Death had been a truck. A sudden, violent reordering of mass and velocity against fragile biology on a rain-slicked Tokyo street. An equation solved with brutal, terminal simplicity.
Life was a coffin.
Kaito Ryker opened his eyes to darkness, a metallic taste like old blood and ozone coating his tongue. Not the sterile scent of a hospital, but the reek of corroded alloy, fungal decay, and human despair. He lay on a pallet of frayed synthetic fibers, encased in a recessed sleeping nook carved into a rusted wall. A single amber light flickered overhead, casting epileptic shadows that danced across exposed conduits and peeling polymer panels.
His body ached with a deep, systemic wrongness. Not the pain of injury, but the profound dissonance of displacement. The last data-point in his memory was the truck's grille filling his world. The current data-point was this derelict cavity.
He sat up. His muscles obeyed, but with a strange latency, as if the signal from his mind had to travel through a vast and silent distance. His hands—pale, scarred, unfamiliar in their leanness—came into view. They were not the hands of a salaryman.
> System Initializing…
> Chronological Discrepancy Detected.
> Local Time Sync: Post-Terran Unification Calendar, Year 1023.
> Temporal Displacement: +1,002 Earth Standard Years.
> User Designation: Kaito Ryker. Status: Anomalous.
> Neural Interface: Stable.
> Primary Functions: Statistic Tracking. Legacy Archive: [ERROR – CORRUPTED/SEALED].
The words hung in his vision, translucent, immutable, etched onto reality itself. They offered no explanation, no comfort. Only data. A thousand years. The number meant nothing. It was too large to be a tragedy; it was simply a new, horrifying variable in an unsolved problem.
The coffin had a door—a corroded slab of metal that shrieked on unoiled hinges when he pushed it open. The world beyond was a revelation of decay.
He stood on a metal gantry, part of a vast, vertical cavern that stretched into gloom above and below. Countless other doorways and cavities pockmarked the curved walls, a honeycomb of human desperation. This was no city. It was a carcass—the hollowed-out remains of something titanic. A generation ship? A orbital habitat? The ribs of a dead god? The air thrummed with a deep, sub-auditory vibration, the heartbeat of failing machinery. Through gaps in the superstructure, a sky the color of a bruise was visible, streaked with the neon scars of orbital traffic.
The Rust Ring. The name surfaced in his mind, not as a memory, but as data downloaded from the atmosphere itself, from the muttered curses of the figures moving on the gantries below. They were wraiths in patched thermal suits, their faces gaunt under the amber gloom. They hauled sacks of scrap, argued over rusted components, traded with the furtive desperation of rats in a sinking labyrinth.
A man noticed him. His face was a topographical map of scar tissue, one eye replaced by a chipped red lens. He spat a black substance over the railing. "Another sleeper. Wandering out like a lost pup. You're in Sector G, bottom-feeder. Your cube's paid for a week. After that, you work, you pay, or you get spaced."
Kaito absorbed the information. Sector G. Bottom-feeder. Economic units of survival. The problem of his existence was refining itself. Survival: Dependent on local currency. Currency: Attained through labor. Labor: Context unknown.
"What is the work?" Kaito's voice was a rasp, disused.
The scarred man barked a laugh that echoed in the metal canyon. "Work? You salvage, feeder. You go down into the Pit, you find pieces the big crews missed, you bring them back, you sell them to the Recyclers. If you don't get eaten by the ferro-wyrms. Or shot by a rival. Or crushed by a shifting stack." He leaned closer, his breath foul. "Your first lesson. Out there, you're not human. You're meat with a price tag."
He shoved a grimy datapad into Kaito's hands. It displayed a flickering, simplistic map of the sector and a list: Salvage Grades: D-Rank Scrap (2 Credits/kg), C-Rank Alloy (5 Cr/kg), B-Rank Circuitry (20 Cr/kg), A-Rank Power Cell (100 Cr). A flashing icon indicated a "Newcomer Kit" could be claimed at Depot 7.
Kaito turned the datapad off. The man's lesson was emotional, subjective. The data was what mattered. He needed currency. Therefore, he would salvage.
Depot 7 was a cage of reinforced mesh overseen by a bored-looking woman with neural jacks protruding from her temple. She scanned him with a handheld device that beeped angrily.
