Kaito woke to the smell of soup.
It was a rich, savory smell. It did not belong in the scentless shadow hall. It was a smell from his old world. It smelled like miso. Like mushrooms and green onion. It smelled like home.
He opened his eyes slowly. He was in the smoky quartz bed. He was tucked under a heavy blanket. The blanket was made of an impossibly soft, dark fabric. The room was lit by floating orbs of gentle violet light. The light was soft. It did not hurt his eyes.
The Soul Fatigue status still glowed dully in his vision. It was a constant, heavy ache deep in his bones. He pulled up his main status.
HP: 40/40
MP: 20/30
[Status: Soul Fatigue - Recovery rates halved.]
[System Instability: 12%]
[Permanent HP Reduction: -10 Max HP]
The permanent reduction was a stark reminder. A reminder of his recklessness. Of the Forced Limit Break. He had damaged himself. Permanently.
He sat up slowly. Every muscle in his body protested. He felt weak. Drained.
On a small table beside the bed, there was a steaming bowl of soup. It was exactly as he had imagined it. Next to it sat a glass of clear, cool water.
And sitting in the twisted darkwood chair, watching him with those glowing violet eyes, was Lilith.
She had changed her dress. It was simpler now. A soft grey shift that draped around her. It made her look almost normal. Almost human. Her long, black hair was down. It flowed over her shoulders like a waterfall of night. She was perfectly still. A statue of a beautiful, ancient woman.
"You are awake," she said. Her voice was a soft murmur. It filled the quiet room. "Good. You slept for a full day-cycle. Your soul needed the rest."
A full day. A full day trapped here. In her domain.
"The soup," Kaito said. His voice was rough from disuse. "How? There's nothing here."
"Your memories are not locked away from me," Lilith replied. A small, pleased smile touched her lips. "The Glitch Bond is a two-way mirror, little star. When you sleep, when your mental defenses are low… I see glimpses. I feel echoes. Tastes. Smells. I saw a white room. I heard a sister's voice, soft with worry. I felt the comfort of a warm bowl on a cold day." Her smile faded slightly. The pleasure was replaced by a shadow of shared pain. "There is so much pain in your past, too. The long sickness. The helplessness. We are the same, in that way. We know what it is to lose everything."
The idea was horrifying. She was in his head. She was picking through his most private memories like they were pages in a book. Like she was in a library of his life. He quickly pulled up his Bond Links screen.
Lilith (Shadow Sovereign). Status: ❤️🔥⚫ (Stunned / Obsession Consolidating). Glitch Resonance: High. Note: Low-level empathic link established. Passive memory bleed possible during sleep or high emotional states.
Empathic link. Not full telepathy. But close enough. Too close.
"Stop it," he said. Anger cut through the fatigue. "Get out of my head."
"I am not doing it on purpose," she said. For the first time, she sounded almost apologetic. Almost. "The bond is… settling. Your catastrophic pulse forged it deeper. It welded our souls at a shallow point. It will stabilize in time. The bleeding will lessen. But until then, our strongest emotions… our most powerful memories… they leak. They spill over." She gestured gracefully to the soup. "Now eat. Your physical body needs it. Your System needs fuel to repair the instability."
He was starving. The smell was irresistible. It was a hook in his heart. Cautiously, he picked up the bowl. It was warm in his hands, not too hot. Perfect. He lifted it to his lips. He took a sip.
The taste was perfect. It was exactly like his sister Aiko used to make for him. When he was too sick from chemo to eat anything else. She would sit by his bed. She would hold the bowl. She would tell him silly stories until he finished it.
A deep, lonely ache throbbed in his chest. It was a pang of homesickness so sharp it stole his breath. His eyes stung. He put the bowl down quickly.
Across the room, Lilith made a small, hurt sound. A gasp. Her hand flew to her own chest. "That feeling… the longing. It is so heavy. It is a physical weight."
"Then don't feel it," he snapped, looking away. But he picked up the bowl again. He kept eating. The food helped. It was warm. It was real. A notification popped up in the corner of his vision.
[Consumed Nourishing Meal (High Quality).]
[Soul Fatigue duration reduced by 2 hours.]
[HP regeneration rate slightly increased for 1 hour.]
He finished the entire bowl. He drank all the water. A little trickle of strength returned to his weak limbs. Not much. But something.
"Thank you," he said. He said it because it was true. And because he needed to understand her. He needed to see what made her tick.
Her smile returned. It was brighter this time. It reached her ancient eyes for a moment. "You are welcome." She stood up. She glided over silently to take the empty bowl and glass. Her fingers brushed his as she took them. That familiar, sharp jolt went through him. A spark of connection.
His Glitch Meter ticked up to 5%.
