He fell without falling.
No wind. No weight. No end.
Only darkness thick and absolute, a velvet ocean without tide or shore. Ji-hoon hovered in it like a thought that had forgotten its owner. He could not tell if his eyes were open or closed the dark did not change. His breath sounded too loud to be real, each inhale a bell tolling in a dead cathedral, each exhale a pale thread that vanished as soon as it was woven.
Am I asleep?
The question drifted outward and did not return.
Time stretched, or perhaps it pooled. He waited, though he could not say for what. A shimmer like distant frost passed through the black once, twice, then not at all, as if the void itself had shivered and decided it would not do that again.
He tried to speak.
"Hello?"
The word did not echo. It simply went away.
Something moved.
Not a sound, not a light pressure. The way the air in a room changes when someone steps through the door behind you. Ji-hoon felt it, the subtle tilt of everything toward a center that had not been there a moment before. The hairs along his arms rose. His fingers curled, seeking a weapon, finding only the memory of one.
Who's there?
The dark blinked.
Two embers opened far away, or very near depth could not be trusted here. They were not eyes and yet they were nothing else ovals of molten gold veined with constellations, patient and older than light. With their opening the void acquired a horizon, then a slope, then the suggestion of scale so enormous his mind refused to measure it.
The gaze found him.
Everything else ceased to exist.
No malice. No kindness. Only recognition the way a mountain might recognize a single snowflake that had once fallen on its shoulder.
Heat bled into the dark. Lines the color of starlight traced themselves around those eyes: an arc like a brow ridge, scalloped plates like clouds frozen into armor, a crown of ridged horns swept back as if carved from night. Each scale that surfaced held a map of silent galaxies, each breath implied a sky that did not belong to this world.
A dragon resolved from the void.
It was wrong to call it large. large was a word for ships and towers. This was a horizon with a heartbeat. Its muzzle alone could have bridged avenues; its tongue was a banner of storm. Wings unfurled without unfurling, and the dark remembered how to be shadow. He felt it looking at him the way dawn looks at candleflame—as something that exists, yes, but only because dawn allows it.
Ji-hoon could not breathe.
His chest worked; no air came. His system thrummed like a trapped moth, pale panes flickering on the edges of his vision and dying before they formed. He tried to will the beastbone spear into his grasp, then Grudge, then anything with an edge; the void ignored him, and so did the dragon.
He should have been afraid.
He was. And yet beneath the fear lay a sensation like standing in a place he had not visited and realizing he had left it only yesterday. Familiarity was the wrong word. This was recognition but not his.
The eyes lowered.
He was no longer in a void. He was a seed held beneath the weight of a mountain. The dragon's pupils narrowed to razors, and color thinned from the world-that-was-not-world until only gold remained. A pulse ran through the dark, struck his sternum, threaded his bones.
His system caught.
[... ... ...]
[—signal unstable—]
[—calibrating anchor—]
The text crawled like frost across glass, letters forming then smearing into light. Another pulse. His ears rang with silence.
[Link detected.]
[Designation: Fragment]
[Observer: —————]
The line after Observer refused to be read. His eyes slid off it; his mind skidded.
The dragon did not speak. But understanding like pressure bled into him: Eternity. Cycle. Witness. The concepts were not words they were architecture, like rooms his thoughts were forced to walk through in a particular order.
He saw
fields of obsidian grass bending beneath a wind that sang the end of things; a tower piercing a sky made of minutes; a man in black standing ankle-deep in the footprints of gods, his shadow full of stars.
gates like wounds that had learned to choose where to bleed.
his own hands, smaller and smaller, until they were not hands at all but a spark in a swirl of dust pressed between a dragon's scales.
The dragon's eyes softened. The gold in them cooled to honey, then to amber caging something that had once been fire. If the void had had air, Ji-hoon would have said it sighed.
A pane of light unfurled clean, vertical, and other. It was not the chalk-white of his usual interface. This radiance was deep and graded, edged in a subtle, regal gold.
[The Crystal watches the Fragment.]
The sentence fell through him like a bell dropped down a well, each word striking a wall he had not known he carried inside himself.
Crystal.
Fragment.
He knew the latter. It had named him once already Fragment of Oblivion the shard of something that had shattered itself to keep watch in a place where watching mattered. The first word he did not know.
"Crystal," he tried, and the void tasted the word with him. "What are you?"
The dragon did not answer. Or perhaps it did, and the answer was simply too large to fit into him. One of its horns tilted infinitesimally, like the nod of a king to a soldier at the edge of a battlefield he would never visit.
His system fluttered again. Gold brightened. The pane multiplied, then stacked into lines as precise as scripture.
[Recognition granted.]
[Accessing legacy protocol]
[Verifying anchor: stable]
[Assessing vessel integrity]
[acceptable.]
Heat wrapped his spine the way a hand might, too large to be human and too careful to be anything else. A current ran from the base of his neck through the notch of his collarbone and unspooled across his ribs like wire.
Pain arrived late thin at first, then widening, then braided with something he refused to call joy.
[Title Acquired: The Divine Being's Successor]
You have been acknowledged by a higher existence.
Effects: Growth rate enhanced. Unique legacy channel established. Certain thresholds may respond to your presence.
Ji-hoon's knees hit a floor that did not exist. He bowed without deciding to, the posture fitting him the way a scabbard fits the first blade it was meant to hold. Somewhere, faintly, he felt his body sweat, breath, the ache that would be lungs if lungs mattered here. The dragon watched him with the patient interest of a mountain considering rain.
