I stared at the sky. The same sky that had no sun, no stars, no horizon. Just a wound of colorless void, open and endless, as if reality itself had forgotten how to exist. The air stung. Not because it was cold, but because it was alive. The forest—if it could even be called that—seethed around me. The trees didn't whisper. They watched. The soil pulsed faintly beneath me like something breathing under the surface. My back pressed against the carcass, ribs jutting like a throne carved for a corpse. My fingers trembled against the jagged bone, half-numb and half-aware. Blood and sweat mixed into something sour on my tongue.
"...I feel like shit," I rasped, my throat dry, voice barely more than a hiss.
The words didn't echo. The forest didn't allow echoes. It swallowed sound, digested it.
My body ached in ways that went beyond pain. The ache lived in the marrow, in the nerves, like my very structure was being rewritten.
I'd done it. I had awakened. That should have meant victory, triumph—maybe even a flicker of hope.
But instead, it felt like desecration. Like I had touched something sacred and left fingerprints where no mortal was meant to exist.
The forest knew.
The silence had changed.
The void above pressed heavier, and the world below pulsed darker.
My eyes drifted to a withered flower blooming from a skull's hollow eye. For a moment, I wanted to laugh. But laughter was a luxury my body couldn't afford. Even the act of wanting hurt.
The drag of the soil eased. My instincts whispered comfort, but instinct was a liar. The world was not kind. The world was waiting.
"I need to move," I thought.
"Not dying here" And i tried.
Muscles rebelled. My limbs hung like the forgotten tools of someone else's body. Crippled. Useless.
Telekinesis—that was the trick. The answer. The gift I had survived long enough to claim.
But my first attempt had been pitiful. I'd tried to lift myself whole, to float the way children dreamed of flying.
The result was agony incarnate.
My body refused.
The carcass beneath me groaned, bone scraping against bone, and every twitch came with silent screams and fresh mockery from my own flesh.
I fell. Hard. Face-first onto a spine.
I tasted grit and blood, and for some reason, I laughed. It came out cracked and broken, but it was laughter.
"Half-dead, half-crippled. Just perfect."
Then came the thought. A cruel, clever thing that cut through the haze.
Why lift everything at once? That was brute force. Inefficient. Stupid.
Control was the answer. Precision over strength.
I focused. Not on levitation, not on flight—on movement. On command. Muscle by muscle. Thread by thread.
The nerves screamed. The body resisted.
But inch by inch, reality obeyed.
It was excruciating. Every attempt was a negotiation between madness and discipline.
But I endured, because endurance was all I had ever been good at.
"Crazy," I muttered between clenched teeth.
The word felt small next to what was happening to me.
My leg flexed. Then the other. Fingers twitched, bones grinding against one another like rusted gears.
I wasn't gliding. I was crawling, stumbling, bleeding.
But I moved. And that was all that mattered.
When the world denies you grace, survival itself becomes a form of defiance.
I reached the ribcage, dragging myself upright. My hands brushed the skull and something snapped. Two canines came loose.
Tools. Weapons. Proof I wasn't completely helpless.
I breathed in, shaking.
"Let's try not to die horribly."
I crouched, telekinetic threads humming faintly under my skin like wispering nerves.
Another carcass loomed ahead. Bigger.
I leapt.
The air punched me back. The body twisted midflight. Pain detonated in my legs. I slammed into bone. Cracked ribs. Rolled. Felt flesh tear open along the way.
But somehow, impossibly—I stayed upright.
I stood there, chest heaving, a grotesque parody of balance.
I climbed higher, dragging myself along the ancient bone until I reached the topmost ridge.
Fog blanketed the world behind me.
But ahead—beyond the sinking sand and twisted trunks—I saw it.
A silhouette.
Tall. Black. Still.
No clue if it was alive, dead, or just some trick.
But it waited out there, patient as death.
Something off in the distance. The kind of wrong Hans used to point at without explaining. Guess the bastard wasn't talking nonsense after all.
My heart thudded once, hard.
The world felt fragile, trembling at the edges of sense.
For a heartbeat, I allowed wonder to exist.
