The rain had been hammering the city for three straight hours when the truck's headlights finally found her.
Elara Voss never heard the horn.
One heartbeat, she was twenty-nine, soaked, exhausted, and scrolling through the newest chapter of some trashy isekai on her phone.
The next heartbeat didn't come at all.
Darkness. Absolute.
Then a single pulse, warm and golden, like someone pressing a hand to the inside of her ribs.
A voice, neither male nor female, neither kind nor cruel, spoke directly into the hollow where her thoughts used to be.
Soul confirmed. Veilbound candidate accepted. Beginning transfer.
The darkness cracked. Light poured through the fracture, and Elara fell.
She hit the ground hard enough to knock every memory of air from her lungs.
Cool moss under her palms. The smell of wet stone and something sweeter, night-blooming flowers that had no business existing on Earth. Above her, a canopy of impossible trees spiraled into a violet sky split by slow-moving auroras. No city. No rain. No truck.
Just silence, broken by the soft drip of water somewhere behind her.
Elara pushed herself to her knees. Her hands were wrong: more petite, delicate, the hands of a teenager. A loose linen tunic clung to her skin, damp and smelling faintly of smoke. Long silver-white hair (definitely not hers) spilled over her shoulders.
"What the hell kind of truck-kun cliché is this?" she croaked. The voice that came out was higher, musical, and entirely unfamiliar.
A translucent blue panel blossomed in front of her eyes like frost blooming on glass.
System Notification
Welcome, Reincarnated Soul:Elara Voss (New Vessel: Elyra Veilborn)
World:The Fractured Continuum – Eldoria Glade (Tutorial Zone)
Level: 0
Class: Unawakened Veilbound
Title: None
Primary Affinity: Eternal Bonds (Dormant)
Stats:
Strength 4 | Agility 6 | Vitality 5
Intelligence 12 | Perception 10 | Will 8
Unallocated Points: 0
Active Skills: None
Passive Skills: None
Current Quest: Survive Your First Night – Reach the Sacred Spring (0/1)
Below the text, a tiny silhouette flickered into existence: a stylized bird trapped inside a cage made of golden chains. The cage pulsed once, then vanished.
Elara blinked. "Okay. That's new."
A low growl rumbled through the glade.
Three shapes detached themselves from the shadows between the trees. Wolf-sized, but wrong, too many joints, too many teeth, bodies stitched together from liquid shadow and starlight. Voidlings. She knew the name the instant she saw them, the way you know a word in a dream.
The nearest lunged.
Pure instinct took over. Elara rolled sideways, heart jackhammering. Her body moved faster than it ever had on Earth, light, balanced, alive. She scrambled behind a moss-covered boulder as claws raked stone where her head had been.
The system pinged again, urgent.
Skill Unlocked (Passive): Veil Whisper – Sense hidden truths and weak points in your surroundings.
+2 Perceptiongranted for first activation.
The world sharpened. She could suddenly taste the flow of energy in the air, threads of pale light connecting everything like veins. One thread, thinner than the rest, ran from the nearest voidling's chest to a glowing crack in the ground ten meters away. A rift node.
If she could reach it…
Another growl. Closer.
Elara's legs moved before her brain caught up. She sprinted, bare feet silent on the moss. The voidlings howled and gave chase. She dove, rolled, and came up running. The rift node pulsed brighter, almost within reach, when the largest voidling cut her off, jaws wide enough to swallow her whole.
Time slowed.
In the creature's obsidian eyes, she saw her reflection, except the reflection was wrong. For one frozen instant, the girl in the voidling's gaze had no face, only a smooth expanse of skin where features should be, and behind that blank mask, something ancient laughed.
The moment shattered.
Elara screamed and threw herself sideways. Her shoulder hit the rift node. Light exploded outward, white and searing. The voidlings shrieked as threads of energy lashed around them like whips, dragging them back toward the crack in the earth. The portal snapped shut with a sound like breaking glass.
Silence returned, broken only by Elara's ragged breathing.
New Notification
Quest Complete: Survive Your First Night
Rewards:+5 Levels, Skill – [Bondforge Initiate], Title – [First of the New Cycle]
Level 5 achieved!
+15 Stat Pointsavailable
New Skill: [Bondforge Initiate] (Lv.1) – Form emotional tethers with compatible souls. Current slots: 1/∞
She sat there on the moss, chest heaving, staring at the glowing words until they faded. Somewhere in the distance, an owl called, or something that passed for an owl here.
Elara laughed. It came out shaky, half-hysterical.
"Five levels for not dying in the first five minutes. Generous."
She climbed to her feet, brushing dirt from the unfamiliar tunic. The glade stretched around her, beautiful and deadly and impossibly real. Moonlight filtered through leaves the color of amethyst. In the hush, she could almost hear the world breathing.
A ripple passed across the surface of a nearby pool. Elara stepped closer, drawn by curiosity and the need to see what she looked like now.
The water stilled.
Her reflection stared back: sixteen, maybe seventeen, silver hair to the waist, eyes a luminous violet shot through with gold flecks. Beautiful in the way fantasy protagonists always were.
Then the reflection smiled, a slow, terrible smile that did not belong on her face.
Behind the reflection's eyes, something vast and ancient looked out.
A whisper, soft as silk brushing bone, drifted across the water.
"You will unbind us all."
The surface fractured into a thousand shards of moonlight.
Elara stumbled back, heart racing again. When she looked a second time, the pool showed only her own wide, frightened eyes.
Far above, unseen, a single caged bird circled once and flew away into the dark.
[To be continued]