Seeking The Unknown

‎A boy wakes up in a cellar. No name. No memory. Only a collar around his neck and blood on his head. Nineteen other children stand around him, eyes shut, silent, like statues arranged by someone else's hand. ‎That night, a voice answers inside his mind. ‎ ‎"Axiom. System designation. Active." ‎ ‎Axiom gives him knowledge, not comfort. A floor plan. A choice. A way out. He takes it, and by morning, he is gone from the mansion, alone in a forest built to kill the people who enter it. ‎ ‎He learns fast, because the forest does not wait. He hunts. He builds. He breathes in a fixed pattern, over and over, chasing a strength called Qi. Axiom gives him functions, tools, and cold, useful silence whenever he asks for more than it wants to give. ‎ ‎"Why won't you answer me?" he asks once. ‎ ‎Axiom does not reply. It never explains itself. It only gives what it decides he needs. ‎ ‎Then one memory returns, and it is not Axiom's. ‎ ‎A room. A lamp. A voice, warm and sure. "You have it. The talent. I don't say that to everyone." ‎ ‎He does not know who spoke those words. He does not know why the memory came back on its own, with no pressure behind his eyes, no cold certainty. For the first time since the cellar, something about him did not come from Axiom. ‎ ‎Years pass inside a place where time does not move the same way. He fights. He dies, again and again, in a space where death costs him nothing but memory. He grows stronger, stage by stage, but every answer only brings more questions. Who built Axiom. Why him. Who was he before the collar. ‎ ‎He has not forgotten the nineteen children either. He left them standing in the dark, and the promise he made them stays with him, quiet but constant, the same way the memory does. ‎ ‎His goal is simple to say and hard to reach: find out who he was, and go back for what he left behind. --- Hi! I have so many plans for this the more I have harder for me to put it all. This story is going to be on hiatus for a few days. ‎