I awoke to the sound of rain.
At first, it was soft—just a gentle patter against the leaves, like a whisper coaxing me out of sleep. But the drizzle grew heavier, turning into a relentless downpour that drowned out every sound in the forest. The steady hum of insects faded, replaced by the rhythmic hiss of rainfall striking soil and foliage.
Cold water seeped through my clothes, washing away the dried blood that clung to me. The dark stains spread thin, bleeding into the earth until there was no trace of the battle that had nearly ended me. My body ached, and for a brief, fragile moment, I just sat there—listening to the rain.
Then the chill set in.
The wind cut through the soaked fabric of my shirt, and I shivered, wrapping my arms around myself. "It's freezing…" I muttered under my breath. Each drop stung against my skin, sharp and unrelenting. The forest was cloaked in a low, rolling fog, soft and gray, smothering the horizon. The trees loomed like silhouettes in a dream, their massive roots twisting across the ground like veins. From their branches hung long strands of vines that swayed with every gust, glistening under the downpour.
The melody of the rain almost lulled me back into sleep. Almost.
But I couldn't afford that luxury.
"I need to find shelter," I whispered. "It's too cold."
I reached for the amethyst around my neck—the makeshift necklace I had created the night before. Its jagged surface was cool to the touch, pulsing faintly with the trace of mana I'd woven into it. It felt heavier now, as if the stone remembered everything I had poured into it. Haley's memory. My fear. My desperation.
I forced myself to stand. My legs trembled beneath me, and pain flared in my side where the mutant's claws had cut deep. The wound had stopped bleeding, but every step sent a dull throb through my ribs.
The rain blurred everything ahead into streaks of gray and green. I could barely see, but sitting here wasn't an option. I needed something—anything—to patch myself up, and shelter from this storm.
Going back to where I'd fought the frog-like mutant wasn't even a consideration. That place was tainted with the memory of the fight, and I wasn't eager to see if more of those creatures were lurking nearby. I was weak, bleeding, and unarmed. If something else attacked me, I wouldn't survive.
"Why is this so damn difficult?" I said, more to the rain than to myself. "All I wanted was to go home… sit on my couch, feed Goldy, play with the dog."
The thought stung. Home. It didn't even feel like a real place anymore—just a dream my mind refused to let go of. I blinked hard, swallowing the knot in my throat.
But dreams didn't matter right now. Surviving did.
So I walked.
I didn't know where I was going, only that staying still meant dying of cold. My shoes sank into the mud as I trudged forward, the ground uneven and slick. I kept my eyes on the path ahead—or what I thought was a path—but it was like the forest had no sense of direction. Everything looked the same.
Still, something began to bother me. The ground wasn't natural. Between the patches of dirt and roots, I noticed slivers of something solid beneath the mud. At first, I thought they were stones, but when I brushed some of the grime away, I saw what looked like broken slabs of concrete.
And not just one. They were scattered all around me.
"Concrete?" I muttered.
I crouched down, tracing my fingers across the jagged surface. The lines were sharp, mechanical. Artificial. My gaze drifted further out, noticing how the ground seemed… patchy. Like mismatched tiles from different places shoved together.
The soil's color shifted every few feet—from dark, wet loam to pale sand to clay. It was chaotic. Wrong.
"This shouldn't be possible…" I whispered.
If it had really been three and a half years since the event—if the planet had somehow been reshaped—there was no way an entire forest could have grown this fast and perfectly overtaken a manmade structure. It looked as though the world had been rearranged. As if someone had torn the planet apart and stitched it back together without caring how the pieces fit.
An uneasy chill ran down my spine that had nothing to do with the cold.
I stopped walking and shut my eyes for a moment, letting the rain beat down on me. "Neo," I said aloud, voice trembling slightly. "Pull up the map."
For a second, nothing happened. Then a faint blue light flickered at the edge of my vision, and a holographic interface projected across my sight. A small window blinked open, followed by a loading icon.
Finally, a message appeared—
ERROR: MAP DATA UNAVAILABLE. SYSTEM UPDATE IN PROGRESS.
A wave of frustration bubbled up inside me. "You have got to be kidding me."
"Update in progress," Neo's voice repeated, calm and robotic.
"Yeah, no kidding," I snapped. "What's even left to update?"
The answer hit me before Neo could respond.
The world.
The entire world had changed.
The continents, the ecosystems, the very molecular structure of the air—it was all different. The data stored in Neo's systems was outdated, based on a version of Earth that no longer existed. The forests. The terrain. The mana itself. Everything had been rewritten.
I looked around again, and for the first time since I woke up, I felt truly lost. Not just geographically, but existentially.
What was this place?
Was it still Earth?
Or something entirely new—something reborn from the ashes of the old world?
The rain continued to fall, soaking into the amethyst at my throat. It shimmered faintly, catching a flash of light that wasn't from the sun—because there was no sun. Just a faint, dim glow behind the clouds, like the sky itself was pretending to remember daylight.