The awareness did not arrive like a gentle dawn greeting the eyelids; it came like a postponed death sentence, heavy and suffocating.
Arka did not open his eyes immediately. He let the darkness linger behind his eyelids a little longer, trying to convince himself that he was still at home, or at least in a hospital ward that smelled of antiseptic. But his senses began to betray that denial. The first thing he noticed was the smell: a mixture of dried blood, wood burned down to pure charcoal, and the remnants of life scorched to ash. It was not the smell of a hospital. It was the smell of annihilation.
He tried to inhale, but what entered his lungs were sharp particles that tormented them. Microdust and soot scraped against his dry throat.
"Cough! Cough!"
His body jerked violently, a painful biological reflex. That was when he felt something heavy, cold, and rough-textured covering his entire body. With what little strength he had left, strength that felt unfamiliar, like forcing a rusted old machine to move, Arka pushed the layer away.
The black material slid off his face like sand from a shattered hourglass. Arka finally opened his eyes, and in that very second, his heart seemed to drop through the floor of his chest, sinking into the pit of his nauseated stomach.
"Where am I…?" His voice cracked, hoarse, quickly swallowed by the low wind that howled through the ruins. "Why… why does everything look like this?"
The sky above him no longer belonged to humanity. There was no calming blue or warm orange. It was a dead expanse of gray, a dull canvas where the sun was nothing more than a lonely white stain, pale and sickly, struggling weakly to pierce the endless curtain of soot. No clouds drifted across it. Only smoke crawled lazily, coiling around the horizon like a dying giant serpent.
Arka raised his hand in front of his face. His fingers trembled violently, not from the cold, but from pure terror. Black ash was packed tightly beneath his fingernails, forming dark lines against his skin. He wiped his stinging cheek, but instead of cleaning himself, he smeared the residue of combustion across his pale skin, painting streaks of war on a frightened face.
"This… this isn't my hand," he murmured. He studied the anatomy of his fingers, slightly longer than he remembered, the joints more pronounced, the skin rougher than the hands of a journalist used to typing all day in front of a computer. "What… why does it hurt if this isn't even my body?"
His last memory slammed into him like an iron hammer.
That night.
The dim office parking lot. The drizzle that made the asphalt shine like dragon scales.
"I shouldn't have come alone," he thought, regret stabbing deep into him. "I should've listened to Mr. Baskara. I should've just deleted that corruption investigation draft and lived a quiet life."
He remembered the sudden blaze of headlights trapping him in a blinding circle of light. He remembered the cold asphalt against his cheek when a heavy blow landed on the back of his neck.
Then total darkness.
"So… I died, right?" Arka muttered to the pile of ash beside him. "Then why am I still here? Is this hell or something? Is hell just… a place where the sun barely works?"
Arka forced himself to stand. His world spun violently. Gravity seemed to drag him sideways, and his stomach twisted in protest. But when he finally managed to stand upright, the sight before him shattered the last pieces of sanity he was clinging to.
The village was gone.
"Destroyed" wasn't enough to describe what he saw. All that remained were black skeletons, charred support beams of houses sticking out of the ground like giant hands frozen mid-plea. The houses had collapsed into mounds of charcoal that still released thin threads of smoke. Roads that might once have echoed with children's laughter and the footsteps of livestock were buried beneath ankle-deep ash.
Every step Arka took produced a sickening crunch.
The sound of shattered wood, or maybe something more organic that had turned completely to carbon.
"Hello?!" he shouted. His voice echoed weakly off cracked stone walls before vanishing into the suffocating silence. "Anyone out there?! Please! Say something!"
Silence.
Only the wind answered, carrying a swirl of ash that hit his face. In this world, silence felt like the most dangerous predator of all.
Then suddenly, a memory that was not his exploded inside his head like a supernova.
An old woman with kind wrinkles smiling as she handed someone a warm piece of wheat bread.
The sound of clear water splashing in the village well at dawn.
The warmth of a fireplace spreading through the room as the first snowflakes fell outside.
Then everything turned red.
Screams ripping through the night.
Fire devouring straw roofs with greedy hunger.
Dark figures in silver armor reflecting the glow of a crimson moon, holding shining swords before cutting down anything that moved.
And finally, a cold, sharp pain in his back as he tried to run while carrying a little girl whose name he never even got the chance to call.
Arka dropped to his knees again, clutching his chest.
"Stop… just stop… those aren't my memories!"
Tears spilled out uncontrollably, washing through the dust on his cheeks and carving two clean lines down his dirty face, traces of humanity in the middle of an apocalypse.
"Who even are you people?" he demanded at the flickering memories. "Why am I feeling all this? I don't even know your names! I'm just Arka, a journalist from Jakarta!"
Regret came in waves, overlapping painfully. There was the regret of the young man whose body this was, a village boy who failed to protect his home. And there was Arka's regret, a man who died in a dark alley for trying to be a hero with a flash drive full of corruption evidence in a world that preferred to stay blind.
"I'm sorry," Arka whispered, not sure if he was speaking to the boy whose body he now used or to the version of himself that was already gone. "I just wanted… at least once… to see something that didn't end up as ashes."
At the peak of his despair, when he was about to collapse and let the dust bury him forever, the air in front of him suddenly split open.
Not with a sword or fire, but with a strange visual glitch.
An electric blue line appeared out of nowhere, slicing through the thick smoke with cold precision. Arka froze. The line widened, forming a semi-transparent panel that glowed softly, pushing the darkness back in a one-meter radius.
=+=
| [LOG: REVIVED] |
| Identity: Arka/Elian (Librarian Candidate) |
| Status: Alive |
=+=
Arka stared at it blankly. The blue light reflected in his tear-filled eyes, a strange splash of color in a world drained of it. His journalist instincts tried to kick in, searching for some logical explanation.
Hallucination from lack of oxygen? Some kind of death simulation?
But the panel looked too real. Its glow carried a technical warmth that didn't belong in this dead gray world.
=+=
| [SYSTEM INITIALIZED] |
| Welcome to the Library System. |
=+=
Arka let out a short, raspy laugh that echoed strangely across the ruins. It sounded dangerously close to hysteria.
"Library System?" he said, gesturing around wildly at the smoking remains of houses and the dead horizon. "Seriously? You see this place? What's the point of a library here?"
He stepped closer to the panel, eyes narrowing with anger born from having his life stolen twice.
The panel didn't respond with encouragement. It simply blinked once and displayed a list beneath its cold blue glow.
=+=
| Status Level: 1 |
| Available Category: |
| Obscure Works (Earth Archive) |
| Available Book : 1 book/day |
=+=
Arka slowly stood and wiped his tears away with the back of his soot-covered hand.
He had no idea whether this was a second chance from God, some alien experiment, or a curse tying his soul to this dead land forever.
But standing in the middle of a village that had turned into ash, he realized one simple truth; he was a journalist. And journalists, good or bad, never let a massacre end without a final report. If this place had lost its voice, then he would become the library that kept their screams alive.
Arka reached out and touched the panel. His finger passed through the blue light, tingling like soft static.
"Alright," he muttered. "Pick Obscure Works."