I open my eyes and instantly regret it. The light hits me like a blade. The ceiling above glows an unnatural turquoise, bright enough to make my skull throb. I squint until the blur settles, then roll onto my side and search for footing like a wounded animal.

  A splash greets me.

  Cold liquid shifts around my hands and legs. Water. Or something pretending to be water. Something thicker than it should be. Something I really, really don’t want to identify.

  At least it’s not acid. Yet. An alien world can be unpredictable after all.

  I try to push myself upright, but then I feel it. Something is in my mouth.

  For a heartbeat, I hope it’s another hallucination, another trick of the illusion. But no. The sensation sharpens, becomes undeniable. Something long and slick has invaded my throat. It stretches deep, sliding down past my tongue, past my esophagus, down into..God knows where.

  A surge of panic claws at the back of my mind. My jaw aches around the foreign shape. My throat convulses around it, gagging, unable to push it out or swallow it down.

  It’s inside me. Something is inside me.

  I do want to see it. I need to. But for what I do next, I keep my eyes shut. Light still stabs too sharply, and honestly, I don’t want to risk seeing something I can’t unsee. I let my hands do the work.

  My fingers brush against it. It’s thick—thicker than a tube should ever be—slick with slime, its surface disturbingly smooth, like polished flesh. It twitches when I touch it. Reacts to me. As if it’s alive.

  Revulsion spikes up my spine. I wrap both hands around it and pull.

  It fights me. It writhes like a hooked eel, trying to slip deeper down my throat, but it’s useless against someone like me. My strength surges on instinct. I yank harder. Hard enough that my jaw throbs, hard enough that my throat feels like it’s tearing, and the thing finally slides free with a wet, obscene sound.

  When it leaves my mouth, a flood of iron fills my tongue. Blood. My blood. Warm and metallic. But it’s better than whatever the hell that thing was.

  It’s also proof. Proof that the Darkest Night kept its damn word. I’m back in the real world.

  Back in Hell.

  And the moment I realize that, the Whispers of Agony slam back into my skull like they’ve been waiting—lurking just outside my consciousness, eager to crawl in the second I slip. They rush through my mind in overlapping layers. At first, they're too loud, but they quickly return to the normal sound I am used to.

  My vision also returns in slow waves, blurring into shapes, then into clarity.

  That’s when I see it. The thing that was in my mouth.

  It’s writhing through the air—slick, dark, and impossibly long—retreating toward the water with an intelligence it shouldn’t have. A tentacle, but not just a tentacle, a piece of something hungrier. Something that didn’t appreciate being ripped out of me.

  I don’t move. I don’t breathe. I watch as it coils once, like it’s tasting the air, then slips beneath the surface with a soft splash. Gone. As if it never existed.

  Part of me expected it to turn back. To lunge. To force itself down my throat again and anchor itself inside me like a parasite reclaiming lost territory.

  But it doesn’t.

  A shaky breath escapes me. Something ugly and cracked, that definitely isn’t confidence. But sweet, weak relief. And with it, the rest of me snaps back into place. My ether surges like a storm breaking open. My memories stitch together, every jagged piece slotting into the others. My connection to the System drags itself awake inside my skull, familiar and heavy.

  Everything comes back as if it never left.

  And that’s somehow the scariest part.

  After a quick scan of my surroundings, the pieces fall into place. The bright ceiling, the pale liquid sloshing around me—probably water, though it tastes like metal on the air. And the walls… the glowing, turquoise crystal walls humming with power.

  'This is definitely like an energy room.'

  I’ve never been inside one before—obviously—but I’ve heard the stories. People who came out changed describe them as rooms carved from crystal and ether, flooded with some chemical solution meant to unravel you and stitch you back together stronger. The rooms are built for one purpose: to take someone showing signs of a power… and turn them into something else entirely. Something stronger.

  It explains why Sasha became such a monster when she awakened. With the proper training, I'm sure she would've stood out in the Nexus Being Society.

  When I realize what this room is, a pulse of dread flickers through me. 'The Darkest Night wanted a mind scraped clean so the Monarch it wants could crawl in and take root. '

  Does the fact that I woke up here mean I resisted? That I didn’t break?

  It must. The ether saturating this place feels concentrated, deliberate, as if I’m meant to be reshaped into the Dragon Monarch’s vessel. As if this whole room exists to prepare a body for something ancient.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  But that plan… failed. So what does that make me now?

  “It doesn’t matter,” I whisper to myself, even though my voice trembles. “I have to get to Nico. Help him kill that thing.”

  A flash of guilt stings when Tessia’s name crosses my thoughts, but she’s gone. Nico isn’t. Nico is alive, fighting, surviving somewhere in this hell. He’s the priority. Devon comes after. After him, I can worry about Tessia.

  Once my thoughts realign, I drag in the cold, biting air and slam my fist into the crystal wall.

  The first punch is strong enough to shake the liquid around me, but the wall doesn’t budge. Not even a crack. I hit it again. Ether bleeds from the crystal, swirling like smoke. The third punch tears open the skin across my knuckles. Warm blood trails down my wrist, mixing with the pale fluid.

  It hurts for a brief moment. I don’t stop. I can’t. I keep driving my fists into the crystal, and my knuckles split wider each time. More blood drips. More ether leaks out like something alive. It clings to my skin, pulses against my thoughts, and I feel its hunger trying to crawl inside my mind.

  I finally understand why dormant humans can’t touch ether directly. It isn’t some gentle power. It’s venom. A conscious poison. And right now, I’m swallowing it through every pore.

