It was a cloudy, gloomy night. Once, this place had been the heart of the greatest country on Earth. Now, not even its name remained.
The sky was heavy, hiding any sign of the stars. Not even the moon dared to show itself.
On the ground, the ruins of a forgotten city were lost in the darkness. Skyscrapers in decay, roads swallowed by greenery, concrete silhouettes eaten away by time.
Back in the early 21st century, this city had been buzzing with life. Now, all that was left was silence. There was no war. No disaster. People just... left.
On the balcony of a crumbling building, a young man was lying there. He was so skinny it was almost pitiful. His short hair had a faint greenish tint, and his eyes were slightly red.
His name was Darian Wube, and those features were a gift from his father, a man born in the Aeternum Atlantis Empire of Earth.
Aeternum Atlantis. One of the three continents that, for reasons no one could explain, rose out of the oceans in the 22nd century, forever changing Earth's geography. At first, humanity hesitated, but those lands were way too fertile and rich in minerals to be ignored. People rushed to settle the new territories, and life went on.
Over time, those born on the new continents started to show small physical differences compared to the rest of the population. Nobody ever found out why, but it was just another weird thing—after all the changes Earth had already been through, it was easily accepted and forgotten over time.
After all, by the 25th century, the impossible had pretty much become normal.
Darian lay there in the dark, flat on his back, eyes fixed on the clouds and the empty skies.
He let out a weak breath and muttered, barely loud enough to be heard: "On my last day... I won't even get to see a little bit of light..."
He tried to move...
But gave up right away. He was too malnourished and weak to even try.
The only thing he could still feel was his right hand gripping an old, thick book. He couldn't open it anymore or read it, but he remembered everything inside by heart.
His mom had given him that book when he was learning to read. It was a fantasy book he'd read over and over again—for some reason, he had always been completely obsessed with that story, even though it had never been particularly popular.
He had tried to figure out why it fascinated him so much and ended up with two reasons. The first was that the beginning of the book was set on Earth in the early 21st century. It was a fascinating time, full of fast technological advances, with Earth divided into hundreds of countries.
The main character was the son of a hidden emperor who ruled over the nations from the shadows. The son rebelled against his father... but got brutally killed right at the start. After that, the story shifted into various fantasy worlds, with a classic hero's journey where the protagonist fell into darkness, redeemed himself from his sins, and, in the end, defeated an unbeatable enemy.
And that was where the second reason came in. Darian felt a weird sense of familiarity with some parts of that fantasy world. He couldn't explain it logically—he just liked it. Even now, he still thought about it.
By the time he finished the book, though, Darian couldn't help but feel like something was missing. The book felt like a well-made summary, but it lacked depth—character development, for example, was almost nonexistent. On the other hand, all the technical stuff and the big picture plot were described in crazy detail.
Oddly enough, the protagonist's relationship with his wife was one of the few parts that got a lot of attention. Actually, way too much—some parts were so intimate they felt like things that should've stayed private between the two of them.
Darian sighed, letting his imagination wander, but his thoughts were suddenly cut short by something urgent:
The sound of vehicles pulling up around the building, surrounding it.
He let out a tired breath. He didn't have the strength to run or hide anymore. Images of a few faces flashed through his mind.
'M-Mom... Lucy... Lucius...' he mumbled. The image of his mom came with a lot of pain, but also a strange sense of relief. 'Who would've thought... a worthless cursed guy like me would actually mean something in the end...'
He grunted weakly, hearing the sounds of people moving in, entering the abandoned building in an orderly way. He felt a wave of relief. Finally, he could die and let go of the guilt he carried.
His father had died the same year his twin siblings, Lucy and Lucius, were born. Darian was only eight at the time and had no memories of him. His mother, left alone with no support, had done everything she could to raise the three of them in a difficult world.
But three years ago, she was brutally murdered. She worked as a housekeeper for the son of an influential man, and her body was found days later in a nearby forest. The signs of what had been done to her before death were clear, but no one dared to investigate. The police just made up an excuse and closed the case.
At that time, Darian was eighteen, and his siblings were ten. Strangely, they had no other family to turn to. The three of them were left alone, almost ending up homeless and going hungry more than once.
Two kids depended on him to survive. And that's why Darian chose to sacrifice himself.
His only weapon...
Was his curse.
It had started when he was ten.
One morning, while walking down the street, he locked eyes with someone—and saw a dark, creepy aura surrounding them. A chilling cold ran down his spine.
He tried to run, but quickly realized that everyone around him had that same aura. Almost always black, like a demon's cloak, and sometimes gray.
Just seeing it was terrifying, but he could also *feel* it. A bone-deep cold, a weird smell—things nobody else seemed to notice.
When his mom, worried, touched his forehead to calm him, he froze.
Suddenly, he saw brutal images—from the point of view of a woman soaked in the blood of countless people.
Were those memories?
He didn't know. He just ran away from her. And little by little, he realized that anyone who touched him would make horrible visions flood his mind. There was no way every single person was that evil, so those images, or memories, couldn't have been done by them, at least not them alone. At some point, he began to wonder if those were memories of past lives or something like that.
