The sky broke.
Not metaphorically. Not poetically. The fabric of reality tore like wet parchment, and through the wound poured something that had no name, no precedent, no mercy.
Kaelen stood on the observatory tower of the Grand Archive, stylus frozen above parchment, and watched the world end.
The rupture appeared first as a shimmer—barely perceptible, a distortion in the air above the western mountains. Then it widened. The edges of the tear flickered with colors that shouldn't exist, hues that made his eyes water and his stomach clench. Beyond the breach, he glimpsed something vast. Infinite. A realm where dimensions folded into themselves endlessly, where time moved in spirals rather than lines, where pocket universes bloomed and died like flowers in fast-forward.
And from that impossible place, it came.
The energy hit Zyviar like a tidal wave of liquid starlight. It cascaded across the sky in rivers of luminescent purple-white, flooding down onto the planet's surface with the weight of inevitability. Where it touched, matter changed. Trees crystallized, their bark becoming something between wood and glass. Stone rippled like water. The air itself seemed to thicken, becoming visible—translucent threads of power weaving through everything.
Kaelen's hand began to tremble. Not from fear. From pain.
His fingers blackened first. The flesh didn't rot or burn—it rejected. His body recognized the energy saturating the atmosphere as foreign, invasive, incompatible. Purple veins crawled up his wrist like parasitic roots, and the agony that followed made him drop his stylus.
Below, in the streets of Valoris, the screaming began.
The city died in minutes.
Kaelen pressed his face against the observatory window, forcing himself to watch. To document. That was his purpose—his calling as a scholar of the Grand Archive. Even as his body betrayed him, even as his lungs struggled to process air now thick with alien energy, he would witness.
A woman collapsed in the market square, her body convulsing. Her skin split along invisible seams, purple light bleeding through the cracks. She didn't scream. Her throat had already dissolved.
A merchant stumbled from his shop, clawing at his face. His eyes had liquefied, replaced by swirling pools of that same luminescent energy. He took three steps before his skeleton simply... stopped holding together. He crumpled like a puppet with cut strings.
Children. There were children in the streets.
Kaelen turned away from the window. He couldn't document that. Wouldn't.
His left arm hung useless now, the flesh gray and lifeless. The purple veins had reached his elbow. He stumbled to his desk, fumbling for fresh parchment with his remaining good hand. His vision blurred—whether from tears or the energy corrupting his optic nerves, he couldn't tell.
Document it. Someone must know what happened here.
He wrote with shaking fingers:
Third hour past meridian. The breach expands. Estimate: forty percent of Valoris population dead or dying. The energy—I will call it Rui, after the old word for "change"—does not discriminate. Young, old, strong, weak. Our bodies cannot process it. We are Predecessors now, relics of a world that no longer exists.
The stylus slipped from his fingers. He stared at his hand—three fingers gone now, dissolved to the second knuckle. He picked up the stylus with his thumb and remaining finger, ignoring the way bone ground against bone.
But some...
He paused, squinting through the window at movement in the square.
Some are not dying.
The girl couldn't have been more than sixteen. She stood in the center of the market square, surrounded by corpses, and her body glowed.
The Rui didn't kill her. It merged with her.
Kaelen watched, transfixed, as the energy flowed into her skin like water into a sponge. Her eyes blazed with inner light. When she raised her hand, fire erupted from her palm—not normal fire, but flame that burned purple at its core, flame that made the air itself scream.
She stared at her hand. Then she laughed.
The sound carried up to the observatory—high, breaking, caught between exhilaration and madness.
Others emerged. A blacksmith whose arms had become living metal. A beggar whose body flickered in and out of visibility, phasing between states of matter. A priest who levitated six feet off the ground, Rui swirling around him like a personal storm.
They were born for this, Kaelen wrote. Or perhaps born in a time close enough to the breach that their bodies remembered what evolution felt like. They are the inheritors. The cultivators. The new humanity.
His chest tightened. Each breath came harder than the last. The Rui had reached his lungs now, turning the soft tissue crystalline. He could feel himself becoming something between flesh and stone.
We Predecessors have a choice, he wrote, the letters growing jagged as his coordination failed. Adapt or die. Cultivate this foreign energy until our bodies accept it, or watch it unmake us from the inside.
A crack ran up the observatory wall. The stone itself was changing, restructuring at a molecular level. The entire tower groaned.
Kaelen kept writing.
The sun set, though it looked nothing like any sunset before. The Rui-saturated sky burned in colors that cycled through visible and invisible spectrums. Three moons rose—Zyviar had always had three moons—but now they glowed with internal light, transformed by the energy that had spread beyond the planet into the void itself.
