The world didn't end with a bang, but with a tear. Thirty years ago, the sky above Guangxu City split open—a shimmering, infected wound vomiting forth things that twisted light and sanity. "The Seventh Dimension," they called it. Not a realm, but a corpse. The fossilized grave of something older than stars, now bleeding into ours.
Civilization crumbled like rotten bone. Nations dissolved into fiefdoms ruled by techno-cults and gene-splicing syndicates. And in this necropolis, beneath groaning metal and flickering emergency lights, a boy lay dying among the dead.
Xie Ren.
Seventeen. Ribs sharp as knife-edges beneath a threadbare uniform. His breath rattled—wet, shallow. Blood pooled hot and sticky beneath his temple where he'd fallen. Around him, the Elimination Chamber reeked: copper, voided bowels, and the ozone stink of failed machinery. Five hundred cadets. All still. All silent. The final genetic aptitude test. Failures weren't expelled; they were discarded.
Why am I conscious? The thought was thick, syrupy. Did the machine glitch? Or… am I just dying slower? He tried to lift a hand. It felt like lifting a mountain. His vision swam—darkness eating the edges. Mother's voice… her hands kneading dough on the cold mornings before the Sky-Tear… The memory was a shard of glass in his chest.
Then—
A sound.
Not in his ears. Inside. A resonance, deep and tectonic, like a planet's core groaning. It vibrated through his marrow, syncing with his faltering heartbeat. THUMP. The world sharpened. THUMP. Time bled into syrup. THUMP.
He saw.
Not with eyes. A deeper sense, raw and newborn. Faint auroras clung to the corpses—ghostly filaments of color and texture, fading fast. Azure threads coiled like smoke from a girl who'd once bent light into illusions. Amber fractals pulsed from the hulking boy whose skin could turn to stone. Crimson embers sputtered where Qi Lian lay—the aristocratic heir, golden boy of the Qi Syndicate, now broken and twitching, one eye staring vacantly at the shattered ceiling. His aura was brightest: jagged bolts of violet lightning tangled with veins of predatory instinct.
Life. The echo of what they could have been.
Xie Ren's hand, unbidden, scraped across the cold floor towards Qi Lian. Not malice. Hunger. Primal, devouring hunger. His fingertips brushed the heir's blood-slicked tunic.
Contact.
The resonance screamed.
Qi Lian's violet energy surged into Xie Ren—not light, but pure sensation. Lightning. It seared his nerves, locked his jaw. Muscles convulsed, tendons snapping taut. He tasted ozone, felt static crackle along his teeth. Beneath it came something colder, sharper: Combat Instinct. Flashes of Qi Lian's training—dodging energy bolts, anticipating strikes—flooded Xie Ren's mind, a violent, alien overlay.
Then came the others.
Azure threads snaked into him. Phantom Reflex. His perception fragmented—seeing the room from five angles at once, predicting dust motes falling. Amber fractals anchored him. Steel Skin. A grinding pressure beneath his flesh, like tectonic plates shifting, sealing cracks in bone, thickening dermis. Crimson embers ignited his lungs. Flame Root. Heat bloomed in his core, scouring the cold from his veins.
It wasn't absorption. It was violation. And salvation.
He vomited bile, choking on the sensory overload. His body was a battlefield—foreign energies warring, integrating, rewriting him. He felt Qi Lian's essence fight back—a final, fading snarl of aristocratic pride—before dissolving into Xie Ren's starving void. The heir's body didn't turn to ash; it deflated, collapsing in on itself with a sickening wet sigh, leaving only damp cloth and a lingering smell of burnt almonds.
Xie Ren rolled onto his back, gasping. Sweat and blood mingled on his lips. His heart hammered—too fast, too strong. He flexed a hand. The knuckles, once bruised and scabbed, were smooth. The grinding pain in his ribs was gone, replaced by a terrifying density.
What… am I? The resonance hummed within him, satisfied. A dark, organic intelligence. Not a system. A symbiote. Born of the chamber's death throes? Or something… older?
A sound ripped through the chamber. Not internal. External.
CRACK!
High above, the reinforced ceiling buckled. Not from collapse. From outside. A shaft of sickly, pulsating violet light speared down, illuminating swirling motes of dust and decay. Within the light, shapes coalesced—not physical, but conceptual horrors: geometric tumors, recursive eyes, singing blades made of fractured math.
A presence pressed against the chamber, vast and indifferent. Scavengers drawn to the psychic backwash of mass death? Or… drawn to him?
A fragment of the resonance—his resonance—flared in warning: Xuanming Ruins. South. NOW. Not words. Urgency. Survival.
He scrambled up. His body moved with terrifying, unfamiliar grace—Qi Lian's instincts guiding his own raw panic. He stumbled past the husks that were once peers. Past the girl who'd shared stolen synth-rations with him. Her blue aura was gone, absorbed. Only a hollow shell remained. A flicker of guilt, sharp and human, pierced the adrenaline. I didn't ask for this.
The massive blast door groaned. Manual override—a rusted wheel. He gripped it. Steel Skin hardened his palms. Flame Root surged into his arms. Muscles, once wasted, bunched and tore the metal wheel free with a shriek of protesting alloy.
Beyond lay the corpse of Guangxu City. Shattered sky-piercers clawed at a sky perpetually bruised by the Seventh Dimension's weeping wound. Violet storms raged on the horizon. The air tasted of ash and alien spores.
He stepped out. Not a survivor. Not a victim.
A predator. Newborn. Terrified. Ravenous.
The vast, recursive eye in the sky-light pulsed. Watching. Knowing.
Xie Ren ran. Not towards hope. Towards the deeper shadows. Towards the resonance's next meal. Towards a universe that owed him nothing, and which he would now devour piece by piece.