Telekinesis wasn't magic. It was control. Pain was just part of the negotiation. Every nerve, every twitch, every microscopic motion was mine to command.
I tested it. Fingers curled. Shoulders lifted. Legs obeyed.
Pain followed each movement like a loyal dog, but I didn't care.
"I feel like a toddler learning to walk," I muttered, dryly amused by my own misery.
Then I remembered the system. The so-called divine interface that reduced existence to statistics.
"Window... System...? Status?"
A chime. Light flickered to life before my eyes—blue, soft, almost mocking.
Name: Dusk Ravel
Soul Name: —
Stage: Nascent(E)
Innate Ability: Primal Will (U)
Affinity: —
Attunement: —
Traits: [Telekinesis (E)]
Soul art: —
I blinked.
U?
There was no U.
I knew the scale. E, D, C, B, A, S, SS, SSS and EX.
U wasn't on it.
"Did I… break it?" I whispered.
The screen flickered. The light deepened.
More text bled into being.
-------
Innate ability: Primal Will
Rank: Unique (U)
Description: A fragment of the first desire — the echo of a greater will that refused to die. It was not granted; it was endured. The world bends before it not in submission, but in remembrance. Those who bear it are not chosen — they are condemned to continue.
Effect:Whatever the user wills may occur, so long as that will is rooted in the core of their being.
--------
My throat went dry.
Condemned to continue.
I laughed, short and quiet.
"Figures. I get the curse version of a miracle."
Hans's words echoed somewhere in the back of my mind.
"You'll have an innate ability."
That was all the man had said. No explanation, no instruction—just expectation.
Typical.
I stared at my trembling hands. The faint shimmer of telekinetic threads danced between my fingers, pulling at the air like invisible strings.
"Primal Will," I muttered. "Sounds like something that belongs to gods. Not to someone crawling through bones."
I tried to will myself up. To fly.
Nothing.
Not a flicker.
Figures.
So this Will only cared when I was dying. Great design.
I closed my eyes. The thought pressed deeper, darker.
Maybe that was the point.
Maybe this power wasn't meant for peace. Maybe it only came alive at the edge of annihilation—when the self shattered, when reason burned away, when instinct screamed louder than logic.
"Perfect," I said softly. "So I can only fight when I'm falling apart. What a joke."
But beneath the sarcasm, I understood.
Primal Will wasn't an ability. It was a sentence.
A hunger that took shape, fed on despair, and refused extinction.
I could feel it now—something ancient stirring within me. Not power, but persistence. The raw defiance that existed before reason or gods.
A faint wind stirred the sand, whispering between carcasses.
I stood. Slowly. Trembling.
The pain was still there, but it no longer mattered.
It was background noise to something larger—the quiet gravity of survival.
My heartbeat synced with the forest.
The air trembled faintly, as if listening.
The world will listen… as long as the will burns deep enough to scar reality itself.
That line from the system hovered in my thoughts.
I clenched my fists.
"Then I'll burn it."
My voice was calm now, stripped of irony. A whisper that sounded more like a promise than a threat.
The forest pulsed once.
The ground shifted slightly beneath my feet.
The sand trembled, grains floating upward like sparks of dust.
For a second, I saw it—a shimmer of invisible energy crawling along my limbs, thin as smoke, violent as hunger.
I felt my body lighten.
Not floating—resisting gravity itself.
The void above flickered.
The air folded faintly inward, like the world taking a breath it didn't understand.
I stared into the sky again.
Still empty.
Still silent.
But now it stared back.
And somewhere inside that silence, I felt it—a heartbeat not my own. A rhythm ancient and familiar, echoing through bone and dust and will.
I smiled faintly, a sharp, exhausted curve.
"I'm not dead yet," I whispered.
"Guess that's enough."
I stayed there, staring at my trembling fingers, feeling the weight of exhaustion settle like dust on my skin.
The ache of hunger coiled through me, raw and merciless.
My stomach twisted, not in demand but in warning.
I turned my head, and my gaze caught on the nearest thing that wasn't bones or sand—a tree, half-dead, bark curling like burned paper.
I kept staring.
And the longer I did, the more I began to wonder if bark could be chewed.