Kaelen lay on the floor of the observatory, his body failing systematically. He'd lost feeling below his waist. His right lung had stopped functioning. But his mind remained clear, sharpened even, by proximity to so much concentrated power.
Through the cracked window, he could see the world remaking itself.
In the distance, mountains moved. New peaks thrust up from the earth as if pulled by invisible hands. Forests ignited with bioluminescent fire that didn't consume, only transformed. The very geography of Zyviar was being rewritten.
And the people who survived—the adapted, the evolved, the new—they fought.
Power called to power. The girl with purple fire battled the phasing beggar in the ruins of the market. The priest's Rui storm clashed against the blacksmith's metal flesh. They fought not from anger or ambition, but from instinct. Testing. Learning. Discovering the limits of their transformed bodies.
One of them—Kaelen couldn't tell which anymore, his vision was too degraded—did something impossible. They spoke, and reality listened. Space itself bent, folding the market square in half. Three blocks of the city simply ceased to occupy normal geometry.
An Epic. The first Epic.
They can reshape reality now, Kaelen wrote, though his fingers had mostly dissolved and he was guiding the stylus with his forehead, pressing down on the nub. The Rui grants more than strength. It grants will made manifest. The old laws are dead. The old physics are suggestions. This is not evolution. This is apotheosis.
His vision darkened at the edges. Not from death—not yet. From the sheer concentration of Rui filling the air. It was visible now, a purple haze that swirled through the ruined city like living smoke.
Five thousand years, he thought, though he could no longer write. If any of my kind survive, if we can adapt, cultivate, integrate this poison into our blood... what will we become in five thousand years?
The answer came to him as his consciousness began to fragment.
Gods. Monsters. Perhaps both.
The final entry in Kaelen's journal was written by someone else.
The scholar who found his body three days later—a survivor who had successfully begun Rui cultivation—carefully copied the last legible words:
We are no longer what we were. We are becoming.
Below that, in the margins, Kaelen had scratched one more line before his body gave out entirely. The handwriting was barely recognizable, carved into the parchment by a stylus held in teeth:
I tried. For three days, I tried to integrate it. The Rui. I meditated. I circulated it through my failing body. I felt it begin to take root in my bones. But I am too old. Too set in the old ways. My body remembers what it was and refuses to forget.
The young will inherit this new world. Perhaps that is mercy.
The scholar who found him noted that Kaelen's corpse had partially crystallized, locked in a state between life and death, flesh and mineral. The Rui had preserved him in his final moment—a monument to the old world's end.
She closed the journal carefully and looked out over what remained of Valoris.
In three days, the city's population had dropped from fifty thousand to three hundred. But those three hundred glowed with inner fire. They moved with inhuman grace. They commanded elements that shouldn't exist.
She could feel the Rui inside herself now—a vast ocean of potential, waiting to be shaped by will and imagination. Her body had accepted it. More than accepted. Welcomed.
The old world was dead. The Day of Renewal had seen to that.
Now came the age of cultivation. The age of power. The age where strength would define not just status, but survival itself.
Five Thousand Years Later
The historical archives of the Royal Phulax Academy contained exactly one original document from the Day of Renewal: Kaelen's journal, preserved in a stasis field powered by condensed Rui.
Students rarely visited it. The past was prologue, and the present demanded their attention.
But if one looked closely at the final page—at the margins where Kaelen's dying thoughts had been scratched—there was something the scholars had missed. Words written so faintly they were nearly invisible, pressed into the parchment by fingernails that had already begun to dissolve:
To whoever comes after: beware what you become in pursuit of power. The Rui grants strength, yes. But it also hungered. It chose us not as inheritors, but as vessels. We welcomed our own colonization.
I die unchanged. Perhaps that is victory.
Or perhaps it is merely extinction by another name.
The journal sat in its case, unread, while outside the Academy walls, the descendants of those first cultivators—five thousand years removed from the Day of Renewal—prepared for another day of training, advancement, and the endless climb toward godhood.
None of them knew that the Rui which flowed through their veins still remembered its origin. Still carried whispers of that infinite-dimensional realm. Still hungered.
And in a royal estate on the outskirts of the capital, a woman screamed as something impossible tore its way into the world—a child born neither Predecessor nor cultivator, but something that should not exist at all.
An abomination.
A singularity.
A boy who would be named Xenos.
The world had spent five millennia learning to fear the power that came through the breach.
It had not yet learned to fear what that power could create.