The Verdant Weald did not welcome them.
It watched.
Light fell in broken shards through trees that had stood before the First Reset. Before the system. Before players knew there were things to fear. These trunks were older than continents, their bark etched with histories no archive dared to record. Leaves rustled without wind, a dry, papery whisper that sounded almost like language.
Moss crept across ruins so ancient the stone had begun to dream itself back into soil.
[Entering Zone: Verdant We—]
The system hiccuped. A stutter in reality itself.
[…ERROR…]
[ZONE PERMISSION: DENIED]
[Recalibrating Narrative Authority…]
[REALITY OVERRIDE REQUESTED—]
Sai Ji stopped mid-step. His boot hovered over soil that suddenly felt less like earth and more like skin.
"…Yeah," he muttered, voice flat. "That's not creepy at all."
A laugh snapped behind him. Too quick. Too loud. Lura's voice carried an edge it hadn't possessed five minutes ago—something brittle, something watching from behind her eyes.
Birds lined the branches above. Hundreds of them. Wings folded. Heads tilted at identical, impossible angles.
One fixed its gaze on Sai Ji.
Then all of them did.
The forest ceased to be a location. It became a living mind: old, patient, and taking measurements. A pulse moved through the soil. Slow. Deliberate. Like a heartbeat waking from hibernation after a thousand-year sleep.
Beneath Sai Ji's ribs, something stirred.
Not memory. Not instinct. The shape of both, pressing up against the inside of his skin. The Werewolf King flexed. Teeth. Territory. The urge to scent the air and claim it.
Hunt.
Protect.
Dominate.
His fingers curled. Claws threatened to breach the knuckle.
Down, he commanded the beast. Not yet.
"Stay close," he said. His voice was rougher now. Older.
Lura pressed against a glowing root, her injured leg trembling. She didn't respond. She couldn't. The forest was already pressing into their minds, fingers of silver mist probing the cracks in their memories.
A root shifted beside her boot. Not growing. Breathing.
It brushed her ankle.
She jerked back with a sound—half gasp, half whimper—that Sai Ji had never heard her make before.
The mist thickened. Coiled. Rose into towers of silver light.
And then his team was gone.
They flickered inside the mist like specimens suspended in amber. Trapped in scenes only they could see.
Lura—seven years old again, small hands reaching toward a door that was already closing. Her mother's silhouette retreating down a corridor of white light. The word wait caught in her throat like a fishhook. She was still saying it, twenty years later, to everyone who left.
Fern—his shield arm raised against an impossible heat. The edges of his pauldron melted into nothing. Then the edges of his skin. His scream was silent inside the memory, but Sai Ji saw his throat convulse.
Nyx—his short swords dissolved, leaving empty hilts. Then his hands. Then his forearms. He stared at the stumps with the hollow resignation of someone who had lost everything before and knew exactly how it would feel this time.
Aeliana—diagnostic spells fizzled against something unnamable. Blue light died inches from her fingertips. For the first time in her life, the magic simply… refused to answer.
Midnight Wolf—data streams cascaded across his vision like a waterfall of blood. Error messages. Corruption warnings. Overloads. Readings that should not exist, should not be seen, should not be remembered.
And then the forest began to digest.
Sai Ji's claws bit into his palms. Blood dripped onto the ancient soil. Hot. Living. His.
The Werewolf King roared beneath his skin.
HUNT.
FIND THEM.
TEAR THE THROAT OUT OF ANYTHING THAT TOUCHES YOUR PACK—
He forced himself flat against the earth. Chest to soil. Heartbeat to heartbeat. He breathed.
I find them first.
A pause. The beast inside subsided, but only just. It settled into a crouch, muscles coiled, waiting for permission.
Then I kill it.
Runes ignited beneath his feet, glowing green-black—colors the system did not recognize, did not have names for.
[ERROR: Narrative Authority Conflict Detected]
[Unregistered Sovereign Presence Confirmed]
[Zone Stability: Declining… 64%… 41%…]
The mist collapsed inward.
Silence fell so complete Sai Ji could hear his own heartbeat echo off unseen walls. The trees were gone. His team was gone. The birds, the ruins, the breathing roots—all swallowed by silver.
He was alone.
He walked forward.
The trees returned, but they were different now. They bent slightly as he passed—not from wind. From recognition. The instinctive deference a wolf pack shows a stronger predator. Branches lowered. Leaves trembled. The very air thickened with something that smelled almost like fear.
The forest opened into a stone circle buried beneath centuries of moss.
Runes floated like frozen constellations, trapped mid-orbit. Broken statues surrounded the arena—gods whose names had been erased from every archive, every quest log, every scrap of recorded history. Their faces were worn smooth by time, but their postures remained: defiance. Despair. One held an empty throne. Another cradled its own severed head.
Three figures stood among the ruins.
NPCs. Tall. Armor fused to flesh like scar tissue, metal and muscle woven together in patterns that made Sai Ji's eyes ache. Their eyes had watched empires crumble, watched Resets scrape the world clean, watched everything they had guarded slowly forgotten.
