The corridor didn’t end.It shed them.Lucy stumbled forward as gravity returned in pieces, her boots skidding across a surface that felt like cold glass layered over stone. Adrian caught her before she fell, his grip firm despite the tremor that still lingered in his hands.Caelum landed a step away, perfectly balanced.“Welcome,” he said, glancing around with satisfaction, “to the remainder.”Lucy straightened slowly.The place around them was vast—and wrong.No sky.No horizon.Instead, endless structures floated in suspension: half-formed cities, broken landscapes, stairways that led nowhere, fragments of worlds stitched together like a memory trying to remember itself.The air hummed with residual energy.Not divine.Not mortal.Unclaimed.Adrian’s eyes narrowed.“There’s no authority here,” he said.Caelum nodded. “Correct. No gods. No Origin. No hierarchy.”Lucy swallowed. “Then what keeps it together?”Caelum smiled faintly.“Nothing,” he said. “That’s the beauty of it.”THE C

Light was not supposed to hurt.But this did.It wasn’t heat.It wasn’t force.It was definition.Lucy felt it first—not on her skin, but inside her thoughts. The light wrapped around her mind like a net woven from rules she had never agreed to.She couldn’t scream anymore.Her mouth opened.Nothing came out.INSIDE ORIGINThere was no place.Only process.Lucy floated in a vast lattice of intersecting geometries, each line humming with authority. Symbols unfolded endlessly, rewriting themselves faster than she could track.She felt herself being read.Measured.Categorised.Simplified.ENTITY IDENTIFIED: HUMAN VARIANT.FUNCTION: ANOMALOUS ANCHOR.STATUS: INCOMPATIBLE.Fear surged—but underneath it was something else.Defiance.No, she thought fiercely. I choose.The lattice shuddered.Somewhere distant, something paused.ADRIAN REMEMBERED WRONGAdrian hit the system like a weapon dropped into machinery.The moment Origin’s light closed around him, it began to pull—yanking memories fr

Adrian woke up choking.Not on air.On memory.It poured into him in fragments—disconnected sensations without context. Cold stone beneath his palms. A sky that wasn’t a sky. The echo of something vast turning away from him.He rolled onto his side and coughed, dragging breath into lungs that felt… human.Too human.When his vision cleared, the first thing he noticed was the sky.It was gray.Not storm-gray. Not void-dark.Just gray. Flat. Endless.No stars.No sun.No sense of scale.Adrian pushed himself up slowly.Pain bloomed everywhere.He paused, stunned by that alone.Pain that didn’t fade.Pain that didn’t retreat under divine authority.He pressed a hand to his chest.His heartbeat was steady.Normal.“…That’s a problem,” he muttered.THE PLACE THAT DOESN’T CAREHe stood.The ground beneath his boots was rough stone—weathered, cracked, real. Around him stretched ruins of a city long abandoned. Towers broken mid-rise. Streets half-swallowed by ash and dust.No energy.No press

Lucy didn’t think.She acted.The system screamed.❌ ABSOLUTE VIOLATION❌ ORIGIN-LINK DETECTED❌ USER STATUS: ANCHOR — RESTRICTION IGNOREDPain tore through her spine as the filaments snapped taut, glowing white-hot. Blood ran from her nose, but her eyes stayed locked on the collapsing projection of the Gray City.“Pull me in,” she whispered hoarsely.Caelum froze. “Lucy—no.”“NOW.”The anchor reacted.Not gently.Reality folded.ADRIAN AND THE ABYSSThe darkness surged upward like a living memory.Adrian felt it wrap around his senses—not choking, not crushing.Recognizing.He staggered as visions slammed into him.Battlefields layered atop one another.Gods screaming as they burned.A throne shattered by a spear he himself had thrown.And beneath it all—A silence.A deliberate removal.“You were not erased by accident,” the voice said calmly.“You were unwritten.”Adrian clenched his teeth. “By who?”The darkness shifted.By those who feared what remembers war without worship.The

The alarm at Nova Imperium University did not sound like any emergency siren humanity had ever designed.It wasn’t loud.It was deep.A vibration that passed through bone, through blood, through the subtle instincts buried in every living thing that whispered:Something is wrong.Students froze mid-step.Lectures cut off mid-sentence.Glass trembled in windows across the elite campus as the sky above the university darkened—not with clouds, but with structure.Lucy screamed.“Adrian—look!”He turned just in time to see it.Above Earth’s atmosphere, something vast and abstract began to resolve.Not a ship.Not a god.A directive.Origin was projecting itself into physical reality.And it was doing so through the campus.THE FIRST SIGNProfessor Calder dropped his tablet as the classroom lights flickered violently.“What the hell—”The walls pulsed.Symbols briefly appeared in the air—thin, precise lines of impossible geometry that burned themselves into the vision of anyone looking too