Lucien couldn't move.
He was awake—aware—but paralyzed. Floating in cold, thick water that felt more like ink than river. Every part of him ached with a pressure that didn't belong to this world. His limbs were unresponsive, his breath shallow and mechanical. He felt more like an echo than a person.
Then came the voice.
Low. Calm. Detached. It slithered through the cracks in his mind, quiet but overwhelming.
"Do not struggle, boy. Your rebirth is not yet perfected."
He wanted to speak. To scream. His throat tensed, but no sound came out. He was a prisoner in a borrowed body.
"The vessel may look identical to your former self, but it is not. It is of another world. There are… differences."
Lucien's thoughts raced. Vessel? Other world? He felt unmoored, like he'd been dropped in the middle of someone else's conversation—someone else's life.
But the panic began to dull. Slowly, deliberately, he drew on the one thing he had left: his mind. He forced it to stabilize. To filter. To adapt.
His fingers twitched. His jaw clenched. He found a voice buried deep inside and managed to rasp out—
"How different?"
The answer came in the form of another question.
"Do you know of magic, boy?"
Lucien's reply was dry and immediate. "Yes."
In the final days of his former life, magic had become routine. Secret rituals. Augmented flesh. Blood-summoned horrors. In the war, it stopped being fantasy and became a tool—used, traded, and weaponized like any other resource.
The voice almost sounded amused.
"Then understand this: magic here is not external. It is of the self. It comes from your core. Your body. What you are. That's all I'm willing to tell you…slave."
The word rang in his skull.
Lucien snorted, the bitterness automatic. "If you think I'll kneel, you really didn't read me right."
But the voice gave no rebuttal. No threat.
Instead, it said one more thing:
"Here are the false memories. You will need them."
And then came the pain.
No fire. No blade. Just raw, mental agony—like someone was carving words into his mind with something jagged. A flood of thoughts, names, images, and identities poured into him. He bit down hard, blood filling his mouth. His nails dragged across his skin as if tearing at the memories themselves.
The voice whispered one last time as the pain crescendoed:
"Do not disappoint."
He awoke coughing in the shallows of a river—the Nebula River, as the newly implanted memories informed him.
His limbs were shaking, but they worked. His skin was pale but warm. He touched his face. Same structure. Same eyes. But it wasn't his body.
Not really.
He had been reborn.
And this life was already written for him.
This was the continent of Harlen, deep within the sprawling territory of the Kingdom of Merrow—a powerful, stable nation ruled by logic, law, and strength. No civil war. No rebellion. Order was preserved from the top down. Nobles disappeared all the time—entire bloodlines erased with a signature—and no one blinked. Power shifted quietly, like stones beneath a river.
His new body had belonged to a boy of the River Clan, a minor warrior tribe that had lived along the eastern reaches of Merrow, at the border of Viscount Ravelin's holdings. Their home, now ruins, had once stood where Lucien knelt now—in the shadow of the Nebula River.
The clan was gone. Crushed during a wartime expansion. Labeled as "unstable, non-integrated, and magic-prone." The kind of place the nobility hated—too spiritual, too wild.
The boy—the vessel—had been a scout. Young. Agile. Promising. A whisper of future potential, snuffed out like a match in the dark.
Lucien now wore his skin.
He rose slowly. The water peeled off him in sheets. His breath came in short, steady bursts.
And then he felt it.
A heartbeat—not in his chest, but deeper. Lower. Radiating from his center.
His mana core.
It was already awakened. Already pulsing. Already his.
A warmth surged through his body, threaded with something colder underneath. Familiar. Hungry.
The knowledge arrived unannounced, imprinted in his bones:
Element: Darkness.
Core State: Stable.
He understood what it meant without needing it explained.
Darkness was concealment.
Darkness was corrosion.
Darkness was control.
He stretched out his hand. The shadows along the riverbank responded. Not just visually—but spiritually. They leaned toward him, like wolves recognizing a new pack leader.
And then there was the other gift.
His Rakai.
Unlike magic rituals or learned spells, a Rakai was instinctual. It arrived the moment your core awakened. Personal. Immediate. Difficult to explain—but impossible to forget.
Lucien's Rakai was called Veil Step.
This world didn't care if he was dead inside. It didn't care what he had done, or what he had lost.
It only cared about strength.
Then he heard it.
A growl—low, wet, and hungry.
A Mortum Beast.
They weren't natural. Once human-like. Maybe animal. It didn't matter. Prolonged exposure to corrupted mana warped them. Bones bent wrong. Flesh moved wrong. Their mana cores still burned, but with a different color—bright and unstable.
Lucien felt the pressure build.
Lucien felt it.
That low, heavy pressure pressing against his chest. That sour taste in the air. That slow, sludgy movement under the surface of the water. At first, he thought it was the echo of the beasts still fighting. The aftershock of their mana.
But the feeling didn't fade. It deepened.
The river remained murky, black and oily. Too thick. Too still.
