A massive chamber stretched before him, furnished with a large bed and a long, wide wardrobe. A clock hung on the wall, while a small wooden table with a rectangular glass top stood to the left of the bed. Some distance to the right stood a full-length mirror beside a stainless-steel cupboard, just steps away from the washroom door. A rich, luxurious scent lingered in the air.
Yug had been sleeping there only moments ago. As he woke and took in the familiar surroundings of his room, a slight twitch of surprise crossed his face. For a fleeting second, it felt like a dream. Considering everything he had endured, he had half-expected to awaken somewhere else entirely—perhaps even in another world. Yet here he was, back in his own bed. Because of one person's intervention, everything had turned out differently.
Two weeks had passed since that pale night, and Yug had returned to his family mansion. Since arriving, he had shut himself away in his room, refusing to let anyone enter. Kruti had accompanied him back to the estate as well. Although Yug barred her from his bedroom, she had already warmed up to his sister and earned his mother's approval. Yug's mother, Prashila, remembered seeing Kruti during his school days and welcomed her as an old friend of her son. That was how Kruti had effortlessly infiltrated his household and secured the best guest room for herself.
Nonetheless, none of this concerned Yug.
He was mute. While he had previously engineered specialized lenses to help him see and interpret his surroundings, he had never needed a device to speak for him. Now, he had to solve that problem from scratch. After giving it careful thought, he had decided to engineer a Vokal Spider—a microscopic vocal interface designed to translate his neural intent directly into speech, allowing him to communicate with the world without using his real voice. He had been laboring over it for days, and the prototype was finally nearing completion.
His biggest setback, however, remained Ticket. He had been unable to repair the shattered core of his main Ticket, and recreating it from scratch was impossible.
Rising from the bed, Yug walked over to the wide wardrobe and stepped inside, passing through a concealed partition where his private workspace awaited. Complete darkness swallowed him. Without his primary Ticket, neither Ticket-2 could illuminate the space nor Ticket-3 assist him. Still, the pitch-black environment didn't hinder him. He had trained himself to map physical spaces through presence alone, needing no ambient light to navigate his tools. As he sat before his console, his mind drifted back to the files on the pen drive Shivani Chandravanshi had given him, piecing them together with what he had witnessed that night alongside Lavanya and Kruti.
Hm, I'm no longer alone with the supernatural in this world. But will I actually gain any advantage of this supernatural, or will I die trying to claim it?
Yug leaned over his workbench, adjusting the skin-colored micro-prototype of the Vokal Spider. Even as his hands moved with practiced precision in the dark, his thoughts lingered on the hidden hierarchy of the world.
Cultivators and Pursuers! Those two factions have sharpened their fangs and carved up this world from the shadows, leaving ordinary humans as nothing more than oblivious spectators. People go about their daily routines as if their lives hold weight, completely unaware that their survival depends entirely on these monsters not growing bored with one another.
BANG! BANG!
Sparks flared across the desk as the prototype ruptured.
Hah... It exploded again. Well, at least I learned something from this failure. The two cores are clashing, and the electrical current running through them—combined with the tension generated by the microchip and its conductive string—is overloading the frame. I either need to dampen the force or reinforce the components so they can match each other's output.
Yug rose from his chair and stepped to his left, retrieving a fresh tray of microchips for the next Vokal Spider. Returning to his seat, he set the replacement casing and the chips onto the workpad. The spider was so microscopic it was nearly invisible to the naked eye, so Yug powered on his optical magnification rig. As the monitor flickered to life, the custom lenses over his eyes caught the screen's glow, allowing him to examine the magnified schematic and pinpoint the exact placement for the core.
I've been approaching the polarity backward this whole time. Experiment No. 334. Everything is proceeding according to plan. The chip is drawing an electrical current into the spider, and the tension of the material is generating a stable magnetic field that circulates cleanly through the circuit. It's functioning just like blood circulation in the human body, carrying energy throughout the system. Those micro-vibrations will synthesize sound directly through the movements of my throat and nervous system... Hehe... I'm just one final adjustment away from making it work.
BANG! BANG!
"FUCK!"
The curse tore from his throat before he could stop himself. Instantly, Yug dropped to one knee. His vision blurred violently as hot blood gushed from his nose, ears, and lips.
Fuck! I forgot. I'm mute. I still haven't conditioned myself to this. If I slip up and speak once or twice more, I'm going to die from my own voice.
Yug clamped a trembling hand over the edge of the desk, biting down hard on his lip to suppress a scream as overwhelming internal pain tore through him. Using the desk for leverage, he hauled himself upright and slumped across the tabletop. His heart hammered against his ribs as though it might burst, while his stomach churned violently. His eyes felt ready to bulge from their sockets, and his veins burned as if a volatile energy were consuming him from the inside out, primed to detonate at the slightest provocation.
He had no choice but to weather it. Clenching his fists until his knuckles whitened, Yug locked his jaw and endured the agony until, second by agonizing second, the internal pressure began to recede.
Hoo... What a relief, he thought, his chest heaving as the violent surges of pain subsided and the suffocating tension in the air finally settled.
Be silent! Be silent! Be silent! Be silent! Be silent!
Though his insides still throbbed, the pain wasn't enough of an excuse to abandon his work. He drilled the warning into his mind over and over, locking his vocal cords shut before resetting the station.
Experiment No. 335. Vokal Spider checked. Mini-microchips checked. System checked. Magnetic field calibrated to suppress the excess force. All auxiliary machines online... Here I go.
Yug rested a fresh microchip near the tip of his left index finger; it was so tiny it sat nestled between the ridges of his fingerprint like a vehicle on a highway. With a pair of micro-tweezers, he positioned the even smaller Vokal Spider at the center of the assembly pad. His right hand was wired into a haptic controller, linking his finger movements to a microscopic robotic manipulator inside the assembly chamber.
Staring intently at the illuminated display, Yug listened to the steady, rhythmic beeping of the diagnostic detector and the location-mapping unit. With everything synchronized, he began the procedure.
A subtle twitch of his wired fingers shifted the camera perspective on the monitor. Inside the chamber, the micro-robotic hand mirrored his movements, gently grasping both the chips and the Vokal Spider. Immediately, the diagnostic beeping grew louder. Across the screen, the location-mapping software projected dozens of colored guidelines, calculating every viable microscopic route to fuse the wiring between the Vokal Spider and the chips.
At the top of the monitor, a completion percentage fluctuated wildly with every passing millisecond. Yug watched every stage of the integration like a hawk. His pupils darted across the data faster than the numbers could climb, his body frozen in absolute concentration.
The synthesis was accelerating so rapidly that calculating the adjustments in real time pushed his mind to the brink.
Sweat rolled down Yug's forehead, stinging his eyes and blurring the glowing lines on the monitor. He bit his bloodied lip, refusing to lift a hand to wipe his face. One twitch of his wired fingers would ruin the alignment.
He had arrived at the exact threshold where every previous attempt had failed: balancing the raw kinetic force of the Vokal Spider against the containment field of the microchip. The warning beeps merged into a frantic, high-pitched whine, threatening another detonation. On the screen, the location-mapping system began to glitch, its colored routing lines trembling and fracturing as they struggled to hold the connection.
Stay patient! I can do it... Yup, just a little more...
He raised his right shoulder a fraction of an inch to steady his hand, squinting with one eye to cut through the blur.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
Fuck you!
Yug slammed his fists onto the desk, screaming the curse purely inside his own skull as raw frustration boiled over. Tangling his fingers in his hair, he yanked hard and stomped his foot against the floorboards in the pitch-black room.
I failed again.