"This place is creepy."
The words came out of Hao's mouth like he was testing if his voice still worked.
So this is another trial… or a remnant? Ugh. So much stuff to remember.
The last thing he remembered clearly was the falling.
Not falling through air, not even down into a pit. More like reality slipping out from under his feet with casual cruelty. Then that hard yank.
After the fall, he felt what could only be described as his body being ripped out of cold water and then slammed into the ground with a thud that was more metaphorical than physical. His head still hurt, but the pain dimmed quickly, like his brain decided to finally take a break from throwing him death signals.
Relief washed over him anyway. Soft and warm, the way a blanket feels when you're too tired to think.
Then he opened his eyes again.
Actually opened them this time.
Wet, slow steps dragged across the forest floor. Leaves clung to his shoes, heavy with recent rain, and the mud didn't so much accept his weight as resent it. Everything smelled alive in the wrong way. Rot sweetened by cold. Bark damp enough to breathe. Mushrooms that looked like they were looking back at him.
He walked.
Not because he had a plan.
Because standing still in a place like this felt wrong.
The forest was too big to feel real. The cabin had been a knife fight in a closet. This felt like a place that didn't care if you existed. Trees rose high and thin, older than they looked, their trunks slick with moss. Light leaked through the canopy in watery strips. The ground was uneven with roots and half-buried stones. Every few steps, his ankle threatened to twist.
Still, he walked like someone trying to outpace a nightmare.
Of course.
Because why wouldn't it be another forest?
"What's with remnants and forests?" he muttered. "Does being an anchor come with a love for nature?"
No answer.
That was a problem in itself.
Silence in the cabin had been a pressure. This was different. This was a silence that pretended to be normal. It was the kind of quiet that could pass for peace if you were desperate enough.
After a while he forced himself to slow, to take another look.
A shallow stream traced between stones and roots. The water was clear and cold enough to look sharp. A crooked log lay half-sunken in mud, the bark pocked by something that had bored into it. Pale mushrooms dotted the base of a tree like spilled teeth.
He stared at them too long.
Then kept going.
He couldn't see any border. No walls. No path. When he tried to focus on a direction, the forest simply offered him more forest.
He lost count of how long he'd been walking for.
Time was weird here. Not warped. Just… uninterested in him.
He wiped his forehead and stopped beside a fallen log. His lungs worked cleanly, too cleanly, like the air had been filtered for his convenience.
That should have been comforting.
It wasn't.
"Okay," he said quietly. "We're not panicking. There must be a hint to the trial."
He accepted the situation almost too fast. Who knew he'd adapt this quickly to living a normal life, then almost being murdered in a cabin, losing a staring contest with a thing that had no eyes and way too many teeth, and now being dumped into a forest.
It couldn't possibly get any worse, could it?
He looked around as if the trees might applaud.
They didn't. The trees were busy doing what they'd always done.
He leaned against the log and did the first sensible thing he'd done since waking up.
Inventory.
His pockets were light.
He checked anyway, because denial was apparently part of his survival kit.
No phone.
No wallet.
No keys.
No kitchen knife.
No anything.
"Great," he breathed.
His voice did not echo.
The forest swallowed it whole.
That annoyed him more than it should've.
He tried to ground himself by thinking about the last real day he remembered. The last normal day. The kind of day that had problems small enough to be solved by going home.
A desk. Papers. The stale smell of a room that had been lived in too long without opening any windows. A clean bed mocking the chaos around it.
He could almost see the image.
Almost.
He tried to fix it in place. To grab a detail.
The color of the walls.
A mug on the corner of the desk.
A single dumb, ordinary item that proved his life had existed before this.
The mental picture blurred, like someone had rubbed a thumb across wet ink.
Hao frowned.
"No."
He tried again.
A face this time.
A friend from his real life. Anyone he knew before this mess started. Someone he used to talk and spend time with.
He could see the shape of a person.
It looked just like any shape of any person.
He tried to guess a name.
He opened his mouth as if saying it out loud would drag it free.
Nothing.
His pulse slid upward.
The voice in the void had said anchors absorbed remnants.
That remnants left traces.
