There was a strange silence in the slums of Sector 9B.
Not the kind born of peace, but the kind that followed death. A hushed void where even the shadows hesitated, wary of whatever had just crawled back from the brink.
Ash's body — no, Veyr's body now — trembled with the raw echo of resurrection.
His breath came slowly, evenly. It was not the breath of a boy saved from death, but of something deeper, something older, re-learning how to draw air into lungs that weren't meant for it. His chest rose, fell, and with each motion, the corrupted core embedded in his sternum pulsed faintly, leaking strands of broken blue light that spiraled under his skin like phantom veins.
The alley still reeked of old metal and damp ash. Blood had dried beneath him, dark and sticky against the fractured pavement. Shards of shattered system junk lay scattered where the Null Beast had rampaged earlier. No witnesses. No noise. Just the distant hum of the purge drones patrolling higher sectors.
He moved a hand across his chest, fingers brushing the spot where the Cipher Core had burned its way into the flesh. There was no wound. No scar. Just heat.
That was the first sign that the System wasn't working correctly.
Not for him.
He let out a slow exhale and finally opened his eyes fully.
What greeted him wasn't just the world — it was a system thread running across it. Broken code lingered in the air, flickering like residual smoke from an unstable spell. His vision danced with symbols and data shards that no slumborn should ever see.
[Initializing Diagnostic Scan...]
[Warning: Unknown Core Signature Detected]
[Mismatch Detected — No Compatible Record Found in System Registry]
[Proceeding with Local Reconstruction…]
Lines of code unfolded before him, and for a moment, it felt like slipping back into an old habit — parsing the structure, tracing errors, identifying command patterns. These were things Veyr Crow had done in his previous life as easily as breathing. Back when he was a Code Architect, he'd written these commands, refined them, buried backdoors and anti-trace lines into them with a casual hand.
And now, he was reading them from inside the prison he had helped design.
Irony dripped from the air like rusted water from the pipes above.
He stood, slowly, feeling the new weight of the body. Ash had been small — underfed, malnourished, all bone and sinew without the strength to survive even a casual blow. But something had changed since the fusion. The cipher was not just a dormant fragment — it was adapting.
The bones had reset. Muscles had been reconstructed with faint strands of encoded mana, woven like synthetic fibers between what little remained of Ash's broken core. The result wasn't strength in the traditional sense — it was structure. Efficiency. Precision.
Still weak. But less fragile.
It was enough.
He took a step forward. Then another. Limbs adjusting, recalibrating with each motion. He walked the narrow alley like a man treading on glass — not from fear, but from awareness. Every motion mattered now. Every breath was the result of someone else's life being overwritten.
Ash was still there — not alive, but not entirely gone.
A flicker.
A whisper.
A boy's voice that lingered at the edge of Veyr's mind. He didn't speak, not yet. But emotions trickled in like echoes. Confusion. Pain. A hollow, desperate yearning. Not for survival. That desire had long since burned out.
It was a yearning to matter.
Veyr paused, gaze falling on a cracked mirror shard resting in the rubble beside the wall. His reflection stared back — thin, pale, eyes too large for the face, with shadowed hollows beneath them. The boy's face.
But his own eyes stared back.
Golden, dimly glowing with threads of blue code dancing at the edges. Not human. Not anymore.
The fusion wasn't complete. He could feel it in the way the core pulsed — unstable, unresolved. Somewhere deep inside, the system was still trying to determine who had authority over the body.
The soul tether was not absolute.
That meant he could still lose control.
[STATUS PANEL – REBUILDING]
[WARNING: Multiple Host Signatures Detected]
[Soul Integrity: 62.7%]
[Cipher Core Sync: INCOMPLETE]
[Known Skills: — ]
[Authorization: NULL – Unverified Node Access]
A twisted grin tugged at the edge of his lips.
The System didn't know what to do with him.
He was unregistered. A rogue process in a closed loop.
That meant opportunity.
But also danger.
It wouldn't take long before something flagged the anomaly. And if the Executors or higher System Monitors caught wind of it, he wouldn't have the chance to run a second time.
He needed information. A hiding place. And a node.
A single access point would be enough.
With that, he could trace a ghost signal into the Tower Grid, mask his trail, and begin rebuilding.
A rustling sound behind him made him turn sharply.
Movement in the rubble. Quiet. Measured.
Veyr crouched instinctively, sliding behind a pillar of broken stone. He tapped the code lines trailing from his core and focused — eyes adjusting to shadow mapping, threads of heat data appearing like dull embers across the ruined corridor.
There. Two signatures.
Low heat. Unarmored. Likely scavengers.
Scum.
They came after purges to collect tech fragments, sometimes organs, sometimes entire bodies if they were fresh enough. To them, Ash would've been a payday — dead slumborn with an unknown shard sticking out of his chest? They'd have carved him open without a second thought.
Too late now.
Veyr rose from cover.
They turned. One froze, the other stepped back, clearly not expecting a standing, breathing boy from a corpse zone.
"Hey, what the—"
Veyr didn't wait.
His hand snapped up, forming a rune midair — improvised from memory. No glyphboard. No access license. Just raw code etched into air with willpower and instinct.
The rune burned hot and blue.
A feedback shock slammed into the nearest scavenger's mind like a lightning bolt — not fatal, but paralyzing.
The other turned to run.
Veyr flicked his hand. The second rune burned a fragment of his core, igniting a force vector.
It launched a shockwave down the corridor — crude, wild, but enough.
The second body hit the far wall with a sharp crack, slid down, and went still.
The air settled.
The rune lines dissolved.
And Veyr stood in silence, pulse steady.
His hands trembled slightly. Not from fear.
From the strain.
That much output — two unstable runes, back to back — had cost him nearly 40% of his remaining mana buffer. And that was with a Cipher Core.
That confirmed it.
The body wasn't ready.
But it would be.
He walked to the slumped scavengers, checking their equipment. Poor-grade junk, but one of them had a scratched transmitter node. He pried it loose, slicing the internal power source from the casing, and tapped the lead against his core.
The interface connected.
Crude, but usable.
From here, he could trace to a local node cluster — a dead zone abandoned during the last sector shutdown. There would be data. Fragmented skill trees. Legacy code. Maybe even a soul-frame template to begin stabilizing his identity tether.
He turned his eyes upward, to the glowing lights of Ark Veil hanging far above.
Once, he'd stood atop its highest tower, reshaping the world with a thought.
Now, he stood in the filth beneath it, reborn in the body of a forgotten child, hunted by the very system he had helped build.
Poetic.
Bitter.
Perfect.
"They built this world on my code," he murmured.
"Let's see how they handle the update."