The Oakhaven market was less a place of commerce and more a battlefield of desperation. It was a sprawling labyrinth of tattered tents, mud-slicked pathways, and makeshift stalls constructed from the bones of massive, low-tier magical beasts. The air here was a suffocating miasma—a blend of roasting rat meat, stale blood, and the sharp, ozone tang of unrefined beast cores.
Kaelen moved through the chaotic throng like a phantom. He kept his head down, his shoulders hunched just enough to avoid drawing the attention of the heavily armed mercenaries who swaggered through the crowds. In a world governed by mana, a Null was invisible until they became convenient prey.
He clutched the small leather pouch of copper coins tightly within the ragged pocket of his coat. Five pounds of iron ore. That was his objective.
He navigated past a slaver's auction block, where men and women with shattered mana pathways were being sold for pennies to work in the lethal Abyssal Coal Mines. He didn't look up. Sympathy was an emotion he could not afford; it cost calories, and it cost focus.
He finally reached the far end of the market, where the heat of makeshift furnaces combated the morning chill. A bloated man with grease-stained skin and a patchy beard sat behind a pile of jagged, dull gray rocks. This was Gorm, a low-level merchant who dealt in scrap and unrefined ores.
"Five pounds of raw iron ore," Kaelen said, his voice flat, devoid of any inflection. He placed three dull copper coins on the wooden counter.
Gorm looked up from picking his yellowed teeth with a rusted nail. His eyes, swimming in fat, locked onto Kaelen. A cruel, predatory smirk stretched across his face. Gorm was unawakened, but he had connections with the local gangs. To him, Kaelen was nothing more than a stray dog.
"Three coppers?" Gorm sneered, his voice thick with phlegm. "Price went up, Null-trash. Five coppers for five pounds. Or you can take three pounds and bugger off."
Kaelen didn't blink. He knew the market rates. The Empire's tax collectors hadn't visited Oakhaven in six months, and there had been no recent beast tides to disrupt the mining routes. Gorm was lying, trying to squeeze a defect.
"Three coppers for five pounds," Kaelen repeated, his tone unchanged. "The 'Blood Hawks' took over the eastern quarry two days ago. They are flooding the market with cheap ore to launder their dirty money. The actual value is two coppers. I am giving you three because Old Man Vance prefers your cut. Don't push your luck, Gorm."
Gorm's smirk vanished, replaced by a flash of genuine surprise, followed quickly by anger. How did a worthless slum rat know about the internal gang politics of Oakhaven? The merchant leaned forward, his massive hands slamming onto the wooden counter.
"Listen here, you little shit—"
Kaelen didn't step back. He simply shifted his weight, his perfectly balanced center of gravity adjusting. His dark gray eyes locked onto Gorm's. There was no mana in Kaelen's gaze, no overwhelming pressure like the silver-haired maiden from the carriage. Instead, there was something much worse. It was the dead, hollow stare of someone who had dissected corpses to learn anatomy.
"If you yell," Kaelen whispered, leaning in slightly, "the Guild guards at the corner will look over. They will see you overcharging for Blood Hawk smuggled goods. They will confiscate your stall. And the Hawks will skin you alive for drawing attention to their operation."
Silence hung heavily between them, broken only by the crackle of a nearby fire. Gorm swallowed hard, a bead of greasy sweat rolling down his temple. He recognized the look in the boy's eyes. It wasn't bravery; it was absolute, calculated ruthlessness.
With a foul curse muttered under his breath, Gorm violently shoved a burlap sack filled with five pounds of jagged iron ore across the counter. He snatched the three coppers. "Take it and rot, you cursed freak."
Kaelen grabbed the sack, hoisted it onto his bruised shoulder without a flinch, and melted back into the crowd.
The journey back to Vance's forge required passing through the 'Narrows'—a claustrophobic stretch of alleyways where the sun never truly reached the ground. It was the territory of cutthroats and addicts hooked on 'Dream-Dust', a highly illegal, crushed version of hallucinogenic plant cores.
