The ruin-thread was quieter here, thinner, stretched taut across broken ceilings and cracked stone floors like the last strands of a dying web.
Every step Ren took stirred faint echoes — soft, ghostly things that faded almost before he could hear them.
No scavengers.
No Nightkind.
No Woken Dead.
Just silence.
And the ruin, watching.
Always watching.
He moved cautiously through the narrowing corridors, crowbar in hand, every sense straining for danger.
The memory of the altar still burned behind his eyes — the way the hunger had almost overrun him, how easy it would have been to reach out, to accept the change waiting there.
He hadn't.
That had to mean something.
Even if he wasn’t sure what.
Yet.
The shackle at his chest pulsed steadily, a slow, relentless heartbeat.
He could feel the ruin now — not just see the threads or hear the whispers — but feel the weight of it pressing against his mind, his bones.
It wanted something.
Needed something.
And so, apparently, did he.
Hours passed. Or maybe days.
It was impossible to tell underground.
Ren scavenged what he could — scraps of edible fungus growing in old water channels, filtered water from a half-collapsed purifier still clinging stubbornly to life.
Enough to survive.
Barely.
The markings on his skin spread further with each hour.
Not just up his arms now, but across his chest and back — thorned spirals and branching chains coiling like tattoos etched by unseen hands.
They didn’t hurt.
That was the worst part.
They felt natural now.
Like they had always been there, waiting under the surface.
Waiting for permission.
He pulled his jacket tighter around himself and pressed onward.
Deeper into the ruins, he found it.
A place unlike any other he'd seen underground.
A chamber carved into the roots of the dead city — not collapsed, not shattered, but standing whole, untouched by time or ruin.
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At its center stood a statue.
Ten feet tall, carved from black stone veined with faint lines of burning silver.
It depicted a figure wrapped in chains, kneeling, its head bowed, arms outstretched.
The chains dug into its flesh, merging with bone and muscle.
Its face was featureless.
Its body broken.
And yet it knelt with a terrible, silent dignity.
Ren approached slowly, every instinct screaming caution.
The ruin-thread thickened as he neared, pulsing faster, stronger.
The air grew heavy.
Electric.
Alive.
He stopped a few feet from the base of the statue.
The shackle at his chest burned hotter, syncopating with the pulses of ruin around him.
And then — for the first time — the hunger spoke.
Not a whisper.
Not a feeling.
Words.
Clear. Cold. Inescapable.
CHAIN SCORE: 6/50
CATEGORY: INITIATE
Ren staggered, clutching his head.
The words weren't spoken aloud.
They carved themselves directly into his mind, burning behind his eyes.
More followed.
CHAIN SCORE = POWER
POWER = VISIBILITY
VISIBILITY = PREY
He dropped to one knee, gasping.
The statue before him shimmered, shifting subtly — not moving, not alive, but somehow more present.
A guide.
Or a judge.
He wasn’t sure.
More words seared into his skull.
SPREAD RUIN TO GROW.
FEED THE CHAIN TO ADVANCE.
ASCEND OR BE CONSUMED.
Simple.
Brutal.
Inevitable.
Ren knelt there in the cold and the dark, the weight of the ruin pressing against him from all sides, and realized with a hollow, sick certainty:
Survival was no longer enough.
Movement. Breathing. Fighting. Scavenging.
All of it was only delaying the inevitable.
He had been marked from the moment he woke in this dying world.
Marked to either rise...
Or fall.
The statue shifted again, not physically but conceptually — as if the idea of it, the memory of its presence, moved forward.
New words cut across his mind:
SELECTION: FIRST GIFT.
A branching vision split across his mind’s eye.
Two paths.
Two choices.
No third.
No way back.
PATH OF THE HUNTER
-
Heightened Senses: enhanced hearing, sharper vision even in ruin-choked dark, faint ability to sense life through ruin-thread.
PATH OF THE BLADE
-
Physical Enhancement: increased muscle density, faster reflexes, slight durability boost against ruin-mutation attacks.
The hunger inside him howled approval.
Either way, it promised, he would survive longer.
Stronger.
Faster.
Deadlier.
Ren clenched his fists, fingernails biting into palms.
Neither choice was clean.
Both reeked of ruin.
Both pushed him further from the man he'd been — from anything remotely human.
But survival wasn’t a human luxury anymore.
It was a ruinbound necessity.
He rose slowly to his feet, the cracked tiles shifting under his boots.
The statue waited, silent and eternal.
Watching.
Waiting.
Judging.
He made his choice.
Sight first.
Hearing first.
Knowledge before strength.
If he was going to survive — truly survive — he needed to see what hunted him.
To hear what whispered in the dark.
To feel the world moving long before it struck.
PATH OF THE HUNTER.
The change was immediate.
Brutal.
The world peeled open around him.
Sounds sharpened into blades — the drip of water from distant pipes, the scurrying of rats through broken tunnels, the slow grinding moan of ancient stone settling above.
Light and shadow no longer blurred — edges sharpened to razors.
The ruin-thread glowed brighter, flowing like blood through the veins of the dead city.
And more.
A sense he didn’t have a name for.
A tug at the edge of awareness — the faint electric touch of life moving through ruin.
Humans.
Monsters.
Other things.
He could feel them now.
Vaguely. Weakly.
But it was there.
A new survival sense.
A new instinct.
Bought with another piece of his humanity.
The statue pulsed once — a silent acknowledgment — then shattered into ash and ruin-thread, dissolving into the walls and floor.
The shackle on his chest flared hot, then settled into a steady burn.
Ren stood alone in the empty chamber, heart pounding, hands trembling.
Stronger.
Yes.
But more visible now.
The ruin knew him.
The ruin marked him.
The predators hunting the broken veins of the city would feel it.
They would come.
He could already sense faint tugs on the ruin-thread around him — distant disturbances, drawn toward the new light of his existence.
Chainbreakers.
Ruinbound.
Woken gods, maybe.
He didn’t know.
He didn’t want to know.
Not yet.
One step at a time.
One breath after another.
Survive.
Grow.
Choose.
He turned and slipped back into the tunnels, moving faster now, softer, sharper.
The world was larger, darker, sharper than before.
And he would need every advantage to stay ahead of what came next.