Kade Ashen died with a laugh on his lips.
It was not the theatrical laugh of a doomed villain in some cheap melodrama; it was a small, private thing — the final rasp of a man who had at last accepted the truth of himself. Flames licked the broken stones around him, candlelight in a ruined chapel that stank of iron and old roses. The crowd had been patient enough to watch: magistrates in polished leather, priests with mouths pried shut by fear, watchers from the Corporate Houses who had come to see a problem neatly burned away. Kade's hands were bound by cords that had seen better days. His eyes, when he opened them, found nothing but the ceiling's black ribbing and the spilled shadows of men.
"Confess," intoned the chief inquisitor, his voice made of pewter and policy. "Say you repent."
Repent. The word had always tasted like coin to Kade. He had learned early that other people collected repentance the way they collected favors — as currency you could spend later on some clean conscience. He thought of all the small transactions that had carried him to this pile of rubble: the bribes that hollowed a promise, the cruelty traded for bread, the faces he had turned away. He had been careful enough to survive and reckless enough to hurt. And when they finally dragged him to the place where sins were counted, he did not lie.
"I did," he said. The laugh came after, tiny and dry as bone. "But only when it mattered."
Someone spat. A child crying in the back made the world smaller. The inquisitor raised his palm and the world shrank further: a blade, old and clean, winked in the torchlight. Kade's breath slowed. He could have found terror in that slow-moving shadow, but terror and he had been familiar since his first stolen winters. It would have been wasted art, to be terrified now.
Instead, the room folded.
There was no thunder, no cosmic decree. The floor of the chapel opened like a seam, and a cold wind breathed up from beneath the world. Light — not warm light, but a coloration like the inside of a bruise — leaked through the crack and curled over Kade's face. People screamed; the inquisitor's hand slipped on the blade. The watchers froze like predators whose bait had fled. The cords around Kade's wrists burned away as if they had been dipped in ice. He felt the sting of nothing and then the absence of everything.
The system chose its arrivals with deliberate cruelty. Kade landed on his feet in a place that was both nowhere and somewhere — a hollow between breaths. He smelled incense and ozone, felt like he had been stripped to marrow and dipped in black mercury.
A voice spoke, without mouth. It did not ask for his name. It offered one instead.
PATHS ARE OPEN. CHOOSE.
Kade laughed again, because now they would think it a miracle. Or a trick. He had learned that surprises were two-edged: they could fascinate as easily as they could devour. He scraped the dirt from his palms and looked.
Before him floated a circle of glyphs that stitched themselves into the air like stars arranging for a new constellation. Four bright sigils pulsed at the compass points: Guardian, Scholar, Prime, and Weaver — the known paths that led players to predictable ends. They were good for orderly men: power that came with restraints, talents channeled into prosperous lives, institutions to shelter those who preferred to prosper under law.
Beneath them, hidden like a tooth in a closed jaw, was a fifth sigil — a small, nearly invisible fractal that the light refused to touch. Kade felt it like heat under frost. The systems had rules; rules had loopholes; loopholes had monsters. He had always been fondest of monsters.
Choose, the voice had said.
Kade's fingers found the hidden sigil before his better mind could dissect the moment. The mark answered with a cold bite, sliding into his skin like a key into a lock that had been half-remembered for a lifetime. Pain jagged, sharp as a truth. He grinned into it.
The first thing to change was his hearing. Not with sound, but with meaning — a faint lattice of numbers and traits overlayed the chapel like a spiderweb only he could see: heart rate, hormone spikes, the broken economy of a man's nervous system. The system annotated the world and handed him data like cards. He tasted its name: SINBOUND.
It was not merely a game. It re-wired the body and then the soul like a surgeon bending bone. Others spoke of Paths that enhanced reflexes, brains, or the ability to weave energy. The Fifth Path had no gentling name. It responded to what he fed it. Sin became currency. Every act that tore at the fabric of another person — greed, betrayal, cruelty, delight in pain — did not merely corrupt: it fed the mark. The more grotesque the offering, the richer the return.
