2025-08-22 21:12:30“What was that gaze for?” Adrian muttered. He watched the officers chase someone off and shivered. ‘Soon that could be my life too, running after criminals’. He shook his head, trying to dismiss the thought.
He hurried onward. After only a few steps, the hum of voices drew him toward the town square. A crowd had gathered. At the center stood a storyteller on a wooden platform, arms spread wide as he commanded the listeners’ attention. “Listen closely,” the man began, his voice cutting above the murmur. “Long ago, thousands, perhaps billions of years past, there was only the True Creator. From Him came two worlds. One, the Demon World: untamed, violent, filled with monsters and chaos. The other, our world: home to humans, animals, and all living things. These worlds were separate, balanced, and meant to remain so.” The crowd leaned in. The storyteller’s eyes swept over them, sharp and deliberate. “But balance is fragile. The Demon World seethed with extremes. Its creatures thrived on madness. One day, while the True Creator slept, the barrier between worlds weakened. A rift tore open. Demons poured into our world, mountains quaked, rivers boiled. The two worlds merged, leaving their scar in the sky: the twin moons you see even now. That was the First Epoch, an age of creation and chaos.” He lowered his voice, almost forcing his audience closer. “Then came the Second Epoch. When the Creator awoke, He raised divine guardians, the beings we call gods. They guided the faithful, punished the wicked, and restored balance. But not all were loyal. Some gods grew proud. They claimed power greater than the Creator’s. They coveted dominion and drew demons to their side. Some even demanded worship from humans…” The words hung in the air. But abruptly, the storyteller snapped his book shut. “That’s all for today. Stay safe, and don’t wander at night.” A few copper coins clinked as listeners tossed their offerings. The crowd slowly dispersed. Adrian lingered, thoughtful. 'Demons and gods…? If this world truly holds such beings, what does that mean for me? If even a simple ritual can draw their gaze… I might already be doomed'. The memory of burning red eyes from his dream jolted through him. He swallowed hard. Policeman or not, if the supernatural gets involved, I’m finished. Shaking off the unease, he turned for home. Afternoon sun was already tilting westward. “Adrian, is that you?” The voice was soft and steady. He turned towards the direction of the call. Outside a small cookie shop stood an elderly woman, silver hair tied neatly, eyes warm with recognition. He remembered her, married to a local, widowed for decades, yet she had remained in town for over sixty years. “Greetings, ma’am,” Adrian said with a smile. “How are you, boy? How’s your studies?” “Umm… fine,” he replied awkwardly. “You’ve always been a gentle, clever one.” She disappeared briefly into her shop and returned with a small bundle of biscuits and candies. “Here, take these to your sisters.” “Thank you, ma’am.” “Give my regards to your parents,” she added then retreated inside. Adrian continued home, pocketing the treats. The house was empty, the mother likely at her shop, siblings at school, his younger brother preparing for exams. He dropped the bundle onto the table and glanced around the modest living room, four chairs, a plain rectangular table. “I’m starving.” he went straight towards the kitchen to check if any food was left. He didn't even see any left overs, the whole place was clean. “I guess i have to cook” he opened the cabinet, which yielded little, just rice, spices, onions, some carrots, and eggs, “This should be enough” He set to work, chopping onions and carrots, stirring them into sizzling oil, then adding blended pepper. The air is filled with spice and smoke. Washing the rice, he poured it into the pot, rinsed the eggs and dropped them into the pot to boil, and added salt and seasoning cubes before covering it all. Hunger made his head light. He slumped into a chair, stomach grumbling. But then, something felt off. The air seemed heavier, sharper. His hearing stretched unnaturally far, he could make out conversations on distant streets. When he looked outside, his vision pierced clear across rooftops, even to a tiny bug resting on a leaf far away. He blinked hard, 'Am I dizzy from hunger?' he questioned himself. His hand brushed the spoon on the table. It clattered to the ground. He bent to pick it up, fingers brushing the wooden leg of the table… Crack! The wood splintered apart. The entire table collapsed, biscuits and candies scattering across the floor. “What the…?” Adrian froze, staring at his hand in disbelief. 'I barely touched it… how could I break it?'
