Kaito spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning. Bran provided him with a rough broom, a bucket of water, and some rags. The physical work was strangely grounding. It gave his hands something to do. It gave his racing mind a simple focus: sweep here, sort there, wipe this bench.
As he worked, his body slowly recovered. His HP ticked up to full: 40/40. His MP regenerated to 30/30, though the Soul Fatigue made it feel like a slow trickle. The dull ache in his bones began to ease, minute by minute.
Elara didn't leave. She perched on a cleared stool, sharpening a set of wicked-looking throwing knives with a whetstone. As she worked, she talked. She gave him a crash course in the world of Elysia, her voice a steady, informative stream.
"Forget nations for now," she said. "Think factions. Four major power blocs. First, the Celestial Legion. Your holy knights, paladins, zealots. They worship the Sun God, Solarius. Their whole deal is order, purity, light. They hate chaos. They despise the undead. They're deeply suspicious of any magic they don't control. You, with your glitchy no-magic magic? You're their worst nightmare. A living paradox."
Scrape, scrape went the whetstone on steel.
"Second, the Arcane Senate. Wizards, scholars, archivists. They're based in the floating city of Aethelgard. All about knowledge, control, understanding the laws of magic. They'd probably want to dissect you to figure out how you break those laws. Less 'purge the unclean' and more 'strap him to a table and take notes.'"
Kaito swept a pile of metal shavings into a dustpan. The information was vital. He committed it to memory.
"Third, the Beast-kin Clans. They keep mostly to their own territories—the great forests, the mountain ranges. They have their own troubles and don't much care for human or dwarven politics. Unless you're in their woods, you won't see much of them. And fourth, the Merchant Guilds. They're not a unified army, but they have the most practical power in places like this. They control trade. They have private armies. They have spies everywhere. Gold talks."
She tested the edge of a knife against her thumb, nodded in satisfaction, and moved to the next one. "And then there are the wild cards. The Four Calamities."
Kaito paused his sweeping. This was the part that mattered most.
"They're not factions. They're forces of nature that gained a will. The Frost Tyrant sleeps in the northern glaciers. The Deep One slumbers in the blackest ocean trenches. The Wandering Plague… hasn't been seen in an age. And your new best friend, the Shadow Sovereign." Elara's tone was matter-of-fact, but her eyes were serious. "They're not evil in the storybook sense. They're just… incompatible. Their existence, their power, their very nature, disrupts mortal life. The Legion wants them destroyed. Everyone else just wants to avoid their attention."
"Lilith is just… sad," Kaito said softly. He hadn't meant to say it out loud. The words just came. "And lonely."
Elara stopped sharpening. She looked at him, her green eyes sharp. "Careful, kid. That's exactly how they get you. They all have tragic stories. The Frost Tyrant was once a mortal king who lost his family to fire, so he embraced the cold. The Deep One was betrayed and drowned. The Shadow Sovereign lost her entire race. Tragic, sure." She pointed the knife at him. "It doesn't change the fact that the Frost Tyrant froze an entire kingdom solid because the children playing in the streets were 'too noisy.' Or that the legends say the Shadow Sovereign consumed the souls of an entire city that betrayed her kin. Their grief is real. Their power is absolute. And mortal lives are like candles to them—brief, fragile, and easily snuffed out."
Kaito didn't answer. He went back to sweeping. He remembered the garden. The perfectly tended rows. The smell of the soup. The single black tear on her cheek. It was hard to reconcile that image with a soul-consuming monster. But Elara was right. He had felt that power. The possessive, all-consuming nature of it. The cage of shadows had been gilded, but it had been a cage all the same.
As evening fell, the high window in the workshop dimmed. Bran lit a few oil lamps, casting a warm, golden glow over the now-clean space. He declared the work "adequate for a first attempt" and handed Kaito a bowl of thick, hearty stew from a pot that had been simmering on the edge of the forge. A hunk of coarse, dark bread accompanied it.
"Eat," Bran commanded. "Then rest. Your body is still mending from the soul strain. Tomorrow, we begin proper training. You need to learn to feel your own energy. To contain it. To keep that lighthouse of yours from shining across the whole damn desert."
Kaito ate at a small, scarred wooden table. The stew was filled with chunks of meat, root vegetables, and barley. It was simple. It was delicious. It was real food. For the first time since arriving in Elysia—since dying on Earth—he felt a sliver of true safety. Of normalcy. The workshop was solid. The people were blunt but not cruel. He had a task. A purpose. A chance to learn.
It felt like a sanctuary.
That feeling lasted until Elara returned from a quick evening errand outside. She had gone to "check the wind," as she put it. To see if Kaito's dramatic entrance had caused any lingering stir.
When she slipped back through the heavy door, her face was grim. All traces of her usual smirk were gone. She didn't say a word. She just walked over to the table where Kaito was finishing his bread. She pulled a piece of thick, cheap parchment from inside her leather vest. She tossed it onto the table beside his empty bowl.
It was a wanted poster.
The paper was coarse. The drawing was done in quick, bold strokes of black ink. It wasn't photorealistic, but it was unmistakably him. The shape of his face. His hair. The set of his eyes. There was an intensity to the drawn gaze that captured his confusion, his otherness.
Below the sketch, in large, blocky letters that screamed for attention:
WANTED
FOR HERESY & CONSPIRING WITH CALAMITIES
THE 'ANOMALY'
DESCRIPTION: MALE, YOUTHFUL, STRANGE EYES, EXUDES ABNORMAL ENERGY.