"No ID. No credit. Just biosigns. Fine." She tossed a bundle through a slot. It clattered at his feet: a battered magnetic harness, a handheld plasma cutter with a half-depleted cell, a tether line, and a cracked visor with a basic heads-up display. "Kit's a loan. Costs you fifty cred. You come back with less than that, we take it from your hide. Literally."
Kaito geared up in silence. The harness settled against his body, the tools hanging with a familiar, grim weight. The visor, when he slid it on, overlay the world with wireframe outlines and toxic atmosphere warnings. O2 Levels: 18%. Contaminants: High. Radiation: Low.
He followed the map's pulsing line to an access airlock. Several other bottom-feeders were there, suiting up in similar ragged gear. They eyed him with a mixture of pity and contempt, a fresh variable in their own bleak survival equations.
The airlock cycled with a scream of metal. The outer door slid open, and the Pit swallowed him.
It was the belly of the beast. A vast, chaotic graveyard stretching beyond the reach of his visor's lights. Mountains of twisted structural members rose like blackened teeth. Rivers of congealed coolant and lubricant gleamed sickly under the distant, artificial sun-strips high in the cavern ceiling. The air was colder here, smelling of metal, static, and something organic and long dead.
And everywhere, the mecha.
Not intact machines, but their dissected corpses. A leg the size of a subway car lay half-buried in debris, its hydraulic pistons frozen in a final, agonized spasm. A cockpit canopy, starred and cracked, reflected his lone light back at him like a dead eye. He saw armor plating etched with symbols he didn't recognize, weapon barrels sheared off, power cores that had melted into beautiful, crystalline slag.
This was not a junkyard. It was a fossil bed of war. The scale was apocalyptic.
His System pinged, a soft chime in his skull.
> Environmental Analysis Complete.
> Designation: "The Pit" – Post-Terran/Unknown Conflict Debris Field.
> Hazard Assessment: Extreme.
> Objective: Secure Salvage (Minimum 25kg C-Rank or equivalent).
> Passive Scan Active. Highlighting Energy Signatures.
His visor flickered. Several points in the chaotic landscape glowed with a faint, ghostly blue outline. The nearest was thirty meters away, under a collapsed beam.
Kaito moved. His body, though unfamiliar, responded. There was no fear, only a focused assessment of terrain. He climbed over a buckling I-beam, his mag-boots latching and releasing with soft clunks. He avoided patches of shimmering liquid that his HUD tagged as Corrosive – D-N Grade. The silence was profound, broken only by the creak of settling metal and the distant, echoing clang of other scavengers at work.
The blue glow emanated from a partially exposed actuator assembly—a joint mechanism from a mecha's arm. His plasma cutter flared to life, its blade a precise, humming line of blue-white. He began to cut, not randomly, but along natural fracture lines his mind seemed to intuitively trace. The metal parted with molten tears.
As he worked, a new sensation bloomed. A… rhythm. Not a sound, but a pattern in the chaos. The slow thermal contraction of the beam above him. The minute vibration of a still-active power conduit three hundred meters to his left. The skittering movement of something small and many-legged through a nearby vent. They weren't just random events. They were interconnected. Flowing.
He finished freeing the actuator. It was heavy, maybe 15kg of high-grade alloy. C-Rank. A start.
He was attaching it to his harness when the rhythm changed.
A new current entered the flow. Heavy, predatory, and approaching fast from his blind spot. His body reacted before his mind fully processed the threat. He dropped into a crouch behind the cut beam just as something massive and silver thrummed through the space where his head had been.
It wasn't a machine. It was a creature. A ferro-wyrm. A segmented, metallic serpent as thick as his torso, its body composed of fused scrap and organic muscle-tendon. Its head was a nightmare of rotating drill bits and plasma mandibles. It sensed heat, motion, and the energy signatures of salvage. It was the Pit's immune response.
It recoiled, hissing, a sound like grinding gears. It poised to strike again.
Kaito's mind became ice. The problem was clear: Hostile organism. Superior mass and weaponry. Terrain: Cluttered, unstable. Assets: One plasma cutter (low charge), one magnetic tether, one piece of salvage.
The wyrm struck, a blinding-fast lunge. Kaito didn't try to dodge backward. He flowed forward, under the lunge, inside its striking arc. The plasma cutter came up, not to meet the armored head, but to slice through a softer-looking joint between its third and fourth segments. The superheated blade bit deep, spraying a jet of steaming hydraulic fluid and bio-mechanical gel.