And something—something—was moving through it.
Not swimming.
Coiling.
Lucien squinted toward the water, barely able to keep his focus. His mana was nearly empty, his body bruised and slow, his head pounding from Veil Step backlash. But he forced himself upright, using the log for support.
The movement under the surface wasn't random.
It was deliberate. Rhythmic. Wrong.
A current shifted.
Then, without warning, something lashed out of the water.
A black, rotted tentacle—long, fleshy, lined with teeth—shot toward him, trailing strings of greenish pus and shredded bone along its length.
His mind screamed.
His body didn't move fast enough.
But it moved just enough.
The tentacle struck the log, cracking it in half, sending a spray of wet wood and mud into the air.
Lucien rolled to the side, barely avoiding the next strike, his foot slipping out from under him.
"What—" he gasped, lungs still half-emptied. "What the hell is that?!"
He scrambled backward, boots skidding through the mud. The tentacle whipped again, carving a shallow trench where his shoulder had been seconds ago.
"This is messed up! This is broken!"
The creature beneath the river didn't rise. It remained submerged, only flashes of its shape visible through the water. Too fast. Too large. Every glimpse he caught twisted into something worse. It didn't move like a beast—it moved like a disease. A thought that shouldn't exist. A godless thing born from mana and rot.
Another tentacle erupted from the water, thinner and twitching violently. It smacked the bank, steaming where it landed.
Lucien screamed inside his head, panicked and furious.
Is this it? Huh?! Is this how I go?!
You dropped me here like a tool, you freakish voice in the dark—and now you're just watching me die on spawn? Is this a joke to you?!
Say something!
He looked toward the black sky, toward the dead moon hanging high and cold above the trees.
Nothing.
No whisper. No response.
"REALLY?!" he shouted aloud, voice raw. "IGNORING ME NOW?! CURSE YOU, YOU ROTTEN COSMIC PIECE OF—"
The river lit up.
A bright, flashing pulse of red ignited beneath the surface—flaring from within the creature.
It shimmered with unstable mana, glowing like a sunken volcano. Heat blasted upward. The tentacles twitched more violently now, faster, angrier, reacting to something—no, charging something.
Lucien's eyes widened.
His heart skipped a beat.
And then—
His body vanished in a flash of black light.
When he reappeared, he was still in the river.
Somewhere else entirely.
He blinked, disoriented, gasping as freezing water crashed over his shoulders. His feet found unstable ground. He stumbled, fell forward, coughed.
He dragged himself up onto a slimy rock shelf, chest heaving.
What—
He looked back toward the spot he'd been standing.
A towering pillar of flame burst from the riverbank. But it wasn't fire—it was magma. Pure molten stone rocketed into the sky in a spiral, illuminating the night in an orange-red blaze that cut through the darkness like a wound.
Then, just as suddenly, the molten stream fell—crashing down in droplets the size of fists.
They hit the water and hissed—freezing into sharp shards of obsidian that rained down like knives.
Lucien stared, frozen in place.
"What… just happened?" he rasped.
Then it hit him.
Veil Step.
It had triggered .
He didn't activate it consciously. He didn't command it. But it had dragged him out of the danger just before the red light detonated whatever the hell that creature was building up.
And now…
He was completely drained.
He reached inside, searching for mana. Nothing answered.
Not a flicker. Not a pulse. His core was cold. Hollow. Every nerve in his body tingled with backlash. Veil Step had saved him—but it had taken everything.
He was defenseless.
Move. Move before it finds you again.
But before he could rise, something shifted in the distance.
Another ripple.
Another shape.
A second Mortum, drawn by the unnatural eruption of mana and light, slithered its way toward the obsidian-black bank—its silhouette massive, moving like a scaled serpent through the shattered pieces of molten glass.
Lucien's breath caught in his throat.
One more. Just one more and I'm done.
But his body didn't respond. He was still too weak. His limbs felt heavy. Slower than they should be.
So he did what he always did when brute force wouldn't work:
He thought.
He rolled onto his side, dragging himself behind a large chunk of stone that had sheared off from the explosion. Its surface was still warm—jagged, black glass. The sharp scent of sulfur burned in his nostrils.
He pressed himself flat, controlling his breath. He didn't have Veil Step. No Rakai. No spells.
Just mud, cover, and luck.
The Mortum crawled past him, inches from his hiding place. He could see its claws scraping over rock. Its bones cracked when it moved. Its breath reeked of blood and moss.
He held his breath so long he felt his vision blur.
Then—finally—it passed.
It went for the flare site. The chaos. The crater of fire.
And Lucien stayed still. Buried. Waiting.
Alive.
When he could no longer hear the beast, he allowed himself to breathe again.
Shallow. Careful.
He rolled onto his back, staring up at the black sky.
No stars. No wind. Just him and the weight of what had almost happened.
It's a miracle I'm still breathing.
But I can't count on miracles. Not again.
He closed his eyes.
Not to sleep.
Just to stop seeing the water.