The air in Sub-Level 12 didn't move; it stagnated, a thick soup of recycled oxygen, aerosolized rust, and the metallic tang of dried blood. It was a pressurized tomb.
***Karys*** knelt on the rusted grating of the Scrubber-Walk, his fingers digging into the calcified buildup of a primary exhaust vent. The "Grit-Lunge" was acting up again. Every time he inhaled, a sound like grinding sandpaper echoed in his chest. It wasn't just dust. It was the "Slow-Stiffening." In the Gyre, if the industrial filters didn't kill you, your own biology eventually would.
He stared down at his hands. They were trembling. The skin was translucent, stretched thin over knuckles that looked like jagged pieces of flint.
"Dry-Marrow," the Suture-Witches called it. A condition of the dregs. His bones were becoming hollow, brittle tubes of chalk because his body couldn't synthesize the heavy minerals required to withstand the Gyre's crushing gravitational pulse.
He was nineteen. He looked like a corpse that had been reanimated by a cruel electric current.
*Thump.*
The first pulse of the shift hit. It wasn't a sound; it was a physical weight that slammed into the floorboards, vibrating through ***Karys***'s hollow tibias. His teeth ached. The Gyre was breathing, and its breath was heavy enough to collapse a man's lungs.
"Move it, Scrubber! The intake valves won't clear themselves!"
The voice was a wet growl. Grendel. The Overseer of Sub-Level 12.
***Karys*** didn't look up. He knew what Grendel looked like—a man who had traded his humanity for industrial efficiency. Grendel's left side was a mass of "Hydraulic-Grafts," thick pistons of brass and steel bolted directly into his humerus and scapula. Steam hissed from the pressure-valves in Grendel's neck, smelling of rancid grease and boiled sweat.
"I'm... clearing it," ***Karys*** rasped. His vocal cords felt like frayed wires.
"You're twitching like a dying rat," Grendel spat, his massive, metal-shod boot clanking against the grating inches from ***Karys***'s face. "The Company doesn't pay for twitching. They pay for Ichor-Scrubbing. If that vent isn't clear by the next Pulse, I'll use your brittle little ribcage as a filter."
Grendel wasn't joking. In the lower sectors, biological waste was the only cheap resource. A dead Scrubber was just more organic mass for the bio-reactors.
***Karys*** forced his fingers back into the vent. The "Slag-Grit" was hot, searing the pads of his fingers, but he couldn't feel the pain. His peripheral nerves had already started to die off months ago. He pulled out a fistful of black, oily sludge—the congealed remains of some failed biological experiment from the Upper Spires that had leaked down the drainage pipes.
It pulsed in his hand.
***Karys*** froze. The sludge wasn't just waste. Inside the black mass, a faint, violet light flickered. It was rhythmic.
*Lub-dub. Lub-dub.*
A heartbeat.
His pulse quickened, a dangerous thing for someone with his "Metabolic Debt." His heart hammered against his sternum, a fragile bird in a cage of glass. If Grendel saw this, it was over. Anything "Living" found in the slag belonged to the Company.
But ***Karys*** was desperate. His bones were screaming. His marrow was dust. And the violet light... it felt warm. It felt like *mass*.
He shifted his body, using his tattered tunic to shield the vent from Grendel's sight. With a trembling hand, he reached deeper into the Slag-Grit. His fingers brushed against something hard. Something sharp.
It wasn't metal. It felt like polished obsidian, but it was warm to the touch, vibrating with a high-frequency thrum that made the marrow in his forearm ache with a sudden, sharp hunger.
*The Loom-Nidus.*
He didn't know the name yet. He only knew it felt like life.
As his fingers closed around the object, the violet light flared. A microscopic filament—thinner than a human hair—shot out from the object. It didn't slice his skin; it bypassed the epidermis entirely, slipping through a pore and threading itself directly into the *basilic vein* of his right wrist.
***Karys*** gasped, his back arching.
It felt like molten lead was being injected into his bloodstream. The filament traveled at a terrifying speed, racing up his arm, past the elbow, and anchoring itself into the *coracoid process* of his shoulder.
"What are you doing, you useless sack of calcium?" Grendel shouted, noticing the sudden tension in ***Karys***'s posture.
***Karys*** couldn't answer. His vision was tunneling. Inside his right arm, the Loom-Nidus was beginning its "Initial Colonization." He could feel his own bone being hollowed out further, not by decay, but by design. The parasite was eating the dust in his marrow and replacing it with something... heavier.
The *Brachioradialis* muscle in his forearm began to spasm. The skin didn't just bulge; it tore.
Small, black threads, tipped with violet light, stitched themselves through his flesh, pulling the wound shut with surgical precision. The pain was absolute, a white-hot spike driven through his consciousness, but he couldn't even scream. The Nidus had already seized control of his *laryngeal* nerves, suppressing the sound to avoid detection.
"Look at me when I'm talking to you!" Grendel reached down, his massive hydraulic hand closing around ***Karys***'s neck.
