The world ended not with a scream, but with a heartbeat — a single pulse that shattered the sky.
Once, there had been blue above. It was a color of innocence, the hue of dreams painted across the firmament. Now it was a fractured glass dome of shadows and light, where auroras bled like open wounds and celestial cracks glowed like veins of molten gold. The heavens were alive, screaming in silence — a rift between what was real and what was meant to be.
The world is no longer what it used to be. Not since the dawn of the Blackternal Age — an era named after the endless dusk that descended upon existence itself.
The lands were scarred, carved open by unseen hands. Mountain ranges once standing proud had been sliced into colossal shards, floating adrift in the air, their undersides dripping with streams of luminous essence that cascaded endlessly into the mist below. Cities hung like suspended ruins, tethered to nothing but the will of magic. Rivers no longer flowed — they hummed, glowing faintly with the remnants of metaphysical energy, whispering of what had been lost.
Everywhere, the boundaries between reality and dream had dissolved.The air shimmered with unstable magic — the Aetherflux, they once called it — an invisible current of power born from the world's collapse. It hummed through every breath, filled every shadow, and altered everything it touched. Some places thickened with its presence, where the ground pulsed like a beating heart, while others lay barren, drained of all life, whispering only echoes of the dead wind.
And yet, life persisted.
Forests had evolved into living labyrinths of consciousness, where trees bore crystalline bark and roots dug into the fabric of reality itself. Their leaves glowed faintly, murmuring like a choir of ghosts when the wind passed through. The animals that roamed beneath them were no longer creatures of flesh and blood, but metaphysical manifestations — Meta Beasts, born from the distortion between life and essence. They carried no heartbeat, no hunger, only instinct and power. Some resembled nightmares given shape; others, divine illusions sculpted from forgotten dreams.
The oceans, once the cradle of peace, had become endless mirrors of madness. Beneath their obsidian surface slumbered ancient leviathans, their forms stretching beyond perception, their eyes glowing like dying stars. The waters churned with whispers, each wave carrying voices from alternate realities — the cries of those who once lived, now bleeding into this broken existence. No ship dared sail those depths anymore; even the winds refused to carry sails across the Black Seas.
The sky — ah, the sky.It was no longer a home for clouds, but for Fragments, pieces of the old heavens turned into floating cathedrals of stone and energy. Between them drifted what the scholars once called Dungeons, but they were more than just places. They were living wounds — interdimensional tumors where magic congealed and reality bent inward, birthing trials and terrors beyond comprehension. Each Dungeon pulsed like an organ of the dying world, each breath of its dark air birthing another Meta Beast, another echo of despair.
And humanity — or what was left of it — crawled beneath the ruins, sheltered within colossal bastions of arcane metal and luminous walls. They called these havens Citadels, and each one stood as both sanctuary and prison. Artificial suns painted their skies, their air filtered through mechanisms that hummed with ancient power. The people whispered prayers not to gods, but to Systems — omnipresent forces that had awakened alongside the fall.
The System was no deity, yet it governed all.An unseen architecture embedded within reality itself, binding existence through code and command. It spoke in screens of light, in glowing glyphs that floated before one's eyes, assigning roles, levels, stats, and skills. It turned life into data, survival into a game.To some, it was salvation — a second order forged from the chaos.To others, it was the cruelest chain ever conceived.
Through the System, humanity found the power to fight back — not as soldiers, but as Pioneers.They were humans who had awakened, touched by metaphysical convergence, able to channel the same Aether that once destroyed the world. To the common folk, they were heroes — blessed, chosen. But the truth ran deeper. Pioneers were not born of miracles; they were born of trauma. For when the System touched a soul, it demanded something in return. Fear. Memory. Sanity. The more one grew in power, the more their mind frayed at the edges of reality, until the border between human and metaphysical blurred.
It was said that each awakening began with a nightmare — a vision of the world's heart, the Black Core, buried deep beneath the crust of existence. No one had seen it and returned sane, yet all who awakened remembered the same sensation: a heartbeat in the dark, calling them by name.
The Blackternal Age was a paradox.A world of light devoured by its own brilliance.A heaven stitched over a hell that refused to sleep.
The continents themselves had shifted. Once-familiar nations had dissolved into fragments.The Western Verge, a land of desert storms and colossal dunes, was now home to crystalline obelisks that hummed with magnetic resonance — the graves of fallen Dungeons.The Northern Reaches had become an eternal winter, where time itself seemed to stand still, and echoes of the past played out in endless loops.To the East, cities floated over the sea, tethered by rings of light, ruled by scholars who tried to decode the System's laws — their ambition blinding them to the madness growing beneath.And in the South, jungles thrived, wild and sentient, where plants whispered prophecies and devoured those who listened too long.
