"Before power existed, all we had was fear. And from fear, we built systems."
Jakarta-9 looked like an old wound — never healed, only thickened.Industrial haze smeared the skyline; streetlights glimmered like fractured veins.Drones patrolled overhead, their red eyes marked with the emblem of Black Garuda.
In the shadow of an abandoned factory stood the Black Light Orphanage.Children queued for their evening ration, faces pale under flickering lamps.The air tasted like rust and old machinery.
Elias Crowe sat on the concrete steps, empty bowl in his hands.He wasn't hungry. He was counting.The metallic clang from the factory in the distance came every 8.3 seconds — rhythmic, consistent, comforting.Predictability was the only mercy left in this world.
He looked toward the far skyline — the place where The Field first appeared thirty years ago.
"You're counting again, huh?"
The voice came from behind. Isha Noor, sharp-eyed, restless.
"Bad habit," Elias said.
"Normal people count money, not seconds."
"I'm not normal."
"Yeah," she smirked. "I can tell."
They both laughed softly — not out of joy, but survival.
A torn government poster clung to the wall:"Red Vale Academy — Tomorrow Begins with Discipline."
That night, under the dim glow of a broken lamp, Elias opened a thin notebook hidden beneath his mattress.Pages filled with numbers, symbols, fragments of worlds — echoes from another life.He didn't know why he remembered those stories so vividly.Perhaps because this world felt like a broken remake of them.
"If the world imitates fiction," he wrote, "then humans are just characters who haven't realized they're being read."
The next morning, a black government vehicle stopped at the orphanage.A woman in a gray coat stepped out, holding a list.
"Elias Crowe," she said.
The name sounded like a verdict.