The wyrm shrieked, a digital scream of pain. Its body thrashed, slamming into the beam above. With a groan of tortured metal, the entire pile shifted. A multi-ton slab of deck plating slid, pinning the wyrm's midsection with a sickening crunch.
It wasn't dead. It was trapped, its drill-head snapping wildly inches from Kaito's face.
He didn't finish it. That would waste cutter charge. He assessed. The wyrm's thrashing had exposed a new cavity beneath the debris. And from that cavity, his visor's passive scan flared a brilliant, steady gold. An A-Rank signature. A power cell. Possibly intact.
Ignoring the pinned, shrieking wyrm, Kaito slid into the hole. There, nestled in a cradle of broken support struts, was a cylindrical object about the size of his torso. Its casing was scorched but unbroken. Faint, healthy glyphs pulsed along its side. A Terran military-grade fusion cell, circa a few hundred years ago. The find of a lifetime for a bottom-feeder.
As his hands closed on the cool metal, something else happened.
The world… simplified. The chaotic currents of the Pit—the vibrations, the thermal flows, the predatory intent of the wyrm—all resolved into a single, coherent stream. A river of cause and effect. He could see not just the wyrm's snapping head, but the probable arc of its next three strikes based on the tension in its pinned segments. He could feel the stability of the debris pile as a tangible pressure. He could see the path—a sequence of four steps, two short climbs—that would get him and the cell out of the hole and back toward the airlock with maximal efficiency and minimal risk.
It was not emotion. It was superior data processing. A fundamental recalibration of perception.
> System Alert: Latent Parameter Activated.
> Ability Awakened: [Primordial Dao: Flow] – Rank F.
> Description: Perceive and integrate with the natural currents of conflict, energy, and matter. Predictive capability: Minimal. Statistical advantage: +5% to evasion/placement in dynamic environments.
> Trait Awakened: [Seamless] – Rank F.
> Description: Reduces neural lag in mechanical operation by 0.5%.
Abilities. Traits. Ranks. The System was not just a journal. It was an interface for a new kind of evolution.
Kaito hefted the power cell onto his harness alongside the actuator. It was heavy. Crucial. He followed the path his new perception laid out, climbing from the hole. The wyrm's last, desperate snap missed his boot by millimeters, a margin that felt as wide as a continent to his flowing awareness.
He did not run back to the airlock. He moved with a calm, untouchable economy. He passed other scavengers who stared, first at the premium salvage on his back, then at the calm in his eyes. It was a look they didn't understand—not triumph, not relief. It was the look of a man who had just discovered the first, fundamental axiom of a universe he was destined to master.
Back at Depot 7, the jack-eyed woman stared, her boredom vaporized. She scanned the power cell, her device chiming a high, clear note. "A-Rank. Military surplus. 105 Credits." She looked at him, her gaze calculating. "You're either the luckiest sleeper I've ever seen, or you're trouble. Either way, you just bought your life."
She transferred the credits to a fresh, anonymous chit. Kaito took it. He paid off the kit loan. He had 55 credits remaining. Enough for food, water, and another week in the coffin-cube.
But as he walked back through the groaning, stinking corridors of Sector G, the credits were irrelevant. The glances of the other bottom-feeders were noise. The only thing that mattered was the cold, beautiful fire in his mind—the Dao of Flow, and the System interface that had now, for the first time, flickered with a new, deeply buried line of text.
> Legacy Archive: [ERROR – CORRUPTED/SEALED]…
> Secondary Access Attempt Detected…
> Echo Fragment Detected: Resonance with User's Awakened Dao.
> Fragment #10,001 (Anomalous) – Status: Dormant. Query: Initiate First Contact Protocol? [Y/N]
Kaito stood before the door to his metal coffin. The hum of the Rust Ring was a symphony of decay. He had woken to a graveyard of giants, a thousand years lost, his humanity reduced to a economic variable.
He looked at the query hovering in his vision. A problem within the problem. A sealed archive offering contact.
His lips, in the amber gloom, did not smile. But something in the ice of his eyes sharpened, focused. The intellectual hunger of Alex Dragonheart, presented with an unsolvable enigma.
He selected Y.
The door to his cube hissed shut behind him, sealing him in darkness. But in his mind, a new, vaster landscape than the Pit began to flicker into existence. The first chapter of the equation was written. The work could now truly begin.