Another pane slid over the first.
[Skill Acquired: Dragonization]
Type: Evolving Transformation
Effect: Assume partial draconic aspects. Each stage grants +2× to all base stats. Aspects intensify with each stage.
Duration: Dependent on physical condition and anchor stability.
Cooldown: None.
Initial Status:Locked.
Activation Condition (Stage I): Defeat a dragon-class entity.
His breath caught locked . Not a gift to be used, but a path to be earned. A ladder dropped from a sky he could not yet climb.
He swallowed against a dry throat that was not a throat.
"Why me?" The words were threadbare. They did not deserve an answer; still he asked.
The dragon lowered its head until one eye filled his world. In that gold he saw storms that had died and been reborn, saw cities that had never been built crumble tastefully into a sea that had not learned the word water. The pupil contracted, then widened, the slow pulse of a star remembering it was fire.
Witness, the pressure said again, closer now. Anchor. Continuance.
He thought of his grandparents' hands around a tea cup, of a market square full of smoke and panic, of a chieftain with broken speech dying with surprise in its eyes. He thought of a promise made to soil he had shoveled with his own palms.
"Then watch," he whispered. "But don't expect me to be gentle."
A noise like a smile passed through the dark.
The dragon began to withdraw. Not with haste, not with reluctance. Simply with decision. Its wings did not beat the void remembered it had never been air, and so there was nothing to move. The gold dimmed by degrees. The scales receded into suggestion, then into conjecture. The eyes lingered last, patient as dawn, then closed.
The dark folded in on itself, and Ji-hoon fell the rest of the way.
—
He woke with his heart already running.
The room was black except for the square of window shape made pale by a moon. His sheets clung to him, damp. The ache of the fight with the chieftain had slept when he had; it woke with him too, a chorus under the drum of his pulse.
He sat up, lungs dragging air like a net. His hands shook. He flexed them until the tremor steadied, then exhaled slowly and let his vision rise where the habit had trained it to go.
Light obeyed.
His interface opened like a book.
Not the usual pallor. Gold edged everything, as if the panes had been passed through light that had learned manners.
[Title] The Divine Being's Successor
Acknowledged by a higher existence.
Effects:
• Legacy Link: A persistent, low latency channel to the witnessing authority.
• Accelerated Growth: Experience and comprehension thresholds adapt upward.
• Threshold Presence: Certain seals, arrays, and wills may respond.
He scrolled no, that was the wrong verb. He allowed the next pane to arrive.
[Skill] Dragonization
Type: Evolving Transformation
Stage Aspects (preview):
• Stage I (Eyes): Pupillary gilding; heat mirage aura; perception dilation.
• Stage II (Breath): Thermal bloom; exhalant ignition control.
• Stage III (Veins): Conductive marrow; muscle fiber conversion.
...
Stage Bonus: +2× to all base stats per stage while active.
Duration: Condition‑bound; strain accumulates beyond safe window.
Cooldown: None. (Warning: Overuse may damage anchor.)
Initial Status: Locked.
Activation Condition (Stage I): Defeat a dragon class entity.
A laugh escaped him, small and disbelieving. He pressed the heel of his hand to his brow until a starburst burned there.
"Of course," he murmured. "Of course it wouldn't be easy."
He let the panes fade. The room reclaimed itself low dresser, the chair with his folded jacket, the spear propped where the wall met shadow. He reached for it without thinking and felt steadier when his fingers found the leather wrapped grip.
The night listened. Somewhere beyond the window an insect tried a song and forgot the next note.
He lay back down and stared at the ceiling until the ceiling remembered it was only dark. Sleep did not come again, but something like it settled a lean, alert stillness he had worn before a first hunt.
The Crystal watches the Fragment.
He rolled the sentence over until the edges did not cut. If Fragment was him and it was then the Crystal was the witnessing authority behind the dragon's eyes, or the lens those eyes looked through, or the name the void used when it tried to be kind. He was not scholar enough to decide. He suspected even scholars would only invent better ways to be wrong.
It did not matter.
Acknowledgment had weight, but it was not armor.
The morning would come. Gates would breathe. Men and women would wake to blue panes and think the world a game until it ate someone they loved. He would hunt, and he would craft, and he would keep two old people safe as long as the world allowed such luxuries.
And somewhere ahead of him a requirement. A condition written like a dare.
Defeat a dragon class entity.
He exhaled once more and let his eyes close, not for sleep but for inventory. Numbers arranged themselves, calm as utensils in a kitchen drawer. He tucked fear where it belonged near the front where he could find it quickly, not at the bottom where it could rot.
"Watch, then," he said into the quiet. "Crystal. Whatever you are."
The room did not answer. The night did not shift. But for an instant the gold edge of his panes brightened, as if something on the far side of a sky had nodded.
Ji-hoon turned on his side, one hand on the spear, and waited for the kind of dawn that only comes after you have decided to do something difficult.
At the margin of sleep, the dragon's eye bloomed once more no image, only impression. He felt the heat of a breath that had cooled worlds and warmed graves.
A final line etched itself where the dark met his pulse.
[Observation retained.]
[Proceed, Fragment.]
He did not smile. But the smallest part of him the part that had learned to be stubborn before it learned to be afraid bared its teeth back.
And the night, which had already been watching, kept watching.