He lifted the boy off the ground. ***Karys***'s feet dangled over the abyss of the lower vents. The pressure on his windpipe was immense. His *thyroid cartilage* began to crack under Grendel's grip.
"You've found something," Grendel muttered, his eyes narrowing as he saw the faint purple glow leaking through the rags of ***Karys***'s sleeve. "Hand it over, or I'll squeeze until your head pops off that brittle neck."
***Karys*** looked at Grendel. For the first time in his life, he didn't feel fear.
He felt a cold, calculated hunger. It wasn't his hunger. It was the thing in his arm. The Nidus had finished its primary anchor. It needed fuel to complete the "Graft-Integration."
Grendel was a mountain of fuel. Organic tissue, rich lipids, and refined marrow—even if half of it was encased in brass.
***Karys***'s right arm moved.
It wasn't a conscious choice. It was a reflex triggered by a nervous system that was no longer entirely human. His arm felt heavy—dense as a neutron star.
He didn't punch. He simply let his hand fall against Grendel's metal-grafted wrist.
*Crack.*
The sound was like a dry branch snapping in a winter storm. But it wasn't ***Karys***'s bone that broke.
The reinforced steel piston in Grendel's arm buckled. The "Siderite-Marrow" that the Nidus had just flash-forged inside ***Karys***'s ulna was harder than any industrial alloy in Sub-Level 12.
Grendel's eyes widened. A mechanical whine echoed from his shoulder as his servos tried to compensate for the sudden structural failure.
"What... what are you?" Grendel stammered, his grip loosening.
***Karys*** landed on the grating with a heavy *thud*. He didn't feel like a Scrubber anymore. He felt like a predator wearing the skin of a victim.
The violet light beneath his skin was no longer faint. It was pulsing in sync with his heart.
*140 beats per minute.* *SIP: 0.8%... 1.2%... 2.5%.*
A window of data didn't appear in his mind; instead, he simply *knew*. He knew the density of Grendel's bones. He knew the exact pressure point in the Overseer's neck where the *carotid artery* was exposed between two rusted plates of armor. He knew how much Ichor he could harvest from the man's liver.
"Fuel," ***Karys*** whispered. The word felt jagged, tearing at his throat.
Grendel roared, swinging his massive mechanical fist in a desperate arc. The air hissed as the hydraulic cylinder fired.
***Karys*** didn't flinch. He watched the fist move. To his newly re-wired brain, the attack was slow, a clumsy movement of a primitive machine.
He stepped inside the guard.
His right hand—the "Nidus-Claw"—shot forward. His fingers, now reinforced with sub-dermal obsidian plating, didn't just hit Grendel's chest; they pierced the rusted iron breastplate.
The sound of tearing metal was followed by the wet, squelching thud of hand meeting meat.
***Karys***'s hand sank deep into Grendel's thoracic cavity. His fingers wrapped around the Overseer's spine.
Grendel's mouth opened, but only a thick, black spray of arterial blood came out. His eyes, once full of malice, were now wide with an incomprehensible terror. He could feel it—something inside ***Karys*** was *drinking*.
The Loom-Nidus sent out hundreds of microscopic cilia from ***Karys***'s fingertips. They tunneled into Grendel's vertebrae, seeking the rich, fatty marrow within. It was a biological heist.
***Karys*** felt the "Metabolic Debt" being paid.
The cold in his bones vanished. A wave of sickeningly sweet warmth flooded his system. His "Dry-Marrow" was being flooded with Grendel's life force, filtered and refined by the Nidus into something alien and powerful.
Grendel's body began to wither. It wasn't a slow process. The skin turned grey, then translucent, then crumbled into fine, white dust as every scrap of mineral and protein was sucked out through the hole in his chest. The heavy brass grafts clattered to the floor, empty husks of metal with no flesh left to hold them.
Ten seconds later, ***Karys*** stood alone in the dark.
Grendel was gone. Only a pile of rusted metal and a smudge of white ash remained on the grating.
***Karys*** stood up straight. His spine didn't creak. His lungs didn't rattle. He felt... solid.
He looked at his right arm. The violet glow was receding, settling into a dull, bruised color. But the skin was different. It was darker, interlaced with a pattern of fine, black lines that looked like a map of a city made of veins.
His **SIP** (Systemic Integration Percentage) sat at **4.2%**.
He was no longer a Scrubber. He was a **Vessel**.
But in the Gyre, a Vessel was just a bigger target. The Nidus in his arm thrummed again—a low, vibrating warning. It had tasted Grendel, but it wasn't satisfied. It was never going to be satisfied.
The Gyre was a graveyard that forgot to stop beating, and ***Karys*** had just become its most ravenous maggot.
He turned toward the shadows of the deeper vents. The Company would be coming for the Overseer soon. He needed to disappear. He needed to find a Suture-Witch who wouldn't sell him out.
He needed more marrow.
***Karys*** vanished into the steam, his footsteps no longer sounding like the frantic tapping of a rat, but the heavy, rhythmic beat of a monster in the making.
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**[END OF CHAPTER 0]**