The path behind the wall wasn't made of stone. It pulsed.
The boy—no, not a boy anymore—crawled into the crack in the cell wall without hesitation. The passage was narrow, alive. The flesh of it rippled beneath his fingers like muscle, and the faint glow ahead wasn't light. It was something older. Hungrier.
He didn't know how long he moved. Minutes? Hours? Time had no meaning in the Abyss. Not anymore.
Finally, the tunnel spat him out into a chamber of impossible geometry. The walls bent inward and outward at once. Darkness bled upward like ink in reverse. Symbols—jagged, fluid, wrong—crawled along the surfaces, alive with malicious rhythm.
At the center of the room: a monolith. Black. Cracked. Whispering.
System Alert:
You have entered a Forbidden Zone.
Sanity Check Initiated... [Failure]
Memory Lock Breached. [Partial Recovery in Progress...]
Pain.
A scream—not from his throat, but from his mind. Images flashed: a white coat. A scalpel. Laughter. A girl crying in a language he couldn't remember. A symbol etched in flame—the same one now glowing beneath his feet.
He collapsed to his knees.
The monolith pulsed again.
And then it spoke.
"There are no gods here, child. Only debts. And you owe."
A code interface tore itself open in his mind—not like the one before. This one bled.
New Trait Acquired:
Fragment of the Forgotten – Your soul carries the echo of something erased. Reality will bend to ignore you... until it can't.
New Passive Installed:
Faithless Core – Immune to divine-class influence. You cannot be blessed. You cannot be cursed.
He laughed. It was broken. Hollow.
And it felt right.
There were no gods in the Abyss. Only him. And the silence he would teach the world.