The impact never came. The sensation of falling simply ceased, replaced by an absolute, freezing stillness. Red opened his eyes. He was no longer in the pit. He was no longer in his body. He looked down at his hands; they were translucent, sketched in gray smoke against an endless black void. The pain of the Soul Flay was gone, leaving behind a cold numbness that felt like anesthesia.
"You are loud," a voice rumbled. It did not come from a throat. It came from the darkness itself. "Even in death, your soul screams."
Red turned. A figure sat cross-legged in the center of the nothingness. It was colossal, a titan composed of cracked sandstone and drying clay. Moss grew in the fissures of its skin. It looked like a statue abandoned in a desert for a thousand years, eroding under a sun that no longer shone.
"Who are you?" Red asked. His voice had no echo.
"I am the Steward of the Seventeenth Continent," the entity said. Its eyes were hollow pits, devoid of light. "I am the Architect of the Lost Land. And I am expired."
The giant leaned forward, dust cascading from its shoulders like dandruff. "I was given a century. One hundred years to birth life, to nurture civilization, to cultivate faith. A simple transaction. Life for power. Worship for existence."
The giant sighed, a sound like a landslide. "I failed. The beasts I created were too feral. The soil was too acidic. No prayers were sung. The deadline has passed."
Red floated closer. He saw the cracks in God's chest widening. Light leaked out, not golden like the King's magic, but a deep, bruised crimson.
"Why am I here?" Red asked. "They killed me. I belong in the garbage."
"You are garbage," the God agreed. "And so am I. We are the refuse of our respective worlds. That makes us compatible."
The God reached into its own chest. The stone groaned and snapped. With a wet, tearing sound, the entity pulled out a pulsing mass of energy. It looked like a heart made of magma and starlight, dripping with liquid power. It convulsed in the giant's hand, hot and violent.
"This is my Phylum," the God said. "My essence. The seed of the Seventh Continent. It contains the mountains, the oceans, the storms, and the beasts."
The God extended the hand. The heat radiating from the essence seared Red's ghostly skin.
"Eat it."
Red stared at the burning organ. "What?"
"I am fading. The System deletes failures. But the land remains. It needs an anchor. Eat this, and you inherit the title. You become the God of the Seventeenth Continent."
"Why?" Red looked up at the crumbling titan. "You don't know me. I'm not a leader. I'm a victim. I just cursed an entire kingdom. Why would you give a world to me?"
The God's face began to flake away, turning into grey ash that drifted into the void. The hollow eyes looked through Red, past him, seeing something far beyond the darkness.
"The wind blows where it chooses," the God said.
"That's not an answer!" Red shouted.
"It is the only one you will get."
The God's arm dissolved. The essence fell.
Red lunged forward. He caught the burning mass before it hit the nothingness. It scorched his spectral hands. He looked at the dying God, demanding clarity, demanding a reason, but the titan was already gone.
The pile of ash scattered, leaving Red alone in the dark with the burning heart of a world in his hands. He looked at it. It pulsed in time with his own rage.
He raised it to his mouth and swallowed it.
The essence did not taste like power. It tasted like wet ash and copper. It slid down his nonexistent throat, a heavy, molten weight that settled in the center of his chest. Red braced himself, expecting his bones to snap back into existence, expecting the sudden rush of blood and the knitting of muscle.
Nothing happened.
He looked at his hands. They remained gray and translucent, smoke held together by sheer will. He was still a ghost. The only difference was the burning sun trapped inside his ribcage. It pulsed with a violent, rhythmic heat, anchoring him to the void. He was a spectre carrying the weight of a planet.
A flicker of light broke the darkness to his right.
A slab of black obsidian materialized, hovering at eye level. It hummed—not with sound, but with a vibration that rattled his spectral teeth. Glowing glyphs etched themselves onto the surface, shifting and rearranging until they settled into legible English.
It looked like a dashboard.
Red drifted closer. The center of the slab displayed a live feed, a window into a world that looked nothing like the civilized marble halls of Aethelgard. He saw a forest of twisted black trees with leaves the color of bruised plums. Fog curled around the roots, thick and impenetrable. Something large and scaled moved through the underbrush, snapping a tree trunk like a dry twig.
Text scrolled rapidly down the left side of the slate.
→ Subject: The Seventeenth Continent.
- Status: Feral.
- Civilization Level: 0.
- Faith Output: 0.
Divine Rank: Corpse-Feeder (Lowest).
Red reached out. His ghostly finger passed through the stone, but the interface reacted to his intent. A small icon in the corner—a simple question mark—pulsed. He focused on it.
A new window popped up, the text clinical and detached.
→ Divine Mandate:
- Current State: Spirit Form.
- Requirement for Incarnation: You lack the Faith Mass to construct a physical vessel.
- Objective: Cultivate believers. Harvest faith. Convert the wildlands.
-Reward: As your influence grows, your body will knit.
Red stared at the readings. The map showed vast stretches of unexplored grey fog, jagged mountain ranges labeled "Hazard Zones," and oceans marked with skulls. There were no cities.
There were, however, hundreds of red dots moving erratically across the map.
→ Species: Varied/Hostile.
→ Allegiance: None.
He understood what this was. He remembered the games he used to play on his second-hand console to drown out the noise of his empty apartment. This was a management sim. It was a strategy game.
But he hadn't started a new game.
He looked at the chaotic layout of the forest, the overgrown paths, the red dots indicating monsters that had likely eaten whatever "civilization" the previous God had tried to build. The previous user hadn't just quit; they had crashed the system and left the debris rotting on the server.
Red floated in the dark, bathed in the pale light of the obsidian screen. He wasn't the player chosen to save the world. He was the glitch inheriting a corrupted save file.