He woke with a gasp that burned his lungs.
The ceiling above him was cracked and stained, a ceiling fan hung crooked, unmoving. Dim yellow light flickered from an exposed bulb, casting long shadows on the peeling wallpaper. The air was damp and bitter cold, laced with the stale scent of smoke, mildew, and burnt sandalwood. A low hum came from the city beyond the grimy window—engines growling, sirens wailing, the eternal insomnia of Hell's Kitchen.
He sat up slowly.
His body felt like it had been pulled apart and stitched back together with fire and ash. His head pounded with the dull echo of voices not his own. Sweat clung to his skin, and his muscles twitched as though waking from something deeper than sleep.
The bed beneath him was barely a mattress—just springs and fabric, patched with duct tape and blood. Not all of it was dry.
His chest stung. When he looked down, his breath caught.
The tattoos were still there—inked in spirals, jagged sigils, and binding scripts along his collarbone, shoulders, and ribs. But they shimmered now. Faintly. Like heat haze over asphalt. Lines that once sat inert were pulsing, moving—adjusting themselves in response to breath, thought, awareness.
They weren't just marks anymore.
They were alive.
And then he remembered.
Not in fragments, but in full: the journey through the jungle, the broken village, the hut beneath the waru tree. The circle. The offerings. The silence before the chant.
The words he had spoken, voice ragged, soaked in blood and belief:
> "Sing nyidam kawruh, marani pati.
Slametku mung sithik, nekatku sakabehe.
Buka lawang sing ketutup.
Aku arep weruh."
> "I who crave forbidden knowledge, walk the road of death.
I am nearly defenseless—yet wholly defiant.
Unseal the door long locked in shadow.
I seek to see what must not be seen."
And then, the answer.
Not spoken aloud, but etched into the marrow of his spine. A voice without breath, whispered from the void between life and afterlife:
> "Panjalukan ditampa. Tumbalmu: uripmu."
> "Your plea is heard.
Your offering: your life."
He remembered collapsing. The circle igniting. The mirror cracking. The world folding in on itself like a burning scroll.
And now—here.
Hell's Kitchen.
A studio apartment he hadn't seen in years, abandoned above a pawn shop that only sold cursed things to people too desperate to care. The place was supposed to be sealed off. Boards on the windows. Warding chalk beneath the floorboards. But here he was.
Alive.
No. Not alive. Not exactly.
There was a wrongness to his heartbeat. A softness to his breath. He wasn't sure if his lungs even worked the same way.
His fingers brushed against a dried smear on the bedsheet. The iron smell of blood, mingled with old incense and something... stranger. Earthy. Ritualistic.
He rose from the bed and stood barefoot on the creaking wood floor. His legs nearly gave out beneath him. The dizziness wasn't from fatigue—it was pressure. A low, spiritual weight pressing on the edges of his consciousness like a dam straining to burst.
The ritual hadn't just summoned something.
It had rewritten everything.
He stumbled toward the bathroom mirror, flicked on the light.
His reflection stared back—gaunt, eyes sunken from spiritual burnout. But behind the pupils, something moved. Coils of gold and red shimmered in the whites of his eyes like glyphs trying to escape.
This wasn't survival. It wasn't luck.
It was a pact.
He wasn't alone in his body anymore.
And whatever now lived inside him—it was still waking up.
---
The mirror didn't just reflect his face—it distorted it.
The first shift was subtle. A ripple in the glass, like heat rising from asphalt. Then came the blur—his reflection warping, stretching, as though reality itself had trouble recognizing him now. The light above flickered once, then held steady. The apartment was silent.
Too silent.
He leaned in.
His pupils thinned. Then vanished.
In their place: spiraling glyphs, rotating mandalas in hues of red and obsidian, inscribed with layered scripts that pulsed like living things. They weren't hallucinations. They were symbols of a pact deeper than language—older than time.
His breath caught.
Then came the hum.
Not external. Internal. It started in his sternum, a tremor that spread like lightning in slow motion—down his spine, into his limbs. His tattoos responded like a second nervous system, flaring in red and gold beneath the skin. Symbols shifted of their own accord, rearranging into fresh configurations across his chest and arms.
He didn't command them.
They reacted—to the awakening.
A voice followed. Not a sound. Not a thought. A presence.
> [RITUAL COMPLETE]
HOST RECOGNIZED. SACRIFICE VALIDATED.
