Thiago's POV
Years before the Celestial Weave broke my son's heart… before the whispers of artificial threading even existed… There was only me. A father.
Upper Iris – Research Laboratory (Ten Years Ago)
The lab smelled of metal and ozone, the low hum of cooling fans filling the corridors like a heartbeat I couldn't escape. Crystal conduits pulsed in the darkness, their violet holograms flickering like the fragile fragments of half-forgotten dreams.
I slumped in my chair, shoulders aching, staring at a cursor that blinked at me with rhythmic judgment. It knew my failures.
Lines of code rolled past—bio-data modules, early neural-link diagnostics, adaptive health trackers. Years of work condensed into a few thousand lines: a system meant for those the world had forgotten. For those with no healers, no blessings, no luck. It was meant to be a guardian angel—something to stabilize vitals, predict threats, and ease the mental toll of a harsh world.
I called it Project ANGELS—an ambitious acronym for Autonomous Neuro-Genetic Evaluation and Life Support. In my mind, it wasn't just a machine; it was a miracle. It wasn't perfect yet, but it was close enough to taste.
I presented the blueprints to the President, and the ink on the funding was dry before the meeting ended. The administration didn't just approve it; they clung to it.
The math was simple and cruel. In the streets of Upper Iris, the non-Arkan bearers were dying in silence, unable even to reach a hospital. Our healers—the few we had left—were being bled dry, drafted, and sent to the borders where the rebellion raged. While the conflict between Upper and Lower Iris consumed our flesh and blood, my Project ANGELS would be the cold, tireless hands that stitched the city back together.
Years of my life had been sacrificed to this pursuit—a thousand failed iterations buried in the dark. I thought I knew the limits of my own creation. But then came the Day of the Weave, and the world I understood ceased to exist.
I remember the way Hasphien walked toward me afterward. No thread. No glow. Just empty, trembling hands. He moved with a terrifying care, as if he were afraid the world would shatter if it noticed he was hollow.
I saw the truth in the set of his jaw—the way his shoulders stayed frozen, a statue of a boy already grieving himself. He didn't cry, but the silence in the room carried the weight of a thousand screams he was too tired to let out.
I returned to my lab that night with a heart knotted so tight I could barely draw breath. The pale blue glow of the monitors caught the exhaustion etched into my skin, mocking the years I'd spent building a savior for the masses.
"You were meant to be the savior for Upper Iris," I whispered, my voice sounding like a stranger in the empty room. "You were meant to save them all."
I looked at the code—the culmination of my career, the promise I made to the administration, the hope of the non-Arkan. Then, I thought of the boy whom the heavens had ignored.
My son needs me now.
My fingers shook as I initiated the override, the keystrokes sounding like gunshots in the quiet lab. I tore ANGELS apart, stripping away its public protocols and its moral safeguards. I dismantled a miracle for the many to forge a lifeline for one. I was turning a shield for a nation into a ghost in the machine for a boy the world had already written off.
[ Dev Mode: Activated. ]
[ Purpose Reconfiguration: Manual Override. ]
[ Target: Hasphien Maxence. ]
[ Primary Directive: Preserve host at all costs. ]
I renamed the core files, a secret between the machine and my own fractured conscience. SYSTÉMA. It was no longer just code; it was a spark. A hand to hold when the world turned out the lights.
"If the heavens didn't choose you," I whispered, my voice finally breaking as the upload began, "then I will."
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Present Day, 4:00 AM
The sharp blue glow of the laboratory terminal cut harsh, skeletal shadows across my face. I had been awake for over twenty hours straight, fueling my system on bitter coffee and a spiraling, obsessive panic.
I turned back to the floating monitors, bypassing the primary diagnostics to slide open a highly classified, deep-level panel—an encrypted core section of SYSTÉMA that I had originally designed to remain completely dormant for the rest of his natural life.
Right now, it was glowing a frantic, pulsating gold.