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Tallying the cost
The phantom chill of the God-Anchor was a new constant in Adrian's bones, a deep-seated cold that even the morning sun couldn't touch. The brand on his soul that mark of attention from the Hungry Void, thrummed with a low, persistent frequency, a reminder that their victory had come with a price far beyond the battlefield. He sat on the edge of his bed, the silence of the mansion pressing in on him. His first coherent thought wasn't of strategy or power. It was of Alan. He pulled up the System interface, his focus sharp. [Core Character: Alan - The Mystic Maestro - STATUS: COMPROMISED] The red, flashing text sent a jolt of cold dread through him, sharper than any magical chill. "System, full report on Alan's exposure and current status," he commanded, his voice tight. A flood of data streamed through his consciousness, grainy images of Alan's desperate flight through the archives, the collapsing bookshelves, the final, brutal look of comprehension on Sister Anya's face before Alan
Once the issue is all over, we can go back to being enemies
The silence after the rift closed was a physical thing, thick and heavy as wet wool. It was broken by the small, helpless sounds the vessel-boy made, shivering against the obsidian stake. Finn was the first to move, scrambling up the black steps with a knife to saw at the thick chains.Adrian didn't move. He stood over the spot where Mordian had been erased, the God-Anchor cold at his feet. The internal wound from using it was a hollow ache, a piece of him scooped out and fed to the silence. But beneath that, a new, deeper cold was settling in. The brand.It wasn't a pain. It was an awareness. A fixed point in the geography of his soul, a icy pinprick that felt like a distant, unblinking eye had just taken note of his coordinates.Boots scuffed on the stone behind him. He didn't need to turn. He knew Maria's step."You look like shit," she said, her voice rough. She came to stand beside him, looking down at the empty space where the ritualist had been. Her arm was bleeding from a deep
The Vessel
Adrian's boot hit the first step of the black altar. The stone wasn't cold. It was a void, sucking the warmth from his soul. Each step upward was a fight against the hook in his core, the hungry void above pulling him in while the dead weight of the Anchor tried to drag him down.He was halfway up when a wave of force slammed into him, not from the rift, but from the side. It wasn't physical. It was a command, written in pure will.STOP.Adrian staggered, his head ringing. At the top of the platform, Brother Mordian had turned from the raging pillar of green light. His eyes were no longer human. They were pools of the same oily blackness as the rift, his tattooed skin cracking like dry earth, leaking that same void. He held one hand toward the rift, sustaining the connection, and the other was now pointed at Adrian.YOU ARE THE KEY. YOU WILL BE THE GATE. The words weren't spoken; they were branded directly into Adrian's mind.The pull intensified. Adrian grunted, driving the base of t
Don't let it touch you!
The world broke with a sound like a mountain dying.One moment, the only noise was the wind and the distant, maddening drums from the basin below. The next, a concussion of force slammed into the ridge, so visceral it felt like a physical blow. The air didn't just grow cold; it became thin, starved, as if the life was being sucked out of it.Adrian's knees buckled. A white-hot brand seared the core of his being, the psychic hook the Reclamationists had embedded in him was no longer a tug, but a chain, and something on the other end was yanking with the force of a collapsing star. His vision swam, the grim faces of his pack smearing into a blur. For a terrifying second, he wasn't on the ridge. He was nowhere. A vast, gray, silent nothingness pressed in on him, and at its heart was a single, overwhelming sensation: Hunger. It was a cold, simple, and absolute need to consume, and his soul was the brightest thing on the menu.On the Sunken Altar below, the gaunt figure of Brother Mordian
The Bleeding Land
Two days of hard marching north-east had stripped away the familiar. The rugged but life-filled foothills of the Serpent's Teeth gave way to a blighted expanse that seemed to suck the very vitality from the air. The ground was a cracked, grayish-purple, like old, clotted blood. Sparse, twisted trees clawed at a sky the color of a day-old bruise. There was no birdsong, no scuttling of insects. Only the moan of a wind that carried the taste of ash and ozone.The Howling Peak army moved through this desolation with a grim, focused silence. The initial energy of their departure had been replaced by a wary tension. Their enhanced senses, a gift from Adrian's ascension, were now a curse, amplifying the wrongness that permeated everything."It's not just dead," Bella murmured, her boots scuffing the brittle ground. "It's... infected. The earth is in pain. It's screaming, but the sound is too high for anyone but it and I to hear."Adrian felt it too, a constant, low-level psychic static that
Alan has been discovered
The polished marble floors of the Eldrige Mage College’s main concourse had never felt so much like a pane of thin ice over a bottomless chasm. Alan walked with his head down, the hood of his apprentice robes pulled up, a single student among a river of them flowing between lectures. But where their minds were filled with spell matrices and alchemical formulas, his was a tangled snare of hyper-vigilance and remembered terror.Every reflection in a window was a potential enemy. Every snatch of conversation was a coded message. The System was silent, but its lessons were etched into his nerves. He saw the world as a spy now, and the picture was terrifying.He felt it first—a subtle, probing pressure against the mental shields the System had taught him to maintain. It was a feather-light touch, a psychic tendril searching for a crack. It was the same feeling he’d had in the Weeping Stone, just before Sister Anya had grown suspicious. They were here. They were using magic to find him.His
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