He tried to tell people, but nobody believed him. Pretty soon, everyone said he was sick.
His mother cried, desperate to help him, but she had no money to take him to a doctor. Seeing her like that made Darian shut up and pretend everything was fine.
But as he grew up, his curse only got stronger. Just looking at someone was enough to see pieces of their past. And it was always awful stuff.
Fear ate him up inside. He stopped looking at people. He shut himself off from the world.
Lucy, Lucius, and his mom were the only ones who never abandoned him. Over time, he got used to their pasts and learned to bear it.
Years went by, and Darian lived locked away, unable to face the outside world. But at least he had a roof over his head, food, and a family.
Until his mom died.
And then, everything fell apart.
He watched his siblings starve, pretending they were fine. His sister, who never asked anyone for anything, almost begging others for help.
It felt like a poisoned blade stabbed right through his heart.
And then, everything changed.
The world was cruel?
Fuck the world.
The fear, the cowardice... he buried all of it.
If he couldn't live a normal life, then he'd use his curse to make sure his siblings had a future.
He sought out and stared at shady and powerful people. He saw everything they did. He wrote down every detail. Those images and memories weren't only from past lives but also from their own.
He hid himself, using middlemen to send out messages, and then he reached out to the underworld. Darian asked for a lot of money. These people could blackmail the powerful and make a thousand times more of the info he gave them. But...
He knew he wasn't getting out of this alive. Didn't matter.
His siblings would live.
His little sister, Lucy, was really smart and sharp. He planned everything with her, hiding only the part about his sacrifice. After trading the info for the money, he ran off alone, leaving stashes of it in certain spots for Lucy to find.
Of course, Lucy would only grab the bare minimum needed to not draw attention. He kept running for days.
Then, he did everything he could to lure them far away. Those people didn't know his name or who he was. Luckily, he had always lived isolated, and even his neighbors barely knew him. But if they ever found out who he was, even if he died, they'd still go after Lucy and Lucius.
The sound of footsteps grew louder.
And so here he was, at the present moment, ready for it. You couldn't escape the underworld forever. Took them just fifteen days to corner him. The only way out now was to end it.
Darian gritted his teeth. Inside his mouth, he already had a small capsule hidden—a magical poison artifact, that's what they called it these days.
It burst, spreading a bitter taste down his throat.
He thought sarcastically while waiting for death to come. The 21st century had always fascinated him. Their tech grew insanely fast, so fast that even young people struggled to keep up. But by the middle of that same century, everything changed, and tech progress almost completely stalled.
If someone from back then traveled to the present, they wouldn't find anything that crazy they hadn't at least heard or thought would be possible soon in the future.
But in exchange, weird shit called "artifacts" started being sold in the underground world. With enough money, anyone could buy them. Artifacts had all kinds of effects—literally magical. Besides that, the Earth itself changed physically and...
'Couf...' Darian coughed blood, feeling a pain he couldn't even describe.
The poisonous artifact wrecked his body completely. Just a tiny bit was enough to rot him from the inside so badly that he wouldn't even be identifiable later—not even through DNA.
"THERE!"
The shout echoed through the abandoned building, bouncing off the broken, overgrown walls.
Heavy footsteps rushed in. A dozen hooded figures appeared at the entrance, moving in formation. Flashlights lit up the cracked concrete floor as they slowly advanced, searching.
The beam of light landed on Darian's collapsed body.
For a moment, no one said a word.
Something was off.
The unknown kid they were chasing wasn't there anymore. That thing wasn't even human. Its grotesque body twisted on the ground. The skin was stained a sickly purple, and the body looked swollen and deformed, like something was eating him alive from the inside.
His fingers scraped against the cracked concrete. Tiny spasms ran through his limbs.
But the worst part was the eyes.
They still moved.
And when they locked onto the hunters' eyes—
A low, muffled laugh slipped from the monster's throat, choked out by the poison rotting his insides. It wasn't a human laugh—it was the sound of something that shouldn't still be alive, a whisper full of mockery and malice.
The man closest to him stepped back, feeling a shiver crawl down his spine.
"W-What the fuck...?"
"H-He took something..." another one stammered.
The silence broke with a subtle sound.
A wet crack.
Darian's body jerked violently, like something snapping inside him. Tiny cracks opened up in his swollen skin, and a faint, dark gas started leaking out, slowly dissolving into the air.
The leader's eyes widened—he recognized a magical poison capable of that. And that gas... it was just as deadly.
"Motherfucker! RUN!"
But nobody waited for him to finish shouting—everyone was already running.
Thirty seconds had passed since Darian took the poison. He felt the dark curtain of death wrapping around him. There was no more pain—the poison had wiped out all his senses.
He just closed his eyes. Now, only his mind and imagination were left, but not for much longer.
'That strange, magical world... why do I feel like those people from that crappy clan at the beginning of the book are familiar?' Even in his final thoughts, he remembered the story.
Weirdly, in that story, there was a young master who assaulted the maids and even killed some for fun. That hit way too close to his real life. In the book, the fat young master died fast and no one pitied him. But why, now, did he have to suffer as the victim?
