Three days.
And seventeen failures.
That's what Grave wrote in his small notebook before wiping the blood from his fingers. It wasn't much blood — just a thin line running from his nose to his upper lip. But he recorded it. Everything gets recorded.
Blood means the core was overtaxed. An overtaxed core means recovery time. And recovery time means he wouldn't be able to use Disruption for at least an hour.
One hour without a weapon. In Grade Two Warped Lands. With half a canteen of water and a stale crust of bread.
This wasn't alarming.
It would have been alarming if he were someone who knew fear.
⁂
The forest around him was upside down.
Not metaphorically. The trees grew inverted — roots reaching toward the sky like the fingers of a corpse, branches buried in the earth. Gravity here was... temperamental. Sometimes it pulled you down as expected. Other times it flickered for a single second and you felt your stomach rise — as though you were falling upward.
This is what Grade Two distortion does. It doesn't kill you outright. It rewrites the rules around you until you forget how the natural world was supposed to work.
Grave hadn't forgotten. He'd never known the natural world to begin with.
Born fourteen years after the Great Unveiling. Everything he'd ever known was this world — the energy, the fragments, the cores, the monsters. The older generation spoke of "before" in wistful tones, as if they'd lost something precious. Grave didn't understand that grief. He hadn't lost anything. He'd been born with nothing worth losing.
Except his name, perhaps.
"Grave." That's what he called himself after the exile. Not because he was dramatic — because he was practical. The old name died when the gates of Stormhold closed behind him. And a man without a name doesn't need to remember what he was.
He closed the notebook. Slipped it into the inner pocket of his torn coat. Touched the wound along his ribs — still painful but it had stopped bleeding yesterday. Good. Not good enough, but better than yesterday.
He looked up. The inverted roots wove a black web above him. The light that leaked through wasn't sunlight — it was the glow of crystallized energy in the upper atmosphere.
A faint blue glow. Steady. Cold.
Like his father's eyes.
...No. His father's eyes hadn't been cold. They'd been empty. Cold means you feel something and suppress it. Empty means there was nothing to suppress in the first place.
"Seventeen failures. Eighteen will be different."
He said it aloud. Not because anyone was listening. But because silence in the Warped Lands isn't silence — it's a living thing that presses against your ears until you hear your own heartbeat. A human voice breaks it.
⁂
He heard it before he saw it.
No — that's imprecise. He heard nothing. That's exactly what alerted him.
The distorted birds nesting in the inverted roots had been chirping in staccato bursts since he'd arrived. An irritating, monotonous, continuous sound. Then it stopped.
Sudden silence in the Warped Lands means one thing: something larger and more dangerous is nearby.
His fingers didn't tremble. This wasn't bravery — it was calculation.
"Core overtaxed. Disruption unavailable for forty-seven minutes. Water at half canteen. Food for one day. No weapon. No active fragments."
He stopped counting.
"Options: flee upward — the inverted roots are sturdy enough to bear my weight. Hide — I don't have a shadow fragment. Fight — impossible in the literal sense of the word."
Upward, then.
He climbed. Quietly. Slowly. The roots were rough and damp — coated in a layer of luminescent algae that grows where energy concentrates. His hands slipped twice. The second time, he nearly fell.
He didn't fall.
He reached a wide fork seven meters up. Sat down. Held his breath. Looked down.
He saw it.
⁂
It looked like a wolf — if wolves were born in nightmares.
A gaunt body. Bones protruding beneath semi-transparent skin — you could see the ribs, the spine, and something pulsing in the chest that wasn't a heart in any human sense. Six pale eyes distributed across the skull in an asymmetric pattern — three on the right, one in the center, two on the left.
The strangest part: no shadow.
The creature cast no shadow on the ground despite the faint blue glow. The opposite, in fact — the light around it was fading. A circle of darkness moved with it. Roughly three meters in diameter, everything within it was pitch black.
"Haze Stalker. Grade One."
Grave knew it from descriptions. He'd heard about them from merchants who passed near Stormhold when he still lived on the lowest floor. He would listen from the window — not out of curiosity, but because information is cheapest when stolen.
Haze Stalker. Only attacks from behind. Sensitive to energy fluctuations. Faster than any Kindled. But it doesn't climb.
Doesn't climb.
So he was safe. Temporarily.
He watched the creature circle the base of the tree. Six eyes scanning every direction — except up. This made sense: in the world of the Haze Stalker, prey doesn't climb. Prey runs horizontally. Always horizontally.
"Note: doesn't look up. Six eyes and not one designed for vertical vision. Design flaw. Exploitable."
He recorded this in his notebook. With a steady hand. While the monster circled below.
⁂
He waited.
This is what he knew how to do better than anything else: wait.
In Stormhold, he'd waited fourteen years. Waited for his core to work. Waited for someone to notice him. Waited to matter — or at least to exist.
He learned that waiting isn't weakness. Weakness is moving before you understand.
Forty minutes passed. The core had recovered enough for a single use of Disruption. A single use — a few seconds at most.
The Haze Stalker was still below. It hadn't left. Patience isn't exclusive to humans — monsters wait too.
"Then. Attempt eighteen."
