Chapter 1 — The World After
The news didn't even bother to broadcast it across the world, in that moment humanity could point to and say this is it. Then came the apocalypse that arrived like rot—slow, quiet.
Two thousand years later, everyone still remembered the first catastrophic event.
What remained was a world that had learned how to live with absence.
Cities existed, but they were not cities as the texts described. They were clusters of survival—stone grown over steel, roads swallowed by roots, towers cut short and repurposed into watch pylons. Civilization had collapsed; it had condensed, shrinking inward like a wound closing badly.
The sky still turned but it was like a deep crimson red like someone poured blood into the sky itself. The sun still rose like a dying plant. But that was the cruelty of it.
Monsters had appeared out of the sky without an explanation, without an origin story, without mercy. They simply began. Randomized. Inconsistent. Hostile to all things, including themselves.
They were called Klins.
No scholar agreed on the name's origin. Some said it came from a dead language meaning error. Others claimed it was a child's mispronunciation of a word for cleanse. Most people did not care. A Klin was something you killed before it killed you, or something that killed you before you understood what it was.
Klins had no hierarchy, no loyalty, no shared instinct beyond destruction. They attacked humans, animals, homes, other Klins. They did not reproduce in any way that made sense. They simply appeared—sometimes fully formed, sometimes half‑wrong, as if reality itself had made a mistake and refused to fix it.
So the world picked the only choice of survival it had to adapt.
Weapons evolved. Tactics sharpened. Walls thickened. Fear became institutional.
And then, slowly, something else happened.
People began to change Not everyone. Not even most. There was no pattern tied to bloodlines, intelligence, or morality. Power did not choose the brave or the righteous. It did not favor the desperate or the cruel.
It responded to simply a messed up reality.
The scholars of the Ashen Era eventually named them Trees, though no one had ever seen their full shape but some dreamed of it, claimed it was golden but it's branch look like it was tipped in black in but who knows.
The first was Kishu.
Kishu awakened through will—not desire, not ambition, but the quiet, grinding decision to continue existing when stopping would be easier. Those who touched Kishu didn't want power itself. They demanded themselves to endure. Kishu powers were strange, personal, and costly. No two were the same. Attempting to imitate another's awakening was said to invite something worse than death.
The second was Koshu.
Koshu did not answer will. It answered fear.
Fear given shape. Fear worshiped. Fear surrendered to. Terror of death, terror of gods. Koshu grew fat on belief—on panic, on false divinity, on that other beings need to kneel before something terrible and call it simply the Law.
Koshu powers were often stronger at first. They were also more unstable.
Between the two Trees, the world learned a new balance. Not none of that good and evil or the hero and villain. Only how you chose to stand when faced with a life you didn't want.
There were no chosen ones.
No prophecy survived intact.
No god watched from above, waiting to be impressed.
And somewhere in the ruins of a burned and destroyed Siheyuan, underneath a red sky clouded by ash and old smoke, a boy sat on the edge of the collapsed structure and watched as a Klin tears apart another Klin.
The boy just watched. His name was Jainen, and at that moment, he didn't move not an inch because,Jainen had learned early that you must not track a Klins attention as it was too dangerous.
The Klin in front of him resembled a mass of blackened bone wrapped in something wet. It had too many joints and not enough symmetry,The other Klin was—smaller, sharper— roared in countless ways as it was torn open.
Jainen watched with calm eyes.
He did not feel fear. He did not feel fascination. Mostly, he felt tired.
When the larger Klin finished, it lifted its head and sniffed the air. Jainen remained still. He had learned how to be stealthy—how to reduce himself from being seen, how to let the world slide past him without noticing.
The Klin twitched it's disgusting eye.
Then it turned away.
Only after it vanished into the ruins did Jainen exhale.
He slid down from the crumbled bridge and landed softly, boots crunching against centuries of old debris. Around him lay the remains of a city that no one had bothered to rebuild or pay respects to. The past had become too heavy to carry forward..
Jainen adjusted the strap of his western style satchel gifted from his mother and moved on.
He was not a fighter. Not yet. He had killed before, but killing had never felt like proof of anything. The smell of blood or fear tracked Klin obsessively, which organizations used to trap and kill klins, they even counted them, ranking them, using them to grow within the Kishu or Koshu hierarchies.
Jainen avoided those systems.
He avoided people, too.
It was safer that way.
For now, the only thing Jainen knew was that sometimes, when he walked through places like this, he felt deja vu like his mindset has been here but not his own body.
The air felt heavier as he crossed into the old plaza. His steps slowed, though he could not say why. It was like someone is ordering his body tooThen he felt it.
Jainen stopped.
He pressed a hand against his chest, frowning. It felt as if his heart was beating faster than his own thinking but soon the sensation passed as quickly as it came, leaving behind a chill that goes deeper than his spine.
He shook his head and kept walking.
As he already knew the world was as indifferent as ever, so what's the point of looking back to something thats already dead.