Ethan Blackwood woke up dying.
Not panicking.Not screaming.
Dying.
Weight crushed his chest in a slow, absolute way—stone pressing from every direction, denying even the concept of movement. Dust filled his mouth. Each breath dragged grit deeper into his throat instead of air.
Buried.
He registered it without emotion.
So this is how it ends.
Not in battle. Not in fire. Not even in daylight.
Pressure. Darkness. Organ failure.
His pulse slowed automatically, conserving oxygen. Panic wasted air. He had learned that lesson years ago in a subway collapse where the screaming lasted longer than the survivors.
His fingers flexed once against packed stone.
No gaps. No leverage.
Good. That removed variables.
He stopped trying to inhale deeply. Let the body fail at its own pace. Less pain. Less noise.
Memory surfaced—not as comfort, but as inventory.
Seven years of survival.Seven years of cities turning into feeding grounds.Seven years of learning exactly how quickly civilization rots when consequences disappear.
Noah crushed beneath falling concrete on Day 4.
Mother's voice dissolving into static over a radio that never powered back on.
Father walking into a riot with a crowbar and not returning.
Ethan did not linger on the images.
Sentiment had never revived the dead.
He filed them where he filed everything else that mattered—useful information about how the world actually worked.
His thoughts shifted to the tomb.
The final error.
A structure buried inside the deepest rift—a place so fundamentally wrong even monsters avoided it. Black stone corridors that absorbed light. Corpses scattered across the floor that radiated the kind of pressure only apex predators or dying gods produced.
And at the center—
An altar.
On it floated an eye.
Black. Veined with molten gold. Awake.
Watching him.
Waiting.
He hadn't hesitated long. Hesitation was just a slower form of suicide.
His hand had closed around it.
Then the ceiling fell.
Stone collapsed.
Reality folded inward.
And now—
A fracture spread through the crushing dark.
Not physical.
Conceptual.
Something sharp forced its way into existence, splitting the suffocating void like a blade through cloth.
Gold light bled through.
Within it—
An eye.
The same one.
Focused entirely on him.
Not pity.Not mercy.
Interest.
Ethan's lips shifted a fraction.
"So you came too."
His hand moved despite screaming nerves and failing muscles.
He touched it.
Pain erased everything.
Ethan Blackwood woke on a bedroom floor.
Air hit his lungs in a single violent intake. He rolled onto his back immediately, coughing once—controlled, efficient, clearing debris that wasn't there.
No dust.
No blood.
No crushed ribs.
Only oxygen.
He stayed still.
Assessment first.
Soft surface beneath him: carpet.No debris. No threats. No hostile noise.
Above him, a ceiling fan rotated with dull mechanical rhythm.
Birdsong filtered through a window.
Birds.
Extinct in Year One.
His eyes opened.
Bedroom. Civilian construction. Pre-collapse architecture.
Memory aligned instantly.
His room. Before college. Before the end.
He stood.
The body felt wrong—too light, too intact, muscles soft from comfort instead of conditioned by survival.
Irrelevant. Weakness could be corrected.
Death could not.
He stepped to the mirror.
A boy looked back.
Nineteen.Unscarred.Unmarked.
Alive.
"…Regression."
He spoke the word flatly, testing its weight.
Possible. Rare. Usually fiction.
Apparently not.
He glanced at the clock.
JUL 17 — 7:06 AM
Calculation followed automatically.
First rift: July 20.Urban collapse: within seventy-two hours.Supermarket disaster: Day 4.Noah dies.
His jaw tightened once, then relaxed.
Emotion would come later, if it served a purpose.
Seventy-two hours.
Enough time to change outcomes.
Not enough to change the world.
He turned from the mirror and moved to the window.
Outside, the neighborhood operated under the illusion of permanence. Cars backing out of driveways. A man jogging. A child kicking a ball across a lawn.
Most of them would be dead within a month.
Many within a week.
He felt nothing.
Attachment outside a defined perimeter was a weakness he had already paid for.
Voices drifted from downstairs.
Alive voices.
Mother.Father.Noah.
His hand tightened on the window frame—not from sentiment, but focus.
Primary objective confirmed.
Everything else was negotiable.
He went downstairs.
The kitchen was exactly as memory recorded.
Mother cooking.Father reading.Noah slouched, laughing at something meaningless.