She didn't pull her hand away. She seemed to savor the tiny spark. The contact. "You need to move. To circulate your energy. Lying still will let the fatigue settle into your bones." She paused. "Would you like to see more of your new home? It is not all dark halls."
It wasn't a question. It was an offer he couldn't refuse. But he also needed to accept. He needed to map this prison. He needed to know its limits. Its weaknesses.
"Okay," he said. He swung his legs out of the bed. He was still wearing the simple tunic and trousers from the forest. They were clean now. The blood and dirt were gone. She must have changed them while he slept. Or magically cleaned them. The thought made his skin crawl. His privacy was gone here. Completely gone.
He followed her out of the bedchamber and back into the vast, towering obsidian hall. The silent vortex of purple and black clouds still churned high above. It was the only thing that moved. She led him to a different archway. They walked down a long corridor. The walls here seemed to absorb the light from the floating violet orbs. The darkness was thicker.
"This," she said, stopping before an open doorway, "is the Heart of the Keep."
The room was circular. In its center was a large, perfectly still pool of black water. The water was so dark it looked like a hole in the floor. It reflected nothing.
"The shadow-well," Lilith explained. Her voice was reverent here. "It connects to the deeper ley lines in Elysia. It is how I draw power. How I maintain this place between places. It is also… how I knew you were there. The shockwave of your first Glitch Pulse rippled through the ley lines. It was a scream in the silence. I followed it to you."
So that was how she found him. His own power had called the wolf. And then it had called something infinitely more dangerous.
The next room was a library. Shelves were carved directly from the obsidian walls. They held scrolls of dark, thick parchment. They held books bound in leather that looked like it was made from solidified twilight. The air here smelled of old paper and a sharp, electric ozone.
"My memories," Lilith said softly. She walked to a shelf. She ran a pale finger along the spine of a large, heavy-looking book. "Centuries of them. It gets… crowded in one's mind after so long. The weight of it. So I put them here. I write them down. I store them. It helps the quiet stay quiet."
"You've been alone here for centuries?" Kaito asked. He tried to keep his voice neutral. Just curious.
"Since the Purge," she said. The word dropped from her lips like a stone into the shadow-well. "When the bright races—humans, elves, the celestial-born—decided my kind were too dangerous. The Shade-Touched, they called us. They said we were born of corruption. That we could not live in the sun with them." She stopped. Her back was to him. She stared at a blank space on the shelf. "They came at night. With torches that burned too bright. With swords and holy words. I was a child. I hid. I hid in a root cellar under our house. I heard everything. The screams. The crackle of fire. The prayers. When the sounds stopped… I came out. There was only cold ash. And the shadows. The shadows welcomed me. They were the only things that didn't burn. The only things that didn't try to destroy me."
The memory from the bond—the burning village, the small hand letting go—clicked into place. A tragic, classic backstory. Just like the outline promised. But knowing the story, understanding her pain, did not make her possessive care feel any less terrifying. It just made it sadder.
"I'm sorry," he said. And he meant it. No child deserved that.
She turned slowly. Her violet eyes were shimmering with unshed tears that looked like liquid amethyst. "You are the first person to say that to me. The first person to say that and truly mean it… in a very, very long time." She reached out. She cupped his cheek with her cold hand. The Glitch Meter rose to 6%. She didn't seem to care. "You see? We are both broken things. Shattered by the world. We fit together. Your broken edges match mine."
He gently pulled his face away from her touch. He took a step back. "Where does the food come from? The ingredients for the soup. You can't grow things in obsidian."
She allowed the retreat. Her hand fell back to her side. A flicker of disappointment crossed her face, then vanished. "There is a small garden. It is in a pocket dimension adjacent to this one. It has real soil. Soil I took from Elysia long ago. It has water from the shadow-well. I grow things there. I will show you."
The garden was the most shocking place of all.
They stepped through what felt like a curtain of cold, thick darkness. Then they were somewhere else. The air changed. It became humid. Rich. It smelled of damp earth and growing things.
The space was no bigger than a large room. But here, there was light. A soft, sourceless glow like a cloudy day. Rich, black soil filled neat, rectangular plots. Strange plants grew in perfect rows.
There were mushrooms that glowed with a soft blue bioluminescence. There were root vegetables with dark, leafy tops. There were herbs that released a spicy, peppery scent when Kaito brushed past them. It was meticulously cared for. Not a single weed was out of place.
"This… this is normal," Kaito breathed out. He was stunned.
"Life persists," Lilith said. She knelt gracefully by one of the plots. She plucked a tiny, invasive weed from near a row of dark-purple carrots. "Even in the shadows. Even for a creature they call a Calamity." She looked up at him. Her eyes caught the soft light. "You thought I survived on darkness and despair alone? On memories of ash?"
He had. He realized, with a flush of shame, that he absolutely had.