"The anomaly arrives… before recognition."
The voice came from all three mouths simultaneously. Not synchronized. Identical. As though three bodies shared one throat.
Sai Ji's eyes caught the mist-light. Gold bled faintly into his irises.
"…You always talk like cryptic final bosses," he said, "or is this a special occasion?"
The left sentinel tilted its head—wrong, like a bird deciding if something is prey. The motion cracked ancient cartilage.
"Designation: Player… insufficient."
"Designation: NPC… rejected."
"Designation… Sovereign Echo."
The system screamed.
[CLASSIFICATION FAILED]
[CLASSIFICATION FAILED]
[CLAS—ERROR—CORRUPTION DETECTED—]
[FORCED SHUTDOWN INITIATED]
Sai Ji silenced it with a thought.
Not a command. Not a skill activation. Just… will. The system stuttered, recalibrated, and went quiet.
"Good," he said quietly. "Means I'm not boring."
Runes ignited beneath his feet. Not the green-black of his corrupted class. These were older. Glyphs older than the class system, older than the Reset that scraped the world clean, older than the sentinels themselves.
The central sentinel raised its fused-armored hand. Not in threat. In query.
Words burned into the air between them, transcribed directly from the soil, from the stone, from the marrow of the forest itself:
WHO REMEMBERS THE GODS ERASED BEFORE THE FIRST RESET?
Sai Ji didn't guess.
He remembered.
A throne of white stone. Stars falling like rain. A god with his face—older, wearier, lines carved by centuries Sai Ji had not yet lived—reaching toward an enemy that existed in negative space.
Not darkness. Not void.
Absence. The shape left behind when something is removed from reality itself.
The god spoke. Sai Ji couldn't hear the words, but he felt them. A command. A plea. An abdication.
Then—teeth. Claws. Betrayal.
Memories tearing past like storms.
The god fell.
And the forest remembered.
Sai Ji surfaced from the vision with blood in his mouth. He had bitten his tongue. His claws were fully extended now, sunk into the moss, into the soil, into the stone beneath.
The sentinels watched. Waiting.
He struck one precise rune.
It shattered.
Then it rewrote itself.
The sentinels stirred. Armor grated against fused flesh. Three heads turned in unison, tracking the new configuration of light.
"He does not answer…"
"…he remembers."
A final symbol hid beneath layers of illusion. Invisible to logic. Immune to pattern recognition. Buried so deep that even the system had forgotten it existed.
Sai Ji slowed his breathing.
Heartbeat matched the deep earth. Movement within stillness. The Werewolf King understood this: the patience of the hunt, the stillness before the strike, the moment when predator and prey both know what comes next.
One strike.
Illusion shattered.
Silence.
The sentinels stepped back.
Not defeated. Not surprised. In reverence.
"The forest recognizes… an unregistered king."
Trees bent inward. Leaves spiraled down around Sai Ji's shoulders like a mantle, settling against his pauldrons, his cloak, the wild mess of his hair. Mist withdrew, pressing itself against the arena edges like courtiers bowing from a throne room.
Far beyond the horizon, beyond the Weald, beyond the crumbling walls of this dying world—
Something massive stirred.
[UNCLASSIFIED ENTITY ACKNOWLEDGED]
[SOVEREIGN FRAGMENT — DETECTED]
[TRIAL STATUS: CONDITIONAL PASS]
"Conditional," Sai Ji said flatly. His voice was raw. His claws hadn't retracted. Gold still bled across his irises. "Give me the fragment and my team. In that order."
The sentinels hesitated.
It was the first time they had shown anything resembling uncertainty.
"Your companions remain imprisoned… within memory cycles." The central sentinel's voice softened. Almost gentle. Almost apologetic. "The forest does not release what it has begun to digest."
A scream tore through the Weald.
Lura.
Not the sound of physical pain. Worse. The sound of a wound that had never healed, torn open fresh. Seven years old, watching her mother leave, waiting twenty years for a return that would never come.
Sai Ji's claws slid free with the sound of swords unsheathing.
Gold flooded his vision. Not bleeding in. Flooding. The world became edges and vulnerabilities, heartbeats and breath-rhythms, the scent of fear on the air and the taste of blood in his mouth.
He turned his back on the sentinels.
On the trial.
On the ancient god that watched from the depths, patient as stone, waiting to see what this broken fragment of itself would do next.
The forest held its breath.
Sai Ji walked toward the wall of silver mist. Toward the screams. Toward his pack, trapped in the soft, consuming dark of memories that were eating them alive.
"I'm coming," he said softly.
His voice carried. Not because he raised it. Because the forest listened.
"Don't break before I get there."
The sentinels did not follow.
They stood among the ruins of erased gods, watching their sovereign walk toward war—not because he had passed their tests…
…but because he had never needed to.
The mist parted before him.
Not welcoming. Not yielding. Fearing.
Behind him, the forest that remembered kings bent its ancient head and prayed to a god that had forgotten its own name.
And somewhere, deep in the silver dark, Lura heard footsteps approaching through the screams.