Neo came back to himself in pieces.
Pain reached him first. It lived in his ribs now, jammed between the bones like something had been driven in there and left behind. Every breath pulled against it. Cold stone pressed against his back, hard enough to drain what little warmth he had left, and blood sat bitter on his tongue.
"Fuck..."
The word scraped out before he had fully opened his eyes.
He tried to push himself upright and failed halfway. His arm shook, the pain in his side flared, and he nearly dropped face-first into the floor again. Neo caught himself, then stayed there breathing through his teeth until the worst of it passed.
When he finally forced his head up, the first thing he saw was the blood.
Dark against his shirt. More of it smeared across his side than he liked.
"Shit."
That got him moving.
He dragged himself backward until his shoulders hit something solid, then grabbed the hem of his shirt with shaking hands and tore off a strip. The first press against his ribs almost took his vision from him. White flashed across everything. He thought he might black out right there and save himself the trouble of dealing with any of this.
He pulled tighter instead.
"Come on... hold."
By the time he tied it down, his hands were shaking badly enough that he had to rest them on his knees just to keep them still. He sat with his head tipped back against the wall, breathing shallowly, forcing himself not to test the injury more than he already had.
The old man on the floor. Blood beneath him. Roderic with the dagger. The forest. The Duskmane. The mountain opening behind him.
Neo shut his eyes for a moment, jaw tight.
None of it fit together, but one fact was more important than the rest.
He was alive.
Badly hurt, trapped underground, and in no shape to survive another problem, but alive.
For now, that would have to be enough.
After a little while, the pounding in his skull eased enough for him to think. The bleeding had slowed. Good enough.
Neo lifted his head and finally looked properly at where he had fallen.
The sight in front of him pushed the pain aside.
The place was dim, but not dark. A faint, sourceless glow clung to the stone, enough to reveal shapes without chasing the shadows away. Smooth black floor, thick columns disappearing upward, walls made from enormous slabs fitted together with impossible precision, ancient lines and worn symbols cut into the surfaces. The air felt sealed, cold in a way that had nothing to do with weather.
This was no cave.
Neo stayed still with one hand braced over the bandage at his side.
The mountain had not swallowed him.
Something inside the mountain had opened for him.
He twisted enough to check behind him. There was no entrance now. No split in the stone like just a few seconds ago. Only black rock and darkness where the opening should have been.
The ring flashed through his mind at once, the heat of it against his chest, the way it had burned just before the mountain moved.
'It reacted.'
He did not know how or why. He only knew the mountain had not opened at random, and the only thing different in that moment had been him pressed against it with that ring hanging at his throat.
Neo lowered his hand from the wall and looked forward again.
This place should not have been here. Not this close to Zone 0. Not hidden under a mountain beside people's homes.
His fingers tightened over the cloth around his ribs.
He was inside an ancient ruin.
And no one had stepped into it for a very long time.
The longer he stared, the worse it felt. A ruin under a mountain was already absurd. A sealed one, untouched this close to the district, was worse. Black stone, old symbols, that oppressive stillness pressing against his skin as though the whole place had spent centuries waiting.
'No way.'
The thought finished itself.
A Godscar Ruin.
Even someone like him knew what that meant.
Godscar Ruins were the kind of places people built legends around. Places tied to scars left behind by gods, or by things close enough that the difference stopped mattering. Families fought over them. Governments buried them. Entire fortunes rose and vanished around rumors of one being found.
For one brief instant, something hot cut through the pain in his ribs.
Greed.
A hidden Godscar Ruin, untouched. And he was inside it.
Then reality came back.
His side still throbbed. Blood still soaked the cloth. Roderic was somewhere above, unless the Duskmane had torn him apart first. Neo had no idea how to get out, no idea what was deeper inside, no idea why the mountain had opened for him in the first place.
The greed died fast.
Neo let out a breath and leaned his head back against the stone.
'A few hours ago I was worried about food.'
Now he was bleeding inside an unexplored Godscar Ruin.
He stayed there a little longer, then forced himself to actually study the place.
From where he had fallen, he was not at the center of the ruin at all. He was on some kind of upper ledge opening into the true structure below. The entire thing descended in a vast circular formation, layer after layer of black stone dropping lower like an underground coliseum. Stairs curved along the inner edge in broad arcs. Columns rose between levels. Far above, an opening in the ceiling let pale light spill downward without revealing anything beyond itself.
Then his attention shifted to the walls.
Dozens of chains, maybe more, had been driven into the black stone at intervals all around the circular structure, forged from a metal darker than iron, with a sheen that looked wrong whenever the weak light touched it. Every single one descended toward the same point at the bottom.
'Screw that. What the hell is down there?'
He did not want to go lower.
Everything about the ruin told him to stay where he was and keep breathing.
But staying where he was solved nothing. He was trapped. Injured. Alone. And if Soul Beasts had made their way inside, waiting politely on the upper ledge was a good way to become dinner later.
Neo exhaled once and pushed himself upright.
The first step sent pain lancing through his ribs hard enough to make his vision tighten.
