn't understand.
[Soul Drain]
The notification appeared, clinical and calm.
[Localized soul drain detected. Cause: Wish Incompatibility. Subjects 4382-4415 wished for concepts incompatible with mortal physiology. System compensated by converting subjects to compatible states. Conversion failed. Subjects terminated.]
Rynn read the words twice before they made sense.
Wished for concepts incompatible with mortal physiology.
Someone had wished for something a human body couldn't contain. Someone else had wished for something a human mind couldn't process. And the System, in its infinite wisdom, had tried to make it work anyway. Had converted them. Had failed.
Had left them empty.
"System," Rynn said, his voice flat. "Are you sentient?"
No response.
"Can you hear me?"
Nothing.
"Then what the hell are you?"
The notifications that appeared weren't answers. They were status updates, warnings, recommendations—the same clinical text that had been following him since the wish. The System didn't respond to questions. It only reported.
Rynn moved on.
He passed a man who'd wished for flight and grown wings—actual wings, feather and bone, sprouting from his shoulder blades. They'd killed him, probably. The angle of his neck suggested he'd fallen from somewhere high, his new anatomy unable to compensate for physics he didn't understand.
He passed a woman who'd wished for wealth and gotten it—literally gotten it, her skin turned to gold, her body a statue worth millions and just as dead.
He passed a child who'd wished for a puppy and now sat beside something that might have been a dog if dogs had three heads and teeth in layers. The child was laughing. The creature was eating something Rynn chose not to examine.
He kept walking.
The sun climbed higher, invisible behind the bleeding sky. The sounds of destruction continued—screams, crashes, the occasional explosion that rattled windows blocks away. But Rynn noticed them less now. Not because they'd stopped, but because his mind had started filtering. Prioritizing. Focusing on survival instead of horror.
It was a useful adaptation. He wondered how long it would last.
By mid-afternoon, he'd made it to the city's edge.
The suburbs stretched before him, houses spaced neatly on manicured lawns, the kind of place people moved to escape the problems of the city. The kind of place where problems weren't supposed to happen. The lawns were empty now. The houses were dark. And beyond them, at the horizon, something rose that hadn't been there this morning.
A tower.
No—not a tower. A structure, organic and impossible, spiraling into the bleeding sky like a tree grown from nightmare seeds. Its surface shifted as Rynn watched, colors sliding across it that didn't exist in normal light. Around its base, smaller structures clustered—buildings that weren't buildings, shapes that weren't shapes, all of them wrong in ways that made his eyes water.
[Dimensional Anchor Detected]
[Local reality now linked to Chain Network]
[Earth designation: NeutralPoint 447-Alpha]
[Awakening Phase: 37% complete]
[Estimated time to full integration: 14 hours]
Fourteen hours. In fourteen hours, Earth would be fully connected to whatever network this was. To other planets, other dimensions, other realities where wishes worked differently and creatures like the void thing were just the beginning.
Rynn found a house at the subdivision's edge. It looked empty—no lights, no movement, the front door standing open like its occupants had left in a hurry. He approached carefully, knife ready, listening for anything that might be waiting inside.
Nothing.
The house was a tomb. Family photos on the walls. A half-finished puzzle on the coffee table. Dishes in the sink, still wet. But no people. No bodies. No sign of struggle. Just... absence.
He checked each room. Kitchen, living room, bathroom, two bedrooms. The second bedroom had toys scattered across the floor, a child's bed with a dinosaur comforter, a nightlight shaped like the moon. Empty. The parents' room had clothes laid out for the next day, a book on the nightstand with the page turned down, a glass of water beside it. Empty.
Rynn sat on the edge of the unfamiliar bed and tried to process the last twelve hours.
He'd woken up normal. Poor, anxious, directionless, but normal. Now the sky was bleeding, the city was dying, and he had a serpent of pure Chaos coiled in his chest that occasionally spat grey lightning at void monsters. He'd watched a man burn to death and felt grateful for it. He'd watched a woman lose herself to beauty and somehow helped her find her way back. He'd absorbed the remains of a creature that shouldn't exist and felt stronger for it.
None of this was normal.
None of this would ever be normal again.
[CHAOS CAPACITY: 0.8 UNITS]
[CHAOS CONTROL: 0.4%]
[RECOMMENDATION: REST]
The System, at least, had priorities.
Rynn lay back on the unfamiliar bed. The ceiling was white. Normal. Boring. Someone had painted it recently—he could see the slight variation in texture where roller strokes overlapped. Small details. Controllable details. Things that made sense in a world that had stopped making sense.
He closed his eyes.
The serpent stirred, then settled. The sounds of destruction continued outside, muffled by walls and distance. And Rynn Sabre, who had wished to manipulate Chaos, slept.
---
He woke to darkness and the smell of smoke.
Not the clean smoke of a campfire—the thick, chemical smoke of things burning that shouldn't burn. Plastic. Rubber. The treated wood of houses that had stood for decades and would never stand again.
Rynn sat up fast, knife in hand before his brain fully engaged.
The room was dark, but not completely. Through the window, the bleeding sky cast a dim, wrong-colored glow—like sunset filtered through stained glass, except the glass was reality and the sunset was apocalypse. By that light, he could see the room was still empty. Still undisturbed.
He checked the System's clock function, which had appeared when he thought about time.
