The world had cracked long before Jinryu was born.
Some say it shattered when the gods tried to raise a new heaven on Earth — The Tower of Babel, an impossible spire meant to pierce the divine. Others claimed it crumbled when the Mythic Cores — living fragments of ancient beasts and fallen spirits — were ripped from the roots of the earth and fused with human greed.
But Jinryu had no patience for stories.
Stories didn't keep you warm in the wild.
Stories didn't bury the dead.
The wind howled through the high cliffs of Mount Soryeon, dragging frozen ash across the jagged ground. Below, the ruins of Baekho Monastery lay in shadow — once a place of harmony and inner stillness, now a smoking corpse of history. The marble gates were shattered, stone tigers split in half, their maws cracked open mid-roar. Red banners — embroidered with the White Tiger's crest — fluttered in the cold like torn skin.
Jinryu stood at the precipice, his silver hair flicking in the breeze, red eyes unmoving.
On his shoulder sat a black cat with heterochromatic eyes — one golden, one void-like. It blinked slowly, its tail curling and uncurling in anticipation.
"Thirty-six dead," Jinryu said, voice barely louder than the wind. "No survivors."
The cat gave a low, mournful rumble — a sound that echoed too much like speech.
Jin ryu knelt, brushing a trail of cracked footprints in the snow. The trail ended abruptly at a deep gouge in the earth. A skirmish, recent. Struggle against something far beyond human.
"They tried to bind it," he murmured, standing slowly. "The core was too old. Too unstable."
A low pulse trembled through the ground — subtle, but unmistakable.
Resonance.
He closed his eyes. In the silence behind the silence, he could hear it: a heart that wasn't his own, still beating below the wreckage. Slow. Ancient. Dreaming of fire.
His fingers tightened around the hilt at his waist.
The weapon — Haeryun, forged from Babelsteel — pulsed in return. It recognized what stirred.
He stepped forward. His boots crunched against a charred monk's staff buried in black ice. Around him, the snow had turned to shards of crystallized ether. Echoes of Qi, frozen mid-release — proof that the monks had resisted. Fiercely. Desperately. Uselessly.
A voice rose from below — warped, wet, inhuman.
"Boooy… child of ash…"
Jinryu descended the broken stairwell into the inner courtyard. Smoke hissed from scorched tiles. At the far end, a Core Seeker dragged itself forward, half its body fused with jagged crystal and corrupted bone. Its face — once a human's — was stretched with veins of silver fire and broken martial runes.
Its eyes were gone. In their place, two glowing slits.
"Give it… back…"
Jinryu did not reply.
He moved.
A breath. A blur.
Steel whispered.
The Seeker staggered, paused mid-motion… then collapsed, bisected from shoulder to hip. Haeryun gleamed faintly, its edge humming with the cry of a spirit long lost.
The black cat leapt from his shoulder, landed silently, and began circling the corpse.
Jinryu crouched beside it. The Mythic Core in the Seeker's chest — still intact, still pulsing faintly — beat like a distant war drum.
A memory struck him like a blade:
Screaming skies.The fall of the Crimson Gate.The Third Shattering.His mother's voice."Run, Jinryu. Run, and never seek the Tower."
He crushed the core with his bare hand.
It splintered like obsidian.
A gust of corrupted Qi bled into the air, and was instantly absorbed into Haeryun's blade, its runes lighting up faintly. The cat hissed, fur bristling.
"Too late to run," Jinryu muttered.
From the east, a horn sounded — deep, long, guttural.
Not human.
He turned his gaze toward the fog-drenched horizon. In the distance, through the smoke and snow, dark silhouettes were approaching. Not beasts. Not men. Something else.
"Shadowbinders," he whispered. "They're hunting survivors."
The cat meowed sharply — not in fear, but in warning.
He stood, his silhouette framed against the pale light of the broken sky.
"They'll be drawn here by the resonance," he said. "And the Council won't ignore the fact that a core went unstable this close to the old sanctum."
He glanced back at the cat.
"I'll need to move faster."
From the far sky — high above the shattered mountain spires — the Tower of Babel loomed, barely visible beyond the clouds. A ruined spine of god-made stone and shattered ambition, reaching eternally toward a dead heaven.
And at its peak, something stirred.
Something ancient.
Something red.
For the first time in a thousand years, a star blinked open — not in the sky, but from within the Tower itself.
Jinryu felt it.
And somewhere deep within his chest, the fragment of his own sealed Mythic Core trembled.