The first thing he noticed was the sound.
It wasn't wind. It wasn't footsteps. It was... chewing.
As the boy crossed through the black stone archway, leaving the fractured vault behind, the realm reshaped around him. Space folded like parchment. Gravity rippled. Time blinked.
And then he was standing before it.
Virelith. The Inverted Spire.
A city not built—but fed into existence. Suspended upside down over a chasm of broken stars, it spiraled downward like a corkscrew into a dying sun. Its buildings were not static—they moved. They breathed. Streets twisted, reshaped themselves, crunched inward before expanding again.
Virelith devoured its own past to survive its future.
It was beautiful in the way a knife is—shining, cold, and meant to enter flesh.
❖ New Realm Entered: Outer Spire Zone-Delta / "Virelith – The Hunger City"
❖ Realm Stability: Tier-3 Inverted Loop
❖ Status: Paradox Zone / High-Conflict Memory Anomaly
❖ Threat Level: Sanguine-Red
The boy stepped cautiously onto the glass-like road that led toward the edge of the city's spiraling gates.
At once, they noticed him.
Figures moved between buildings—some human-shaped, some not. One had no face, only a mouth stitched closed with golden wire. Another carried its own shadow on a leash. A few bowed when they saw him. Most vanished into the architecture like ghosts avoiding the light.
The chewing stopped.
Then, laughter.
Not from the city.
From the air.
"Another one, hm? It's been… what, three reloops since we had fresh meat?" a voice rasped.
A figure emerged from the thin edge of space beside him—not teleporting, but bleeding in from a crack in reality. He was tall, lean, draped in scrolls instead of clothes. His skin was tattooed with constellations that blinked. His eyes were black—pits filled with starless hunger.
He bowed low.
"Welcome, stranger. You bear the Mark, don't you? Of course you do. The Thronebreaker always wears it loud."
"I am Klym Vass, Registrar of Virelith's Current Loop. Pleased to record your death... unless you survive the Trial of Entry."
❖ Hidden Quest Accepted: Trial of Entry – "The Hunger's Welcome"
❖ Survive for 3 Virelith Cycles (Approx. 3 hours real-time)
❖ Constraint: No Memory Recall Allowed
❖ Penalty: City Will Consume All System Authority
❖ Reward: Access to Lower Districts + Vault Signature Tracking Resumed
"What kind of place forces a trial before entry?" the boy muttered.
Klym smiled wide. Too wide. His jaw dislocated.
"The kind that remembers too much. And needs to forget you before it can let you in."
Then the ground split.
Not beneath the boy—but behind his thoughts.
Pain lanced through his skull. His memories—the Vault, the girl's voice, the Trial—they vanished. Torn out, sealed away by the city's sentience.
He staggered, breathing hard.
❖ Alert: Memory Seal Engaged. Combat Subroutines Active.
❖ Status: Core Consciousness at 47%. Trust Nothing.
Klym raised a hand.
"Let the Hunt begin."
It started with whispers.
The buildings began speaking—not in words, but in impressions. "Run," they said. "Kneel." "Devour." "You are prey."
From the city's outer veins poured Collectors—grotesque entities shaped like lost memories. Each one bore a fragment of a forgotten identity. One wore a mask that looked like the boy's face. Another dragged a chain of laughing severed heads.
They didn't chase him.
They remembered him wrong—and attacked based on that.
One screamed, "You left us in the Fire Fields!" and hurled a whip of living fire.
Another sobbed, "You let her die!" and tore at his soul with a blade made from screams.
The boy ducked, slid under a collapsing bridge, activated Crownless Domain, and shattered an incoming illusion with raw system suppression. But every move took effort.
The city was eating who he was.
His thoughts blurred. His instincts rewired.
At one point, he forgot why he was running.
Time fractured.
He blinked—and now he was standing inside a room made of mirrors, facing a version of himself with glowing eyes and six arms.
"You failed the trial," the doppelgänger said flatly.
"No," the boy snarled. "I'm still moving."
"That's not the same as surviving."
They fought—violently, wordlessly. System skills flickered between both bodies. His copy used techniques he hadn't yet unlocked. Future echoes.
He lost.
But before the killing blow landed—he remembered something.
The girl.
Her voice.
"Don't choose the throne…"
With a scream, he reversed the timeline in a five-second burst—his system surging with a forbidden function:
❖ Skill Activated: Loop Rejection (1x Use Per Realm)
❖ Status: Enemy Copy Erased
❖ Cycle Restarted – Phase 2 of 3
The second cycle began in a church built upside down, hanging over a sea of glass teeth.
This time, he was hunted by something worse than Collectors.
The Choir.
Priests with no mouths and burning eyes. They sang through the holes in their faces, unleashing waves of nullification—a type of anti-memory. Anything caught in their song was forgotten.
He fought them for twenty minutes of real-time.
Each kill gave him pieces of his memory back—but incomplete.
At one point, he forgot his own name.
At another, he forgot what he was fighting for.
When the last of the Choir fell, he whispered, "I remember enough," and limped toward the city's heart.
❖ Cycle Two Complete
❖ Soul Integrity: 58%
❖ System Suppression: Weakening
Klym appeared again—floating upside down above a burning library.
"You're stubborn," he said. "But you've only got one more cycle before Virelith keeps you. And once she keeps you… well. You'll forget that there was ever an outside at all."
Cycle Three was personal.
The city created a street from his past—one he didn't recognize, yet knew in his bones.
It was his home.
The real one.
Walls filled with handprints. A door painted with a symbol he couldn't read but felt warm seeing. A photo on a table of him as a child—smiling.
And a woman waiting.
Not the girl from the memory.
Someone older.
Wiser.
With eyes like knives dulled by time.
"You can stay," she said. "Just let go. Forget the throne. Forget the pain. Let the city have you."
The city offered him peace.
A way out.
He almost said yes.
But then the System flickered, and a final alert came through:
❖ Final Cycle Ending.
❖ Last Memory Fragment Recovered: [True Purpose Code]
❖ Directive Reinstated: Find the Girl. Destroy the Throne. Break the Loop.
He turned from the door. Didn't look back.
As he walked away, the house screamed. It wasn't a woman.
It was the city, trying one last time to eat him whole.
When the cycle ended, he stood atop Virelith's central spire, the inverted heart of the Hunger City. The buildings had gone still. The chewing sound ceased.
Klym bowed low.
"You passed. You may now be forgotten correctly."
❖ Trial Completed
❖ Title Gained: [Devourer of Paradox]
❖ Realm Access Unlocked: Lower Loop Districts
❖ Vault Signature Detected: 0.7 km Northwest – Resonance: [Unknown Female / Origin Keyholder]
❖ New Memory Unlocked: "Her Name Was…" [ACCESS DENIED]
❖ New Adversary Detected: "The Dreamless Crown"
The boy exhaled.
He didn't feel stronger. He felt hollow. Like something had been scraped out and replaced with something... alien.
But the fire in his chest remained.
He had a direction.
And a city that now feared him.
He looked toward the northwest.
A figure stood in the distance—on a floating shard, back turned, hair white as moonfire. The System couldn't scan her. But his heart reacted.
She knew him.
And she was waiting.