The second forced one hand against the wall.
By the fifth, sweat had already gathered at his temples.
'Yeah. This is going great.'
He kept going anyway.
From inside it, the ruin felt even larger than it had from above. The columns rose like they belonged to something built for beings larger than men. The chains ran beside him and above him, heavy and old, all of them pulling down toward the same hidden point. The faint glow never reached far enough to make the place feel safer. It only made the dark beyond it feel deeper.
Godscar Ruins were rarely empty. Places like this drew Soul Beasts sooner or later, especially when strange energy, hidden paths, or buried treasures were involved.
Which meant there was a very real chance he was not alone down here.
And if he stayed underground long enough, another problem would find him.
Food.
Neo's mouth tightened.
'Amazing. Ancient ruin, broken ribs, maybe monsters, and I still get to starve underground.'
He kept descending.
After a long stretch of steps, the darkness below finally started to take shape. Something waited at the center, and it was more than stone. With every step lower, the shape sharpened.
The stairs opened onto a wide circle of smooth black floor, flat and bare except for the figure at its heart. No steps beneath it, just a flat center set apart from everything around it like the heart of the whole place.
Someone.
Or something that had once been someone.
Neo slowed without meaning to.
The figure was kneeling.
Its arms were stretched out to either side, held in place by the chains he had seen from above. They ran from the walls, down through the ruin, and into that single body at the center.
'That doesn't look very comfortable.'
He kept going.
Step by step, the details sharpened.
It was a man.
Or what remained of one.
Neo's expression tightened. A section of one forearm was missing. Part of the neck looked cut away. A piece of the abdomen was gone as well. It did not look like rot. It did not look like animal damage. It looked precise, almost deliberate, as if someone had removed parts of him the way pieces could be taken from a puzzle and still leave the shape standing.
Then his stomach growled.
The sound turned ugly in the silence.
Neo's face twitched.
'Of course.'
A few hours ago, all he had wanted was food. Enough Creds to shut his stomach up for one night. Enough to get through the day without feeling hollow.
Now he was limping through an unexplored Godscar Ruin toward a chained corpse in the center of a place that should not exist.
'Where the hell did my luck go?'
He kept moving.
By the time he reached the last stretch of steps, his side was screaming and his breath had turned shallow without him meaning it to. The pale light from above fell more clearly here, striking the center of the ruin like judgment.
Neo stepped off the last stair.
The sound of his boot on the floor carried farther than it should have.
Neo went still.
Nothing changed.
The chains did not move. Nothing in the circle reacted. Only his breathing remained, and the faint scrape of metal somewhere high above, as though the ruin were shifting in its sleep.
Neo looked up.
The figure knelt beneath the shaft of light, fixed there as though it had been left longer than the mountain itself. From down here, the scale of everything became clearer. Descending rings of black stone. Endless columns. Dark opening far overhead. Every line of the place pulled the eye back toward that single kneeling shape.
'Right. Of course. Because my day clearly wasn't ridiculous enough already.'
He took another careful step.
The thing looked like a man.
There was enough of that shape left for his mind to keep trying to accept it, but every closer look made the effort fail. The body was ruined with a precision that made his skin crawl, and even like this it gave off a pressure that sat over the chamber like invisible weight. Old and alien and wrong in a way he had no words for.
Neo glanced around the empty circle, half expecting someone to step out and explain the joke.
No one did.
'Great. So I'm standing in the middle of some buried nightmare.'
His attention returned to the chained figure.
Whatever that thing was, this whole ruin had been built to keep it there.
Neo moved a little closer, circling slightly with a shallow, uneven gait.
"Alright," he muttered, voice low in the vast silence. "What exactly are you, my friend?"
Nothing answered.
He took another step.
"Because this feels a little excessive."
He tilted his head, studying the ruined remains.
"What did you even do to deserve this? Tax fraud? Pissed off the wrong god? Stole someone's lunch?"
The dry humor helped for about half a second.
Then it stopped helping.
Even destroyed like this, the corpse gave off something heavier than death. The place had not been built around a body.
It had been built around a presence.
Neo's mouth flattened.
Then his stomach growled again.
Loudly.
The sound bounced through the black chamber.
Neo shut his eyes for a beat.
"Again? Really?"
When he opened them, his attention dropped to the figure's chest.
Something was shining there.
Neo squinted at it.
He had seen Soul Cores before. Cheap ones. Low-rank ones moved in boxes for men with money and no shame. Enough to know the shape. Enough to know the feeling they usually gave off.
This was not one of those.
Even from here, it felt wrong in a way that made his skin crawl.
Neo stayed where he was.
Then everything else rushed back at once. The old man was dead. Roderic was somewhere above, alive or not. He was underground, wounded, hungry, alone, and staring at the only thing in this place that looked capable of explaining any of it.
Whatever this ruin was, whatever that corpse had once been, whatever had made the mountain open for him, all of it pointed back to that yellow light.
Neo exhaled once, then pushed himself forward with a wince.
"I don't like you," he muttered under his breath, staring at the Soul Core. "But I don't exactly have better options either."