Kaelen kept his senses hyper-tuned. His lack of mana meant he couldn't sense killing intent through aura, so he had to rely on the physical world: the shifting of shadows, the squelch of a boot in the mud, the sudden cessation of rats squeaking.
Halfway through the Narrows, he stopped.
Three figures stepped out from behind a pile of rotting crates, blocking his path. Two more dropped down from a low hanging roof behind him. Five in total. They were gaunt, their eyes bloodshot and twitching—Dream-Dust addicts. But more dangerously, the leader of the group, a man with a jagged scar across his throat, possessed a faint, sickly red aura.
Early Rank 1: Aura Initiate. A failed cultivator, likely cast out from a minor sect, now reduced to robbing slum-dwellers to feed his addiction.
"Leave the sack, kid," the scarred man rasped, drawing a rusted, serrated dagger. The red aura around his blade made the metal hum faintly. "And any coin you got. Do it quick, and I might let you keep your kidneys."
Kaelen slowly lowered the sack of iron ore to the muddy ground. He didn't speak. He didn't beg. He simply slipped his right hand into the deep pocket of his coat. His fingers wrapped around the smooth, bone-carved handle of a six-inch shiv he had crafted from the femur of a Horned Boar.
"Get him," the leader spat.
Two of the unawakened addicts lunged at Kaelen from the front, wielding heavy wooden clubs.
In a world of magic, people relied on their cores. They fought with overwhelming force and flashy techniques. Kaelen, having nothing, had spent the last four years studying the biomechanics of the human body. He didn't need to overpower them; he just needed to break the machine.
Kaelen didn't retreat. He exploded forward.
His explosive acceleration, born from ten thousand daily swings of a heavy iron sword, caught the first addict off guard. Before the man could swing his club, Kaelen slipped inside his guard. With surgical precision, Kaelen drove the toe of his heavy leather boot directly into the man's kneecap.
CRACK.
The sickening sound of snapping bone echoed in the narrow alley. The man screamed, his leg bending backward at a grotesque angle. Kaelen used the falling man as a shield, shoving him into the second attacker. As they collided, Kaelen pivoted seamlessly, drawing the bone shiv from his pocket in a fluid, deadly motion.
The two men behind him rushed in. Kaelen dropped into a low crouch, dodging a wild knife swing. He drove his bone shiv upward, entirely bypassing armor or thick clothing, directly into the soft, unarmored armpit of the third attacker—severing the axillary artery.
Blood sprayed in a hot, dark arc. The man dropped his weapon, clutching his armpit as he bled out in seconds.
Three down in less than four seconds.
The scarred leader, realizing this was no ordinary Null, roared in fury. His red aura flared, granting him enhanced speed and strength. He lunged, his serrated dagger aiming straight for Kaelen's heart.
Fast, Kaelen thought. Too fast for my eyes to track perfectly.
But Kaelen didn't try to block. A Rank 0 attempting to block a mana-infused strike from a Rank 1 would result in shattered bones. Instead, Kaelen sacrificed his body to win.
He twisted his torso at the very last microsecond. The serrated dagger missed his heart but plunged deep into his left shoulder, tearing through muscle and scraping against the collarbone. Pain, white-hot and blinding, flared through Kaelen's nervous system.
He didn't scream. He didn't flinch. He used the moment the blade was stuck in his flesh to act.
With his right hand, Kaelen drove the bone shiv directly into the scarred man's throat, right through his vocal cords and out the back of his neck.
The red aura instantly sputtered and died. The leader's eyes went wide with shock and horror as he choked on his own blood. Kaelen violently twisted the shiv, then yanked it out, stepping back as the man collapsed into the mud, convulsing his last.
The final addict, seeing his mana-wielding leader butchered like a pig in less than ten seconds, dropped his club and ran screaming into the darkness.
