Forty-eight hours without sleep felt like wearing a suit of wet sand.
Luo Shen's apartment—a studio that smelled like old takeout and desperation—was covered in a blizzard of printed paper.
Forum threads, news archives, obscure blog posts.
Pages from digital libraries so deep they felt illegal just to look at.
He'd been searching for two words: Academia Celestial.
Public records? Nothing.
Government databases? Zip.
It was a ghost.
But in the cracks, the places where people whispered about things that couldn't be real, he found echoes.
On a paranormal forum buried under three proxy servers, a user named 'Eidolon' posted:
"Saw a guy make a streetlamp bend like a noodle last night. He was crying. Said they were coming for him. Mentioned a 'school'. Next day, his apartment was empty. Landlord said he never existed."
A conspiracy subreddit had a thread titled 'Glitch in the Matrix or Government Psy-Ops?'
It detailed brief encounters with individuals who displayed impossible physics.
Followed by the arrival of 'men in grey who make you forget'.
Luo Shen scrolled, his eyes burning.
Every story ended the same way.
The person with the power vanished.
Erased.
His hand, the one that had held the blue fire, tingled.
A phantom hunger.
He flexed it, staring at the unmarked skin.
What did you take from me when I made it stop?
That's when he noticed it.
The memory thing.
It wasn't just that he remembered everything he was reading.
He remembered… everything. Period.
The specific grain of the wood on the orphanage desk where a kid named Leo had carved a dragon in third grade.
The exact number of tiles on the ceiling of the bus he took to his first terrible job interview.
Forty-eight.
The feel of the static shock from the metal slide on a rainy Tuesday in October, fifteen years ago.
His perfect recall had been a tool.
Now, it was a flood.
It was booting up randomly, unprompted.
Drowning him in a tsunami of irrelevant, crystalline detail.
He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to force it back.
Stop.
Just the relevant data.
Just the threat analysis.
Instead, his brain served him the complete ingredient list from the back of a candy bar he'd eaten when he was nine.
"Stop it," he muttered to the empty room.
A soft, dry rustle answered from the corner where his shadow pooled.
It was thicker there.
More solid.
It didn't just lack light; it seemed to reject it.
The whispering hadn't come back since the basement.
But the feeling of being watched had.
It was a pressure.
A constant, low-grade chill on the back of his neck.
Like someone had left a window open to a place with no air.
The more power you accumulate, the more intensely the Abyss will watch you.
The sentence formed in his mind, unbidden.
A law. A warning. A price.
He hadn't just stolen a power.
He'd opened an account.
And something was reading the statement.
He needed to know the rules.
He needed data.
Swallowing hard, he focused on the memory of the blue fire.
Not the horror.
The mechanics.
The sensation of the cold hunger moving under his skin.
The way it sought structure to unravel.
He held out his palm.
"Come on," he breathed. "Just a spark."
He concentrated.
His eidetic memory replayed the sensory data—the texture of the energy, the "shape" of its intent.
He wasn't creating fire.
He was recreating a memory of a metaphysical event.
A pinprick of blue light flickered in the center of his palm.
His heart hammered.
Success.
Control.
The light grew to the size of a marble, spinning lazily.
The familiar, glacial hunger whispered up his arm.
The air around it grew thin, stale.
And the feeling of being watched intensified.
It was no longer a chill.
It was a presence.
The sunlight in the room seemed to dim, not in brightness, but in… significance.
Like the world was a painting.
And something was leaning in from outside the canvas to get a better look.
A headache, swift and brutal, lanced through his temples.
It was the same pain from the basement, but sharper.
A drilling sensation right behind his eyes.
He clenched his fist, trying to snuff the light.
It took more effort this time.
The little fire resisted, clinging to existence.
He had to mentally crush it, visualizing the dark figure's negation.
Pop.
The light died.
The drilling pain in his skull exploded into a white-hot burst.
He cried out, doubling over on the floor, papers scattering.
A hot gush flooded his sinuses.
He wiped his nose.
His fingers came away slick and black.
The ink-like blood dripped onto a printed forum page, blurring the words 'he never existed'.
The pressure of observation faded slightly.
Not gone.
Just… satisfied. For now.
That was the rule.
Not a cost of energy.
A cost of attention.
Use power, draw the gaze.
The headache, the black blood—they weren't the price.
They were the side effects of the real price: the Abyss noticing him more.
Each time he used it, the gaze would last longer.
Dig deeper.
Get hungrier.
He was a mouse learning to ring a bell.
Every ring brought the cat closer to the hole.
A soft click came from his apartment door.
Not the lock turning.
