The rain had passed, but the mountain held the scent of blood.
Kairo stood at the mouth of a collapsed temple, mist curling around his boots as he peered into the hollow ruins. This wasn't Veilwither—not anymore. This was deeper. Older. This place was the Graveward Verge, where once-forbidden sects brought their dead when even death felt unclean. And buried within its cracked foundation, the Pale Spine Crypt waited.
It was the first of many marks on the soul-map.
The shard inside his chest pulsed faintly, as if stirred by the approach. The Abyssal Nerve Codex trembled beneath his skin, tendrils of corrupted qi twitching like serpents dreaming. Though it still clawed at him with whispers of hunger and power, the shard muted its madness—just enough to keep him whole.
He descended.
Each step took him deeper into silence. No birds. No echoes. Just stone groaning under its own age. Ancient murals flanked the descent—spirals, suns, twisted figures kneeling before something unseen. Their eyes were hollow. Their mouths open.
And then he saw it: a carving of a great flower blooming in darkness, its petals shaped like screaming faces. At its center, an abyssal sun.
He reached the vault door.
It was sealed with a broken sigil, but the corrosion had long since eaten through its strength. One push, and the slabs parted like parting veils. The scent of dust and forgotten blood rushed out to greet him.
Kairo stepped into darkness.
Inside the Pale Spine Crypt, relics lay in waiting. Not gold. Not scrolls. But bones, encased in crystalline sarcophagi. They floated weightless above stone altars, their remains preserved in a luminous field of spiritflame. The crypt was vast, the ceiling lost in shadows that moved even when the air was still.
He approached the central altar. Something pulsed beneath it. Not life, not death—but memory. He placed his hand on the stone. The glyphs flared beneath his palm.
A flood of voices rushed into his mind.
"He bears the mark… the cursed one… the child of silence…"
"The seal is fractured… we are not safe…"
"Feed the Crypt. Let it remember the world…"
Kairo staggered back. His breath misted. The shard inside him throbbed, reacting to the spiritual pressure. The sarcophagi around him began to tremble. Then shatter.
Ghostly figures rose from the altars—fragmented spirits in flowing robes, their faces melted with time, their limbs twisted into weapons. They shrieked, not with hatred, but desperation, like souls forgotten and starving.
Kairo drew Twinblight. The sickle blades caught the corrupted spiritlight and pulsed with familiar hunger.
"Come then," he whispered, his voice cold. "Let the abyss speak."
He danced between the revenants, Twinblight carving arcs of void-light through spectral limbs. The Codex surged, feeding him flickers of instinct. Each strike was brutal and precise—fleshless necks severed, ghost-light banished. But for every spirit struck down, another rose in its place.
Their chanting grew louder.
"The Bloom must rise… the Bloom must rise… the Bloom…"
Kairo grit his teeth. The shard burned hot against his chest. Not with rejection—but resonance. It wanted him to survive. To consume.
Twinblight split into two blades. He moved faster. The ground cracked beneath his feet with each step. He wasn't just fighting. He was invoking the Codex, threading his qi through the spectral realm, bending the ghosts' formation to his own rhythm.
The largest of them loomed behind the altar—once a high elder, judging by its layered, rune-laced robes. Its mask was a jagged crescent of bone, fused to its skull.
It raised a staff formed from soulfire and struck.
Kairo caught the blow with both blades, the impact cracking the altar in half.
"You bear the mark," the ghost intoned. "Then awaken it."
The spirit's fire surged into Kairo's chest. For a moment, he couldn't breathe. The shard pulsed like a heart under siege. And then—
It devoured the flame.
A shockwave of black-red energy exploded outward, reducing the ghost to flickering ash.
The crypt fell silent again. Only the echo of the Codex's pulse remained, like a second breath within him.
He stood alone among ruined spirits and fractured relics. But something deeper had been stirred.
From beneath the altar, where the elder spirit had stood, a new passage opened—spiral stairs leading downward into colder depths.
And as Kairo stepped toward it, a whisper brushed his ear, though no one stood near:
"The bloom takes root in darkness."
Far away, across a jagged sea and bloodied skies, the Thirteen Petal Accord received a message—an emergency alert glyph flaring crimson within their deepest sanctum. Their scout's lifeblood seal had been shattered by forbidden arts. A relic crypt disturbed. A shadow awakening.
Their response would be swift.
But not swift enough.