[22:47 Local Time]
[Awakening Phase: 89% complete]
[Estimated time to full integration: 1 hour, 13 minutes]
He'd slept through most of it. Through the night, through the worst of the chaos, through whatever had happened while he was unconscious. He should feel guilty about that, probably. Should feel like he'd abandoned the world to its fate while he rested.
He didn't.
Survival required rest. The System had recommended it, and the System, for all its clinical coldness, seemed to know what it was talking about. Besides, there was nothing he could have done. One man with a knife and 0.8 units of uncontrollable Chaos wasn't going to save anyone.
[CHAOS CAPACITY: 1.4 UNITS]
[CHAOS CONTROL: 0.4%]
The rest had helped. The slow accumulation of ambient Chaos—from the void thing's remains, from the general breakdown of reality around him—had refilled his reserves. He still couldn't control it, still had less than half a percent mastery, but at least he wasn't empty.
He stood, stretched, checked the knife. Still there. Still sharp.
The house creaked around him, settling into its emptiness. Outside, the screaming had stopped. That was almost worse than the screaming—the silence that followed, thick and expectant, like the world holding its breath.
Rynn moved to the window.
The subdivision was dark. No lights in any of the houses, no movement on the streets. The organic tower still rose at the horizon, but it had changed during the night—grown smaller, somehow. Tighter. More focused. As if it was preparing for something.
[Dimensional Anchor: Finalizing]
[Network Connection: Establishing]
[Earth Integration: 93% complete]
Numbers ticked upward as he watched. 94%. 95%. The air felt different now—thicker, charged, like the moment before a thunderstorm breaks. 96%. 97%. The sky rippled, the bleeding light intensifying. 98%. 99%.
100%.
The world lurched.
Rynn grabbed the windowsill as vertigo swept through him. For one endless moment, everything existed simultaneously—the house, the subdivision, the city, but also a thousand other places layered on top of them. Mountains of crystal. Oceans of fire. Cities built from light. Forests where the trees moved and watched and hungered.
Then it passed.
The sky was still bleeding. The organic tower still stood. But the world felt connected now. Wired into something larger. Rynn could sense it, somehow—the vast network of planets and dimensions and planes that Earth had just joined. Could feel the weight of them pressing against reality, waiting to be explored or exploited or destroyed.
[Integration Complete]
[Welcome to the Chain, Earth]
[Your world is now connected to 1,247 other awakened planets]
[Your world is now accessible from 17,432 dimensional planes]
[Your world is now classified as a Tier 0 Resource Zone]
[All humans have been evaluated and ranked]
[All humans have been assigned classifications]
[All humans have been integrated into the System framework]
[Check your status?]
Rynn blinked at the notification. A new option. Before, the System had only reported. Now it was offering a choice.
"Yes," he said. "Check status."
The display that appeared was more detailed than anything he'd seen.
[NAME: Rynn Sabre]
[AGE: 26]
[SPECIES: Human (Baseline)]
[AFFINITY: Chaos (Primordial) - UNIQUE]
[CLASSIFICATION: Unclassified]
[TIER: 0 (Mortal)]
[STATUS: Active]
[CHAOS CAPACITY: 1.4/??? Units]
[CHAOS CONTROL: 0.4%]
[ABILITIES: None]
[SKILLS: None]
[TECHNIQUES: None]
[EQUIPMENT: Kitchen Knife (Ordinary)]
Below the status, additional information appeared.
[Due to unique Affinity, standard ranking systems do not apply]
[Due to unique Affinity, standard ability frameworks cannot be used]
[Due to unique Affinity, standard advancement paths are unavailable]
[Recommendation: Develop personal mastery through experimentation]
[Recommendation: Avoid direct combat until Chaos Control exceeds 5%]
[Recommendation: Locate and consume Chaos-aligned resources to increase Capacity]
[Warning: Chaos Affinity is highly desirable to certain entities]
[Warning: Chaos Affinity will be detected by any entity with Tier 5+ perception]
[Warning: Chaos Affinity may attract unwanted attention from higher-dimensional powers]
Rynn read through it all twice. The warnings were concerning—"unwanted attention from higher-dimensional powers" sounded exactly like the kind of problem he didn't need. But the recommendations gave him direction. Develop mastery. Find resources. Avoid combat.
Simple. Clear. Achievable.
For the first time since the wish, he had a plan.
He turned from the window, knife in hand, and walked out of the empty house into the integrated world.
The street was no longer empty.
A man stood in the middle of the road, facing away from Rynn. He was tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in clothes that hadn't come from any store Rynn knew—dark fabric that seemed to absorb light, cut in styles that suggested another world entirely. In his hand, he held a weapon that glowed faintly blue.
He turned as Rynn approached.
His face was human. Young, maybe thirty, with sharp features and eyes the color of old gold. He looked at Rynn the way a person looks at something interesting they've found on the ground.
"You're the one," he said. His voice was calm. Accented, but not with anything Rynn recognized. "The anomaly. The one the System can't classify."
Rynn stopped walking. Knife ready. Heart pounding.
"Who are you?"
The man smiled. It wasn't a friendly expression.
"My name is Kaelen. I'm from a planet called Verathis. We've been part of the Chain for three thousand years." He tilted his head, studying Rynn with those golden eyes. "And you, Chaos-bearer, are the most interesting thing I've found in a century of exploration."
He stepped forward, and the blue weapon in his hand began to glow brighter.
"Don't run," he said. "I'd really rather not have to chase you."
Rynn thought, "Run!"
---
A lot of self-explanation here.... Heheheheh