BOUNTY: 5,000 GOLD PIECES – DEAD OR ALIVE.
ISSUED BY THE CELESTIAL LEGION.
ALLIES OF ORDER ARE ENCOURAGED TO REPORT ANY SIGHTINGS.
Kaito's blood turned to ice in his veins. The last piece of bread turned to sawdust in his mouth. The spoon he was holding slipped from his numb fingers. It clattered loudly into the empty bowl.
Five thousand gold pieces. It was a fortune. A life-changing fortune for almost anyone in this city.
"They work fast," Elara said quietly. Her voice was all business now. "These are plastered on every major gate, every guild board, every well-trafficked square in the city. The bounty is high enough to make every cutthroat, every down-on-their-luck adventurer, every greedy merchant with a guard force start looking very closely at every young man with strange eyes and a confused look."
Bran walked over. He picked up the poster. He didn't look at the picture. He looked at the bounty amount. His expression was stone. He crumpled the parchment in his massive fist. He walked to the forge and tossed the crumpled ball into the glowing coals. It blackened instantly. It curled in on itself. It flamed for a second and then was nothing but ash.
"Then he doesn't leave this building," Bran said, his voice final. "Not for any reason. Not until we change his look. And not until he learns to dampen that energy signature to nothing. A haircut and dye we can do tomorrow. The dampening… that will take time we might not have."
Kaito stared into the forge. The ash of the poster was gone. But the words were burned into his mind. Dead or Alive. The Legion wasn't playing games. They had categorized him as a heretic. A corrupting influence. Seraphina's personal conflict wouldn't matter now. She had orders. A direct bounty. She would hunt him. It was her duty.
His safe haven had just become the most dangerous place in the entire city. He was a five-thousand-gold prize sitting in a hidden workshop. If anyone found out…
A notification appeared in his vision. Stark. Red. Urgent.
[Quest Updated: Survive the Oasis-Fortress Zerzura.]
[New Objective: Avoid capture or death for the next 24 hours.]
[Threat Level: EXTREME.]
[Note: Your likeness is now publicly known. Your unique energy signature is a key identifier.]
[Bond Link Pulse Detected: Lilith.]
[Status: ❤️🔥💢(Grieving/Rage)… Searching.]
She knew he was gone. Truly gone from her reach. The bond carried her emotional state. It wasn't just sadness now. It was rage. A cold, ancient rage born of abandonment. And beneath the rage, a purpose: Searching.
He wasn't just hunted by the forces of light. The shadows themselves were now seeking their lost "anchor."
He finished the rest of his meal in silence. The stew now tasted like ash. The sanctuary felt like a trap waiting to spring.
Later, in his small, spare room off the workshop, he lay on the narrow cot. He stared up at the strip of starry night sky visible through the high, small window. The sounds of the sleeping city were a distant murmur.
He opened his System interface. Not to check his stats, but to look at the Bond Links. The two entries glowed softly, ominously.
Seraphina: ❤️⚔️🌀(Disoriented / Link Intensity: HIGH)
Lilith: ❤️🔥💢(Grieving/Rage / Searching)
Two hearts. Two women of immense power. One was a symbol of ordered light, trapped in a whirlpool of duty and confused empathy. The other was a flame of ancient darkness, burning with possessive rage and bottomless sorrow.
He was a pawn between them. A prize to be captured. An anomaly to be solved. A star to be kept.
But he had a new skill now. Minor Reality Mend. He could fix broken springs. He could convince reality a small error had never happened. Could he mend the larger errors? Could he fix the glitch in his own soul? Could he repair the broken situation he was in?
He closed his eyes. He didn't dream of the white hospital room. He didn't dream of the flatline. He dreamed of a quiet, impossible garden in a realm of shadow. He dreamed of a bowl of soup cooling on a small table. He dreamed it was waiting for someone. Someone who was never coming back to eat it.
He woke with a start in the deep dark of the night. A sound had jolted him awake.
But it wasn't a sound in the workshop. There was no knock at the door. No creak of a floorboard.
The sound was in his mind.
A faint, cold whisper. It was carried across an impossible distance. It traveled along the thin, strained thread of the Bond Link. It was a voice made of sorrow and winter and the void between stars.
"I will find you, my anchor. My little star. The world is not so big. The shadows are everywhere. And they all whisper your name to me now."
It was Lilith. Not a shout of rage. Not a sob of grief. A promise. A cold, absolute, terrifying promise.
He sat bolt upright on the cot. His heart hammered against his ribs. He looked at the Bond Link screen in his mind. Her status flickered, the text unstable.
Lilith: ❤️🔥💢(Grieving/Rage)… Searching… Signal Strengthening.
She was coming. She wasn't just sitting in her broken Keep. She was active. She was using the bond, using the shadows, to search for him.
The hunt wasn't just from the Legion anymore. It was from the shadows themselves. From the very darkness in the corners of the room.
He lay back down, but sleep was impossible. He watched the strip of sky through the high window. He counted the stars as they slowly tracked across the blackness. He counted them until the first faint, grey light of dawn began to creep into the sky, washing the stars away.
Tomorrow, his training would begin. Bran would try to teach him to hide his power.
He had one day. Maybe less. One day to learn. To get stronger. To become something other than prey.
One day before the walls of this new, fragile sanctuary were tested by hunters of light and seekers from the dark.
The race for his life—for his very soul—was on. And the starting pistol had already fired.
To be continued...