Kaelen stood alone in the alley, surrounded by groaning and dying men. The freezing rain began to fall, washing the blood from his hands. He reached up, gripped the handle of the serrated dagger still lodged in his left shoulder, and with a sharp exhale, ripped it out.
A fresh torrent of blood soaked his coat. He quickly applied pressure with a piece of torn fabric from one of the dead men, picked up his sack of iron ore, and continued his walk to the forge.
He felt no remorse. In Eldoria, the weak were meat, and the strong ate. Kaelen simply refused to be meat.
By the time Kaelen returned to his shack, it was past midnight. He had delivered the ore to Vance, received his meager day's wage, and spent two coppers on a loaf of stale, rock-hard bread.
His shack was barely standing. The roof leaked, the wooden walls were rotting, and the wind howled through the cracks. It was located at the very edge of the slums, overlooking the dark, terrifying expanse of the Whispering Woods.
Kaelen sat on his dilapidated bed, chewing the hard bread mechanically while stitching his wounded shoulder with a rusted needle and boiled thread. He didn't use any anesthetic. He simply bit down on a piece of leather and let the pain keep him awake.
Once the wound was closed, he knelt on the floor. He pushed aside a specific, loose floorboard, revealing a small, hollowed-out space in the dirt.
Normally, this was where he kept his emergency stash of copper coins. But tonight, his eyes were drawn to the object sitting beside the coins.
It was a small box, no larger than a fist, made of an unknown, pitch-black stone. It was entirely seamless. There was no lid, no keyhole, no hinges. It looked like a solid block of void. His parents had left it to him before they vanished into the Abyssal Mountain Range ten years ago. They had told him it was his inheritance, his destiny.
For ten years, Kaelen had tried to open it. He had smashed it with hammers, burned it in Vance's forge, dropped it from cliffs. It had never so much as scratched.
But tonight, it was different.
In the pitch-black darkness of the shack, the box was glowing. It was a faint, terrifying illumination—not of light, but of an incredibly dense, swirling darkness that seemed to absorb the ambient shadows of the room.
And right down the middle, a jagged, hairline crack had formed.
Kaelen held his breath. He remembered the suffocating pressure of the silver-haired maiden from that morning. The residual, supreme-tier mana that had clung to his clothes and skin... it had interacted with the box. The box hadn't reacted to physical force; it had been starving for high-tier mana.
Kaelen slowly reached out. His bloodstained, calloused fingers brushed against the cold, black stone.
The moment his skin made contact, the crack violently split open.
There was no sound, but a shockwave of absolute, freezing nothingness exploded from the box. It hit Kaelen directly in the chest. He was thrown backward, crashing into the rotting wooden wall of his shack.
He gasped, but no air filled his lungs. The world around him faded into a monochromatic gray. The sounds of the rain and the wind vanished.
From the shattered remnants of the black box, a thick, viscous liquid that looked like liquid nightshade began to ooze out. It didn't pool on the floor; it defied gravity, floating into the air like a living serpent of darkness.
Before Kaelen could react, the dark serpent shot forward, plunging directly into the center of Kaelen's chest—right where his heart was, right where a mana core should have been.
Agony, entirely different from the physical pain of a knife wound, tore through Kaelen's soul. It felt as if a black hole had been ignited inside his chest, violently ripping apart his internal organs, his blood vessels, his very existence.
He screamed, a silent, horrifying scream that made no sound in the gray world.
As his consciousness began to shatter under the weight of the impossible pain, a voice echoed in the deepest recesses of his mind. It was ancient, hollow, and utterly devoid of emotion.
[Host confirmed. Mana pathways: Non-existent. Core: Non-existent. Fate: Null.]
[Condition met. Initiating 'The Devouring Void' protocol.]
[The heavens have denied you light. Therefore, you shall become the abyss that consumes it. Awakening the Rank 0 Origin Core: The Null Singularity...]
Kaelen's eyes rolled to the back of his head, and the dark, miserable world of Eldoria finally faded into absolute black.