Lin Da'is always believed he was ordinary.
That lie lasted until the night the satellite fell.
It began with a tremor—barely strong enough to rattle the loose tools on his workbench. He barely noticed it as he leaned over the dissected circuit board, solder iron steaming nearby. He worked the night shift in Sector 6's scrapyard lab, a place filled with the corpses of forgotten technology. Old drones. Cracked data cores. Empty signal shells from a time when Earth thought it understood the stars.
Lin had grown up around this junk. He knew how wires thought, how circuits whispered, how machines decayed. The scrapyard was where he felt sane. Or more accurately… normal.
The same couldn't be said about the people around him.
Most people who met Lin Da'is said the same thing afterwards:
"He feels off. Like he's listening to something we can't hear."
He laughed at comments like that. People were dramatic; that was all.
But the tremor that night wasn't normal. He felt it not through the ground, but inside his bones—like a vibration humming along a buried frequency meant for him and him alone.
He froze, staring at the ceiling. Something wasn't right.
The scrapyard floodlights flickered, one by one. The giant crane at the far corner gave a mechanical groan. His toolbox slid half an inch across the floor and stopped.
Then everything went silent.
Too silent.
The kind of silence where sound wasn't just gone—it was suppressed, strangled by something lurking beneath reality.
Lin slowly stood, wiping oil off his hands.
"System check," he muttered to himself—an old habit. "Grid stable. Cooling fans active. Temperature nominal."
He waited.
No answer, of course. There never was.
But tonight, he expected one.
Something in him expected it.
The silence worsened. His breath misted, even though the scrapyard was warm from the industrial furnaces. His fingertips tingled. His heartbeat slowed to an unnatural, almost mechanical tempo.
And then the sky tore open.
He didn't see a meteor. He didn't see a falling satellite.
He saw a shape—metallic, broken, wrapped in wires and antennae—that wasn't falling but dragged, as if pulled by an invisible hand.
A dead satellite.
And it was heading straight for the scrapyard.
Lin had no time to run.
The impact hit like a thunderclap—dust exploding, debris flying, metal shrieking. Lin threw his arms up, but the shockwave knocked him backward, slamming him onto the ground.
The room shook violently. Lights burst. Windows shattered. A second tremor ripped through the floor.
Then everything stopped.
And something started.
---
The satellite lay only a few meters from Lin, half-buried in the ground. Its surface glowed faintly—soft blue lines crawling like veins. It clicked, hissed, and leaked waves of heat that distorted the air.
Lin stared.
"This… isn't a model I've ever seen."
It looked old—older than any satellite Earth had launched in the last fifty years. Its plating wasn't standard alloy. Its wires looked grown, not manufactured. And at its center, where the metal had cracked…
Something pulsed.
A core. A sphere of shimmering black liquid, suspended in cracked casing.
Lin felt his chest tighten.
Everything inside him whispered one command:
Approach.
His legs moved before he agreed.
The heat radiating from the Object—no, from the Core—should have burned his skin. It didn't. Instead, the warmth felt familiar… comforting… almost welcoming.
He reached out.
Just a touch.
Just one.
His fingers brushed the sphere.
And the universe screamed.
A shockwave of black-light erupted, swallowing his vision. Symbols he'd never seen carved themselves into his mind—circles inside circles, intersecting lines, spirals that refused to stay still. His ears filled with whispers, but the words were reversed, like speech from a fractured dimension.
His breath caught.
His pulse shattered.
His vision split into three identical but delayed copies of reality.
And then—
The Core melted into his hand.
Not over his skin.
Into it.
The black liquid crawled up his arm like living ink, threading through his nerves, tasting him, reading him. He tried to scream but no sound came. His heartbeat vanished. His lungs locked. His body convulsed as the liquid burrowed deeper, racing across his chest, throat, spine—
Then everything went white.
---
He didn't know how long he was unconscious.
Minutes? Hours? He had no reference. Only the cold floor beneath him and the ringing in his skull.
Then he heard it.
A voice.
Soft. Metallic. Wrong.
"HOST DETECTED."
Lin's eyes snapped open. He scrambled backward, grabbing a metal pipe for defense.
"Wh—who's there?!"
The scrapyard was empty.
"IDENTIFIED: LIN DA'IS."
He turned toward the sound.
It wasn't coming from the room.
It was coming from inside his head.
"I… I'm hallucinating," he whispered. "I must've inhaled something toxic from the crash…"
"NEGATIVE."
Lin's muscles tightened.
"YOU ARE DESIGNATED: MILESTARS-HOST 00."
The word hit him like a punch to the ribs.
Milestars.
A classified myth.
A whisper among military engineers.
A project that supposedly caused an entire research facility to vanish from existence.
Lin staggered to his feet. "No… no, Milestars doesn't exist. It's conspiracy junk—"
"INCORRECT."
