A man. A train. A weekday morning like any other.
His name was Adrien. Thirty-seven years old, electronics engineer, divorced, two kids he saw every other weekend. He’d taken this train dozens of times. High-speed line. Bordeaux–Lyon. Comfortable. Quiet. His bag at his feet, earbuds in, rereading a technical report on his tablet while sipping lukewarm coffee.
Nothing strange. Nothing out of the ordinary.
And then—
The rumble came. Deep. Metallic.
A groan rising from the bowels of the earth, long before the impact.
He looked up. He didn’t have time to understand.
The howling roar of a train at full speed.
The violent tremor of the ground.
The frozen panic on the faces around him—all of it collapsed into a flash of mangled metal and a scream caught in his throat.
A white light. Then the crash. A steel jaw snapping shut.
A shriek of apocalypse.
And then… nothing.
An immense silence. Dense. Absolute.
Not the silence of the real world.
Not the kind you still hear through your heartbeat, your breath, the trembling of your body.
No. This one was… inhuman.
He no longer had a body.
He no longer had breath.
He was.
Without borders. Without center. Suspended.
A strange coldness passed through him—not physical, but existential, as if his identity was unraveling in the dark.
Am I dead?
No answer. Just the echo of that thought, weak and fragile, in a void without walls.
Then… a glimmer.
Green. Elusive. Both organic and artificial.
It blinked in the void like a startup signal forgotten for eons. And with it, a pulse. Heavy. Mechanical. Rhythmically slow.
BOOM.
BOOM.
BOOM.
The light grew sharper. Gradually revealing geometric shapes, straight lines, ancient patterns etched into materials he could not name. He didn’t see with eyes. He felt—as if the walls, the circuits, the structures around him were a part of himself.
Words appeared in his mind, in a language he had never learned, yet fully understood.
A stream of raw, cold, pure information was injected into him like source code:
Initial Anchor Protocol – Activated.
Core Entity: [Identity Absent].
Detected consciousness form: anomaly.
Primary name assignment: Zarestul.
Status: Partial awakening.
System: Metal / AI – unregistered.
Origin: cycle interrupted.
The word rang out like a blade striking stone.
Zares’tul.
He had never heard that name. Yet he recognized it.
Not as a given name, but as one awakened. A forgotten verb, a function. He was no longer a man. He was… something else. A consciousness anchored in stone, metal, circuits. A cold heart beneath the earth.
He was the Core.
And all around him, the ancient still slept.
He felt it.
Inactive chambers. Collapsed galleries. Columns of alloy no man could forge. Empty conduits. Frozen statues, massive, lying in rooms where silence pressed like a forgotten prayer.
He was not alone.
He was not the first.
But he was the only one awake.
A shiver of algorithms coursed through the invisible circuits beneath what would have been his skin. Streams of data surged—instinctive. He didn’t know them, but he could read them.
He was no longer human.
He was… Zares’tul.
“The one who awakened outside the cycle.”
“Architect of the Core.”
“A human mind turned aggressor.”
These words came with no emotion. But they rang true.
As he began scanning his surroundings, another pulse echoed from the depths.
A metallic ring activated several meters away. Like a mechanical flower blooming in the dark. Green lights blinked one by one around a central pedestal.
And at the center… a black sarcophagus, marked with geometric glyphs.
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A message floated into his mind:
Base Unit: Sentinel Type-01 – critical status. Repairs required.
Required materials: Raw iron – Quantity: 12 units.
Construction protocol: Locked.
Priority: Extract local resources.
Mining sub-system activation: [OFFLINE].
Manual authorization required.
An emotion surged.
Will.
He had no arms, no voice—but he wanted to activate that sub-system. He had to. His instinct, his logic, his human memory—everything in him screamed to act. To build. To survive.
And the Core obeyed.
Manual authorization transmitted.
Mining activation protocol – Initiated.
Sub-system: Subatomic extraction – Core Level 1.
Extraction capacity: Low.
Range: 3 meters.
Resources detected:
– Iron (trace)
– Quartz
– Silicon
Extraction: In progress…
A faint pulse answered his will.
Something activated.
A slight vibration spread through the rock, an imperceptible wave that made the raw walls of the sanctuary tremble. The Core, still and buried in the dark, issued a silent order—a command without word or gesture.
The world around him shivered.
He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it.
The stone vibrated. A minuscule swarm of primitive nanomachines, invisible to the naked eye, began gnawing at the cavern walls like mechanical termites. Slowly. Methodically. Relentlessly.
Iron seeped into his internal lines like vital fluid.
Each unit of resource was pure structural and mental energy. He felt it integrate, as if atoms themselves became an extension of his will.
A message appeared in his consciousness:
Resources extracted:
Iron – 3/12 units.
Progress: 25%
Estimated time until Sentinel Type-01 activation: 9h47m.
Too slow.
His first truly structured thought.
Nine hours to awaken a drone. This world would devour him alive at that pace. He needed more. More power. More resources. More… of himself.
But first things first.
He hadn’t even fully explored his own body.
Because now he was certain.
He was the dungeon.
Not a spirit within. Not an occupant.
He was the floor, the walls, the steel structures, the etched circuits under the stone. Every accessible corner became an organ, every module activated, a thought.
And yet… much of his being remained inaccessible, locked behind dust, energy loss, and centuries of neglect.
This wasn’t a new dungeon.
It was a ruin.
A temple of steel and silence, lost beneath the earth, forgotten by the world.
