Chapter 1
The scent of stale rain and urban rot hung heavy in the narrow alley. For the man standing there, the stench was a bizarrely solid anchor in a reality that had only hours ago dissolved into nothingness. He was nineteen, yet wore the face of a forgotten century.
"Kneel, or be consumed," the our MC said, his voice level, betraying none of the chaos churning inside him. The preserved skin of the vessel felt cold, stiff, but the power surging beneath it was undeniably his. He stood over Elias, a man known to the shadowed corners of the city as a predator, a stain of depravity.
Elias, tall and lean, with eyes that held the dead cold of a veteran killer, simply laughed. It was a grating sound, like dragging metal over concrete. "A brat in a fancy coat thinks he can claim my soul? You look like you just crawled out of a museum, boy." He gestured dismissively toward the MC's clothing—an expensive but antique suit the vessel had been preserved in. "I make the rules on this street. I'm the one who hunts. I offer a sigil, freedom from judgment, and power beyond your petty crimes. Your sin will feed my survival, and in return, you will have what you desire."
"What I desire is to watch you bleed, and I don't need a child's permission," Elias snarled, his hand flashing. A long, wickedly thin hunting knife appeared from his sleeve, aimed straight for the MC's throat.
The attack was fast, trained, and lethal. But the MC moved with a speed he hadn't earned; it was gifted, a dark inheritance. Before the steel could bite, a shadow flowed from his right hand. It wasn't smoke or light, but something denser, a coiling, impossibly black substance that felt like solidified malice. This was Origin.
Origin moved instantly, solidifying into a black, oily chain that wrapped Elias's knife hand. The metal of the hunting knife whined as the black material choked it, and Elias cried out, his knuckles cracking under the unnatural pressure.
"You refuse the gift?" our MC asked, his eyes catching the limited light of the alley. "Then you are merely food."
The chain of Origin abruptly dissolved, only to instantly reform into a wickedly curved scythe. The shift was seamless, reflecting the violent and self-serving intent the MC focused on the killer. This was a weapon born of soul, meant to devour.
Elias scrambled back, terror replacing arrogance. He hadn't just met another street thug; he'd stumbled into something truly outside the world he understood which sent a chill through his heart. He lunged wildly, trying to use the refuse bags as cover, but our MC was already on him.
The clash was brutal and intimate. The scythe lashed out, not to simply cut, but to carve away essence and blood. It grazed Elias's chest, and the killer screamed shrilly, not from the shallow cut, but from a profound emptiness and dread that instantly opened up within him. He felt part of his self being torn away.
Our MC didn't hesitate. He thrust the scythe forward, plunging it deep with a sickening squelch. Origin glowed with a faint, internal crimson light, drinking the man's life force. Elias's eyes rolled back. His screams turned thin, rattling groans, as if his voice was being sucked out of his lungs. He collapsed, his body little more than a husk than a cold corpse.
A strange, dark warmth spread through our MC's chest, directly beneath the stone idol in the cave miles away. The power surge was temporary, a fleeting respite from the terrible, gnawing hunger.
"Good. Feel the power. Drink deep, little successor. Survival tastes like this," a voice whispered in the confines of his mind. It was smooth, ancient, and laced with a perverse ecstasy—the echo of the original lustful heir who had created the totem's sentience.
The MC gripped the scythe, which instantly dissolved back into a liquid shadow, retracting into his soul. His hands were clean. His clothes were barely stained. He felt a deep, chilling disgust, yet simultaneously, a terrifying relief.
He had died less than twenty-four hours ago—falsely accused of rape, cornered, and beaten to death by vigilantes fueled by righteous rage and lies. His last moments were pure, blinding helplessness and rage. That dark cocktail had been his ticket here. His soul, instead of fading, had been pulled into the Forgotten Cave, drawn by the hungry idol.
