My Turn

The walk home was quiet.

Ashen strolled along as if nothing had happened, humming tunelessly under his breath every now and then. Cain trudged beside him with his head down, not knowing what to do with his hands, his face, or his entire existence.

‘It’s been a while since the primordial vampire’s seal loosened,’ Ashen thought, idly wiping a fresh trickle of blood from his upper lip. ‘No wonder this guy got scared out of his wits…’

He sniffed.

‘And I even had to use Rewind with this frail body… almost killed me.’

His head was still ringing like a struck bell. His eyes were so blurry he could barely see three steps ahead, and every so often his left hand twitched on its own, as though remembering something his mind would rather not.

‘Ah, whatever.’

He reached out and tapped his brother on the shoulder.

“Hey, fanboy.”

“...”

“You see, your big brother isn’t exactly in tip-top shape right now.” He waved his palm through the air over his own body, from head to toe, with exaggerated flair. “So scouting and finding the way back is your job. You’re good at that, right? C’mon, show me. I’ll praise you lots.”

“…Alright.”

Ashen nodded in satisfaction and fell into step behind the expert scout.

Meanwhile, he decided to check his status window. He vaguely recalled a new entry popping up back in the cave, but he’d been a little too busy bleeding from the face at the time to look.

‘Dear System… show me the goods~’

[...]

==============================

Name/Connection date:

Ashen Hunt—

March 1st

Year 002

of 8215

of the 4th million

Sex/Age: Male/19

Height/Weight: 190 cm / 81 kg

Current condition: Heavily injured, exhausted mind.

Pathway: Step V: Body Refiner

Thema: Trofos (Nurturer)

Affiliation: The Hunt Tribe

Title: Paradoxite

[2. Traits]

—Titan’s Grind

—Insightful

—Soul Bastion

—Pure Heart

[3. Physical Level]

Strength: D+ | Endurance: C+ | Agility: D+

Perception: D+ | Stamina: C+ | Mana: C+

[4. Abilities]

4.1 Innate Powers:

—Beholder's Eyes

4.2 Path Skills:

—Late Bloomer (Masterful+)

—Patient Eye (Zenith-)

—Living Temper (Masterful+)

—Resting Forge (Masterful+)

—Sown Strain (Skilled)

—Fallow Rest (Skilled+)

4.3 Other skills:

—Way of the Spear (Skilled+)

—Trinity Harmony (Skilled+)

—Spear Harmony (Skilled+)

—Riven Convergence (Skilled+)

—Time Magic (Zenith+)

—Blood Magic (Masterful+)

[5. Conceptual Powers]

—Lethargy of Time (Resonance)

—Crimson Torpor (Glimpse)

[6. Cognitive Depth (Thoughts, Mindset, Disposition)]

—Lapis will be worried / Endure, Overcome / Absurdist

==============================

‘Aha! Patient Eye reached Zenith?’

Ashen honed in on the most impressive upgrade immediately.

‘Well… I’ve been using it nonstop for years now, and it’s seen a myriad of things. I guess that’s fair.’

He had also noticed something over the years: if he studied a target in more ways than simply staring at it with the skill, the skill understood it better too. Reading about it, touching it, living with it. That was how he had somehow ended up an expert in botany without ever meaning to.

‘Some of my old skills resurfaced as well…’

Time Magic and Blood Magic. He had used both to deal with Cain’s ritual and drag the idiot back from the brink, so their reappearance wasn’t too surprising. What surprised him was that the concepts he had once integrated into them had come back too.

Lethargy of Time. Crimson Torpor.

When he had used his spear in this life, his old Extra skills had come back as well, but the concepts he had woven into them back then, Slothful Transcendence and Sloth Efficiency, had never shown up.

And thank goodness for that. His body would have burst like an overripe fruit if they had.

Even now, with just these two derivative concepts sitting in his status, Ashen could feel his body teetering inches from the edge. It wasn’t only the Rewind’s fault that he was this wrecked. His flesh simply wasn’t built to carry this much yet.

‘Come to think of it…’

He glanced inward at the dozens of seeds he had sown into his body during the fight, the struggle against the silk, and the Rewind itself; into torn muscle, burst vessels, strained circuits, and a skull that felt like it had been used as an anvil.