The deadbolt disengaging by itself.
The knob rotated silently.
Luo Shen scrambled back, wiping his black-stained hand on his jeans, heart in his throat.
The door swung open.
Two men walked in.
They wore expensive, charcoal-grey suits that fit a little too perfectly.
They didn't look like cops.
Cops had a certain tired bulk.
These men were lean, movements economical, like predators in human skin.
The taller one closed the door gently behind him.
The lock re-engaged with another soft click.
"Luo Shen," the tall one said.
His voice was pleasant. Empty. Like a recording of a pleasant voice.
His eyes caught the fading afternoon light and reflected it for a fraction of a second too long, with a faint, metallic sheen.
Reptilian.
"You have no right—" Luo Shen started, his back against the wall beside his rickety bed.
"We have every right," the shorter man interrupted.
He had a forgettable face, the kind you'd see on a subway and never recall.
"You witnessed an unauthorized Manifestation Event forty-eight hours and seventeen minutes ago. You subsequently manifested a residual echo of a Proscribed Arcana. Class: Consumption. You then experienced a Paradox Backlash. You have been conducting conspicuous research into restricted topics."
They knew.
Everything.
"Who are you?"
Luo Shen's mind was racing, scanning the room.
Window? Third floor, fire escape rusted shut.
Kitchen? A butter knife wasn't going to cut it.
His shadow stretched long across the floor toward the men, quivering.
"We are the cleanup crew," the tall one said, taking a slow step forward.
His shiny shoes made no sound on the linoleum.
"You are a statistical anomaly. An unregistered, spontaneous Pact-Bearer. That makes you a hazard. A walking violation."
"I didn't ask for this," Luo Shen spat, the fear turning into a sharp, cold anger.
"No one does," the forgettable man said, almost sadly.
"It asks for you. And now, you come with us. For evaluation."
"Or what?"
The tall man smiled.
It didn't touch his eyes. They remained flat, reflective.
"Or we contain the hazard. Here."
The taller man raised his right hand, palm facing Luo Shen.
He didn't make a gesture.
He just… held it up.
The world stuttered.
The faint hum of his mini-fridge died.
The distant sound of traffic from the street below vanished.
The dust motes, floating in a sunbeam, stopped dead in the air, perfectly still.
Luo Shen tried to breathe in.
His chest hitched.
The air was thick. Solid.
Like trying to suck cement through a straw.
He looked down.
His own chest wasn't moving.
Panic, pure and electric, shot through his mind.
Move. MOVE!
But his body was a statue.
He was trapped inside it.
He could see, he could think, but every nerve, every muscle was locked in place.
Frozen in the exact moment the man had raised his hand.
Time hadn't just stopped.
It had been turned off.
The tall man lowered his hand and walked forward, his steps eerily silent in the absolute stillness.
He stopped inches from Luo Shen's frozen face.
Luo Shen could only stare, his eyes wide, his pupils dilated with terror.
The man leaned in close.
His breath smelled like ozone and nothing else.
"See?" the man whispered, his voice the only sound in the universe.
"No mess. No fuss. We just walk out, and you stay like this. Forever. A perfect, still-life painting of a problem solved."
He reached out a finger, aiming to tap Luo Shen's frozen forehead.
In the corner of Luo Shen's petrified vision, his own shadow on the floor—the only thing in the room that wasn't frozen—twisted.
It coiled like smoke, rising up from the ground.
Forming a slender, dark tendril that positioned itself between the man's finger and Luo Shen's skin.
The rustling voice filled Luo Shen's paralyzed mind, clear and desperate.
…mine… to watch…
The man's finger paused, a millimeter from the tendril of shadow.
His reflective eyes flicked down to it.
His pleasant, empty smile finally faded.
"Oh," he said, a note of genuine surprise in his hollow voice.
"It's not just an echo. It's already nesting."
He looked back into Luo Shen's terror-stricken, motionless eyes.
"You're not a hazard," he whispered, the ozone breath washing over Luo Shen's frozen face.
"You're a crisis."
He straightened up and nodded to his partner.
"Call it in. Priority Alpha. We have an active, nascent Abyssal Pact. Tell them… tell them Subject Zero might have been wrong. There isn't just one Abyss. It's multiplying."
The forgettable man pulled out a sleek, black communicator.
As he lifted it, Luo Shen, trapped in the prison of his own stilled body, screaming silently inside his own skull, saw a single, horrifying thing.
In the perfect, deadly silence of the stopped time, the only thing moving was the black, ink-like blood.
It was still dripping from his nose.
One drop.
Falling with infinite slowness.
Toward the floor.