No one remembered when the world was gentle.
Not truly.
History claimed there had once been laws—moral ones, natural ones, even divine ones. Rules about life, about family, about what was sacred and what was forbidden. But in the present age, such words had lost all meaning. The world no longer ran on ethics. It ran on hunger, power, and survival.
This was a universe where a mother could kill her child, cook the flesh, and eat without hesitation—if the hunger was deep enough. A universe where love was a liability, mercy a disease, and weakness a death sentence.
A universe governed by a single, brutal truth:
Only the strong deserve to exist.
And even strength was never enough.
Long before the world became a wasteland, before the skies turned black and the oceans thickened like oil, something tore reality open.
No one knew what the entity was.
Not gods.
Not higher beings.
Not even the creatures that lived beyond dimensions.
All that was known was that it was traveling—moving through layers of existence far above mortal comprehension—when it ripped a hole through this universe by accident.
Not a tear.
Not a crack.
A wound.
For a fraction of a second, the universe was exposed to something it was never meant to touch.
And from that wound, Ink poured out.
Ink was not a substance.
It was not matter.
It was not energy as humans understood it.
Ink was a corrosive existence-force, a foreign principle that distorted reality itself.
It did not burn.
It did not freeze.
It did not explode.
It rewrote.
Everything it touched—space, time, flesh, thought, law—began to rot from the inside, as if existence itself was being erased and replaced with something wrong.
Planets dissolved into black wastelands.
Stars collapsed into ink-stained corpses.
Dimensions twisted, overlapping, bleeding into each other.
Even the universe fought back.
Reality healed the hole.
The wound closed.
The entity vanished.
But it was already too late.
The Ink had spread.
The planet that would later be called Earth did not explode.
It didn't shatter.
It survived.
Which was worse.
The skies turned permanently dark, as if stained by invisible oil. Cities corroded into skeletal ruins, their metal frames warped like melted bones. Oceans thickened into black tides where nothing swam the same way twice. Forests became graveyards of distorted trees, their branches twitching like veins.
And humanity…
Humanity was forced to adapt.
Or die.
Ink could not be absorbed.
It could not be controlled.
It could not be purified.
But some people—by accident, by will, by sheer refusal to collapse—resisted it.
Those who endured the corrosion without being erased awakened something.
Not blessings.
Not gifts.
Mutations of existence itself.
A man who survived intense thermal distortion gained heat resistance.
A woman who endured spatial tearing awakened teleportation.
A child who resisted neural corruption began hearing thoughts.
Abilities were not granted equally.
There was no system.
No ranks.
No levels.
No fairness.
Two people could stand in the same disaster.
One might awaken the ability to breathe underwater.
The other might awaken the power to erase mountains with a glance.
The difference was not talent.
It was how much of the Ink they survived.
The more corrosion the body and soul endured, the more violently reality rewrote them.
Some awakened small changes.
Others became walking disasters.
And some… became monsters pretending to be human.
Society collapsed in under a year.
Governments failed.
Religions fractured.
Nations dissolved into hunting grounds.
The strong built territories from corpses.
The weak became resources.
Cities turned into arenas where power was the only currency.
Plants mutated.
Some grew teeth.
Some learned to move.
Some learned to think.
Animals evolved into distorted predators, their bodies reshaped by Ink into unnatural forms—multiple eyes, shifting organs, intelligence that should not exist.
Even the air was wrong.
Breathing too deeply could drive a person mad.
Looking at the wrong thing for too long could erase memory.
Sleeping without protection could mean never waking up the same.
This was no longer a world.
It was a battlefield spanning dimensions.
Above the ruined planet, far beyond human perception, beings watched.
Not gods.
Not demons.
Things older than concepts like life and death.
Dimensional entities.
Multidimensional intelligences.
Universal predators.
Multiversal observers.
Some were drawn by the Ink.
Some were hunting its source.
Some simply saw this universe as an experiment that had gone wrong.
Mortals had become part of something far bigger than themselves.
They just didn't know it yet.
Ink continued to spread.
Slowly.
Relentlessly.
It distorted everything it touched—matter, energy, space, even higher dimensions. Entire timelines began to diverge unnaturally. Parallel realities overlapped like broken mirrors. Some universes bled into others, creating zones where multiple laws of physics existed at once.
This universe was no longer clean.
It was polluted.
A corrupted layer of reality.
A cosmic infection.
And at the center of this dying world, among ruins and monsters and twisted survivors…
A single human was born.
Not special.
Not chosen.
Not blessed.
Just alive.
In a universe where being alive was already a miracle.
And where surviving the Ink meant one thing:
Sooner or later, reality would decide what kind of monster you were allowed to become.