Now, he lived again, trapped within the preserved body of a 19th-century boy who had met a similar, if more baroque, end. The Ancient Totem was no mere statue; it was a contract, a leash, and a source of horrifying power even a fictional author's brain could comprehend. The contract was simple: feed it sin, or starve. The soul of the original 19-year-old MC was tethered to the Totem's core. Resist the dark path, refuse to gather the wicked, and his soul would be consumed to feed the very life he was fighting to keep.
The greatest lie ever told is that the path of virtue is easier than the path of sin. Virtue demands effort against nature; sin is merely letting go, the Totem's voice purred in his mind.
He was a monster by necessity, wearing the flesh of a monster by inheritance. He had to cultivate a secret society, a cult of sin, feeding their perverse and wicked deeds to the idol for his own survival and power.
He quickly disposed of Elias's body, wrapping it in a large canvas sheet he'd prepared and dragging it toward the drainage ditch since the guy at least deserved a death certificate. As he worked, a rusted-out police cruiser slowly rolled past the alley entrance. The sudden intrusion of the mundane world was a sharp jolt. Our MC froze, instinctively using the large, jagged shadow cast by a derelict dumpster to conceal himself and the body. The car stopped briefly, its spotlight washing over the street, then slowly, thankfully, drove on. The Totem had already imparted the instinct for stealth, the art of being unseen.
Once the killer's body was gone, the MC turned and noticed a second presence in the far corner, tucked beneath a heap of abandoned pallets. It was another man, young, perhaps his own age, lying still in a rapidly spreading pool of dark liquid. He had been dead mere minutes, a victim of Elias before out MC's arrival.
Our MC approached the body. He could leave it, but something in the back of his mind—that pragmatic, survival instinct honed by the Totem—told him this was an opportunity. He was a creature of darkness now, but he needed a mask for the light.
He knelt, placing a hesitant hand on the cold forehead of the deceased. Focusing the energy of the Totem, he tried a nascent power he had only just learned to control—Soul Extraction.
A faint, blue-white mist—the last flicker of the dead man's essence—lifted from the body and flowed into the MC's touch. Simultaneously, a violent rush of memories slammed into his consciousness which he quickly wiped out it's emotions.
The dead man had a name: Urca. Once a son of wealth, recently bankrupted by his parents' sudden, tragic death. His fiancée's family, ruthless social climbers, had immediately dissolved the engagement when the fortune vanished, forcing him instead to marry the family's other daughter—the one crippled in a riding accident, meant as a humiliating punishment and a means to seize Urca's remaining, meager assets and also a dispicable sense of fulfilling a promise and and also finding a husband for their daughter.
Urca had run. Seeing the woman he loved marrying a wealthier, crueler man, happy and triumphant while he was left with betrayal and forced servitude, he had snapped. He ran out on his wedding night despite his new wife's desperate pleading, unable to cope with the utter injustice, only to meet the serial killer Elias in this dark alley. Betrayed by society, then murdered by a monster.
The final, desolate thought of Urca echoed in the MC's mind: I have nothing left to give the world.
"Poor, pathetic wretch," our MC murmured, retracting his hand. "Your life was cut short by small cruelty and great evil. Now I wear your skin. Your debt will be repaid, but first, I must survive."
He changed quickly, shedding the outdated suit for Urca's simple, if slightly bloody, shirt and trousers. Using the extracted memory, he rearranged the muscles in his face—a secondary function of the soul-vessel binding—until the reflection in a shard of broken glass showed the features of the deceased Urca. He was slightly unremarkable, a perfect face for an average life. A perfect mask. With a flick, a clothes was clean.
He looked back at the alley. Elias's soul was fueling the Prison, the dark, ethereal reservoir deep within the cave, a fact that felt like a distant, low hum of power. The body of the original Urca was simply another piece of refuse.
He turned his back on the scene, the darkness, and the brief, violent rebirth of his life. His destination, a place he only knew from stolen memory, was Urca's unwanted new home. He needed to establish the Mask, secure the Base, and find his first true, living follower.
In a world that had killed him once, he would not allow himself to be helpless again. He would wield sin, not because he was born a monster, but because he was desperate to survive.