"When the heart sinks into deep thought, curiosity is born. It hungers endlessly for answers, and from that hunger spring uncontrollable questions."
*****
It had been exactly one year since the night Morca was forcefully abducted from the train. During this period, a cascade of severe symptoms—the kind he attributed to a broken protagonist—had dragged him deep into the mysterious, suffocating labyrinth of Evoslon's hidden reality.
Night had fallen over the province.
An ethereal moon loomed impossibly high above the landscape, its illusionary light spilling over a lonely cliffside in eight distinct, spectral hues. They hung in the sky like the chained moons of the great dripper, each one hiding behind the next—afraid to be seen standing alone. Yet together, they watched from the heavens, silently awaiting the singular moment they were destined to witness.
On the grassy clifftop, a sixteen-year-old boy lay flat, his back pressed against the cool earth. His head rested heavily upon his folded left arm, while his right hand loosely clutched a small, black metal scale. It was dark, worn, and ancient, with twin silken strings trailing listlessly from either side.
His ink-black hair spilled across the green blades of grass beneath him like dark paint bleeding into a pristine canvas. A cold night breeze teased through the strands, brushing against his fragile, yet strangely calm frame.
He wore a plain, faded brown shirt and loose black pants. His chest rose and fell in slow, measured intervals, as if his breath were operating in sync with something far deeper than life itself.
The most jarring aspect of his appearance was his exposed, dried skin, which was covered in a widespread, peeling texture. If it were merely the natural effect of desquamation (the body shedding its outer epidermis in response to physical damage) it would have been a relief.
But a single look was enough to confirm a far more insidious truth: he was suffering from a horrific, underlying biological decay.
Translucent, brilliant bluish veins suffused through the raw cracks of his outer skin, making his flesh appear dangerously venous and clear.
The air surrounding the cliff was unnaturally clean, ancient, and pure. Whisps of faint, golden-azure primal source curled through the atmosphere, visibly drifting like slow, lazy smoke.
If the citizens of Evoslon had a word for environmental pollution, it had likely never been spoken in an environment as sacred as this.
Behind the youth, a dense forest stretched into a limitless sea of deep green. Leaves rustled softly in the dark. Twisted vine plants coiled tightly around the ancient tree barks like parasites, while some wiggled restlessly in the open air.
Above, the heavens shimmered with the eight-hued moon and brilliant stars. Below, scattered across the grass, lay the splintered remains of broken training dummies.
The stillness of the valley was so absolute that one might genuinely believe Evoslon was a world at peace. It was a comforting lie—a truth that existed only within a heavily veiled reality.
And then there were his eyes.
One eye glowed with a piercing, blood-red intensity, crowned by a rotating silver-ringed pupil that seemed to cut through the fabric of reality like an ancient bird of prey. The other eye was a void of pitch-black, entirely devoid of a visible pupil—an orb of endless, terrifying depth that stared at absolutely nothing... yet somehow, perceived everything.
Seen from a distance, without the faint, rhythmic rise and fall of his chest, one might have easily mistaken him for a corpse—slain brutally and left with his eyes unfairly open to the sky.
He is Morca.
Earlier in the evening, he had set out to perform his grueling daily training routine... only to be struck down by this strange, hollow stillness the exact moment he touched upon a fleeting, worldly discovery....
Then came the agonizing groan that shattered the pristine silence.
"Augh… ugh, my head hurts!"
Morca rolled violently across the dirt, his body thrashing in awkward, erratic movements as he clutched his skull, burying his face into the grass like a madman trying to dig his way into the hard earth.
He forced himself into a seated position, locking his head between his hands as a searing, white-hot pain lanced directly through his brain. His fingers dug desperately into his temples, trying to cage the internal storm tearing his mind apart. His eyes squeezed tightly shut.
"Why does it hurt so much? What… what just happened? Where the hell am I?"