‘Once the seeds from Sown Strain germinate, my body should adapt to all this. Maybe by then I’ll be able to use Time Magic more freely.’

His eyes brightened at a second thought.

‘And with Soul Bastion on top of that… maybe I can carry over even more conceptual power from my first Pathway?’

Concepts weighed on both body and soul. Until now, his body had been the bottleneck. His soul was old and sturdy, tempered by his traits and the absurdly long life he had lived, but his flesh had been the weak link.

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With the skills Body Refiner had given him… maybe that was about to change.

“From here… we have to walk more carefully.”

Cain’s hesitant voice interrupted his thoughts.

“Alright.”

They picked their way through a rocky stretch of land, boulders jutting up around them like broken teeth. And as they walked, Ashen’s blurry gaze drifted to his brother’s back.

‘I didn’t think much about it at the time… but this guy saw my memories from the second History Fragment, didn’t he?’

“Hey.”

“…Yes.”

“I don’t think I have to say this, but just in case. You won’t go babbling about what you saw, right?”

“…!”

Cain’s entire body jerked. He began to tremble, as though Ashen had dragged him straight back into the most traumatic moment of his life.

Ashen tilted his head.

‘Hey… I haven’t even started threatening you yet, and you’re already this scared…?’

“D-don’t…”

“What?”

“P-please… don’t remind me…” Cain’s voice was barely a whisper. “I don’t… I don’t want to remember…”

“Ah.”

‘This guy doesn’t even want to think about it. There’s no way he’d ever talk about it, ha.’

Ashen shook his head in exasperation. “Alright, I won’t bring it up. But don’t mention your little prank to the family either. I don’t think they’d be as forgiving as your big brother here, y’know.”

“Yes… yes… please… just stop talking…”

Cain was starting to convulse again, so Ashen sighed and kept his mouth shut.

He even changed his mind about bringing up the Rewind. ‘Not like this guy would believe what he saw anyway.’

They walked on in silence.

“...”

‘Why am I being so nice to him, anyway?’

When Ashen actually thought about it, it didn’t quite add up. He wouldn’t have killed the idiot, sure. But he would at least have been a lot harsher. A broken leg or two, maybe.

A month of mucking out the latrines would have been perfectly reasonable.

‘So why… hmm…?’

His mind circled the question as they walked, around and around, until a memory surfaced.

It was from before he knew what the System was. Before he knew there was any continent on Earth besides Esperra, aside from the crackpot theories on the internet.

It was a memory of his deadbeat self.

The version of him who had caused his family so much pain. He had never tried to sacrifice any of them in a bloody ritual, of course. But he had broken promise after promise. He had made them watch someone they loved waste away in front of their eyes. He had put them through years of hardship as they tried, again and again, to save him from himself.

‘Yeah… when I put my bum self from back then next to this fanboy right here… it tracks.’

‘As for why I’m being so nice…’

Back then, Lapis had never given up on him. Neither had Alice. Neither had Mom, or Dad.

A faint smile tugged at his lips.

‘I guess it’s my turn not to give up on family.’

Even that despicable version of him had been forgiven, in the end.

So why not his own brother?

◉◉◉

They reached the settlement two days later.

As they descended through the last of the tunnels and stepped past the final ward, a soft white glow spilled up the passage to greet them, and Ashen let out a long, relieved breath.

“Huh. We made it back during the day.”

The crystals were awake.

They were embedded all across the ceilings of the underground home: in the great halls, in the corridors, and most of all, in the vaulted roof of the farm. Clusters of pale crystal, ranging from the size of a fist to the size of a man.

And they were the reason the word day still meant anything at all.

Every morning, they woke slowly, brightening from a faint blue to a warm, gentle white. By midday, they shone so brightly that the farm looked almost like a summer meadow. Toward evening, their light dimmed and warmed into a soft amber. Then, as night came, they faded almost to darkness, leaving only a faint, cool glow behind, just enough to walk by.

Morning, noon, evening, night. Over and over, without fail, for as long as anyone in the tribe could remember.

On the surface, there was nothing like it. Only the black sky and the crimson ring, unchanging.

