Cold.
The kind that gnawed at bone, that slid into the marrow and whispered of death.
When his eyes opened, there was no sky, no light, only the crushing dark of water pressing in on all sides. His breath became ragged, muffled by something enclosing him. He tried to move. His limbs struck wood. A coffin.
Not just sealed… Nailed shut.
The realization was like a stab to the stomach, a hammer to the heart and a bullet to the brain all at once. Instinct screamed at him to thrash, to claw, to resist.
He battered against the lid, his lungs already aching. Nails groaned in their sockets. Splinters stabbed his fingers. Then, with a desperate shove, something in him snapped awake. Power surged in his muscles. The wood burst, rusted, corroded nails tearing free, and icy water flooded over him in an enveloping embrace.
He kicked upward, arms clawing at the void.
When his head finally broke the surface, he gasped. But there was no air of land, no shore, no horizon. Only water, stretching into infinity.
Above, a pale light bobbed in the distance, it was like a sentient orb that coruscated gently like a firefly in the wind, a spirit? Or a trick of his oxygen-starved mind?
The light pulsed.
A jumbled, impossible raving voice rang in his skull:
"Congratulations, Nameless. First trial… passed."
'Nameless?'
His mind staggered under the weight of the words. Questions rose in a torrent. 'Where am I? What trial? Why was I underwater? Who is speaking?' But another question struck with sudden, sickening clarity:
'What… is my name?'
His thoughts froze. He couldn't remember. Not his name, not his age, yet he remembered other fragments: the taste of coffee, the hum of streetlights, the blue glow of a phone screen. Earth. He had been on Earth.
A ripple disturbed the water behind him.
He turned.
Fifty meters away, a scarlet shark glided toward him. It was monstrous, longer than a bus, its skin a tapestry of wet crimson scales broken by lines of dull metal. Beneath those seams, gears churned slowly, their teeth catching the faint light like tiny, spinning predators of their own.
Its eyes were worse. Round, black, and lifeless, like a doll's buttons stitched where sight should be. They stared through him, seeing nothing but the space his body would occupy in its jaws. The shark-like creature was slowly encroaching, a murderous frenzy beaming in its eyes, as if it hadn't eaten in days and suddenly stumbled upon a scrumptious snack.
The raving voice returned, louder now, a tide of ravings that seemed to come from all directions at once. His vision blackened, not with unconsciousness, but as if a curtain had been drawn. On the back of his eyelids, words appeared in pale fire:
"Pick your poison. A gift for passing the first trial. Choose carefully, your first choice will shape all that follow."
A hundred objects shimmered before his mind's eye. Knowledge of each slammed into his skull, drilling into the deepest depths of his brain: a lightning-forged sword that could paralyze prey, a revolver with endless bullets, glasses that glimpsed half a second into the future. Each felt real as if it were already in his hand.
He discarded the weapons, he'd never fired a gun or wielded a blade, and both were useless underwater. His mind desperately sifted for anything that might save him. 'I need something to survive. Anything… I beg!'
In his mind's eye, he searched for items that appeared useful in this perilous situation, stumbling upon 3:
A fishing rod that would always reel in something.
An ocarina to speak with aquatic animals for one minute.
A seashell that allowed one to breathe underwater for ten minutes.
'The rod? It can pull in anything, but what good is that when a predator is already bearing down on me, pulling it in closer would be akin to suicide! The ocarina? Even if it worked on that abomination, those black eyes of its promise me it wouldn't listen to its meal's qualms about being devoured. The seashell? Use it to swim underwater and run away? Ten minutes of air is meaningless if the chase ended in seconds and that shark would undoubtedly close the distance in seconds...'
The water trembled, the shark was two arm-lengths away now.
Hopelessness swelled in his chest, tight and crushing. His gaze skimmed over the shifting catalog of items. His eyes squirmed and rolled in their eye sockets, buzzing, gliding and practically begging for an item that could save him until they finally landed on something. A glimmer of hope.
Luminous Eye.
Control light in a small radius. Shape it. Speak to it.
The moment he saw it, his thoughts locked on the pale spirit floating before him in the real world. If he could control that, if it was alive in some way, maybe it could save him, he instinctively suspected that this ball of light was responsible for the ravings that resounded in his mind, as if the spirit was a telepathic speaker, no he could ascertain the source definitively, as if it were an instinctual response.
There was no plan, just a frantic, irrational spark of hope in the dark.
He seized it.
The choice slammed into reality and the spirit flared in answer. Pain stabbed through his skull, sharp enough to make him grit his teeth.
With a hoarse laugh, an uncanny voice muttered "…I'll allow it."
Control flooded him. The spirit obeyed.
The shark surged forward, mouth gaping wide, rows of obsidian teeth gleaming wetly. Its breath was hot, foul, carrying the stench of rotting meat. The air inside its maw felt humid, suffocating. He could see the twitch of its jaw muscles, the glisten of saliva like oil on black water.
At the last instant, he hurled the light into those empty eyes. It struck and drilled inward. The gears in the shark's flesh whined, teeth grinding faster for a heartbeat before seizing entirely.
The creature shuddered once. Twice. Then its entire body went slack, mouth still hanging open as if frozen mid-bite.
"Level 1 Puppet Shark slain."
A warm tide of alien vitality poured into him. His muscles stopped screaming. The corpse floated, unnaturally buoyant. He clambered onto it, chest heaving.
The spirit drifted free of the carcass and brushed against his hand. Text of light formed in the air:
Nameless's First Spirit.
Level 0 - weakest sentient spirit.
Subordinated after - [illegible]
He frowned. Earth. His memory was shattered, but enough remained to know this world was wrong. The shark, the voice, the spirit, none of it belonged.
Before he could think and contemplate the answers to his seemingly endless sea of questions, a cold scratching started deep inside him, like claws carving his soul like a carpenter did a wooden puppet, like a couple engraving their names on a piece of bark using a knife or like a teacher ceaselessly etching information onto a chalkboard.
"Congratulations, Nameless Number 99. You are the 831,399th to pass the first trial. Five perished. Remaining Nameless: 999,995."
Nameless… others? A time limit pressed on him, a wordless certainty etched into his being.
He felt the time limit in the deepest recesses of his body, as if it had been ingrained into his soul, becoming a part of him, as fundamental to his being as instinct itself.
How a 'time limit' could become instinctual to someone was beyond him, but he subconsciously matched the instinct of a time limit to the feeling that someone had when they were holding in their urine or feces, one would always have a rough estimate of the time they could endure before emptying their bodily excrements. And this feeling of a "time limit" was similar, however, it wasn't uncomfortable like straining one's bladder to hold in urine nor was it a rough estimate, instead it was a certainty that resounded throughout the boy's being, the limit and task itself read:
One week. Survive.
The sensation faded, and the light around him dimmed. A shadow fell over the water.
He looked up.
A creature that was enormous, a torso the size of a car, four black wings plush as velvet and dark as shadow, a jagged head like a pterodactyl fused with a rhinoceros carved from stone. Button eyes stared down with dead patience.
It swooped, rapidly closing the distance between itself and the boy.