He lost count of how many times he had asked himself those exact questions over the past year. Every single time he woke up from one of these episodes, the confusion was clear.
He had repeatedly struggled to distinguish reality from his nightmares, frequently mistaking his dreams for reality.
His mother the only anchor to sanity within the lonely valley.
The crushing headache. An unbearable itch crawling like an insect along his spine. A haunting, phantom sense of having lived and died in two separate lifetimes.
The harder he tried to recall the specific details of what he had just seen in his slumber, the faster the memories slipped away, like slick oil escaping through his fingers. His mind was left as blank and white as blank page.
This, too, was no longer a stranger to him.
After several agonizing minutes, the bizarre pain finally began to subside, allowing his mind to clear.
He attempted one final, desperate time to reconstruct the lost timeline.
Did I just... doze off? Or was it that lingering trauma acting up again?
He couldn't tell. But he knew with absolute certainty that he had witnessed something—felt something that defied every law of nature. A deeply haunting vision.
Over the past year since his abduction from the train, this had become a recurring pattern. Whenever he unconsciously drifted too deep into a profound understanding of historical records, or engaged in probing thoughts that challenged the very fabric of existence, his mind would violently short-circuit, casting him into that identical, unsettling void.
It must be that nightmare hunting me down again, Morca thought, his chest heaving frantically as he tried to stabilize his breathing. Only this time... it literally felt like I lived two separate lifetimes within a single, condensed moment. At this rate, I don't know how much time I has left. With how frequently these episodes are striking... maybe I have a month. Or even less.
He could feel the physical degradation. Each time the mysterious illness flared, it felt as though his lifespan was being quietly drained away.
Because of this volatile condition, he had been completely isolated in this remote valley for nearly a year—entirely cut off from the social world and the civilization he once knew.
Now, Morca could clearly see the end approaching.
His lifelong dream of becoming a renowned historian had been permanently shattered the exact second he opened his eyes a year ago in this region. The architecture, clothing, and cultural environment of this place were completely alien compared to what he had anticipated from textbooks. It was as though he had been forcefully transmigrated into a mythical fantasy land of cultivation—a reality that should only exist in ancient civilizations or fictional fairy tales.
Upon arriving at the Mount Sham province of the Salvic Union, located on the massive Mystrasia Continent, Morca had uncovered a terrifying truth that completely overturned his upbringing: the mundane Evoslon he knew was nothing more than a carefully constructed façade.
Beneath the glamour lay a dark, predatory reality, strictly governed and watched over by extraordinaries.
In the grand scheme of this hidden Evoslon, he was absolutely no one special. Even the high academic achievements he silently bragged about only placed him slightly above average within the vast hierarchy of the lineage families.
Then, there was the ritual they called the Sin Purging Ceremony—a mandatory rite that every youth tied to a Lineage-Order family undergo upon turning fifteen.
A successful awakening would allow a candidate to manifest and master their lineage flaw, stepping onto the path of power.
Yet, even after adjusting his mind to the existence of the supernatural in this familiar yet alien place, the world had ruthlessly denied him a spot on the ladder. Instead of power, his ceremony had left him with nothing but a shattered psyche—the heavy price of knowing things he was never meant to discover.
More than anything... Morca had long since given up on the concept of living.
He had failed to awaken during his ceremony—a disastrous outcome directly caused by his own father's sudden, violent intervention, the true reason for which remained a complete mystery to him even now.
Now, he's nothing more than a crippled mortal. A failed candidate who had missed his chance to awaken his lineage flaw, left deeply traumatized and physically broken by the sabotage. All that remained for him was to bide his time, waiting for a death that no longer felt distant.
His current agonizing state was merely another echo of that lingering, permanent trauma.
In a world teeming with hidden power, lurking monsters, and predatory extraordinaries, Morca was completely broken—left with absolutely nothing to hold onto but a decaying illness, and the ever-looming shadow of an early grave.
Or so he believed.