His heart stopped.
'Fuck it... if there's another life, I'll get my revenge.'
Thrump! Thrump!
Then something weird happened—his heart beat one more time, like it was using its last strength and willpower to resist.
'Fuck this world. If I was born surrounded by sinners... am I really different from them? What the hell was I afraid of? Fuck... a demon is always the best expert in dealing with other demons... I had everything in my hands and threw it away.'
His eyes burned with a wild, unstoppable will, and at the same time, something deep inside Darian's essence pulsed. A faint light spread from inside him, covering his whole body.
Suddenly...
A gaze from a place really, really far away from Earth locked onto Darian.
Out in space, looking at Earth, a female silhouette appeared out of the void. Her eyes looked at him approvingly, then she nodded.
At the same time, deep inside Darian's soul—way deeper than the broken body—two ring-shaped marks appeared: one black, one white.
In an instant, his entire body lit up in sync with those rings. But Darian didn't see or feel any of it—his consciousness had already vanished into nothing.
***
The sunlight hit Darian's face and he opened his eyes.
It took a few seconds for him to realize, stunned, that he was alive. When it finally sank in, his heart started pounding. With a thought, he jumped up.
First, he looked around, confused. The book that was supposed to be by his side had disappeared, and everything around him looked way more wrecked.
He was in the same place as before and, worse... he felt perfectly fine, full of energy. His body was totally recovered, no poison, no signs of starvation or the malnourishment he had before.
"What the hell..."
*Buzzz!*
A loud buzzing sound cut through his thoughts. Suddenly, he looked up at the sky and saw something unreal.
"!"
A pair of bluish-gray eyes landed on him, freezing him in place.
It was a woman with magnetic beauty, her golden hair flowing in the wind like a glowing waterfall. She wore a flowing white tunic, trimmed with gold details that made her presence even more striking. Her rosy lips, mature and proud posture, plus those perfectly defined curves, gave her an aura that made Darian's heart skip a beat.
The sunlight reflected off her in a magical, almost holy way. She was flying, dozens of meters above him, staring straight down at him.
On her back, Darian could see a pair of golden wings. When he caught sight of them, he felt like they were shadows tied to his own body. It was like they weren't real—but at the same time, they were there, flapping gently, even though they weren't what was keeping her in the air.
"She's... a High Human?!"
Darian muttered, completely stunned. High Humans... the biggest change Earth had seen in the last few centuries.
To regular humans, they were real-life superheroes: unmatched physical skills, limitless magical powers, doing things that made them look like actual gods.
They were the Earth's elite, all serving as agents for the Empire that ruled over the common folk. The whole world revolved around them, their clans fighting for power while the regular people worshiped them.
The dream of every normal person was to one day meet one of them. After all... life was hard, and just having a connection to someone like that could make all the difference between surviving or not.
Nobody really knew how or when High Humans were born, but every year, new ones popped up. There were rumors that sounded like fairy tales—they said if a normal human got approved by Heaven's Will, they could turn into a High Human.
But what was Heaven's Will?
Some said it was what people used to call God. But Darian didn't buy it; he had a different idea based on that fantasy book he read.
The woman floating in the sky watched the stunned young man for a few seconds, sizing him up with an unreadable look. Then, she let out a soft breath and waved her hand.
Instantly, something latched onto Darian.
He felt it.
It was like invisible threads weaving into his mind, pulling him toward something bigger—something he didn't understand yet.
Then, a female voice spoke directly into his head, making him flinch:
'You felt the change, didn't you?'
Darian's eyes widened.
'I can't explain much, but you've been chosen to become a High Human. Now, the choice to accept it or not... that's all up to you.'
She spoke slowly, and Darian's heart started racing even harder.
'You have to decide now. I know it sounds like a divine gift, but trust me—it's a damn twisted curse, and there's no going back. You can still pretend none of this happened and go on living your normal life. You'll die without ever knowing what lies beyond the veil. That's the peaceful, natural way. Honestly... living like that is something I envy.'
She paused, her eyes sparkling in the morning light.
'Or... you can come with me. But if you do, you'll realize real fast that everything you ever dreamed about was just a sad joke. The dazzling lives of High Humans are nowhere as amazing as the Empires make it look like. You'll wish there was an easier way—and you'll curse yourself for not choosing to live quietly.'
A shiver ran down Darian's spine. It wasn't because of her words. He didn't understand it, but it felt like he had been waiting for this moment for a long, long time.
It felt like he could finally start his life over for real. He could change everything, fight for what he wanted... and most of all, protect the people he loved.
'Think carefully. Your awakening was just a preliminary thing. If you go back to your normal life, everything will stay exactly the same.' she said, tilting her head slightly, studying him like she was testing something. 'But if you come with me, all the rules you know will be torn apart. Calling your life "hell" will be putting it lightly—not even death will be a relief anymore.'
Silence.
Darian felt his breathing grow heavy. Whatever this was, it wasn't a dream.
The gorgeous woman raised an eyebrow. Before she could even ask the final question—
"I accept."
He didn't hesitate. Something was pulsing inside him. Something new. Something unstoppable. He could finally live for real.