The first thing I felt was not light. It was weight.
Heavy, suffocating weight pressing down on my chest and shoulders, as though the battlefield itself had collapsed upon me. My breath caught, shallow, ragged, torn from me by pain sharp enough to rattle my ribs.
The dark was gone. The ash, gone. The whisper of the System faded like smoke dissolving in wind. But the burden remained. Every inch of me ached. Not the clean ache of bruises or shallow cuts, but the deep, bone-soaked agony of something inside me cracked and refusing to knit together.
I tried to open my eyes.
The world bled in slowly, shapes and colors blurred as if they feared to be seen. The canvas above me wasn't sky, not the blood-soaked gray of the battlefield, but pale cloth stretched overhead, trembling with faint movements.
A tent.
The air was thick with herbs—sharp, bitter, cloying. Smoke from oil lamps twisted in the stillness. Voices murmured somewhere close, low and urgent, but too muffled to pull apart.
