THE BLOOD INK OF THE VALERIUS BLOODLINE

Chapter 2: Awakening Beneath Two Moons

Cough! Kh... hork!

A thick liquid forced its way up his throat. Billy jolted, his body instinctively rolling sideways as his mouth expelled black mucus mixed with the remnants of river water that reeked of stale copper. His chest heaved wildly, his lungs burning as though he had just inhaled powdered glass.

"Cough... argh... damn it..."

Billy let out a long groan. His voice was broken and hoarse, rough as a coconut grater.

The first thing to touch his cheek was not the cold tile of a hospital floor, but a mound of thick, wet moss. Its scent stung his nose, a combination of rotting leaves, peat soil, and a strange sweetness like fermented fruit sap.

"Kuncoro... bastard," Billy hissed softly, his eyes still squeezed shut against the violent dizziness spinning through his head. "You... you really threw me into a sewer."

There was no roar of trucks. No car horns from the overpass.

All he could hear was the cold wind whistling through dense foliage and the creaking of enormous branches rubbing against one another.

Billy slowly opened his sticky eyelids.

"What the hell..."

His vision was blurry, but gradually, it made out something that made absolutely no sense.

Above him stretched a canopy of trees with trunks as wide as multi-story buildings. Their leaves were not green, but dull silver, reflecting a pale, dim light. The moss beneath his body grew as high as his calves, soft like a waterlogged foam mattress.

"What kind of hospital is designed like this?" Billy muttered, holding back a bitter laugh. "Am I... in a botanical garden?"

He tried to lift himself using both elbows.

SREEEB!

"AAAKH! FUCK!"

An unbearable pain stabbed through the left side of his abdomen.

Billy collapsed back onto the moss, his hand instinctively clutching his stomach. His fingers brushed the stiff fabric of his jacket, hardened with dried blood, and beneath it, an open wound swollen and burning against his skin.

Billy's breath caught.

Cold sweat immediately drenched his temples.

"It's not... stitched?" Billy whispered in panic. His voice began to tremble. "Hey! Is anyone there?!"

Silence.

Only the whispering wind answered his call.

"Help! Somebody! I've been stabbed!" he shouted again, louder this time, until his throat felt raw. "Doctor! Nurse! Is anyone outside?!"

The forest remained silent.

There were no footsteps from nurses. No ambulance sirens.

Billy gasped for breath on the moss, his vacant eyes staring into the empty air before him.

His teenage brain, stuffed with modern fiction, suddenly triggered a crazy thought.

"Wait... wait a second," he muttered, his eyes widening. "In comics... there's usually..."

Billy raised his right hand into the air and waved it experimentally.

"Status?" Billy called uncertainly. "Status window? Open profile?"

Nothing happened.

The air remained empty.

"System?" he called again, this time with a mixture of irritation and panic. "Hello?! Beginner's assistance?! Reincarnation reward box?! Come out, damn it!"

The only response was a silver leaf drifting down and landing directly on his nose.

"Great. Just great," Billy snorted sarcastically, blowing the leaf off his face in annoyance. "No system, no winged fairy, no white-bearded old man. Just me, a festering stab wound, and some godforsaken forest. What a great fate, Bil."

The heat in his abdomen spread upward into his chest.

Fever began attacking his head, making the world sway slowly around him. The infection from the filthy river water had already begun eating away at his body. His temperature was rising rapidly. His skin shivered with cold on the outside while boiling from within.

With his teeth chattering as he endured the pain in his broken ribs, Billy reached into the inner pocket of his jacket.

His trembling fingers touched a cold cylindrical piece of metal.

He pulled it out.

It was his grandfather's bronze pen.

The object now appeared completely lifeless. It no longer emitted the red-gold light it had produced when he sank into the river. But his dried blood remained caught between the intricate engravings at the tip, as though the metal had swallowed every drop.

"You're the reason, aren't you?" Billy stared at the pen with murderous eyes. "Huh?! What the hell are you, some kind of artifact?! Where did you throw me?!"

The pen, of course, did not answer.

The metal remained silent and cold in his hand.

"I'm asking you, idiot! Answer me!" Billy shouted in frustration, nearly throwing the pen into the bushes.

But at the last second, his hand stopped in midair.

His street instincts held his fingers back.

Somehow, this thing had saved him from dying at the bottom of the Ciliwung River. If there was a way home to his world, or at least an explanation for what had happened, the answer had to lie within this cursed object.

"Damn it," Billy muttered, carefully slipping the pen back into his pocket. "You'd better not be useless."

He forced himself to roll onto his stomach.