YOU HAVE BEEN ACCEPTED INTO THE NUSANTARA LEGACY PATH.
TIER: BASIC
SPIRITUAL CONDUIT ESTABLISHED.
He staggered back.
But the world didn't remain stable.
The apartment around him peeled away—not physically, but perceptually. A layer beneath the visible world uncoiled like an ancient scroll, revealing something vast and intelligent behind it all. Runes drifted across his vision like burning leaves. Lines of ancestral code wrote themselves mid-air in scripts no longer spoken, yet deeply familiar.
He was no longer a man with a system.
He was the system's newest conduit.
---
[NUSANTARA LEGACY PATH: BASIC TIER ACCESS GRANTED]
> Available Branches:
• Daily Spells
• Daily Curses
• Rituals
• Traditional Ghosts
• Spirit Storage
• Supernatural Reputation: UNKNOWN
---
The interface shimmered, then slowly receded—collapsing into a soft, glowing sigil that floated in the periphery of his vision like an eye carved from fire and prayer. It didn't demand attention. It offered it.
He reached—not with his hand, but with thought.
The sigil bloomed.
> [Daily Spell Unlocked: Second Sight]
Function: Perceive spiritual phenomena, spectral residue, ancestral bindings, and concealed forces.
Tumbal: A flicker of personal energy.
No hesitation.
He exhaled, steady. Let his inner breath—a term from older rituals, meaning life-force or napas dalam—drain outward in a slow pulse. It flowed from the core of his chest, riding the channel of his spine, reaching the tattoos inscribed over his face.
The sigils drank it like thirsty soil.
His vision broke open.
He didn't just see more. He saw beneath.
Layers of reality folded over each other like transparent fabric. The walls around him no longer looked man-made—they were latticed with glowing scars, faded ancestral markings, and crawling glyphs etched by spirits long gone. The floorboards groaned—not physically, but spiritually, whispering with latent energies sealed into the wood.
There were prints on the mirror—ghostly hands, burned into the reflection. Three of them. Each different size. Each belonging to someone who had not left through a door.
And then—movement.
A silhouette drifted past the cracked kitchen door. Pale, faceless, shrouded in cloth. Not malicious, not aware. It passed through the wall, silent and lost.
He stood frozen.
Not in fear—but in understanding.
This wasn't borrowed power. This wasn't imitation.
This was the beginning of what it meant to walk the path of a dukun. The real path. The forbidden one. The one that didn't come with chants printed in books or incense bought from a stall.
The one that took everything and gave back just enough to ruin you.
And he smiled.
Because he had finally arrived.
---
The aftertaste of the spell still lingered in his mouth—bitter and electric, like copper dust dissolved in old tea. It crawled along his tongue and throat, leaving behind a feeling not unlike static. Something was still flowing through him. Not power. Not adrenaline. Presence.
The Second Sight had dimmed, but not vanished. The veil remained open—just a little—like a cracked door waiting to be pushed further. He could still feel it: the cold film between worlds, the vibration in his blood, the eyes watching from nowhere.
He stepped carefully through the narrow apartment, each board beneath his feet creaking in protest. The kitchen was just a few meters away, but the distance felt stretched—like he was walking into something else entirely. Not a room. A threshold.
The temperature dropped.
The air thickened.
As he crossed the doorway into the kitchen, the world changed again.
The overhead light buzzed violently, then went dead. A faint greenish glow spilled in from the window—more reflection than illumination, bouncing off damp metal and old tile. The wallpaper had peeled further since he'd arrived, revealing not brick or plaster, but dark shapes scrawled underneath—symbols that shouldn't exist in the waking world. Curved. Layered. Organic.
He wasn't alone.
The realization didn't come with sound. It arrived as instinct. A prickling along the spine. A subtle wrongness in the way the shadows pooled.
Then he heard it.
A dragging noise. Dry. Deliberate.
Fingernails. Wood.
He turned.
In the far corner of the kitchen, where the light failed and space refused to behave, something was standing—still, and far too tall for the room.
Wrapped in stained white cloth. Tight, cocoon-like. Its head tilted too far to the side. The face underneath barely visible, but stretched thin like someone had sculpted it from dried leather and smoke.
A pocong.
But not whole.
