The air tasted like rusted wires and filtered failure.
Kael Veyne sat on the cold polymer floor of the evaluation chamber, fists clenched so hard his nails bit into his palms.
The walls flashed with light hexagonal panels glowing blue, red, then that sterile white that made everyone look like they'd already died.
Monks called it the "Color of Alignment."
Kael called it bullshit.
"Candidate Veyne," the AI said, voice as smooth and dead as always.
"Zero percent coherence. Null output. Recommendation: disposal or reassignment to manual labor sectors."
He tilted his head back, eyes on the ceiling, and laughed.
Short, dry, loud.
"Eat shit," he said.
Someone in the room flinched.
A young monk, couldn't have been older than twenty.
The rest stood still.
Faces blank.
Monks didn't react.
Detachment, composure, all that sacred jazz.
They stood like statues while the AI spoke for them.
"I mean it," Kael went on, getting to his feet. "You think I give a damn about your strings and mantras and quantum chants? I sat through your tests. Sat through the neural scrapes, the sleep deprivation, the fasting. Let you jack a probe into my skull and tell me my soul's out of tune with the fucking universe. And now you just stamp me Zero like I'm trash?"
The AI didn't respond.
It never did when you talked back.
Not programmed for debate.
"Escort the candidate out," it said after a pause.
Kael turned toward the monk closest to him an old guy with skin like wet parchment and veins glowing faintly blue.
Probably been alive for two hundred years, wired into half a dozen coherence engines.
"What's it feel like," Kael asked, stepping up close, "letting a goddamn voice in a wall do all your thinking?"
"Your coherence is zero," the monk replied, not even blinking. "You have no place here."
"I've got a place. Right here. Inside your skull."
Two guards walked in.
Heavy armor, visors down, stun rods ready.
Not monks.
Security.
Real people who didn't waste time on words.
They grabbed him by both arms.
He didn't fight.
What was the point?
He just laughed again low and bitter.
"You'll remember this, old man. One day, when your sacred circuits are screaming and the walls bleed code, you'll remember the Zero who told you to go fuck yourself."
They shoved him into the corridor.
The door slid shut behind him with a soft hiss.
He didn't look back.
The lower levels of the Saint Temple weren't made for people.
Service tunnels, mostly dark, narrow, unfinished.
Lights flickered.
No guards, no monks, just the quiet noise of dormant infrastructure and walls that breathed recycled air.
Kael stormed down the passage, each step louder than it needed to be.
"Zero coherence," he muttered, spitting on the floor. "Whole empire built on quantum bullshit and I'm the one who's broken?"
He didn't notice the corridor had changed until the sound of his footsteps changed too.
From metal to stone.
Stone.
Kael stopped.
Looked down.
Old stone blocks, cracked, chipped. Not smart material.
Not part of any temple schematic he knew.
No self-cleaning polymer.
No cables.
Just rough, uneven floor.
He looked up.
The walls had shifted too gray, weathered, like they'd been carved by hand a thousand years ago.
"What the hell..."
He turned.
The hallway he came from?
Gone.
Just stone stretching back into blackness.
And then he heard it.
A whisper.
Not sound.
Not really.
It felt like a memory brushing the edge of his thoughts like someone else's dream flickering in his skull.
"Listen… listen in the silence…"
"Not happening," Kael muttered. "Nope. I didn't sign up for a haunted temple. Fuck off, ghost."
He moved forward.
Because turning back wasn't an option.
Not anymore.
The corridor narrowed.
He had to squeeze through sideways at one point.
And still, that green light pulsed at the edges of his vision low, rhythmic, like a heartbeat.
It led him to a room.
Wide, circular, silent.
A dome of rock and dust.
In the center, it floated.
A sphere.
Perfect.
Smooth.
Blacker than black so black it seemed to suck the light from the walls.
No seams, no panels, no tech ports.
It didn't belong here.
Kael stepped forward.
Eyes scanning the space around it.
Strange markings hovered around the orb glyphs he couldn't read, equations that bent when he looked too long.
They weren't monk symbols.
They weren't even human.
He reached out.
Touched it.
And the universe changed.
No walls.
No floor.
Just stars.
He was floating, weightless, but grounded.
No air, but he could breathe.
No sound, but he could hear.
Then a voice not sound, not language, but something deeper.
"YOU SEE IT BECAUSE YOU ARE BROKEN."
Kael jerked. "What the fuck....who is that?"
"YOU HEAR IT BECAUSE YOU ARE EMPTY."
"Get out of my head."
"YOU CAN WALK THE PATH BECAUSE THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE."
Before him, something unfolded a spiral, infinite and alive.
A fractal made of memory, code, and collapsing equations.
It spoke again.
"BEGIN."
He gasped and opened his eyes.
Back in the room.
Back on the floor.
But the silence was different now.
It had Shape.
Pattern.
He sat up, head pounding.
Blood dripped from his nose and pooled at his upper lip.
He licked it off and laughed.
He heard it.
The Strings.
Not sound.
Not music.
Not even vibration.
It was the code behind those things.
The framework.
The layer monks claimed only coherence could access.
He was hearing it with nothing.
No training.
No rites.
Just raw exposure.
And it was beautiful.
He stood.
Hands shaking.
"They called me Zero," he whispered. "Thought I had nothing."
He looked up at the dark ceiling, smiling with blood in his teeth.
"But nothing is where the code starts."
The truth was, Kael had never fit.
Born in a fringe sector to a drugged-out mother and a war deserter, he'd been picked up by a monk-patrol when he was six.
Scanned, tagged, dragged into the Saint Temple program like every other orphan with decent neural resonance.
They taught him logic, meditation, quantum scripture, how to make your soul align with the waveform of the universe.
He never got it.
Never heard the "Song of Reality."
Never merged with the coherence field.
Never floated in pure entanglement.
But he could lie.
And fake.
And survive.
Until now.
Now something had changed.
He walked out of the chamber, eyes sharp, back straight.
No alarms.
No monks.
No AI watching from the walls.
The temple didn't know yet.
Didn't know what he'd touched.
What he'd become.
But they would.
Oh, they fucking would.