The movement sent a violent throb through his stab wound, whitening his vision for several seconds. Billy bit down hard on his lower lip until the salty taste of blood filled his mouth, forcing himself to stay conscious.

Don't close your eyes, Bil, he told himself sternly. If you close them now, you won't wake up again.

With both palms digging into the wet moss, Billy crawled forward a few inches.

He slowly leaned his back against a massive protruding root.

His breathing came in ragged gasps, his chest rising and falling rapidly.

When his head rested against the tree trunk, his gaze drifted through a gap in the dense silver leaves overhead.

The night clouds slowly shifted, revealing the open sky.

And that was when Billy's breath truly stopped.

"Oh my God..." Billy whispered, stunned.

His eyes widened, his pupils trembling violently.

Across the deep violet night sky, there was no single moon like the one he knew from Jakarta.

Hanging over the vast horizon were two enormous moons side by side.

One glowed with a dim golden light, its jagged craters clearly visible to the naked eye. The other was smaller, radiating a cold purple glow that dazzled his eyes as it slowly rotated.

Not Earth.

This was definitely not Earth.

"Am I... really dead?" Billy's voice trembled, stripped of every trace of sarcasm.

An icy loneliness crept up from his chest, squeezing his heart so tightly that he could barely breathe.

On Earth, he had been an orphan. He slept on storefront steps, ate with whatever money he earned carrying loads at the market, and lived with thugs working for government officials hunting him down.

But at least there, there had been the smell of fried food from roadside stalls.

There had been the evening call to prayer from the small mosque down a narrow alley.

There had been the noise and bustle of people he knew.

Here?

Two strange moons stared down at him from the sky without mercy.

The forest was too quiet, too vast, and ready to swallow him whole without leaving a trace.

Suddenly, his ears caught the echo of a low, cold laugh carried through the wind.

"Say hi to the devil down there..."

Billy jolted and spun toward the surrounding bushes.

"Kuncoro?!"

There was no one there.

"You orphaned brat playing hero... you're gonna die like an idiot here."

The whisper circled inside his head.

Billy clutched his throbbing temples.

This damn fever was making him hallucinate.

The poison from his wound had already begun attacking his nervous system.

"Shut up, you bastard!" Billy shouted into the darkness of the forest, his voice cracking with desperate anger. "I'm not dead yet! You hear me?! I'm not fucking dead!"

His voice echoed between the silver tree trunks before slowly being swallowed by the silence of the night.

Billy's chest heaved.

His throat felt as dry as a desert, burning fiercely beneath the heat of the fever raging inside his skull.

If he did not find fresh water soon to soothe his throat and clean the pus from his abdomen, his body would give out within hours.

Drip... drip...

A faint sound reached his ears.

Not the laughter of thugs.

Not the wind.

Running water.

Billy's eyes immediately narrowed as he stared into the darkness.

About twenty meters to his left, beyond a mound of moss-covered earth and thin, thorny bushes, the sound of flowing water grew increasingly clear.

"Water," Billy whispered through cracked lips. "There's water."

That tiny spark of hope pumped a little strength into the muscles of his weakened legs.

Billy dropped himself onto the ground, no longer caring about the pain tearing through his abdomen.

He crawled on his elbows and knees, dragging himself across the carpet of wet moss and leaving a trail of dark blood across the silver leaves.

"Just a little farther," Billy muttered to himself with every breath. "Just drink... then find medicine... don't die here, idiot."

One meter.

Two meters.

Billy crawled past an enormous tree with a trunk as wide as an articulated truck.

The sound of flowing water was now extremely close, right behind the tree.

But as his right hand reached for the bark of the giant tree to pull himself upright, his fingers touched something wet, sticky, and reeking of a powerful, rotten stench, far worse than the pus in his abdomen.

Billy slowly looked up.

His gaze froze.

On the trunk of the enormous tree, exactly two meters above his head, were three gaping slashes that had torn through wood as hard as steel.

Claw marks.

Each slash was as wide as the blade of a wood-splitting axe, carving half a meter into the trunk.

From the wounds in the wood, thick black sap mixed with fragments of rotten flesh still dripped slowly onto the ground.

Whatever had done this had left only moments ago.

Directly beneath the claw marks, a beast's paw print was pressed into the mud.

It was twice the size of a motorcycle helmet.

Billy's blood instantly ran cold.

The pain from his stab wound, the fever burning through his head, and the thirst tormenting his throat all vanished, completely consumed by a primal terror that made every hair on his body stand rigid.

From behind the thick bushes near the stream, a heavy breath smelling of sulfur drifted slowly through the air.

Huuuuh...