The awakening spread like dawn across a broken world—
not with light,
not with hope,
but with a trembling exhale shared by thousands of bodies rising at once.
Every hospital, clinic, relief shelter, field tent, and improvised ward across the continents shuddered with the same impossible rhythm. It wasn't a quake. It wasn't machinery.
It was breath.
A synchronized inhalation by people who should have been dying.
Or unconscious.
Or already dead.
The first Hosts rose.
And the world felt it.
The Moment of Genesis
In the Mumbai trauma ward, where Dr. Rao still stood paralyzed by the metallic tears of his once-dead patient, every other wounded body around him convulsed.
Monitors flared.
Oxygen tanks hissed.
Broken ventilators surged to life with no power source.
Rao's hands shook as he backed into a corner, eyes wide, watching in mute disbelief as nineteen patients—some with shattered spines, some with missing limbs, some who had no pulse minutes ago—sat upright.
Slowly.
