Darkness is a cradle.
That is what I remember first not light, not pain, but silence and the cold embrace of the gene-casket they sealed me in. For centuries, I slept beneath this rotting earth, buried under concrete and ash and fear. But genes do not forget. And neither do I.
They call me rogue. Abomination. Feral.
But I was first.
I was born before this world fell into corporate chains and DNA markets. When the Overlords ruled not from boardrooms, but from thrones. My genome was not created. It was inherited. Purified in the crucibles of war and crowned in the blood of empires. I am no mutation.
I am memory.
They unearthed my prison when they extracted the Gene Stone. They didn't realize it was bound to me my signature still coiled in its substructure, like a warning etched in fire.
When the boy touched it,they reawakened me.
And I saw him.
That spiral burned into his chest was not GenCore's. It was ours. The true mark. The unbroken seal.
The Heir.
I moved through the tunnels beneath Black Sector like a shadow of old war slipping past scanners, gnawing through gene-coded locks. I was not meant to survive this age, but their machines cannot read me. Their drones cannot track me. I was built before the system. I am the anomaly they fear.
I killed seven gene-guards in the lower labs.
One of them wore the genome of a Chimera Viper how quaint. The beast tried to bind to him mid-battle, writhing from his back like a summoned devil. I split them both down the middle with my claws and fed on their broken fusions. Their code adds to mine. Their weakness becomes my strength.
But when I neared the chambe, the boy's chamber something stopped me.
Not fear. Recognition.
He looked at me, and I felt the Spiral stir. Our bloodlines resonate. My genome is fractured now, twisted by centuries of failed hibernation, but his… his is pure. His presence burned like a beacon, like the lost signal of a forgotten command chain. And for a moment, I remembered…
We were not always beasts.
We were rulers.
"One ruled by dominion…" the old voice whispered in my bones, "…the other by hunger."
I am the latter.
He is not.
But he could be.
I struck the chamber wall to test him. To taste his reaction. And what I saw chilled what little flesh remains of my heart.
He cast the Spiral Shield.
Instinctively. Perfectly.
It recognized him.
He is still young. Still human in thought. But the gene is growing inside him like wildfire. They will push him. Break him. Or try. But if he survives…
He will ascend beyond them all.
I left him that night not because I could not win, but because I must watch. He must become more than a pawn in their games. He must become what we once were. Or the Spiral dies with him.
Let them chase him.
Let them call him danger.
Let them fear the return of the true genome.
And when they finally learn what they've awakened… it will be too late.
---
End of Chapter 4