Chapter 7 Hollow Blood

For the first two hours they walked in silence.

Not the comfortable kind — not the silence in between people who knew each other well enough to leave it unfilled. This was the silence of three strangers, each with good reason to distrust the other two.

Aela walked at the rear. Always at the back — a position that left her facing Ren and Kael without turnng her back. Her eyes were never still, and every time Ren looked back over his shoulder she met his gaze — not fear, but the remote calculation of an Enchanter picking apart a puzzle.

“You are staring at my back,” Ren said, not turning.

"Your mana is wrong." Aela didn't bother being subtle in her observation.

“Everyone has a mana signature — stable, consistent, readable. Yours is like a hole. Like something’s… missing where it oughta be.”

Kael, like a demilitarized buffer zone walking in between, sighed. “Can we suspend the mutual suspicion till at least lunch?”

Aela ignored him. “You’re a Grade-E with the battle style of a C. You’ve hastily gained two Classes in a week. Who are you, really?"

“Someone who’s not supposed to live this long.”

Aela said nothing. But her lean had moved a meter forward Not trust — a determination that the answer was trustworthy enough, for now.

It would speed them southwest — toward the Ruin of Ashveil, a dead city an old Scavenger had talked about back at Camp 7. A regularly stable Grade-C Dungeon, he said. Good leveling spot, if you'd been foolish enough to enter.

They were crazy enough.

Ashveil shouldn't have existed.

Not like this, at least. Historical accounts of Ashveil painted it as a small pre-Collapse settlement — a mining town obliterated when The Collapse ripped through the Fractured Lands. But what awaited them was not a ruined village.

It was a city.

Pale stone towers emerged from parched soil — dilapidated, crumbling, devoured by time, but the architecture was unmistakable. Geometric arches of surgical precision. Windows set in runes that still pulsed faintly after thousands of years. Radial, all converging on one point at the heart of the city stone roads, arranged in perfect patterns

This wasn't primitive. This was advanced.

Aela halting at the main gate. Her fingers grazed the wall — and her look changed. “These runes…” She traced the patterns on the stone surface. "This is Enchantment. However… more intricate than anything that has been taught at the Academy. Layer upon layer, all interlocked, like —”

"Like what?"

“Like a language that is already dead.”

“This is not a post–The Collapse city,” Lyra said. Her voice was low — lower than it usually is, like a person walking through a graveyard. 「It's from before. The civilization that fell… was much more advanced than any of you believe. 」

Ren barely heard Lyra. He stared at something above the gate.

The Void symbol. Now he recognized it — a circle with emptiness inside. The same one on his grandfather's house floor.

But this time there was something different.

A second symbol — like the Void, that twists around itself in two snakes. Its light was different: where the Void flickered blackish-purple, this one pulsed a pale gold. Opposing each other. Completing each other.

Aela stepped back. Her face went white. "That's… impossible."

"What is it?"

"The Genesis Core symbol." Her voice was a near whisper. "An Enchanter legend. The first of all time, the source from which all Cores came. It is a myth, or at least it’s supposed to be.

But myths didn’t work that way, they weren’t carved into city gates next to the Void with this level of precision.

「Void and Genesis,」 Lyra said. 「Not separate. They're a pair. The two halves of the Core system that once was — before The Collapse sundered it into what you now call Awakening. 」

Ren stared at both symbols. Creation and erasure. Beginning and end. Woven into a single design.

And his Void was half of that key.

The Ashveil Dungeon had opened as a stone gate at the city’s center, runes flaring to life when Ren walked up.

Grade-C. Stable. Phantom Knights on the inside — humanoid monsters dressed in spectral armor, icy blue eyes and swords made from pure mana.

They moved in military formation — coordinated, disciplined, as if they were soldiers who hadn’t quite stopped fighting a war that had given up the ghost thousands of years beforehand.

Aela summoned a maze of walls — gold barriers that broke the Phantom Knights’ long line into small segments. Kael took the back end, Heal running steady, keeping them both moving. And Ren slipped in-between the unseen gaps, Silent Step up, Shadow Claw shredding them to bits one-by-one from angles they couldn’t even see.

The Phantom Captain followed — bigger, its armor thicker, its blade burning hotter. A full Grade-C.

The battle was brief and bloody. Ren got a slash across the arm, while Shadow Claw punched through an opening in the Captain’s helm. The beast fell — and Ren felt the tug.

Devour.

"Completed Devouring" rewards: Guardian Core (Basic) - Rank C. New Skill: Void Shield (Active) - Creates a void barrier that lasts for 10 seconds, absorbing all magic-based attacks. Also, "Class Classes: 3 Classes - Orc Warrior + Assassin + Guardian"

Then the warning.

「WARNING: Host-body strain at 67 percent. Anything over 80% could permanently damage the vessel. 」

Lyra didn’t give me a snarky response this time. Her voice was stern:

「Three Classes in a Grade-E body. You’re gambling at limits no one has yet tried. A fourth Class could kill you before it even gets the chance to be used. 」

Ren flexed his fingers. A new strength coursed though him — unlike Beast Warrior and Assassin. This one felt like a wall. Like existing suspended between something and nothing.

"Ren."

Aela's voice. She was three meters behind him, her eyes wide — not with fear. Something worse than fear. Recognition.

"That was Core absorption." Her voice trembled, barely audible. “And so that’s what my dad was trying to do in Project Rebirth.”

Ren froze. The atmosphere between them froze.

"The difference…" Aela swallowed. "…is that you succeeded."

As Ren approached, the walls of the dungeon’s innermost sanctum responded — stone shifted, Void runes flared to life in a stack along one vertical plane, and a slit opened like some yawning mouth.

Ren picked it up. His fingers knew the feel of that leather before his eyes knew the handwriting — because his grandfather had wrapped every book in their house in that hide.

Gareth's handwriting. No mistaking it.

“If you have found this, then my blood flowed to where it was always meant to flow. Forgive me, Ren.

Everything you know about who you are — is incorrect.”

Not because he was calm. Because every muscle in his body had frozen stiff.

Kael and Aela stood in silence behind him. The Void runes that lined the walls pulsed lazy — the heartbeat of a dead city, waiting for just the right person to come along at read the truth it had buried inside.

Ren flipped to the second page.