The candle had long burned out.
Moonlight spilled through the curtains, pale and ghostlike.
I lay on my back, eyes half-closed, letting the quiet hum of the night sink into me. Sleep should have brought rest, but it did not.
Instead, it brought nightmares.
Fragments of my past — flashes of white, sterile rooms; metal floors slick with reflection; the smell of bleach and iron.
A small boy, trembling, strapped to a chair.
"Subject 539, begin synchronization test."
Pain surged through my veins like fire, tearing, stitching, reshaping me. Screams echoed — my own, endless and raw.
Hands held me down. Needles pierced my skin. Days bled into nights. Hunger gnawed at me until it became a companion.
A voice hissed: Kill or be nothing.
They forced me to fight, starved me, broke me… and I adapted.
Until there was nothing left but the machine I had become.
Then — darkness.
I woke, gasping, and whispered to the shadows: "I thought it was over."
For a moment, silence answered me.
Then it hit — a stabbing pain beneath my ribs. Sharp. White. Unrelenting.
My breath tore from me. My hands clawed at the sheets.
The pain swelled until it consumed me entirely. I wailed, a sound I thought had died years ago.
And then — a voice.
Cold. Mechanical. Detached.
(Reawakening detected.)
(Host previously awakened — current potential evaluated.)
(Foreign bloodline detected — anomaly.)
(Potential exceeds world threshold.)
(Evaluating bloodline… rare external origin.)
(Adjusting equilibrium… stabilizing host mana and soul layers.)
(Bloodline temporarily sealed for containment.)
My chest burned as if the very essence inside me was being rewritten, reshaped.
White fire coursed through every nerve, every vein, every inch of my being.
Power I didn't yet understand screamed within me, clawing against the seal, thrashing against containment.
The system — the interface of Eden itself — spoke again:
(Bloodline successfully sealed. Host synchronization stable.)
(Warning: Overload imminent.)
And just like that, consciousness slipped away.
The last thing I felt before the black swallowed me was the faint pulse beneath my ribs — violet, alive, and waiting.
(Welcome back, 539.)
Then — nothing.