"Is there anything you need me to do?"
Yohan called to his mother from the doorway. She was ironing clothes in the room across from the stairs. She let a couple of seconds pass before answering.
"Not right now. I'll let you know if something comes up."
" 'kay, I'll be studying, so please don't interrupt me for a while." Yohan said, already moving toward the stairs.
"But first tell me what important work of yours was pending without going to Daniel's home?"
"To learn gambling..." he muttered under his breath mid-step, then raised his voice. "...ah, I just needed to use his computer for an assignment." He didn't elaborate further. He reached his room and pulled the door shut behind him.
Crap. I forgot to bring the materials.
He slipped back downstairs on quiet feet and returned with a kitchen knife, a matchbox, and four glasses arranged on a tray. He set everything on the desk, dropped onto the bed, and looked at his phone.
'I skimmed the pages on the way home. It sounds easier than I expected and also less convincing.'
He took a slow breath and pulled a pen and paper from his bag and began writing something while looking in his phone.
From what he had read of the forbidden book, there were two prohibited methods of awakening the human core, both involving some form of interference with what was referred to as the Subliminal Continuum of Core. He had no clear understanding of what that term actually meant.
What he did understand was the risk. Particularly with the first method. The second seemed more conceivable by comparison — safer, at least in theory, and easier to stomach. But grasping its procedure was another matter entirely. It read like something out of an occult ceremony, and what he couldn't make sense of at all was what it demanded as an offering — a condition stated plainly, yet utterly opaque in meaning.
"Your worth" and "Will of First Cause"
Yohan couldn't make anything of those offerings, so he turned his focus back to the first method. Simpler to comprehend than the second, at least.
But as he read through the procedure, a dark expression settled over his face and an unusual, familiar emptiness wrapped itself around his chest, like something he had felt before without ever naming it.
The second method mentioned no direct risks related to core awakening, but it wasn't the same with the first method.
Normally, the worst that could happen when attempting to awaken one's core was the permanent shattering of the core itself, alongside varying degrees of mental and physical harm, if done hastily or without proper guidance.
However, in this predicament, the risk was far worse. This was the kind of risk a person could only take once.
Yes, the risk was the direct death of the Seeker...
...And beyond that, should the ritual fail under certain conditions, there was a significant chance of harm extending to those in the Seeker's vicinity. Worse still, a failed attempt could result in the Seeker mutating into an unconscious Anomaly or a feral Wraith. Which, in either case, also insinuated the end of a life.
Yohan knew what a Wraith was, but becoming an Anomaly was slightly behind his grasp. Anomalies were those creatures beside humans that possessed an awakened core. Not every non-human creature carried a dormant core to begin with, but those that did, held a chance of becoming awakened. However, these chances were extremely rare to occur. These odds in favor of humans averaged somewhere around one in a hundred thousand under ordinary circumstances. Not to mention they were even rarer within human civilization. The likelihood varied across species, but it was never something you counted on.
Because of this, such creatures had their own hierarchy among themselves. Different regions classified them in different ways, each shaped by local history, threat levels, and political interests. But to avoid confusion, a simpler international ranking system was established.
They were ranked from Tier-1 to Tier-8.
Tier-1 represented the weakest—dangerous, but manageable. Tier-8 stood at the other extreme, creatures capable of causing disasters on a scale most people would never survive to describe.
Then there was Tier-0.
A classification reserved for creatures that could not be properly ranked. Sometimes the reason was geographical isolation—beings hidden in places too hostile to study. Sometimes it was political secrecy, restricted information, or confidential records buried by governments and organizations. Other times, the reason was far worse: no one had lived long enough to determine their true limits.
A Tier-0 creature could be weaker than a Tier-2… or far beyond a Tier-8. That uncertainty made them far more terrifying than any known threat.
People fear monsters they understand.
But they fear far more the ones they cannot measure.
Maybe, that's how the fear of unknown came from.
Although, the fear of unknown has been the greatest asset of humanity or... A weapon.
After reading through all the conditions and rules, Yohan felt like he had run straight into a wall. He set the phone down for a moment and took a slow, deep breath, trying to steady himself.
He was nervous, and he knew it, even if he wouldn't say it aloud.
Somewhere deep down, in the part of himself he usually ignored, he had been hoping this ritual was nothing more than another mystical scam—just empty words dressed up as forbidden knowledge to fool desperate people.
That would have been easier.
He kept telling himself the same thing: he wasn't afraid of death, so there was nothing to fear. The ritual didn't even sound realistic, let alone believable. At worst, it was an experiment. At best, it might actually change something. Either way, he had convinced himself he had nothing to lose.
But that strange nervousness still lingered at the back of his mind, maybe it was fear of death. Or maybe it was the fear of stepping into something he didn't understand much.
Yohan locked the door. Before sealing the room off entirely, he walked to the mirror and draped a tunic over it, making sure not even a corner of the glass remained visible. Then covered the window, shutting off the last traces of the fading evening light, leaving the room in near-complete darkness where only the outlines of furniture and familiar objects could still be made out.
He returned to the desk, unscrewed his water bottle, and filled four glasses one by one.
After that, he placed them carefully in the four corners of the room.