An old part of Kade — the part he had kept in a jar beneath his tongue, unspeaking — unfurled like a brittle flag. Where others felt disgust, he felt relief: at last there was a system honest enough to reckon with what he already was. The mark pulsed red beneath his skin and whispers arrived, low and precise: techniques, thresholds, edges he could push. The world opened as an equation in which he could select variables and watch consequences ripple.
He stepped back into the chapel amid smoke and blood and the stunned silence of men who thought only in laws. Their doctrine had said death would be final. The system laughed; it did not laugh as men do. The watchers blinked like animals who had smelled a predator.
"You were… saved," croaked a voice. Mercy, hatred, confusion — Kade did not know which flavor it wore. He was not interested in their theology. He had tasted the mark.
"You called me sinner," he said softly. The words came out like a promise and a threat. "You were right."
Power, he understood immediately, was not just strength. It was leverage. The mark let the skin remember things it had done: the weight of blades, the taste of fear, the small cues of people on the verge of breaking. Each memory became a tool he could sharpen, a muscle he could flex. He found he could tune the mark, coax it. A certain sin — a lie told to save a child — yielded warm, amber power; a scream of betrayal gave him a spike that tasted like copper and black smoke. The system categorized, ranked, and rewarded. He thought of ways to feed it elegantly.
Across the chapel's threshold the inquisitor had recovered his wits. He put his hand to his throat as if to find words that had fled. "Blasphemy," he breathed, which was the most useless of accusations now. Kade's smile was no longer private.
"Blasphemy is a market term," he said. "And markets are where transactions happen." He took a step forward and felt the runes beneath his boot sing with a low, hungry note that answered the mark. The watchers flinched as if the air itself had taken on weight. A woman near the back — a wife of one of the House delegates — whimpered when Kade's gaze brushed her. He did not know her name. He would learn it later if it pleased him; names were often useful.
The system supplied instructions with math and violence. Level thresholds, trigger conditions, passives that bled into the nervous system like new synapses. He saw a list that read like commandments in reverse: to purchase a higher edge, spend a sin. To stabilize a monstrous augmentation, bind a soul to a promise. The Fifth Path did not offer moral guardrails. It offered potential. It was an economy that commodified vice.
Kade closed his eyes. Memory came: the first time he had slashed a throat to feed a family; the last time he had watched a friend drown rather than throw himself into scandal; the name of a girl he had kissed once on a platform and later sold for safe passage. Each image flashed and the mark feasted, altering his physiology in tiny, ravenous increments. He felt it: sinew tightening, pupils thinning, a jawline sharpening to a blade. He tasted strength for the first time that felt like it belonged to him.
He could have left, become a wild, wandering sinbound monster — a legend the Houses would whisper about. That was the predictable path of such power: terror, blood, a string of villages with fires and husks in the fields. But Kade had never admired predictability for its own sake. He liked plans. The Fifth Path was not merely about rampage; it was about design. Its power promised dominion if one knew how to trade cleverly.
Outside the chapel the city moved like a living ledger. Corporate banners flew over market squares; altitude rails hummed; the old cathedral bells — the ones that still pretended to mark virtue — cracked under the new pressure. Kade slid into a shadow and considered his first transaction.
He would become something gods made space to fear. But gods and markets were the same in the end: both sought continuity. He had an opportunity: make a bank of sins, trade them like currency, and bend institutions until they whispered his name. The Fifth Path fed on spectacle, on escalation. If he fed it well, its returns would compound. If he fed it cleverly, no one would know where the corruption began until it was already too late.
He stepped away from the gathered and into the narrow alleys that stitched the city. The mark warmed like a heartbeat against his ribs. Somewhere, deep in the system's architecture, thresholds waited. There would be costs — always costs — and debts to be settled. Kade smiled, and the ghost of that smile made the night colder.
They had asked him for repentance. He had given them performance. They thought they had cleaned a blot from society by lighting fire to a life. They had no idea they'd opened a ledger.
He had been given a path that traded in sins. He intended to be the one who wrote the ledger.
And somewhere, a system logged the first of his transactions: SINFED +1. Balance: UNBOUND.
The night closed in, and under the red sky Kade Ashen moved like a creditor among the sleeping — calculating, patient, and hungry.