The darkness didn't fade; it dissolved. One moment, Elian was collapsing under the weight of a guard's boot, the metallic taste of blood thick in his throat. The next, the pain was gone—not just the agony of the beating, but the very sensation of having a body.
Elian opened his eyes, or rather, his consciousness expanded into a world that should not exist. He was standing on water.
It was a vast, obsidian sea that stretched infinitely in every direction. The surface was as flat as a mirror, yet it possessed a terrifying depth that seemed to swallow light itself. Above him, there was no sky—only a boundless, violet-grey haze that felt heavy, like the atmosphere of a planet that had never known a sun.
Panic, cold and sharp, pierced through his mind. Kaito—the man who had lived twenty-one years on Earth and navigated the most ruthless of mountains—felt like a child lost in a storm. He looked down at his feet. He wasn't sinking. The water didn't even ripple where he stood.
"How..." his voice didn't make a sound, yet it echoed in the silence of his mind. "Where am I? I should be dead. The guard... the pit..."
He spun around, searching for a landmark, a door, or even a threat. The horizontal infinity of the sea was a sensory nightmare. He was a 21-year-old strategist trapped in a 12-year-old's soul, and for the first time in either life, his logic failed him. He was truly, deeply horrified.
Then, a light ignited behind him.
It wasn't the flickering blue of an Aether-lamp or the sapphire glow of the Mid-Grade crystal. It was a pure, blinding white that cut through the violet haze like a blade. Elian turned, shielding his eyes with a phantom arm.
To his astonishment, a tree was growing out of the sea.
It was massive, its trunk made of a material that looked like polished bone and starlight. Its roots didn't go into soil; they delved deep into the black water, pulling sustenance from the void. From its trunk, nine distinct branches spiraled upward, reaching for a sky that didn't exist.
As he watched, the first branch began to change. The Mid-Grade energy he had involuntarily absorbed in the physical world was manifesting here. A dark, liquid energy began to crawl along the white bark like ink. At the very tip of the first branch, a bud began to form.
It didn't bloom like a flower of the sun. It unfurled slowly, with a predatory grace. The petals were a pitch-black so deep they seemed to be made of shadows, yet they were lined with a faint, pulsing violet aura. This was the first of his nine flowers.it was a living, breathing reality on the branch of his soul.
Elian was mesmerized. He reached out a hand, drawn to the black flower's forbidden beauty.
"Hi, Elian. Or should I say... Kaito?"
The voice didn't come from the air. It came from the sea, the tree, and the very fabric of his own mind. It was a sound that carried the weight of eons—a primordial resonance that sent a wave of such absolute fear through his soul that his spectral form began to flicker.
Elian's heart—his real heart, somewhere far away—stuttered. The name Kaito struck him harder than any punch the guard had landed. His secret, the one thing that anchored him to his past life, had been stripped away in a single breath.
"Who... who are you?" Elian tried to scream, but the pressure in the air was suddenly unbearable.
The "sea" around him began to churn. The White Tree groaned under the gravity of the speaker's presence. Elian's soul felt like it was being squeezed by an invisible hand, his consciousness beginning to fragment under the sheer power of the entity's voice. He was a moth in front of star.
"Oh! Looks like we are short on time," the voice said, its tone almost conversational, though it hummed with the power to unmake worlds.
Elian slumped to his knees on the black water, his vision fading into grey. He couldn't speak; he couldn't even think. He was losing his grip on this sea of consciousness, his soul unable to bear the proximity of such a being.
"I will keep this message short and sweet," the voice continued, echoing as if from a great distance. "Take care of yourself. I have a very important thing for you to do in Caelum."
The words were an anchor and a curse all at once. Before Elian could ask what the "thing" was, before he could demand to know why he was here, the White Tree vanished. The sea evaporated.
The silent void was replaced by a sudden, jarring cacophony of sound.
Elian gasped, his eyes flying open.
The first thing he felt was the cold. He was lying on a thin, moth-eaten sack of straw that smelled of damp limestone and unwashed bodies. Above him, the low-vaulted ceiling of the slave barracks dripped with condensation.
He was back in the "Crows" unit's sleeper barrack.
His body was a map of pain. His ribs were tightly bandaged with strips of dirty cloth, and his face felt swollen and stiff. But beneath the pain, there was something else. Near his solar plexus, where the "Hollow" had drunk the sapphire energy, there was a cold, humming emptiness.
He felt lighter, yet more substantial. The "Click" in his mind had settled into a steady, rhythmic thrum.
"He's awake!"
The voice was Baraq's. A moment later, Talin's weathered face appeared in his field of vision, his eyes shadowed with worry and exhaustion.
"Easy, lad," Talin grunted, placing a heavy hand on Elian's shoulder. "You've been out for two days. We thought the butcher had finally finished what the Siphon started."
Elian tried to sit up, his mind still reeling from the image of the pitch-black flower and the voice that knew his name. He looked at his hands. They were shaking, but they were alive.
He was back in the hell of Iron-Thistle, but the game had changed. He wasn't just a survivor anymore. He was a tool being sharpened for a purpose he didn't yet understand.