Kai sat cross-legged in perfect stillness, spine straight, shoulders unburdened. Around him was the quiet void of his inner world, his soulprint — a liminal, dimensionless space rendered in stark, eternal contrast. No sky. No walls. No source of light. Yet everything was visible.
The ground stretched endlessly in every direction, smooth and seamless, carved from a single sheet of dark marble. It mirrored nothing. No stars, no feet, no self. Only shadowed gleam — the kind of floor that didn't reflect your body, but instead hinted at the weight of your soul.
He inhaled.
"Properties," he said aloud, the word a trigger.
The air around him shimmered. A silent, HUD-like interface bloomed into view before him — Sovereign's system.
---
Name: Malakai Apolix
Alias: Fateless Sloth
Description:
Fate fears you… but you choose not to act.
You are the pause between consequence and chaos — Fate refuses to include you in fear.
And when you finally move, the world learns why it should have begged you to stay still.
Brand: None
Burden: Can't ask for help
---
Boons:
– Vicarious Shell
Redirects physical damage to Velnix, his spirit guardian. Pain silently bypasses Kai's nerves, transferring to the wraith.
– Residual Step
Allows Kai to short-range teleport behind a target, leaving behind a shimmering afterimage to disorient them.
Activation: Snap your fingers with your thumb.
---
Soul Item:
– Ever-Lasting Smoke
A small, worn cigarette pack that never runs out. Origin unclear. May or may not be magical. Comforts Kai in moments of anxiety.
---
Spirit Guardian:
– Velnix
A spiraled, mist-born entity resembling an obsidian wraith. Limbless unless needed. Eyes appear when danger draws near.
Silent. Elegant. Protective to the point of cruelty.
Guardian Boon – Burden Mirage:
Pain transferred to Velnix is stored, then redirected at enemies.
Emotional pain manifests as dread, confusion, despair.
Physical pain converts to equivalent injury projected on targets.
---
Kai exhaled. The display faded like breath on glass.
He stood slowly, boots making no sound on the dark marble. The emptiness didn't bother him — if anything, it felt familiar. Honest. Not trying to be anything it wasn't. No lies, no masks, no systems pretending to care.
He walked. No direction. Just movement for its own sake.
And then he saw it — a faint light, impossibly distant, yet burning steady like a dying star.
He narrowed his eyes. It didn't glow on anything. It simply existed — a perfect contradiction in a world of nothing.
Without thinking, he began moving toward it.
Each step made the air denser. Like walking through pressure, thought, memory. His mind wandered.
The light grew clearer. It wasn't a flame, or a sun, or a bulb. It was a single flickering workbench suspended in the void, lit by a dull golden glow beneath it.
Something about it felt... sacred. Not in the religious sense. But in the personal sense — like someone had stolen a piece of him from the future and left it here, waiting.
He reached out, fingers hovering over the surface of the bench.
A familiar voice rang out — unfeeling, mechanical, yet intimate from how many times it had spoken to him in crisis.
[SOVEREIGN NOTICE:]
This location contains a sealed Trial Node.
Trial: The Workshop Layer
Purpose: Unlock creative autonomy within Soulprint.
Warning: Progress is irreversible. Failure results in fragmentation .
[Would you like to begin?]
Kai stared at the prompt. His hands twitched. He knew Sovereign didn't lie. If it said fragmentation, it meant his identity would literally be split — cracked at the root.
But he still said it.
"…Yeah."
[TRIAL ACCEPTED.]
[Quest given.]
Kai stood alone in the center of his soulprint — a vast expanse of black marble that stretched into a foggy nothingness, the edges lost in quiet swirl and shadow. The air was weightless, cool. His breath didn't fog. His footsteps made no sound. But something was coming. He felt it.
Then the tremor hit.
A pulse cracked through the floor beneath him, not violently, but with purpose. Lines of emerald light veined outward, curling like circuitry before fading. And ahead — from the void — three stone pillars rose.
They ascended in silence, one after the other, as if summoned by his very presence.
Each bore a single offering:
— A small green orb, pulsing softly.
— A blade, sheathed in glimmering silver.
— And a glowing white orb, radiating steady warmth.
They hovered just above their respective platforms, humming with quiet energy.
Then came the voice — not from around him, but from within him.
[CHOOSE YOUR WORKSHOP.]
[Guardian Workshop]
[Boon Workshop]
[Soul Item Workshop]
[Warning: This choice is permanent and cannot be traded later.]
Kai tilted his head. His fingers twitched.
He could feel Velnix watching, even without form — lingering behind his spine like mist ready to move.
'Velnix will love this… I wonder how it works,' Kai thought, lips quirking slightly at the green orb.
He stepped forward and touched it.
The moment his palm hovered above the orb, it vanished into his hand, and a heavy pulse ripped outward — this time with force. The other two options exploded into fragments, raining harmless light across the marble and fading into the fog.
[GUARDIAN WORKSHOP SELECTED.]
[LOCKING OTHER PATHS.]
He exhaled.
The marble shifted beneath his feet. Seamless tile split and reformed. From the blackness, something began to build — not with sound, but with sensation.
A workshop emerged from the marble itself, sculpted as if the soulprint had been waiting to show him this all along. It resembled a forge and a temple — dark walls rimmed with spiraling runes, glowing faintly blue. Tools hovered in midair: chisels of light, sculpting gloves, memory-tethers, ethereal screens. Every tool vibrated faintly with possibility, reactive to will, not touch.
In the center of the room floated a spiraled mist-cocoon — a manifestation point for Velnix.
Above it hovered a status field:
[Guardian State: — shapeless]
[Primary Form: Incomplete]
[Edit Permissions: GRANTED]
The Guardian Workshop pulsed with Kai's heartbeat, syncing perfectly to the rhythm of his soulprint. A sleek obsidian console materialized near the entrance, its glowing interface unfolding like a living script across the air. Dozens of categorized menus shimmered in and out of view —
Instinct Modulation, Form Adjustment, Combat Merges, Memory Sync, Bond Conditioning, Past Hosts Archive, and even risky protocols like Forge Link and Rebirth Attempt. Each category offered deeper levels of customization for Velnix's behavior, shape, bond intensity, and combat utility, though some options flickered—locked not by Sovereign, but by Velnix's own will. The console hummed as if listening to Kai's intent, waiting.
'All these settings can be created by meditation but this is different it's system is like a build a bear or something'
Kais thoughts made him chuckle.
But at the bottom of every page, one phrase was carved in light:
[Every gain costs soul gems or demon cores]
Kai stood in the center of it all — not overwhelmed, just still.
Here, inside the deepest layer of his own soul, he now had the tools to shape not just himself, but the guardian who had protected him since the beginning.
And Velnix, silent but near, pulsed faintly in response — approving.