One sat near the mirror, on the edge of the desk pressed against the corner beside his bed. Another went behind the door. The third he placed on top of a stack of old storage boxes at the far end of the room, things the family only touched when necessary. The last rested on the corner shelf beside the bed, slightly above head level.
Only after arranging all four did he take the paper in his hand and tear it into four equal pieces. Each piece had something different written on it. Following the instructions exactly, he dipped each paper into one of the glasses in the same order they had been placed.
When he finished, he stopped for a moment. He pulled out his phone and reread the photographed pages, tracing the procedure again from the beginning — making sure he had it exactly right.
Reading through, he realised that portions of the text in the photos he had taken were redacted in the original as though certain information had never been meant to be read at all.
The conditions for beginning the ritual were stranger than they had initially sounded. No specific time of day was required, but it had to be performed in a fully sealed room with no natural source of light and no reflective surfaces like mirrors or anything with a shine to it. Four glasses of distilled water, equally filled, placed in each corner of a four-cornered room. In each glass, a specific text written on paper and submerged.
So he did as he understood this far, but got stuck on the next step. He needed to draw a triangle at the center of the room — large enough to sit inside.
It sounded simple, however it wasn't, because the three sides that needed to create the traingle were quite strange, rather they were questions that Yohan needed to write, each one forming a side of the shape.
The three sides were as follows:
One — What were you in the past?
Two — What are you in the present?
Three — What do you want to become in the future?
Yohan fell into an endless abyss of rumination over what to write — until he read the next line.
"These answers may have their own consequences."
Something in his eyes darkened for a moment. Then, with a perfectly blank face, he reached into his drawer, pulled out a chalk, and wrote his three answers on the floor.
Nothing.
Something.
Dunno.
Thus, creating a triangle comprising these three words.
Now he understood what came next, and it was far from simple.
In fact, the more he read, the less certain he became—not because the instructions were missing, but because they were written in a way that felt deliberately difficult to understand, as if the person who wrote them never intended for ordinary people to follow them easily. It wasn't poetic or philosophical. It was just… strangely incomprehensible.
Every line felt clear and unclear at the same time, like something that made sense only after you had already experienced it.
As best as Yohan could piece together, the ritual was implying that in order to awaken the core, he had to enter a certain kind of virtual realm, a world created by the subconscious will of the core itself.
That alone sounded ridiculous.
A core having subconscious? Or does it mean my own subconscious mind?
According to the text, he had to enter what was called the Subliminal Continuum of Core—a virtual realm formed by the subconscious will and conscience of his core. Somewhere inside that place, he would have to search for his core essence, the very thing needed for awakening.
Yohan stared at the page with growing disbelief.
A core's will? Not the person's will?
He rubbed his forehead in frustration.
"Why does everything have to sound so unnecessarily cryptic?" he muttered. "Can't they just explain things like normal people?"
As per the text, the realm would appear much like any real world — drawn from the experiences accumulated across one's existence. Within it, the Seeker had to find their essence in order to awaken.
But what exactly is the essence? Like how would I recognise what's my core essence? Would it be sealed in some bank vault or what?
However this doubt of Yohan got solved further, or maybe just made him more doubtful.
Huh? The essence can be... anything?! And I would know once I see it...!
Yohan sighed, pacing back and forth as he read.
It sure is fake yet I am eager to try... Why? Curiosity kills the cat, ...wish I were a cat.
There were several conditions and precautions to observe, one had to follow, to avoid falling into irreversible consequences.
The realm would be populated — humans or certain beings, indistinguishable in appearance and behaviour from the real. Trust none of them. Feel nothing toward them — no emotion of any kind.
Anything that formed a bond could become a weakness.
Anything that got close enough could take hold.
And if something within that world moved to harm you or threatened to overtake you before you could find your essence — there was only one reliable way to prevent it.
Kill yourself.
Before anything else could kill you first.
That death would force him back into conscious state, safe in the real world, like tearing himself awake from a lucid dream before the dream turned into something worse.
But according to the ritual, failing to do so carried far worse outcomes. Depending on what happened inside that realm, a person could return as nothing more than a corpse… or something far less human. A wraith or an anomaly.
Yohan sat there, comprehending the procedures, the precautions, the dense and relentless accumulation of information that was simple enough to memorise but rarely as simple to truly absorb.
Without another thought, he slipped the matchbox into his pocket and strapped the knife to his waist with a leather belt — ragged and worn, the kind that looked borrowed from a costume. He took his position at the far end of the room, back to the wall.
He raised both hands level with his chest. Thumbs pointed outward, index fingers curved together to form an eye-shaped oval at the center, middle fingers extended upward in together followed by rest of his fingers folded behind the gesture. The final gesture resembled a single eye held inside a symmetrical frame.
Then with an ounce of reluctance Yohan whispered, stepping toward the glass to his left:
"𐌃𐌄𐌉𐌔𐌉𐌄𐌔 𐌏𐌅 𐌓𐌐𐌉𐌓𐌉𐌔𐌕𐌀𐌋 𐌓𐌉𐌎𐌆𐌕𐌋𐌀𐌓𐌉𐌔𐌙"