Chapter 1- Prologue

Chapter 1: 1- Prologue

Eighty years ago, the sky opened a silver eye and swallowed the sun.

But the world didn’t end suddenly, it was a slow, freezing ending for humanity.

The warm gold of the afternoon simply faded into an endless twilight.

At first, people just thought it was an eclipse. They locked their doors and waited for the morning.

Then, the chaos started in the hospitals and the streets.

People realized that when someone died, the body didn’t just stay behind to rot.

The exact second a heart stopped beating, flesh and bone dissolved into a pale mist, ripped violently upward into the sky.

The Moon was eating the dead, leaving nothing in the dirt except a jagged, glowing shard of crystal.

Once humanity realized the sky was a starving beast, the true panic set in.

Out in the cold, the animals that basked in the new silver light began to change.

It was a slow, terrifying evolution. Wolves shed their fur for skin like iron-wood.

Spiders grew to the size of hounds, woven from razor-wire.

Even the trees mutated, growing pale, massive roots that slowly crushed the concrete of the old cities.

To survive the overgrown ruins, humanity learned to hide.

They built walled cities, locking themselves behind heavy gates and artificial lights. They also learned to be cruel.

Since you can’t kill a beast for food without the sky stealing your meal, they built Harvest Houses.

Butchers chain living monsters to iron tables, carving off what they need and burning the wounds shut so the creature stays alive.

Humanity decided to bleed the world the exact same way the world bleed them.

If that wasn’t enough, on the exact stroke of midnight of the twentieth birthday, the silver light drags the young’s minds into a place called the Somnium

Most break out of terror, waking up empty, shivering, and hollow.

The few who survive wake up with the power to absorb those crystal shards, serving the corrupt nobles who rule the cities.

Right now, deep in the freezing gutters of the slums, a starved butcher’s apprentice is fifty seconds away from midnight.

He sits in the freezing mud of a dead-end alley, dragging a broken whetstone across a rusted meat cleaver.

Across from him, huddled under a torn tarp, is a younger scavenger named Rix. Rix is nineteen.

He has a whole year before the sky looks at him, but the terror is already rotting him out.

"Forty seconds," Rix whispered, his teeth clicking in the cold. "You’re shaking, Sol."

"I’m freezing," Sol muttered. He didn’t look up.

Scrape. Scrape.( the sound of grinding the cleaver)

Rix pulled the tarp tighter around his neck. "If you break in there... if it hollows you out..." Rix swallowed hard. "I’m taking your boots."

Sol finally stopped.

He looked at the boy, his dark eyes sunken, reflecting the sickly silver light bleeding through the grating above.

He tossed the whetstone into the mud and turned the handle of the cleaver toward Rix.

"If I break," Sol said, his voice completely flat, "you pick this up and take my head. Don’t let me become a hollow."

Rix flinched, staring at the rusted blade.

Before he could answer, the wind howled through the alley, carrying the distant, heavy chime of the inner city clocktower.

The first stroke of midnight.

Gravity dissolved.

The freezing mud beneath Sol’s boots vanished, replaced by the jarring impact of solid, perfectly smooth stone.

He didn’t gasp. He kept his grip tight on the handle of his rusted cleaver and slowly opened his eyes.

He was standing on an impossibly wide expanse of black glass, suspended over an endless sea of pale mist.

Above him, taking up the entire sky, was a colossal Silver Eye. It radiated a cold so absolute it burned the inside of Sol’s throat.

But the sheer scale of the nightmare was what made his breath catch.

He wasn’t alone. Stretching out in every direction, as far as Sol could see into the hazy horizon, were thousands upon thousands of people.

Every single human on the continent who had turned twenty that night had been dragged onto this endless floor.

The divide was staggering. Scattered throughout the chaotic sea of weeping, terrified slum kids were tight, disciplined formations of inner-city nobility.

The nobles stood shoulder-to-shoulder in their pristine, fur-lined coats, perfectly calm.

They had been tutored for this exact moment.

They knew the rules of the Somnium.

They knew there were exactly four trials to survive before they could wake up as cultivators, humanity’s group of elites, the defenders of their race.

A deafening, synchronized chime echoed across the endless expanse.

In a single moment, a hundred thousand panes of frosted glass materialized in the air. Cold, elegant silver text bled across Sol’s panel.

[SUBJECT: Sol

STATUS: Uninitiated (Low)

TRIAL 1 OF 4: The Lunar Affinity Test

OBJECTIVE: Breathe the silver mist. Let the cold anchor your soul.

TIME REMAINING: 60 Seconds.]

"First trial," a young noblewoman standing twenty yards away said clearly, her voice carrying over the whimpers of the crowd.

She closed her eyes, lowered her shoulders, and took a deep, willing breath of the pale mist swirling around her ankles.

Sol watched her. As she inhaled, the silver light washed through her veins.

Her trembling stopped instantly. Her eyes glazed over, turning a pale, milky white, and her status panel chimed with a soft-

[PHASE 1 COMPLETE]

All around her, hundreds of other nobles did the exact same thing, their faces going slack and hollow. They had survived the first step by letting the Moon numb their emotions.

But some of the slum kids couldn’t do it. Across the black glass, thousands of them panicked.

They held their breath, swatting blindly at the mist, screaming at the colossal eye above them.

When their countdowns hit zero, a wave of horrific, snapping bone echoed across the realm. The silver light slammed into the failures like a physical weight.

Sol watched in horror as hundreds of people around him screamed, their spines arching backward as pale iron-wood erupted from their skin.

