Mesopotamia, 4950 BC
The heat of the Fertile Crescent was not a shimmer; it was a weight. In the valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates, the air tasted of silt, dry barley, and the metallic tang of a world still cooling from its creation.
Gunnar didn't wake up to the chime of a bell. There was no polite, translucent blue box floating in his vision. There was no "Welcome, Traveler" or "System Initializing."
There was only the screaming.
It took him three decades to realize the screaming was coming from his own nervous system.
In his first life—the one that ended in the screech of tires and the smell of ozone on a rain-slicked New York street—Gunnar had been a man of data and hard edges. He understood the world through a lens of structural engineering and a healthy obsession with speculative fiction. When he opened his eyes in the dust of Mesopotamia, he expected the tropes. He waited for the "Quest" to find a village. He waited for the "Status" screen to tell him his Strength was a 10 and his Agility an 8.
It never came.
Instead, he found himself trapped in a frame that felt like it was woven from starving lightning. He was a Sovereign-Origin Anomaly. In the comic books he'd devoured as a teenager, he would have been called an Eternal, or a Celestial seed—a biological bridge between the muddy, carbon-based reality of Earth and the terrifying, hyper-dimensional energy of the cosmos.
But there was no manual for being a bridge. And bridges, when built with incorrect tension, do not just stand still. They vibrate. They resonate. They tear themselves into scrap metal.
The Cave of Ichor
Gunnar had fled the early human settlements. The sight of the primitives—his ancestors, yet not his kin—hurting each other with sharpened stones was too much to bear when his own skin was trying to shed itself.
He found a limestone cave in the Zagros Mountains, a jagged throat in the earth where the air remained cool. It was here that Gunnar spent the first fifty years of his new life.
It was a nightmare of biological feedback.
His heart did not beat like a human's. It was a heavy, thudding drum that struck once every ten minutes, sending a shockwave through his chest that cracked the stones he sat upon. When he bled, he didn't bleed red. He sweated a viscous, golden ichor that smelled like burnt sugar and scorched copper.
"Think," he would rasp, his voice a grinding of tectonic plates against the cave walls. "Think, damn it. You aren't a character in a book. You are a physical event."
He remembered Swallowed Star. He remembered the "Student Phase" and the "Star-Traveler Level." He remembered the endless "Cultivation" novels where heroes sat under waterfalls and suddenly became invincible. He tried to mimic them, closing his eyes and searching for a "Dantian" or a "Core."
He found nothing but chaos.
His cells were over-clocked. They were trying to draw power from the very vacuum of space, but the "wiring" of his DNA was melting under the load. He realized then that if he didn't find a way to organize the energy, he wouldn't become a god. He would become a crater.
"This isn't magic," he whispered, his eyes glowing with a faint, unstable violet light. "This is physics. I am an engine with no cooling system."
The First Cycle: The Iron Vessel
The realization changed everything. He stopped trying to "meditate" and started trying to engineer.
He began to observe the world not as a survivor, but as a scientist. He noticed the way the sun felt on his skin—not just as heat, but as a bombardment of neutrinos and solar radiation. He felt the background hum of the universe, the faint, ghostly echo of the Big Bang that still resonated through every atom of the planet.
He dubbed his solution the First Cycle: The Iron Vessel.
If his body was vibrating to pieces, he needed to increase its density. He needed to turn his "soft" biological matter into something that could withstand the voltage of his soul.
He sat in the center of the cave, naked, his body skeletal yet shimmering with that terrifying gold sweat. He began the process of Atomic Tempering.
He didn't just breathe; he pulled. He visualized the ambient cosmic radiation—the leftovers of the creation of the stars—and he began to "thread" it. He used his consciousness as a needle, sewing the energy into his bone marrow.
The pain was beyond anything a human mind could comprehend. It was the feeling of being burned alive from the inside out, millisecond by millisecond, for years.
Year 60: He focused on his femur. He crushed the marrow with internal pressure, then reinforced it with the cosmic "thread" until the bone was no longer calcium and phosphorus, but a lattice of reinforced bio-matter.
Year 85: He moved to the spine. Every vertebra was a battle. He had to time the "sewing" with the ten-minute strike of his heart. If he missed a beat, the feedback would shatter his ribs.
Year 110: The musculature. He remembered the term from his old life: Carbon Fiber. He began to weave his muscle fibers into triplets, binding them with the indigo energy he was now successfully filtering from the atmosphere.
He became a craftsman of his own anatomy. He would sit for decades, visualizing his cells as tiny, empty jars. He would fill them, one by one, with the "lightning" that had once threatened to kill him. He was no longer a bridge vibrating to pieces; he was a dam, holding back a sea of fire.
By 5000 BC, the world outside had changed. The Ubaid period was in full swing. Humans were building irrigation, forming the first cities, and whispering stories of the "Domu"—the sky-people, the watchers.
But inside the cave, Gunnar was finally still.
The golden ichor had stopped leaking from his pores. His skin had taken on a permanent, barely visible indigo hue, like the sky just before a storm. He no longer felt like he was dying. He felt... heavy. Not the heaviness of exhaustion, but the heaviness of a mountain.
He stood up for the first time in forty years.
The movement was silent. There was no creak of joints, no strain of sinew. He looked at his hands. They looked human, but he knew that beneath the surface, his density was ten times that of any living creature.
A stray mountain lion, desperate with hunger, crept into the mouth of the cave. It saw a man—a tall, dark-haired figure with eyes that held the depth of an abyss—and it lunged.
Gunnar didn't move until the beast was inches away.
He didn't punch it. He didn't use a "skill." He simply raised a hand and caught the lion's skull. The force of the lion's own momentum shattered its neck against the "Iron Vessel" of Gunnar's palm. It was like a glass bottle hitting an anvil.
Gunnar looked down at the dead predator. He felt a flicker of the old 21st-century empathy, but it was buried under the cold, hard logic of the centuries.
"Stage One is complete," he whispered. The sound of his voice caused the loose pebbles on the cave floor to dance. "I am a stable vessel."
He stepped out of the cave. The Mesopotamian sun hit him, and for the first time in an age, it didn't feel like a burden. It felt like fuel.
His lifespan had shifted. He no longer thought in terms of seasons or decades. He thought in eons. He looked toward the horizon, where the smoke of the first human hearths rose into the air.
"The vessel is built," he said, his indigo eyes tracking a hawk miles above him. "Now, I need an engine."