This one shimmered at the edges. Its form twitched, jittered, faded and re-solidified like a corrupted memory. Parts of it flickered in and out of view—an elbow, a knee, the wrapped curve of a foot that hovered just an inch too high off the floor.
It wasn't moving toward him. It wasn't attacking.
It was simply... there.
And it was watching him.
A pulse beat beneath his tattoos. Then came the voice—not his, but the system's, calm and inhuman:
> [TRADITIONAL GHOST DETECTED: UNBOUND ENTITY – CLASS I]
Spirit Type: Pocong Derelict
State: Incomplete. Non-hostile. Tether weak.
Options: (1) Banish. (2) Bind. (3) Observe.
He didn't flinch.
Instead, he took a slow step forward, bare feet quiet against the worn wood. The air grew colder with each movement, like he was wading deeper into a river made of memory. The spirit didn't retreat. Its head twitched slightly to follow him. The cloth that bound its body fluttered slightly, though there was no wind.
And then—
It knelt.
Slowly. Awkwardly. As if remembering how.
Not submission. Not fear.
Recognition.
A kind of reverence.
And deep inside his chest, where the pact had rooted itself, something moved. A pressure shifted. Words came unbidden to his lips—old and full of weight:
> "Aku sing mbukak lawang. Aku sing ngundang."
"I opened the door. I am the one who called."
The spirit's cloth-wrapped head lowered.
The system responded immediately:
> [SPIRIT RECOGNIZES AUTHORITY. TETHER LINK POSSIBLE.]
Warning: Binding without formal ritual may result in instability or degradation.
Do you wish to attempt link?
He hesitated—but only briefly.
He didn't know the name of this spirit. Didn't know what life it once lived, or what sins it carried. But it had answered him. And in the language of the old ways, that was enough.
He lifted his right hand.
The tattoos across his palm rearranged themselves, forming a circular pattern—the dasar level binding seal, unfinished and simple, but stable enough to hold a lesser spirit. His breath steadied. He reached forward with that hand—not touching the spirit, but presenting the mark.
> "Stay," he said. "Until I understand what I've become."
The spirit twitched once—violently.
Then its body unraveled into a black mist, drawn into the glowing mark on his wrist. The air snapped as the kitchen seemed to exhale all at once. The light above flickered back to life. And the room was still again.
But he was not alone.
The mark on his wrist pulsed, once.
> [SPIRIT STORAGE UPDATED – 1/10 SLOTS OCCUPIED]
Entry: Bound Fragment – Pocong Derelict
Stability: Unstable (Requires ritual stabilization)
He lowered his hand and stared at it, as if the skin might open again.
It didn't feel like possession.
It felt like inheritance.
Like he had just accepted something sacred, forgotten, and heavy.
He walked back to the main room in silence. Sat on the mattress. Looked at the window. Neon light stuttered in time with his heartbeat.
There was a ghost inside him now.
And this was only the beginning.
He leaned back, breathing slowly, letting the system's echo fade into the stillness. The tattoos dimmed, returning to their dormant state. The city noise outside became real again—car horns, distant shouting, a train rattling somewhere deep underground.
And in that sudden normalcy, the memories crept in.
Not of the ritual.
Of before.
Jakarta. Rain on rusted rooftops. The smell of fried tofu and wet concrete. His mother's voice, low and bitter, as she warned him not to dig into the old stories. The curses were real, she'd said. But worse were the invites. The rituals that didn't just bring spirits—they opened something that couldn't be closed.
His father had vanished during one of them.
The man had been a dukun too—not a showman, not a scam artist, but the real kind. Quiet. Dangerous. Respected by people who never called him by name. They said he walked barefoot into cursed ground and came back with other people's voices in his mouth.
Then, one day, he didn't come back at all.
All they found was a scorch mark, a broken rooster bone, and an empty jar meant to hold a soul.
The boy he used to be had sworn that day he'd never follow the path. That he would bury the old world and leave it to rot.
But rot doesn't mean forgotten.
The world had changed. Superheroes now flew through the sky. Gods battled in foreign cities. But his father's whispers still lingered in the dead alleys of Java. In cursed hospitals. In haunted corners of the earth no Avenger would ever walk.
And now—he was one of them.
Not a hero. Not even close.
Something older. Something worse.
His fingers curled into a fist.
There was no turning back. The gate was open. The blood was spent. The pact was sealed.
And somewhere beneath the veil, spirits were stirring—
—because one of their own had come home.
---