He felt pressure behind his eyes, as if someone pressed fingers against the inside of his skull.
"ACCESSING HOST MEMORY."
"What? Stop—"
"CORRECTING HOST MISCONCEPTIONS."
Lin gasped as a cold wave flooded his brain.
Images flickered—notes, diagrams, blueprints of something impossibly advanced. Human bodies grown around machine cores. Synthetic nerves woven with quantum fibers. Layers of identity constructed like software.
A hybrid.
A human built with technology instead of destiny.
Lin stumbled, clutching the wall. "These aren't my memories."
"THEY ARE NOW."
He froze.
His hand shook.
"Wh… what are you?" he whispered.
"DESIGNATION: MIL-00. PRIME KERNEL. LAST SURVIVING UNIT."
Lin swallowed. "And what do you want from me?"
Silence.
Then—
"YOU MUST SURVIVE."
Lin blinked. "What do you mean—?"
The floodlights exploded again.
A sound echoed across the scrapyard, deep and vibrating—like a voice stretched through miles of empty dimension.
Lin turned. His skin prickled.
A shape stood at the scrapyard's edge.
Humanoid.
Tall.
Wrong.
Its joints bent the wrong way. Its body twitched like broken frames of animation glitching in reality. Its head tilted too far, neck stretching as if made of rubber.
Lin's breath died in his throat.
"What… what is that?"
"MILESTARS ANOMALY DETECTED," the voice inside him said calmly. "VOIDBORNE ENTITY. DESIGNATION UNKNOWN."
The creature dragged its limbs forward, scraping metal across the ground. Its face had no features—only a hollow indentation where eyes should be.
"WHY IS IT HERE?" Lin whispered, backing away.
"REASON: THE VOID HAS NOTICED YOU."
His stomach dropped.
The creature stopped moving. Its head snapped toward him with impossible speed.
Lin froze.
Its body expanded slightly, almost humming—like something smelling prey.
Then it lunged.
Lin threw himself behind the workbench as the creature's arm stabbed through metal like wet paper. Sparks exploded. The bench flipped. Lin crawled backward, heart hammering.
"I can't fight that thing!"
"CORRECTION: YOU CAN."
"How?!"
"INITIATING MILESTARS OVERDRIVE."
Lin felt it—cold liquid lightning racing through his veins. His senses sharpened. His heartbeat steadied. His vision stabilized into hyper-focus.
His fear didn't disappear.
It transformed.
The creature lunged again.
Lin moved.
He didn't dodge. He didn't sidestep. He simply appeared two meters left, as if reality skipped a frame.
His breath hitched.
"What… what was that?"
"FRAME-SKIP MOBILITY. LOW-LEVEL FEATURE."
The creature shrieked and struck again. Lin backstepped—except he didn't. He watched himself move before he actually moved, each action predicted half a second ahead.
"I'm—seeing my own future?"
"YES."
The creature grabbed a steel beam and swung. Lin ducked under it, grabbed a wrench on instinct, and slammed it into the creature's arm.
Metal clanged.
The creature didn't react.
It wasn't made of flesh.
It wasn't made of metal.
It was made of nothing.
It screeched louder.
Lin's head throbbed with pressure. The creature's sound wasn't sound—it was frequency, scraping across the inside of his brain.
He stumbled, clutching his head. "Stop—"
The voice inside him whispered:
"HOST IN DANGER."
"No kidding!"
"ACTIVATING NULL PULSE."
A shockwave burst from Lin's skin—silent but crushing. The creature's body warped, the air around it bending like hot glass. It staggered backward, limbs flickering.
Lin blinked. "Did… I do that?"
"Yes."
The creature regrouped, body folding and unfolding like origami. It charged.
Lin raised his hands instinctively.
A surge of invisible force blasted forth.
The creature hit the far wall, its body cracking like shattering porcelain. It twitched, limbs snapping in unnatural angles.
Then it dissolved.
Not died.
Dissolved—into particles of black dust that evaporated into the air.
Lin collapsed to his knees, gasping.
"What… what was that thing?"
"The Void's observer," the voice said. "It came to confirm your awakening."
Lin wiped blood from his nose. "Why me?"
There was a pause.
"BECAUSE YOU WERE CREATED FOR THIS PURPOSE."
Lin froze.
His pulse slowed.
"Created…" he whispered. "What are you talking about? I was born in Sector 6. I have parents, a job—"
"FALSE."
Lin's throat tightened. "Don't lie to me."
"I DO NOT LIE."
Cold fear seeped into his spine.
"What… am I?"
"For now," the voice said softly,
"you are human technology. A prototype. A vessel."
"A vessel for what?"
The scrapyard lights flickered once more.
A shadow passed overhead.
Something enormous.
Something alive.
Something watching.
The voice answered:
"FOR THE UNSEEN."
Lin looked up—and his world changed forever.