  It takes longer than it should. Time stretches thin and sick, like something is watching me from behind it. But I manage to crack the crystal. Then split it. Then tear it open with my hands, even as shards bite deep into my palms.

  The moment the crystal breaks, the world outside it rushes in. The change is violent, like stepping from a bright operating table straight into a grave.

  The area beyond is nothing like the artificial glow I woke in. The walls are black—too smooth, too perfect, as though something enormous melted stone with its breath. There are no lights here. No runes. No machinery to give hints to what I would expect from an advanced race.

  This is the interior of the Dragon Spire, which stands out like a lighthouse to all the dangers of this world.

  When I step out of the energy chamber, it vanishes. The only reminder of where I came from is the thin trail of liquid dripping off me, the same fluid I woke inside. It splashes onto the floor and seems to vanish instantly as it's absorbed by whatever this place is made of.

  I can see. Barely. Only outlines. Only shapes. The air is wet enough to cling to my eyelashes, cold enough to gnaw at the tips of my fingers. Each inhale rattles in my chest, and the moisture feels…wrong. Not like water. More like breath. The breath of a creature I can’t see.

  Time passes as I follow the dark corridor. I’ve decided it’s safer to chase the Ether that feels human enough to trust. It's thin, trembling, but familiar to a dormant human's. This could be Nico's. Or an illusion the Darkest Night has decided to whip out for fun.

  As expected, the Dragon Spire reveals itself as a majestic structure of wonderful and almost perfect architecture. The black walls bend inward to meet at the ceiling, forming a long, sharpened triangle overhead. Perfect lines carve through the surface, glowing faintly enough that you can't see them. I feel the Ether circulating inside them like veins, guiding me through the pitch darkness, whether I want the guidance or not.

  Despite being ten thousand years old, everything here feels disturbingly advanced. It resembles the interior of a spacecraft built by a race far more intelligent than humans ever will be.

  Its beauty makes me wonder what the dragons truly were. They were not of the reality I grew up knowing, yet they had their own beliefs, their own rules, their own gods shaped by infinite worlds I will never understand. Beings of absolute good… or so the system wants us to believe.

  The ether hums around me, vibrating through the walls, and another question cuts through the silence:

  How did the Monarch die in the first place?

  A thought I shouldn’t chase. ‘No, Astrid. You do not need to know.’

  Right. I remind myself of what I am. What I’m not. I may be associated with their lineage, but ultimately, I am a clone. A stitched-together imitation wearing the echoes of dragons.

  An imposter.

  ****

  While I cross the corridor, my thoughts drift to the world beyond these walls. If by some slim, ridiculous chance I manage to tear off the bracelet tied to my very essence, then freedom becomes more than a fantasy.

  But what lies beyond an unshackled version of me? I’m a child with no parents, no money, no identity outside of torture rooms and experiments.

  How would I even step foot on a shuttle heading to another colony? I wouldn’t. They’d drag me out before I even breathed the recycled air.

  On top of that problem, the Darkest Night wasn’t wrong about some things. Powers like those of a Monarch need to be nurtured, shaped, and fed until they become something incomprehensible.

  Even Nexus Beings need funds to survive training, to buy armory, to not die within the first week. That’s why Sasha and the others were under companies tied to the Galactic Order or the Alliance. Ashmael’s worshippers are already entangled in that rotten, tangled web.

  I think hard. Too hard. It’s a suffocating truth: countless people will come after me the moment they learn I’ve ascended toward Monarch. Right now, it’s Bloodhaul… and the Blood Monarch lurking behind it all. But it won’t stop there. I can feel it already.

  Things will only spiral into something worse. Much worse. I have to grow this power should I get my hands on it.

  And then there’s everything else. Politics of the human world. General knowledge I was never taught. I’ve only learned of the Monarchs recently, meaning that there are a lot that I do not know.

  Ignorance is a liability that will put me in danger eventually. I have no single clue what the society of Nexus Beings is like. What happens to Nexus Beings who refuse planet exploration and terraforming? What happens to ones who… run? Those who choose to work alone. Is it even possible?

  I grit my teeth. The number of questions I have with no answers proves just how unprepared I am for the outside world.

  But who can blame me? I came to die, and the fates forced me to live. It should’ve been Nico with this curse. He could’ve put what I am to greater use than myself.

  I wish I could change things the way the constellations have done the same to me. But I can’t. I have no choice but to adjust to those changes. That’s why when the system leads me to the surface of Beta 3, I will have to find a way to leave the planet before I’m detected. I’ll have to slip to one of the moons, join another shuttle, and launch myself into the unknown.

  Eden is the first obvious choice. But even Eden isn’t safe for someone as ignorant and hunted as me.

  There is Mars and its moons. And just like Eden, it’s in the Solar System—far from this sector, far from Bloodhaul, far from everything that wants me dead or used. Could I head there?

  Mars is an industrial planet; no one bats an eye if someone disappears into the factories or the mining belts. I’m sure I could survive there for a while, hidden among the noise and metal, until I figure out what to do next.

  ‘Yes… Mars might be a good shot.’

  The thought pulls a small, unfamiliar smile out of me. Maybe. Just maybe. I do have a chance at a real life.

  As I imagine what living on Mars might look like, the corridor finally ends. Ahead, massive dark doors rise from the shadows like a revelation. Like a call to salvation. Or judgment.

  Strange markings cover the walls. The shifting shapes mean nothing until the moment I look directly at them. They twist, curl, and rearrange themselves into words I can read.

  [Let ye who have no evil in their heart reclaim what was forever lost]