The rain had long since stopped, yet the scent of iron and salt lingered in the air. Morning came slowly, dim and fractured through the heavy clouds that clung to the sky. Jin Hyeon awoke inside the ruined temple, the cold stone pressing against his back. For a moment, he thought the silence had returned, the kind that devoured everything—but then he heard it again. A faint heartbeat, not his own.
It came from the earth beneath him. Slow, steady, ancient.
Jin sat up, his breath misting in the chill. The temple floor pulsed with faint traces of violet light, seeping through the cracks like veins beneath the skin. He reached out, hesitating only for a moment, then pressed his palm to the stone. The light flared.
A whisper touched his mind, layered with a thousand voices at once. Not words exactly—memories, emotions, fragments of existence pulled together into meaning.
We remember the first silence.
The world around him blurred. His vision shifted, and suddenly he was standing in a vast expanse of shadow. No sky, no ground, only an endless sea of black. In the distance, faint lights flickered, each one a dying star swallowed by the void.
Then came the figures. Shapes made of fragmented memories—mages, warriors, children, all dissolving into ash as they moved. Their eyes glowed faintly with that same violet light. Jin realized with a jolt that they were not alive. They were echoes. The remnants of mana devoured by the void.
One of them stepped forward. Her face flickered between forms—a woman, a child, an old man, and then nothing. Her voice was calm and full of grief.
You have awakened what should never wake. The abyss remembers you.
Jin tried to speak, but the sound of his voice was swallowed by the dark. His body felt weightless, as if his existence was being pulled apart and examined by something vast and impersonal.
"I don't understand," he said finally. "What am I?"
The echo tilted her head. You are not destruction. You are recollection. The void consumes only to remember what the world has forgotten.
He frowned. "Then why does everything I touch disappear?"
Because you do not yet control what you are. You erase without knowing the shape of what you take.
The shadows trembled as her form began to dissolve. The Bureau seeks to end you, but they cannot see what you are meant to become. The Codex has awakened. Its pages have begun to bleed again.
"Codex?"
The Abyssal Codex. A relic buried beneath Aurea. A record of what came before magic, before the weave itself. It remembers the first unmaking. You must find it before they do. Only then will you know the truth of the silence within you.
Jin reached out, but the figure faded completely. The void crumbled, replaced by the dim light of dawn filtering into the temple. His heart raced as he looked down. His palm was marked with faint sigils, glowing in the same rhythm as the light from the floor.
The heartbeat was gone. The silence had returned—but it no longer felt empty. It was waiting.
Far above, in the floating city of Aurea, the Bureau was not sleeping.
Director Seo stood before the containment vaults, watching as the massive obsidian doors sealed shut. Inside were fragments of corrupted mana, sealed relics that once hummed with divine power but now leaked only decay. The Bureau's laboratories were filled with whispers of panic. The leylines were collapsing faster than anyone predicted.
A scientist approached him, trembling as she held out a report. "Director, the Codex has reactivated. Its containment runes failed at dawn. Something is rewriting the sigils from the inside."
Seo turned sharply. "Show me."
They entered the central chamber, where the Abyssal Codex rested on a pedestal of living crystal. Its cover was black, the surface shifting like liquid shadow. Ancient runes crawled across it, forming new patterns only to dissolve again seconds later.
"What caused this?" Seo demanded.
"Unknown. But the Codex is resonating with a specific signature. The same null frequency we detected in Sector Thirteen."
Jin Hyeon's name hung unspoken between them.
Seo stared at the book, his jaw tight. "Open it."
The scientists hesitated. "Sir, the last time someone attempted—"
"I said open it."
Reluctantly, one of them extended a trembling hand. The moment the Codex opened, the air exploded with pressure. Shadows burst from the pages, forming symbols of light inverted into darkness. A voice echoed through the chamber, not human, not divine, but vast.
The balance has broken. The weave recoils. The unmaker walks again.
The lights flickered violently. The floating runes above the city pulsed in response, and alarms blared across Aurea. Seo shielded his eyes, shouting over the roar.
"Shut it down!"
The Codex snapped shut on its own, the entire room plunging into eerie stillness. Only the faint hum of machinery remained.
When the lights steadied, Seo saw something etched onto the crystal pedestal beneath the book. Words that hadn't been there before:
"When silence breathes, the world will listen."
He turned to his officers. "Track him. Every scanner, every drone. I want his location before the Codex writes again."
Meanwhile, far below, Jin was already on the move.
The temple had begun to collapse after his vision. The sigils under the floor glowed brighter until the stone cracked apart, revealing a hidden staircase leading deep into the earth. He hesitated only a moment before descending.
The deeper he went, the colder it became. The air was thick, not with mana, but with something older. The walls were carved with runes that shifted when he looked too long, spelling words in languages he didn't know but somehow understood.
Each step echoed like a heartbeat.
At the bottom of the stairs was a vast chamber, lit only by the faint violet glow of his veins. In the center stood a statue of a figure cloaked in shadow, hands raised as if holding the sky itself. Its face was featureless, but carved at its feet were words so old they felt like they had been waiting for him.
To unmake is not to destroy. It is to remember the shape before creation.
Jin stepped closer. The black flame flickered to life in his hand, illuminating the base of the statue. There, half-buried in dust, lay a fragment of obsidian crystal, pulsing faintly with light. When he touched it, the air around him rippled.
A vision struck him—cities of light collapsing, oceans of mana twisting into shadow, the sky tearing open to reveal something vast and endless. And at the center of it all stood a figure that looked like him, cloaked in darkness, his eyes mirrors of violet fire.
The vision ended abruptly. Jin fell to his knees, gasping for breath. The crystal fragment disintegrated into dust, but its memory remained.
He understood now. The void was not born within him. It had chosen him.
Outside, thunder rolled across the distant sea. The wind howled through the ruins, carrying the faint sound of approaching engines. Bureau drones, scanning the coast again.
Jin stood slowly, the last traces of light fading from his eyes. His voice was calm, almost serene. "If the Codex remembers me, then I will make the world remember too."
The silence around him deepened, thick and heavy. The black flame returned, steady and strong.
Above him, the cit
y of Aurea trembled as the Codex opened once more on its own.
And the first word it wrote was his name.