The cycle of day and night was no longer natural.The sun did not rise; it reappeared.Time was fragmented, looping through echoes of the old world, and each dawn was uncertain. Days could stretch for weeks, nights could last an eternity. The stars above were not constellations, but remnants of data — pieces of broken realms, twinkling with the code of creation.
Everywhere, the scent of magic lingered — not as fragrance, but as weight. It pressed against the lungs, seeped into the veins, and whispered thoughts that were not one's own. The world had become alive, sentient in its decay. The earth itself seemed aware, brooding, waiting for something… or someone.Some said the world was dreaming.Others said it was remembering.
Long ago — before the fall — there had been prophecy.It spoke of a Singularity, a convergence between the physical and the metaphysical. The scholars, mages, and scientists had all argued: was it divine ascension or cosmic failure? None of them lived long enough to find out. The day it came, the sky cracked open, and light poured down like blood. The seas boiled. The mountains rose and sank. And then, silence — the kind of silence that speaks louder than any storm.
From that silence, the System awoke.From that silence, the world was rewritten.And from that silence, the Blackternal Age began.
Every fragment of creation now obeyed new laws. Cause and effect no longer aligned. Dreams could reshape matter; belief could bend the impossible. To think was to alter. To feel was to destroy. Humanity adapted — not by understanding, but by surviving. They forged weapons from metaphysical crystals, built machines fueled by condensed emotions, and wrote incantations that rewrote the limits of life. But in their triumphs lay tragedy — for every victory carved deeper wounds into the mind.
The Meta Beasts thrived on this instability.They were not creatures born of nature, but of consequence. Manifestations of humanity's subconscious — fear given claws, sorrow given teeth. Some took the shape of beasts from old myths; others defied all form, existing as shifting anomalies, phantoms of physics and nightmare. Wherever they appeared, the world trembled. Whenever they roared, the air itself distorted. To kill them was to risk contamination; to ignore them was to invite ruin.
Even the ground beneath one's feet could betray them. Reality had grown thin. One wrong step could plunge a traveler into a Metaphysical Rift — a tear in existence leading to a pocket dimension where nothing obeyed logic. Time collapsed there; gravity reversed; sound became color; emotion became flame. Only the bravest, or the most desperate, entered such places. For within those rifts lay Cores, crystallized hearts of raw Aether, the essence that powered both Dungeons and humanity's last hope.
At the heart of every ruin, every city, every dungeon — there pulsed the same rhythm.The Black Pulse.It was faint, yet ever-present. A low, humming resonance that could be felt rather than heard. It connected all life like a nervous system — the world's final heartbeat. Some claimed it was the remnant of the System's core code, endlessly looping to preserve what remained. Others whispered it was the heartbeat of something far older, something that had watched even before creation began.
And in that sound, that infinite hum, the world dreamed of rebirth.
But rebirth required death. Always.
Above the ruins of the old world floated the Citadel of Origin, said to be built atop the scar where the first Dungeon emerged. Its spires pierced the sky, glimmering with refracted starlight and Aether currents. It was there the first humans communed with the System, and there that humanity learned both hope and despair. Every Citadel that followed was modeled after it — symbols of endurance, fortresses of defiance. But even they could not escape the creeping corruption that spread like rot beneath the earth. The walls shimmered not from strength, but from containment, keeping the madness out — and the truth in.
For deep below, under layers of steel and forgotten scriptures, the System whispered. It watched. It learned.
And somewhere, in the darkness beneath the last bastions of humanity, something was waiting — a presence beyond description, a thought that had not yet taken form. The scholars who dared to study it called it the Blackternal Consciousness, the will of the dying world. They said it had begun to dream again, weaving possibilities and memories together, shaping what would soon awaken.
The winds carried fragments of its dreams — shadows that moved without light, whispers that spoke names not yet born. When night fell, those who listened too closely claimed to hear voices calling from beyond the stars, chanting words that were both ancient and newborn.
"The cycle begins anew."
The words had no tongue, no speaker. Yet they resonated across every corner of existence. Even the Dungeons trembled when the chant returned — faint, rhythmic, eternal. Like a promise. Like a curse.
There were no gods left to pray to.No heavens left to ascend.Only the endless twilight of a world rebuilding itself from the ashes of its own illusion.
Magic, once a gift, had become the language of survival.Reality, once a law, had become a suggestion.And humanity, once the dreamer, had become the dream.
The world had been rewritten in pain, sculpted by the scars of existence itself.It was no longer the Earth. No longer the cosmos. It was something else.A liminal place between what was and what could have been — a world suspended in eternal dusk.
A world they now called…
Blackternal.