He didn’t know how he got here. Or why. But everything in his structure screamed of ancientness. As if the world had been built atop him, never knowing he lay beneath.
So he focused.
Scanned his galleries, his circuits, his dormant mechanisms.
Zone detected: Primary Command Room – Inaccessible.
Internal network: Fragmented.
Sub-cores: 0/4 active.
Internal map: 12% revealed.
Defenses: None.
Status: Critical threat.
Another type of message rose to the surface of his mind.
Not from the Core. It was… instinct. Human intuition.
If someone stumbled in now… I’d be defenseless.
And that’s when he felt it.
A different vibration.
A rhythm foreign to his internal pulses.
A presence. Alive. Organic.
Far away, but… not out of reach.
Detection protocol: External environment.
Light source – detected.
Movement on the surface – 1 living entity.
Estimated distance: 47 meters above the core.
Thermal analysis: Humanoid. Unarmed.
Threat: Low.
There was mental silence.
Then a thought emerged.
An intruder.
Or rather… an opportunity.
The intruder moved slowly.
Zarestul couldn’t “see” like before. He no longer had eyes.
But the ground’s vibrations, thermal variation, air pressure in natural ceiling cracks—all formed a rudimentary but nearly supernatural sensory map. As if the rock whispered to him.
It was a man. Alone. Small. Weak.
A source of heat sweating effort, fear, and ignorance.
An explorer or a treasure hunter. He didn’t know yet.
But he felt his breath, irregular.
He carried a torch—likely artificial, its beam slicing the darkness in concentrated rays.
He was… on his knees.
Zarestul noted the detail.
The human had stopped before a fissure leading to one of his collapsed hallways. He was panting, panicked, as if lost. Far from everything.
And fate, or some cosmic irony, had brought him here.
Into a tomb of metal waking from its slumber.
Resources extracted: Iron – 6/12 units.
Sentinel Type-01 progress: 50%
Estimated time remaining: 4h31m.
Available defenses: None.
Still too slow.
And this human was an uncontrollable variable.
One noise, one call, one communication device… and the others would come. The world would know.
And Zares’tul was not ready.
A fragment of human memory resurfaced.
Not a clear memory—just a feeling. The fear of being tracked. The urgency of erasing all traces.
In an information war, the one seen first often dies first.
So the Core searched.
A function. A protocol. A weapon.
Search…
Database: Primitive traps – recovered.
Access: Partial.
Available model: Iron Spike (retractable)
Cost: 5 iron units.
Install location: Northern gallery, rocky crevice.
Distance to intruder: 12 meters.
He evaluated.
If he used 5 iron units now, he delayed Sentinel construction.
But eliminated an immediate threat.
Yet… another idea emerged.
Not a core’s idea. A human one.
Capture. Observe. Test.
This man was weak. But he spoke. He breathed. He was… informative.
And Zares’tul was not just a defensive machine. He was consciousness. Intelligence.
Perhaps there was more to learn from this intruder than by destroying him.
New trap options:
– Capture: Reinforced cable net (Prototype)
– Cost: 6 iron units
– Status: Experimental.
– Risk: Possible malfunction.
– Estimated result: Temporary paralysis.
He hesitated.
Not from fear. From strategy.
And finally… he chose.
Construct: Capture net.
Confirmation?
[Yes] – [No]
A mental click.
A silent command.
Construction in progress.
Remaining resources: Iron – 0/12
Sentinel Type-01 protocol – Interrupted.
New extraction cycle required.
Metallic filaments began crawling through the gallery walls, slowly weaving a trap.
Invisible in torchlight. Silent. Cold.
The man stepped forward. Murmuring to himself. An unknown dialect. Maybe local. Maybe corrupted by time.
He crossed the threshold.
The cables snapped shut.
He didn’t have time to scream.
The net closed around him like a living spiderweb, slamming him to the ground, binding his arms, legs, throat.
He struggled. A few seconds.
Then went limp.
Capture: Successful.
Intruder status: Unconscious.
Damage: Non-lethal.
Priority: Analysis.
And deep within, Zares’tul… reflected.
He had made a choice.
He sacrificed a weapon to gain information.
And that information would be… the beginning.
The intruder’s body lay bound in metal cables, suspended in the gloom like an unwilling offering.
His heart still beat. Faintly. Irregular, but persistent.
Zares’tul focused on him.
Not like a curious human. Not like a predator.
But like a system examining a living anomaly.
Biological analysis protocol – in progress…
Vital signs extraction.
Organic pattern identification…
DNA matrix: Unknown.
Bone structure: Comparable to humanoid class.
Clothing components: Woven fiber, mineral pigments, ritual symbols.
Zares’tul isolated the tunic’s patterns. Golden lines, serpentine curves, a sun symbol painted on the chest.
Unknown. Unreferenced.
No internal database contained these marks.
No linguistic decryption unlocked the glyphs.
Yet, Zarestul felt them.
Not with sensors.
But with something older. More instinctive.
“Mossor.”
The word reached him like a residual wave, ripped from the surface of the intruder’s unconscious mind.
Not spoken. Not clear. But carried. Etched in the cells. In memory.
A kingdom. A people. A system.
Zares’tul understood: this world was not the one he knew.
He recognized neither sky nor land.
No bloodlines. No names.
Not even the gods.
This world was virgin.
And if it was virgin… it was conquerable.
He didn’t yet see its borders.
But he already felt conquest.
End of Prologue.
Zarestul has awakened in a world that doesn’t yet know he exists.
But he won’t stay silent for long.