When I built SYSTÉMA, my intention was simple, grounded in a father's desperate love: it was supposed to be an internal, mechanical surrogate. An artificial booster to structurally reinforce Hasphien's muscles and nervous system so he could physically keep pace with a society dominated by Arkan-bearers. It was designed to help him survive without a divine blessing.
But SYSTÉMA hadn't just boosted his biology. It had acted as a sonar, bouncing a data signal off his soul and mapping a hidden architecture I never knew existed.
[ Arkan Thread: Confirmed (Unconventional) ]
[ Mana Intake Rate: -45%/hr — STATUS: CRITICAL ]
"He's not empty..." I whispered into the freezing, sterile air of the lab, my fingers digging hard into my forehead as if I could physically steady the frantic racing of my thoughts. "Did the heavens truly skip him—or did something else look down and claim him first?"
But the awe was instantly suffocated by a cold, rising dread. The engineering metrics flashing on the glass simply didn't make mathematical sense.
Every normal Arkan user in Upper Iris operated like a well-constructed hydraulic system. They absorbed ambient mana from the atmosphere, and their internal "pool" filled up to a set, measurable limit. There were boundaries. Endpoints. Capacities.
But Hasphien's mana graph didn't possess a ceiling. It didn't rise at all. It plunged straight down into a terrifying, continuous negative spike.
He was actively absorbing ambient mana at an alarming rate, but the energy wasn't storing itself in his body. It was vanishing completely, falling into a localized, bottomless void within him.
I stood up, frantically pacing the small radius of the workstation, my heavy boots echoing like hammer strikes against the metal flooring.
"He's draining himself trying to fill an endless abyss," I muttered, my eyes locking onto the scrolling telemetry.
As an inventor, this was the ultimate nightmare variable. A bottomless pit could mean two completely opposite things, and I didn't know which one to pray for.
If this void was a structural defect—a tear in the unconventional Thread the Celestial Weave had forced into him—then the vacuum would eventually grow hungry enough to start consuming his own vital biological energy. It would literally eat him alive from the inside out, collapsing his organs to feed a hunger that could never be satisfied.
But then... there was the alternative. A thought so staggering it made my breath hitch in my dry throat.
What if it wasn't a defect? What if the reservoir inside Hasphien wasn't broken, but was simply so incomprehensibly, astronomically massive that a few days of ambient intake couldn't even fill a single percent of its true volume? What if the sky hadn't left him empty, but had instead planted a seed so heavy it was currently warping his internal gravity just trying to sprout?
I returned to the terminal, my eyes narrowing as I stared at the final, blinking line of systemic feedback:
[ Internal Status: NULL. ]
My chest tightened until it physically hurt. "He's Threaded, and he doesn't even know his own soul is operating like a black hole."
I slowly shut down the active tablet interface and looked up at the reinforced wall. Hanging beside a row of delicate calibration wrenches was a small, faded physical holoprint. It was Hasphien as a little boy, white sugar dusted all over his chubby cheeks, laughing hysterically at a lower-district summer festival. Right beneath the frame sat his old, chipped, moonlit guardian toy figurine.
I had engineered SYSTÉMA to give my son a fighting chance at a normal life in a world that looked down on the powerless. But staring at the gold-pulsing terminal now, a chilling realization settled deep into my marrow.
SYSTÉMA wasn't a surrogate anymore. It was a damn containment unit. It was the only regulatory barrier currently keeping his unconventional Thread from completely destabilizing and tearing his physical body to pieces.
I grabbed my heavy coat from the back of the chair and shut down the monitor. Outside the laboratory windows, the very first pale, grey streaks of a cold dawn were beginning to bleed across the jagged skyline of Upper Iris.
"You're Threaded, son… but whatever is inside you is burying itself deep because it doesn't want to be found," I murmured, pressing my palm against the cool glass of the partition.
The data was a terrifying mystery, but I was the Artificer. I had spent my entire life forcing the laws of physics to bend to my will.
"I'll figure out what that void is," I swore quietly into the fading dark of the lab. "Whether it's a weapon or a casket... I'll find the bottom of it. Even if I have to rewrite the laws of the Weave to keep you alive."