"I survive," she said simply. She stood up, brushing the rich soil from her fingers. "I tend my garden. I read my books. I wait. I thought I was waiting for nothing. For the slow end of eternity. Until I felt your glitch. It was the first new thing. The first interesting thing in centuries." She walked toward him. "Now, I am waiting for you. For you to understand. This can be your home too. A quiet place. A safe place. We can tend the garden together. You can tell me of your world of machines and miracles. I can show you the mysteries of this one. No one will hunt you here. No one will call you an anomaly or seek to cage you in light."
The offer was seductive. It was a siren's song. After a life of sickness. After a rebirth into pure chaos and violence. The promise of quiet. Of safety. Of simple, domestic routine… it was a powerful drug. It tugged at the exhausted, frightened part of his soul.
But it was a cage. A beautiful, gentle, gilded cage. The door might not be locked, but the walls were made of her love and her loneliness. They were just as impassable.
He needed to see the limits. He needed to test the bars.
"Can I go outside?" he asked. His voice was quiet. "To Elysia? To see the sun? The real sun?"
Her expression closed off. The softness vanished. It was replaced by the impassive, ancient mask. "It is not safe."
"For who?" he pressed. "For me? Or for you, because I might choose not to come back?"
She didn't answer. The silence that followed was heavy. It was answer enough. The cage door was locked from the outside. She held the key.
She led him out of the garden, back into the cold, silent halls of obsidian. The transition was jarring. From life and light back to stillness and dark.
They ended up in a large, empty room. The floor was polished black glass. It reflected the violet orbs above like stars in a night-time lake. "This is the practice room," Lilith said. Her voice was back to its neutral, calm tone. "I thought… you might wish to explore your System. To gain control over your skills. So you do not hurt yourself again with another desperate act."
It was a manipulation. A kind one. She was giving him what he wanted—control, power, understanding—to make him want to stay. To make him see value in this place. To make him need her guidance.
But he would take it. He needed every advantage he could get.
"Okay," he said.
For the next few hours, Lilith sat silently against the wall. She was a statue again. She watched as Kaito tested his skills in the empty space.
He started with Mana Bolt Lvl 2. It was stronger. It was faster. He could now shape the energy slightly with his will. He could make it a thin, piercing beam. Or he could make it a wider, concussive blast. The wider blast cost more MP. He practiced the forms until his MP ran low. Then he sat on the cool floor to let it regenerate. The regeneration was painfully slow with Soul Fatigue.
He tried Enhanced Cognition. In the empty, quiet room, with no immediate threat, the skill simply made the world feel slow and hyper-detailed. He could see the tiny, microscopic imperfections in the polished glass floor. He could hear the almost-silent hum of the Keep's ancient energy. He could track the path of every floating mote of dust in the still air.
He focused on his System Instability: 12%. It was a red, pulsing warning in his status. He tried to will it to decrease. To heal. Nothing happened. It was like a broken bone in his soul. It just sat there. Aching.
"Instability is damage to the framework of your soul," Lilith's voice came from her corner. It startled him. He had almost forgotten she was there. "It cannot be healed by will alone. It is not a wound that stitches closed. It requires time. Deep rest. And… integration. Accepting the Glitch as a part of you. Not fighting it. Making peace with the cracks."
"And if I keep fighting it?" Kaito asked, looking over at her shadowy form.
"You will break," she said simply. There was no malice in her tone. It was a fact. "The System will shatter like flawed crystal. And it will take what is left of your soul with it. There will be nothing left to put back together."
Cheerful. So his options were: become comfortable with the cosmic error in his soul, or die.
He needed a new skill. Something defensive. Something that could help him escape. He looked at his skill menu. Skill Fusion was an available function, but it was grayed out. A tooltip said it required two existing skills of compatible types to attempt a fusion. He only had a few skills.
But he remembered his desperate idea in the forest. Combining Mana Bolt with… something. With the environment.
He looked around the practice room. At the deep shadows clinging to the corners. The shadow essence that saturated this entire demi-plane was thick here. It was the very fabric of Lilith's power.
What if…
He walked to a corner where the darkness was thickest. It was a pool of liquid blackness. He raised his hand. He cast Mana Bolt, but he did not aim into the open air. He aimed directly into the center of the shadow pool.
The bolt of blue energy shot from his finger. It hit the darkness and was swallowed completely. Nothing happened. No sound. No light. It was just gone.
He tried again. This time, he didn't just cast. He pushed his will into the bolt as he formed it. He imagined the mana not fighting the shadow, but merging with it. Combining. Mana Bolt. Shadow. Combine.
A notification flashed red in his vision.
[Skill Fusion Attempted: Mana Bolt + Ambient Shadow Essence.]
[Required Affinity: Shadow – Not Possessed.]
[Fusion Failed.]
He lacked the Shadow Affinity. Of course. He was an Otherworlder. A blank slate. He had no natural affinity for this world's elements. Not yet.
