[Countdown Initiated: Host Reclamation in 39… 38… 37…]
The system's voice echoed faintly—no longer robotic, no longer sterile, but soft and inevitable. Like a breath spoken through old stone. Like a funeral bell trying to whisper.
Far above the crimson seabed of the shattered Dreaming, 'reality itself' slowed.
The collapse paused. Symbols froze mid-unraveling. A great crack split the horizon and then hung there, unshifting—caught in the exact moment of ruin. Time, or something like it, 'bent', making space not for destruction…
…but for return.
[34… 33… 32…]
The GUIDE did not hurry.
He didn't have to.
He had already done what he came to do.
The Dreaming was in ruin. The Leviathans had awoken. The sleepers could no longer sleep. The laws were shattered. The river of mercy was bleeding backward into the sea of forgetting.
And Dracula…
