Solo levelling: My architect system

My bargain with the void

Silence so absolute it felt like the world had swallowed its own lungs.

No pulse. No heat. Not even the small, comforting thud of a heart to tell me I existed. Just an aquarium of nothing ,black water and my thoughts bumping against the glass.

I tried to move. My hands were suggestions. My voice was a memory. Even my shadow had quit on me. There was only thought, replayed like a cheap clip: the smell of smoke, the wrong angle of light on a broken floorboard, the sound of small lungs gone quiet.

Then the pain arrived not flesh pain, not a cut that smarted; a slow, surgical tearing of the inside. It pulled regret out of me like rotten teeth.

They're gone.

Lyra's lifeless body falling . It kept playing on repeat in my head . My mother face-down on the tile, eyes open at the wrong angle. The image slammed through me harder than any actual blow.

Something inside me split and slid away.

You should have done something!! I thought to myself. It didn't feel real , it didn't make any sense. No logic could explain this , part of me desperately hoping it's a dream a dick one . But I knew this was reality.

" WHY !" I screamed into a nothing that heard everything. My throat shredded on the sound. "I... I was supposed to protect them."

My words broke the void the way a rock breaks a pond: a single ripple became a storm. Anger spread through me like heat under tar. I punched at empty air until my knuckles felt like I'd hit glass, and the echo of each hit sounded like my own bones disagreeing with me.

The silence waited, patient as a judge. Then a voice unfamiliar and yet nicknamed sliced through.

"You were always going to lose, Lucas Anderson."

Light gathered where there shouldn't be any ground. A figure stood there: no face, only a shape of shifting color, like oil on water pretending to be a person.

"Who the hell are you?" I spat. My mouth tasted like old metal and fresh blood.

" I am a remnant of a forgotten entity."

"Entity ?" I laughed, because crying felt too expensive. "You want me to believe that your an entity? That doesn't make any sense, entities don't exist only logic . I just watched my family die and I'm not in the mood for silly games you are playing "

The figure made no motion you could call a shrug. The light pulsed with something amused.

"Still logical, even now. You think, you calculate, you refuse instinct. But you forget vengeance isn't math. It's fire. And you are already burning."

The words were simple and true, and they slid a blade beneath my skin. Heat that had been coiled into cold calculation uncurled into something hot and jagged. This felt like those webnovels I read but I didn't think in my wildest dreams that it would become a reality.

"What are you offering?" I asked, and my voice sounded smaller than I felt.

"Revenge. And truth. They didn't only kill you and your family they erased your bloodline from the universe , you were the last one standing. I can give you more information and I can help you track the killers ."

The emptiness hummed like a wire. My brain tried to stitch the sentence into something sensible. Bloodline .... universe .

" What bloodline are you talking about? They said something about the architect , is that it?"

" Yes you carry the bloodline of the architect. A very powerful being at that .

I paused to process what he was saying, I wasn't an ordinary human I had a bloodline. He said he was a forgotten entity, and said something about the architect. The most logic approach is he may be the remnant of this architect. But why didn't he say it , he is hiding something.

"You said you could help me track them but I know nothing comes for free , what do you want?"

The entity laughed. " I knew you were a smart one, I want you to free me . I am going to send you to a new world and your purpose there is to free me . I will give you a system to guide you and help you grow stronger. You would have to find where I am being sealed and you might even fight the hero "

"I don't trust you." My hands were trembling now, but the trembling sharpened me. "But I don't have to. I'll take your deal because I'll use you. Like you're trying to use me. I don't care who I fight or obstacles I face as long I achieve my goals."

The figure laughed softly not cruel, not kind. Approving.

"Good. I prefer devils who know they're damned."

Symbols erupted beneath my feet, a circle of white fire and runes I felt without understanding. Text cold and clinical...pinged into my head like a system booting up.

[SYSTEM BOOTING…]

[HOST: LUCAS ANDERSON]

[MISSION: RETRIBUTION.]

Energy poured into me like a hot tide. It burned but it built. Gold flares mapped my veins. Green light braided through the pulse I still didn't feel. The void tore open like a door kicked in.

I gasped the sound felt obscene after the nothing. Air hit my lungs like a lover who had been waiting, patient and warm. I coughed. Silk brushed against my palms. Incense curled in the air, lazy and domestic, like a house pretending normalcy.

Marble walls were scored with faint runes. Lamps spilled honeyed light. My hands found a mirror without meaning to.

Not the tired, slumped face that hauled fields of worry back to bed every night. Not the dirt-under-the-nails boy who'd stayed up making gadgets in a one-room apartment. The glass showed a new sculpture: white hair that fell like a deliberate mistake, emerald eyes that measured and did not flinch, a jaw that could cut through lies.

I touched the face in the mirror as if to check it wasn't a mask. My fingers left no smear. My reflection didn't flinch.

"So this is what you made me," I said the calm in my voice an armor I'd learned to wear.

"Fine." My mouth edged into something that could pass for a smile, but was thinner, colder. "Then I'll make them remember the bloodline they tried to erase."

The system's voice clinical, indifferent, stripped of poetry folded into my head like a boot into a soft sock.

[WELCOME TO THE ARCHITECT SYSTEM...]

The words meant the beginning of everything or the end of everything. Either way, it was a door I couldn't unopen.

I smiled then, small and precise and dangerous.

"Let's begin."