You can choose to skip this to go to chapter one.
The world of Neraveth was no ordinary world.
It was a living colossus — a planet so vast that its continents were larger than small universes, its skies stretched beyond stars, and its oceans swallowed dimensions. The ground pulsed with a heartbeat older than time, yet it never spoke. No one, not even the gods born from its soil, knew who had birthed them.
For trillions of years, the children of Neraveth multiplied. Gods forged worlds like toys, created angels to praise them, demons to fight for them, and beasts to roam the wild edges. Elves grew forests that brushed the edge of the void. Fox-folk and dwarves mined the bones of the planet for hidden power. And, much later, came the humans — fragile, defiant, and cursed with ambition.
And then came war.
It began as a spark — a clash of ideology between angels and demons — and bloomed into a wildfire that consumed all races. Treaties shattered. Civilizations burned. Whole continents sank beneath the seas of void energy unleashed by beings too powerful to comprehend.
In the far-flung Veyr Province, a small farming village clung to life amid the chaos. It was there that a boy named Kaelith lived with his parents and his five-year-old sister Lyra. Though poor and common, his parents had been proud — his father a healer, his mother a scribe. They had taught him to read the runes of the old tongue, to see the patterns of the stars, to hope in the middle of ruin.
But hope was a brittle thing.
On the night of the Final March, when the armies of angels, demons, beasts, and elves all converged on Neraveth's middle continents, Veyr Village was caught in the path. The ground trembled as Drakari beast-engines thundered past. Winged Avierian knights swooped down like silver arrows, striking indiscriminately. Fae sorcerers unleashed storms of voidfire, reducing homes to dust.
Kaelith had hidden Lyra beneath the floorboards of their hut, pressing a finger to her lips. "Don't make a sound," he had whispered, eyes burning. "I'll get Mother and Father."
But he had been too late.
Through a crack in the wall, he had seen his parents fall — his father cut down by a spear of light, his mother crushed beneath collapsing rubble. The world had roared around him, and the only sound he remembered was his own breath, ragged and shallow. Powerless. Helpless.
Something in him had broken that night.
He had clutched Lyra to his chest as the village burned, vowing through tears that he would never forgive the races that had done this. Not the angels. Not the demons. Not the elves or the beasts. None of them. His hatred became a seed, hard and black, buried deep in his heart.
For ten years, Kaelith and Lyra survived on the ashes of their old life, scavenging the ruins, moving from one refugee camp to another. He learned to fight with a knife, to track beasts in the woods, to barter scraps of old magic. Always watching. Always waiting. Always cold.
And then, on the night when the twin moons of Neraveth aligned, he felt it.
A pulse. A whisper. A flicker of silver runes at the edge of his vision.
A voice slid into his mind — smooth, cold, and almost amused:
> "Candidate detected. Hatred: high. Potential: amusing. Initializing Nyxion Protocol."
Kaelith froze. "Who… what are you?"
> "Nyxion Protocol. Adaptive Evolutionary System. Directive: Survive. Conquer. Transcend."
His heart thudded. For years, he had heard rumors of systems, blessings, curses — gifts from the unknown. He had never believed them. Until now.
> "Trial commencing," the voice said. "Punishment for failure: death."
Lightning cracked across the sky. Not a distant flash, but a spear of pure white energy that tore through the clouds and slammed into him. Pain exploded through his body, every nerve on fire. He fell to his knees, gasping, the taste of metal on his tongue.
Lyra's frightened cry reached him through the haze. "Kaelith!"
The voice chuckled — a dark, velvety sound.
> "Get up, little predator. This is only the beginning."
And as Kaelith's vision darkened, the interface unfurled before him, lines of silver runes spelling out his new reality.
A world of gods, demons, and endless war.
A boy with nothing left but a sister and a seed of hatred.
A system named Nyxion Protocol, colder than the void itself.
This was how it began.
This was his Journey.