Without the crystals, the tribe would have long since lost track of time altogether. Every warrior even carried a small chip of the crystal in a pouch on expeditions. It brightened and dimmed in rhythm with its siblings back home, so that even up there, under that dead sky, they knew when to sleep and when to wake.

But the crystals did far more than tell time.

Their light fed the farm.

The plants drank it in the same way they drank sunlight, and without it, every crop in the settlement would have withered within a season.

It fed the people too.

Ashen had noticed it long ago with Patient Eye: the children who played beneath the crystals grew stronger bones and brighter eyes than those who spent too long in the dim tunnels.

People slept better, their moods were steadier. Their minds didn’t sour the way minds did in endless darkness.

The crystals were the sun of this underground world.

Aside from its people, they were the most precious thing the tribe had. Without them, the Hunt tribe would never have been the same.

Ashen squinted up at the glowing ceiling with a nostalgic smile.

‘Even so… it’s not quite the same, is it?’

He was one of only two people in the entire tribe who still remembered what the real sun felt like on his skin.

◉

Their report to Adam was short.

There had been a beast in the cave. Some kind of burrowing thing, slipping in through the deep cracks and feeding on the spiders.

That was why the colony had been sickening and refusing to eat. The two of them had tracked it down, and Ashen had killed it, but the fight had been loud and messy and had torn up a good part of the webs.

“The spiders all fled into the cracks,” Ashen said with a regretful sigh. “They’ll come back once they’re sure it’s safe, but it’ll be a few months before they crawl out and start spinning again.”

Adam’s eyes flicked over his son’s bloody, battered face, then over Cain’s silent, pale one.

For a moment, Ashen thought his father might ask something. But Adam simply nodded.

“A few months. Iris won’t be happy, but she’ll survive.” He set his quill down. “Go to your mother. You look like a corpse.”

That was it.

…No more questions.

When they stepped out into the corridor, Cain lingered for a moment.

Ashen thought he might say something. Instead, his brother only looked at him for a long time with an expression he couldn’t quite read. Then he lowered his head, turned, and walked away toward his room without a word.

Ashen watched him go.

Then he went to get scolded by his mother.

Anastasia took one look at him and went pale then red.

Then she dragged him into her healing room by the ear, healed him, and nagged him the entire time, the same way she always did whenever one of her children came home looking half-dead.

‘At least Lapis isn’t here to join in,’ he thought, wincing as his mother poked a particularly tender bruise. ‘Yet.’

He knew his heartstitch had burned since he had felt it go.

‘She’s going to make me owe her forever now… haah.’

◉◉◉

When he finally escaped, the crystals had already dimmed into their warm evening amber.

He didn’t go to his room.

His feet carried him to the farm on their own, the way they always did.

Past the rows of crops and the sleeping Hushweaver in its quiet corner, to the tree glowing softly at the heart of it all, its pink leaves rustling as he approached, as though it had been waiting for him.

Lapis was there.

She sat with her back against the trunk, her head tilted to one side, her veil pushed loosely off her face. Her katana lay across her lap. Her hand was still resting on its hilt.

She was asleep.

Ashen stopped and looked at her for a while. There were dark circles beneath her eyes.

One of her fingertips was wrapped in a scrap of cloth. He could guess how long she had been sitting here, and how little she had slept since the night the heartstitch burned and the tether went silent.

His lips curved slightly.

He walked over as quietly as he could, sat down beside her, leaned back against the trunk, and closed his eyes.

Barely a few breaths later, he felt her stir.

She didn’t wake, but her body seemed to know he was there all the same. She shifted, murmured something incomprehensible, and slowly slid sideways until her head came to rest in his lap.

Her hand let go of the katana and found a fistful of his shirt instead, holding on tightly.

Ashen didn’t move. He let his hand settle on her hair.

Above them, the tree’s leaves rustled softly, a pale pink glow drifting down over them both.

Somewhere across the farm, the Hushweaver spun a single thread in the dark. Far above their heads, the crystals dimmed toward night.

…And deep inside his body, the seeds he had sown began, quietly, to grow.

For a little while, in this small, ordinary corner of a world drowning in suffering, the two of them simply rested.