"You are trying to touch the shadows," Lilith observed from her seat. She hadn't moved. "They are my domain. My element. You lack the innate connection. But…" She tilted her head. "Your Glitch is a thing of chaos. It does not play by the normal rules of affinities and elements. It is a wild card. A nullifier."
A nullifier. An idea sparked. What if he used the Glitch itself as a catalyst? As the bridge?
He waited for his MP to refill to 15. He focused on a patch of shadow on the far wall. He prepared to cast Mana Bolt. But as he did, he deliberately let his control waver. He focused on the Glitch Meter, currently at 6%. He nudged it. Not enough to trigger a pulse. Just enough to let a tiny trickle of that chaotic, error-code energy infuse the spell as he formed it.
The blue bolt left his fingers. But it was streaked now. Streaked with faint, crawling red lines of static. It hissed through the air. It shot into the patch of shadow on the wall.
This time, it did not vanish.
The shadow rippled. It warped. Then, with a soft pop, the entire patch of darkness vanished. It was just gone. It left behind bare, smooth obsidian wall. A few small, black sparks fizzled in the air where the shadow had been. Then they too died.
[Skill Fusion Successful!]
[New Skill Created: Shadow Spark Lvl 1.]
[Description: Disrupts and consumes weak shadow constructs or ambient darkness. Small area of effect: approx. 1 square foot. Cost: 10 MP. Additional Cost: +1% Glitch Meter per use.]
[System Instability: 13%]
The instability had gone up. Using the Glitch as a tool, as a catalyst, came with a price. It stressed the damaged system further.
But he had done it. He had a new skill. A tool specifically for this place.
Lilith was on her feet. She moved so fast she was just suddenly standing. Her eyes were wide. Glowing brightly. "You… you unwove my shadow. Not with opposing light. Not with holy energy. But with… nothing. With a different kind of nothing. A chaotic nothing." She looked from the now-bare spot on the wall to his face. Her expression was pure, unadulterated awe. "You truly are unique. A work of beautiful, broken art."
Kaito ignored her praise. His heart was pounding. This was it. This was the key.
The Shadow Keep was made of two things: physical obsidian, and magical shadow-binding. The obsidian was just rock. The shadows were what held it together. What gave it its strange, extra-dimensional nature. If he could disrupt enough of the shadow-binding in a specific, weak place… maybe he could create a temporary hole. A tear in the prison wall.
He needed to test it on something bigger. A proper shadow construct.
He walked across the practice room to where a large tapestry hung. The tapestry was not made of cloth. It was woven from solidified shadows. It depicted a scene of a starless, endless night sky. It was a shadow construct. A piece of Lilith's art and power.
He raised his hand. He focused. "Shadow Spark."
A bolt of murky, static-filled energy shot from his palm. It crackled with red and blue energy. It struck the center of the shadow-tapestry.
The effect was immediate and dramatic.
The woven shadows did not burn. They unraveled. It was like watching a time-lapse of a sweater being pulled apart from a single loose thread. The tapestry dissolved from the center outward. It vanished into a cloud of tiny, dark motes of dust. The motes hung in the air for a second, then faded to nothing. In less than five seconds, the large, beautiful tapestry was gone. Only the bare obsidian wall remained.
The Glitch Meter ticked up to 7%. The System Instability held at 13%.
It worked. It consumed a lot of MP, and it fed the Glitch, but it worked.
Lilith stared at the empty space on the wall where her artwork had been for centuries. She wasn't angry. She looked fascinated. And deeply, profoundly unsettled. "You can break my world apart," she whispered. The whisper echoed. "You can unmake the very things I have built to keep myself sane."
"I need to not be trapped," Kaito said, turning to meet her glowing gaze. He forced his voice to be steady. "I can't live in a cage, Lilith. Even a kind one. Even a beautiful one with a garden."
The deep, ancient sadness returned to her eyes. It drowned out the awe. "And if the outside world is just a bigger cage? A cage of hunters and pain and people who will use you or kill you? Is that truly better?"
"Then that's my choice to make," he said. "My mistake to live with. Not yours to decide for me."
They stood in silence for a long moment. The gentle, domestic fantasy of the garden and the soup was shattered. He had shown her he was not a docile, broken star to be kept and admired. He was a force. A glitching, unpredictable force that could erode the very foundations of her home.
Finally, she nodded. It was a slow, resigned movement. "I see." She turned without another word. She walked toward the archway that led back to the main halls. "Come," she said, not looking back. "It is time for the evening meal. You must keep your strength up."
The atmosphere had changed. The possessive care was still there. He could feel it radiating from her. But it was now edged with a new, sharp tension. A recognition of his capability. A fear of it. The balance of power in his beautiful cage had shifted. Just a little.
To be continued...