Their minds snapped instantly. They were beasts now, violently extracted from the trial.

Sol watched the brutal arithmetic of the world unfold. Just breathe it in, he told himself. Let it make you numb.

He wasn’t a hero. He didn’t care about pride, or rebellion, or fighting the sky. He just wanted to wake up tomorrow. He wanted to live.

Sol dropped his rusted cleaver onto the black glass. He closed his eyes, forced his jaw to unclench, and took a deep, ragged breath of the silver mist.

The cold rushed down his throat. It felt like swallowing crushed ice. The silver energy sank into his lungs and curled around his heart, trying to freeze his emotions, trying to carve out the hollow space the Moon needed to take root.

But the moment the moonlight touched his heart, something went horribly wrong.

It didn’t freeze him. Instead, a sudden, agonizing ache ruptured in his chest.

Sol gasped, his eyes flying open as his hands desperately clawed at his own sternum. It felt like someone had driven a red-hot railroad spike directly through his ribs.

He fell to his knees, hacking violently.

WARNING: Lunar rejection detected.

SYSTEM PROMPT: Cease resistance. Breathe the mist.

"I’m... trying," Sol choked out, his teeth gritted in pure agony.

He tried to inhale more of the mist to appease the system, to force the cold down, but his body violently refused.

The latent, terrifying thing buried deep inside his soul, a spark forged by ten years of butchery, starvation, and the suffocating hatred of his grandmother’s murder woke up.

His heart burned, not recognizing the Moon’s energy. And his body reacted with a catastrophic immune response.

The silver mist inside his veins began to literally boil.

Sol screamed, pressing his forehead against the freezing black glass.

The veins in his neck and arms bulged. He wasn’t resisting the Moon on purpose, his heart was acting as a furnace, trapping the lunar energy and violently incinerating it.

The panel in front of him flickered wildly. The elegant silver text began to warp and distort as the ambient temperature around Sol’s body rapidly spiked.

ERROR: [UNAUTHORIZED ENERGY DETECTED]

WARNING: Subject’s core temperature is exceeding safe parameters.

TIME REMAINING: 5 Seconds.

The black glass beneath his palms began to hiss. The cold mist trying to touch his skin evaporated instantly, turning into a blinding cloud of steam.

The countdown hit zero.

Sol braced himself for his spine to snap, for the pale iron-wood to tear through his flesh like the thousands of others. But the mutation never came.

His violently waking heart had completely incinerated the parasite before it could take root.

The silver panel chimed with a flat, dissonant chord.

TIME EXPIRED. PHASE 1: FAILED.

REASON: No Affinity. Lunar Energy Rejected.

REROUTING SUBJECTS...

The black glass beneath Sol’s knees abruptly shattered.

The endless ocean of people vanished. Sol plummeted through the dark, hitting the ground hard, rolling to absorb the impact.

The air down here was instantly different, it wasn’t the sterile, freezing mist of the upper floor. It was thick, heavy, and reeked of rot, Sol knew this was what spoiled meat smelled like.

He forced himself up, his hand closing instinctively around the handle of his rusted cleaver, which had fallen with him.

The agonizing heat in his chest settled into a dull, heavy throb, acting like a warm engine against the ambient cold. He blinked the dark spots from his vision to take in the new nightmare.

He was standing in the center of a colossal, circular pit. The walls were made of towering, rusted iron grating, stretching up into the dark and stained black with decades of dried blood.

High above, the Silver Eye stared down through the grating like a spectator in a slaughterhouse colosseum.

He wasn’t alone, but the thousands were gone. Only a few hundred people had fallen with him.

These were the anomalies.

The ones whose affinities had clashed with the mist, who had flinched at the last second, or whose bodies simply refused the graft without immediately mutating.

Most were slum kids, looking around the massive arena in dazed, shivering confusion.

But a few paces away, a boy in a pristine, fur-lined noble coat dropped to his knees in the blood-soaked dirt.

"No," the noble whispered. His perfectly composed, arrogant face crumbled into absolute, weeping horror. "No, I did the breath. I memorized the cadence! My affinity is pure, I swear it!"

"Where are we?" a girl in rags asked, her voice trembling as she looked at the towering iron walls.

The noble didn’t even look at her. He clawed at his own throat, staring at the dirt. "The Meat Pen. We failed the trial. We failed."

"So what?" another slum kid spat, holding a sharpened pipe and trying to sound tough. "We just pass the second trial."

The noble let out a pathetic, barking laugh, tears spilling down his pale cheeks. "There is no second trial for us! You don’t understand! The four trials are for those who passed! If you fail the first, you don’t get tested again. There is no escape!"

A heavy, grinding metallic shriek echoed through the colosseum.

Across the blood-stained arena, four massive iron portcullises began to slowly rise from the dirt, revealing pitch-black tunnels leading out of the pit.

From the shadows of those tunnels, the heavy, rhythmic thud of massive paws vibrated through the ground. The air grew freezing cold.

A new pane of frosted glass materialized in front of Sol.

TRIAL 2: The Selection

OBJECTIVE: Amuse the moon, prove you are worthy of existing.

CONDITION: Survive until only 10 subjects remain.

Sol stared at the panel, then looked toward the pitch-black tunnels. The low, rumbling growls of beasts echoed in the dark. Beside him, the noble was already sobbing into the dirt, waiting to die.

Sol tightened his grip on his rusted cleaver. His blood hissed quietly in his veins.