Alive.
Ethan took in the room the way soldiers scan terrain—entry points, blind spots, object placement, distances.
His mother looked up first and smiled.
"Morning, Ethan."
The sound hit old damage, not fresh emotion.
"Morning."
Noah snorted. "You're up early. Who replaced my brother?"
Ethan sat.
"Couldn't sleep."
True enough.
His father glanced up briefly. "Orientation nerves?"
"Something like that."
A plate slid toward him.
Eggs. Bacon. Pancakes.
Fuel.
He ate methodically, ignoring memory associations. Taste was irrelevant. Calories were not.
Conversation continued around him—dorms, schedules, trivial concerns belonging to a world already scheduled for extinction.
He answered when necessary. Offered nothing extra.
Noah would die on Day 4.
Not this time.
After finishing, Ethan stood.
"I'm going out later. Need supplies."
His mother frowned. "For the dorm? We already—"
"Not dorm supplies."
He met her gaze steadily.
"Things I want."
She studied him for a moment, then nodded. "Okay. Be careful."
Careful.
Another obsolete concept.
Back upstairs, Ethan locked the door.
Civilian persona off.
He opened a notebook and wrote:
72 HOURS
Under it, he listed priorities in tight, clean strokes.
WeaponsToolsMedicalWaterMobilityInformationSecure family
Power
That last word stayed on the page longer than the others.
Without power, everything else was temporary.
A pressure ignited behind his right eye.
He didn't flinch.
Recognition.
"So you did come back."
Pain unfolded slowly, like something ancient stretching after centuries of stillness.
His vision flickered.
Crimson text burned into existence.
AUTHORITY FRAGMENT DETECTEDUNIQUE ARTIFACT BOUND — DEVOURING EYE
He read without reaction.
Ability: CORPSE DEVOUR
Requirement: recently deceased target
Condition: body largely intact
Effect: absorb abilities, traits, affinities, authority fragments
Ability: SOUL UPGRADE
Consume souls to evolve abilities beyond natural limits
Ethan exhaled once.
This wasn't luck.
It was leverage.
In his previous life, growth had depended on timing, chance, and surviving encounters with things stronger than him.
Now growth followed death itself.
Predictable. Scalable. Unrestricted.
His gaze shifted to the wall.
A spider crawled across the paint.
He focused.
[Arachnid — Minimal Life Force]
He crushed it between two fingers.
A thin thread of gray energy lifted from the corpse and sank into him.
Soul Acquired — Negligible Quality
A faint warmth settled in his chest.
Confirmation.
No kill requirement.
No ritual.
Only proximity to death.
"Efficient."
Battlefields would be reservoirs.
Disasters, windfalls.
Anywhere people died, he would grow.
Movement outside caught his attention.
He looked up.
Across the street, a man stood on the sidewalk.
Suit. Pale skin. Perfect posture.
Watching the house.
Watching him.
Ethan held his gaze.
Pressure thickened in the air—not hostility, not aggression, but awareness. Like something deep underwater rising toward the surface.
Not human.
The man smiled.
Polite. Controlled. Predatory.
Then stepped back—
—and vanished.
No distortion.
No sound.
Absence.
Ethan watched the empty space for several seconds.
"Too early."
Observers normally arrived weeks after the rifts opened.
Unless something had flagged him.
His hand rose to his right eye.
"Or someone."
That night, Ethan did not sleep.
Not from fear. From habit.
Deep sleep without security had been a luxury he stopped trusting years ago.
Around midnight, the air shifted.
Presence.
Ancient. Vast. Curious.
A voice brushed across his thoughts like cold glass.
"You returned."
Ethan remained still.
"Apparently."
A pause.
Interest sharpened.
"Grow strong."
"I want to see what survives."
His eyes opened in the dark.
"What are you?"
Silence stretched long enough to feel intentional.
Then—
"Hungry."
The presence withdrew instantly.
No fade. No transition.
Gone.
Ethan stared at the ceiling.
"Good."
"If you're watching… keep watching."
Outside, far above human sight, a thin fracture spread across the night sky like stress in glass.
Something on the other side leaned closer.
Waiting.
Calculating.
Ethan closed his eyes.
Three days.
This time, the world wouldn't catch him unprepared.
This time, he wouldn't just endure.
He would take.
Three days until the harvest begins.