In the previous seventeen attempts, he'd aimed Disruption at the creatures' senses — sight, hearing, smell. Result: temporary confusion. A few seconds, then the monster recovered and attacked harder.
Seventeen times. Same result. Same failure.
The definition of insanity is repeating the same action and expecting a different outcome.
Grave wasn't insane.
"Every previous time, I aimed Disruption at its senses. What if I aimed at something else? Not the senses — the energy itself. Its body's energy. Can I disrupt the energy instead of the senses?"
He didn't know if it was possible.
He didn't know if it would kill him.
"Probability of success: unknown. Probability of death: unknown."
He thought for one second.
"...Acceptable."
⁂
He jumped.
Seven meters. Free fall. The wind whistled in his ears and for a moment gravity flickered — his body lightened, then heavied, then lightened again. His stomach nearly turned.
It didn't.
The Haze Stalker spun. Six pale eyes went wide. For a moment — one moment no longer than a heartbeat — it looked surprised.
Monsters don't get surprised. And prey doesn't fall from the sky.
Grave extended his hand. Touched the edge of the darkness surrounding the creature. And with everything left in his overtaxed core —
He pushed.
Not at the senses.
At the energy.
⁂
Something happened.
It wasn't like the previous times. Normal Disruption was like a slap — painful but passing. This was different. He felt something inside the creature... oscillate. Its body's energy — the force that kept it alive and formed its darkness — shuddered. Like a guitar string plucked with violence.
The Haze Stalker froze.
The circle of darkness around it... trembled. Contracted. For one second — one second only — it vanished completely. Blue light struck the creature from every direction and six eyes clamped shut on instinct.
One second.
Then the circle returned. The eyes returned. And the monster returned — more violent and faster.
A strike.
Pain.
Grave flew three meters and crashed into the trunk of an inverted tree. He heard something crack in his chest — a rib. Maybe two. The pain was white-hot, like molten iron. His right eye was covered in blood. His left hand stopped responding.
But he smiled.
Not from madness. Not from courage. He smiled because he saw something.
In that one second — when the creature's energy shuddered — he felt his own core respond. As if it recognized what happened. As if it had done this before.
As if it was designed for this.
⁂
The Haze Stalker didn't finish him. Not out of mercy — but because something else caught its attention. The smell of Grave's blood was stronger than the scent of his energy. And monsters in the Warped Lands don't waste time on broken prey when easier prey exists.
It left. Dissolved into the darkness between the inverted trees.
Grave remained on the ground. The pain was blinding. Two broken ribs — maybe three. Bleeding from a head wound. His left hand was dislocated or broken — he didn't know and didn't care right now.
With his right hand — the one that still worked — he pulled out the notebook.
Opened it to a fresh page. In shaking handwriting, he wrote:
"Failure eighteen. Not a failure. The energy responded. The core knows what it's doing. I don't know yet. But I will."
He closed the notebook. Closed his eyes.
"Probability of surviving until tomorrow: forty percent. Acceptable."
⁂
He didn't die.
This isn't a great achievement — but it's enough.
He woke with the first leak of blue glow through the roots. His body was a single mass of pain. But pain means you're alive. And alive means another day for experimentation.
He sat up slowly. Every movement sent a wave of pain through his chest. He checked his left hand — dislocated, not broken. Good. Dislocated can be reset. Broken needs time he doesn't have.
He pressed his shoulder against the tree trunk. Pushed. Heard a pop.
He didn't scream. Not because he was a hero — because screaming attracts monsters.
⁂
He stood. Wiped the dried blood from his eye. Started walking.
Northward. Toward the smoke he'd seen yesterday. Smoke means fire. Fire means humans — or at least something that uses fire.
He walked for an hour. Slowly. Every step calculated — avoiding the spots where energy was denser, avoiding the open areas where he might be spotted, avoiding the deep shadows where something might be hiding.
Then he saw it.
⁂
A glowing patch.
Floating in the air between two inverted trees. The size of a human head. Its color... wasn't a color in the ordinary sense. It was every color and no color in the same instant. It pulsed slowly — as if breathing.
Whispers came from it.
Not words. Not human sounds. But they carried something — a feeling. As though someone was trying to say something desperately important but speaking from behind a thick wall, and all you could hear was the echo.
Grave's core pulsed.
The pulse wasn't painful. Wasn't comfortable. It was... an invitation. As if something inside the glowing patch knew he was there. And wanted him closer.
He stood still. Stared at it. Felt warmth — strange, because energy in the Warped Lands doesn't produce heat. Stranger still: he felt something like sadness. Not his own sadness — someone else's.
"Anomalous. Insufficient data. Ignore it."
He turned his back and walked.
Two steps.
He stopped.
The stop wasn't a conscious decision. His body halted before his mind decided to. As if something deep inside his core — something older than his awareness — didn't want him to leave.
"...Unacceptable. I decide. Not the core."
He walked.
This time he didn't stop. But he recorded in his notebook:
"Luminous patch. Location: north-northwest of drop point, ninety minutes walking distance. Core responds to it. Must return — after I understand more."
He didn't know that what he'd seen were the remains of a dead person.
He didn't know it held the secrets of an entire lifetime.
He didn't know it would change everything.
But the smoke was closer now. And the sounds coming from it...
Were not entirely human.