Chapter 1: Prelude to Collapse
London's rain no longer represented romance; it was a physical "dilution of reality."
This change did not happen overnight. It was like a long, imperceptible chronic illness, silently eroding the marrow of the European continent—starting from those places known as "liminal spaces."
Empty airport departure lounges; high-rise office corridors, brightly lit deep in the night yet dead silent; wilderness gas stations that truly existed but were never marked on navigation maps. These places, which originally existed only as "transitions," suddenly seemed possessed by a bizarre vitality. They began to stretch, fold, and recur. Subway transfer tunnels that should have taken only a minute to walk began to trap commuters, leaving them to wander desperately for hours until they went mad, disappeared, or turned into dried, soulless husks on some cold morning.
The laws of physics were like an old, overwashed sweater, unraveling at the seams.
The first thing to alert the authorities was the abnormal interruption of communication signals. NATO monitoring stations discovered that certain regions of the European continent were beginning to show vast signal blind zones—not ordinary electromagnetic interference, but complete " non-existence." Images taken by satellites overhead showed the outlines of towns in parts of southern France remaining intact, but all attempts to contact these areas vanished like stones in the ocean. Drones sent out would transmit images that suddenly turned into gray and white static upon reaching specific coordinates, before completely losing contact within seconds.
Even stranger were the descriptions from the lucky survivors who escaped.
The words they spoke could not be pieced together into a complete picture—"the road got longer," "the houses are repeating," "cannot get out"—these descriptions sounded like the ravings of madmen. But when thousands of survivors said the same things, the government began to realize one fact: the problem was not with the people, but with space itself.
Administrative jurisdiction over one-third of southern France was thus wiped off the map. The official term was "Natural Disaster Control Zone," but in reality, no one knew what it had turned into. There was no longer law, no longer order, only the "Lost Labyrinth" spoken of by survivors—where a sense of direction was a luxury, time was currency to be cashed in, and the only thing trustworthy was whether every step beneath your feet was repeating the trajectory of the last.
In this world on the verge of a funeral for logic, the precision balance of science could not measure the source of the disaster. Those particle accelerators costing hundreds of millions of Euros possessed less logical stability than a piece of parchment soaked in cold sweat. The prayers that had echoed in cathedrals for millennia could not exchange for the pity of any miracle—traditional religion and technology appeared pale as waste paper before these reviving spirits.
Survivors used countless lives to summarize the cruel classifications of those things that could not be stared at directly.
Ataphoi (The Unburied), the most common. They are wandering souls unable to enter the underworld due to lack of funerals, their bones abandoned in the wilderness. They linger on the edge of this world, emitting a sickening stench of iron rust and ancient earth. They are not intensely aggressive, but their appearance signifies a "dilution" of realistic logic—wherever they go, space becomes distorted and impossible to escape.
Aoroi (The Prematurely Dead), next in frequency. They are those poor creatures whose lives were forcibly cut short, dying full of resentment. They are obsessed with finding "replacements," harvesting the souls of the living by replicating specific death scenarios. They often parasitize specific objects or mirrors, quietly altering the senses of the living.
And the most terrifying are the Biaiothanatoi (The Violently Slain)—predators of the highest order representing pure violence and slaughter. They have no emotions, no communication, only a rigid and unsolvable pattern of killing. Once targeted by them, death becomes the only endpoint; the only difference is how many seconds you can last in that logical trap.
In this era called the "Ghostly Revival," humanity found itself smaller than ever before. All nuclear weapons, all aircraft carrier battle groups, were less significant than a gram of high-purity gold before these monsters capable of modifying physical base code.
Only gold—this metal representing eternity and the sun in the notes of ancient alchemists—became the final line of defense to seal spirits and reinforce realistic logic.
The world collapsed, the old order groaning painfully in the ruins. A secret agency named the "Witch-Hunters" took over power in the shadows. They recruited those madmen who had luckily survived spiritual contact, forcing them to harness those taboo powers at the cost of their souls being eroded and their bodies petrified.
These people, known as the "Ghost-Tethered," are walking a tightrope between sanity and madness, attempting to cordon off the last habitable lands on this wasteland of logic before darkness completely swallows Europe.
And before all this happened, in the basement archive of St. Mary's Library at the University of London, a history student named Elliott Thorne was about to receive the first, and last, "survival guide" of his life.