That the veil is a place where anchors can live. But would it really be a good place, maybe he would have to pay a price to live there.
He assumed the price would be scars.
Pain.
Maybe nightmares.
He hadn't considered this.
He hadn't considered losing common, harmless pieces of himself like loose coins slipping through a ripped pocket.
He stared at his hands.
"Okay," he whispered. "There must be something from before."
He tried to remember his own address.
A street name surfaced.
Then evaporated.
He tried to remember a childhood smell.
Soap, maybe.
Warm food.
Rain on hot pavement.
The images flickered but refused to stick.
He swallowed hard.
So I'm really stuck here alone, barely knowing what to do. No one to help me out. Not even a weapon.
He almost laughed at the thought of how stupidly reasonable that sounded. Like the problem was gear. Like a knife would fix the fact that the world had quietly rewritten his future into something that didn't include safety, certainty, or other people.
He dragged a hand through his hair while pretending that being calm was a choice.
It wasn't.
"Damn," he muttered. "Even if they wouldn't help much, I wish I had something to work with."
That was the moment the forest stopped being the biggest problem.
A small, almost electric tingling ran through him.
His body betrayed him.
His heart stuttered.
Beneath his skin, something moved.
Not a single thing.
Many.
Small enough to be imagined, sharp enough to be real. Like tiny insects crawling across his muscle fibers, slipping through the space between nerves.
His skin didn't bulge. Nothing visibly shifted.
But he felt every one of them.
The sensation arrived all at once. His palms clamped down on his knees, white-knuckled.
Don't freak out, he told himself.
That voice warned him about this, didn't it?
He couldn't even be sure anymore.
But how couldn't he freak out?
The sensation was too accurate. Too intimate. It crawled across his arms, his ribs, the deep channels of his back. Up his spine. Toward his throat. Then higher, like it was curious about his eyes.
A high, broken sound leaked out of his lungs at the thought.
He hit the ground hard.
Hao rolled instinctively, grinding his shoulder into wet leaves, then his side, then his back. As if he could crush what he couldn't see. As if panic could be physical enough to solve itself.
It only made the sensation worse.
The things scattered like they'd been kicked awake. They raced across every scrape, every tiny tear in his skin, as if looking for an exit.
He clawed at his sleeves.
Scratched at his neck.
Dragged his back against the bark of a tree so hard he felt it bite through his shirt.
His mind tripped on multiple horrid scenarios, but one stuck out the most.
What if they erupt from under my skin like ants leaving a nest, pouring out of every weak spot, every scrape, and I don't even get a say in it?
He froze mid-roll.
No.
They can't be real.
It's just the feeling of them. A trick. A remnant's aftertaste. There cannot be anything under there.
He forced himself to stop thrashing and turned onto his back, breathing like he'd run a kilometer on broken glass.
His palm stung.
He lifted it.
A fresh scrape, raw and bleeding where his hand had skidded across rock.
Then he saw them.
At the ragged edges of the wound, tiny motes gathered into clusters. Dark purple points flickering together like a small swarm.
Not bugs.
Not exactly.
More like pieces of darkness given weight.
They slid out from beneath his skin and pooled along the cut, hesitant, alive, as if deciding whether the outside world was safe.
A whimper broke free from his throat, loud and humiliating.
The pain from the scrape was nothing now. A distant signal.
The real sensation was deeper.
The motes traveled.
Not through air.
Through him.
Across his meat, along nerves and muscle fibers, threading up his forearm like a memory learning how to move.
He tried to shake them off.
They didn't fall.
He tried to wipe them away against his pants.
They slipped back into his skin as if his body had opened a door for them.
He stared.
Horrified.
And then, stupidly, he scraped his palm again against stone, as if proof required more evidence.
Blood welled.
The motes returned instantly, eager and precise.
He jerked his hand back with a strangled sound.
They didn't stop.
They didn't get out.
His breath came shallow and fast.
He pressed his scraped hand to his chest as if he could pin them in place.
The crawling sensation widened.
Not just in his arm now.
Across his torso.
Down his legs.
A soft, internal swarm kept rearranging itself, as if it were settling into every part of him.