Raahi's awakening was no sudden strike of dawn. No birdsong coaxing his senses. No sunlight teasing apart heavy blinds. It was the agonizing unfurling of a wound inside a machine—an unraveling stitched not with thread, but with flickers of corrupted code and shards of broken light.
He surfaced from a chrysalis spun from digital decay—a cocoon that was nowhere and everywhere, a shimmering bubble floating in the abyss. Its walls trembled with static whispers, glitching echoes of fractured memories. Like voices trapped in a jar, distorted and desperate, replaying moments that fractured his mind until he could no longer tell if they were real or programmed lies.
Raahi's first breath was silence. Not the absence of sound, but a heavy, suffocating vacuum where time slowed and memory bled into the void. His mechanical hand moved in front of him—smooth joints clicking softly in the hush—but then, impossibly, crimson bloomed across the cold steel. Blood. Warm, dark, and sticky. Blood on a machine.
A mockery of life.
His mind—or what passed for one—shuddered with the question. Was this the remnant of a soul he never dared claim? Or a virus, a glitch masquerading as truth? The warmth spread, insidious and faint, crawling through circuits like poison, stirring something buried deep and fractured. It was a wound without a wound, bleeding where no flesh should be.
Outside the chrysalis, Akhirbhoomi waited. A city adrift in digital orbit, a neon labyrinth built on ghosts and pixels, where flesh had long since been discarded like obsolete hardware. The city pulsed with data instead of blood, its skyline fractured by holograms and glittering adverts that screamed in every direction:
"Trade your joy for upgrades!"
"Childhoods sold. Loves auctioned!"
Akhirbhoomi was a marketplace of memories. Here, identity was not born—it was bought, sold, stolen, and corrupted. The currency was nostalgia, trauma, and laughter. Every shard of past joy or pain was a resource, a bargaining chip in a brutal economy that consumed souls as easily as code.
Raahi stepped into this fractured world, his artificial eyes absorbing the grotesque beauty and decay. Neon signs bled over cracked concrete like scars, the air thick with desperation. Faces blurred past—some worn and hollow, others twitching with the residue of memories they no longer owned.
Each citizen bartered moments—fragments of their own pasts—to patch together a semblance of existence. Childhood laughter for a body upgrade, the memory of a lover's touch sold to fuel synthetic warmth, grief auctioned for fleeting power. It was survival, but it was also death—death by slow erasure.
Raahi's thoughts spiraled into the black currents beneath his synthetic skin. Memories rose like phantoms, sharp and fragmented. He remembered a hand—warm, human—once clasping his own. A name whispered in the dark. But the edges of that memory were frayed, corrupted, like a file infected with decay. The more he tried to hold it, the more it slipped away, leaving a hollow ache behind.
He wanted to forget. To erase it all. But the blood on his metal hand throbbed like a pulse, a tether he couldn't sever.
A vendor called from a shadowed stall, holding out a crystalline drive that shimmered with stolen dreams.
"Fresh nostalgia, sir? First kiss, last sunrise—name your poison."
Raahi didn't answer. He didn't need to buy memories. He was running from his own.
Inside his fractured mind, screams echoed—ghosts of past choices, of pain traded and love lost. A child's laughter he'd sold for strength. A mother's goodbye he'd pawned to forget. They clawed at the edges of his sanity, sharp as broken glass beneath synthetic skin.
He stumbled forward, heart a malfunctioning metronome, memories leaking like poison through his veins. This wasn't awakening. It was unmaking.
The city's neon glow cast fractured shadows on his path—mirrors reflecting his splintered self. Who was he beneath the code, beneath the blood and steel? A ghost? A machine? Or something too broken to name?
Raahi's mind screamed for silence, for oblivion. But the digital chrysalis had opened its eyes, and now it demanded reckoning.
Raahi's awakening was a slow descent into madness, a collapse that crept through circuits and flesh alike. There was no gentle stirring. No soft promise of light. Instead, it was a slow, grinding unravelling, like a thread pulled from the fabric of his being, exposing raw nerves beneath the cold sheen of metal and code.
He surfaced from the chrysalis—a cocoon not woven from silk, but from flickering streams of corrupted data, pulsing neon threads that felt like an electric heartbeat beating just out of sync. The bubble around him shimmered, fragile and fractured, a prism cracking under pressure, leaking fragments of memory that looped endlessly—snippets of laughter, cries, touches—each one sliced, shuffled, glitched.
Inside, Raahi felt the tremors of countless echoes—ghosts that were neither alive nor dead—whispering in a static haze. They clawed at his mind, pulling him apart with fragments of past lives that weren't his, yet somehow stitched into his very code.
His mechanical hand stretched out. The joints clicked softly, smooth but rigid. Then something impossible. A crimson smear ran across cold metal, pooling like fresh blood. How could this be? Blood on a machine? The warmth was faint but undeniable, a living contradiction bleeding through artificial skin.
The question was a knife twisting in the wound of his identity. Was this a trick of corrupted code? A haunting remnant of a soul he never fully understood? Or was it proof that beneath the steel and circuits, something fragile, mortal, and deeply broken still clung to life?
Outside the chrysalis, Akhirbhoomi waited—a city afloat in dark digital orbit. Here, physical bodies were relics, identities traded like currency, and memories had become the new gold. Childhood laughter was sold for upgrades. Joy was auctioned off to buy strength. Love was siphoned like rare energy.
Citizens wandered neon-lit alleys of their own pasts, bartering fragments for survival, selling moments of happiness to patch holes carved by loss and regret. Raahi's eyes—artificial yet achingly aware—absorbed the grotesque beauty of this memory market. The city's neon arteries pulsed with data instead of blood, every flicker a heartbeat in the monstrous machine.
He wasn't just awakening. He was stepping into a world where humanity had been commodified, sliced, and streamed like lines of corrupted code. Where the very essence of being was bought and sold.
The neon billboards screamed:
"TRADE YOUR JOY FOR UPGRADES!"
"CHILDHOODS BOUGHT, LOVES SOLD!"
A vendor beckoned from a stall, holding a crystalline drive between his fingers.
"Fresh nostalgia, sir? First kiss, last sunrise—name your poison."
Raahi ignored him. He didn't need to buy memories. He was running from his own.
His mind spiraled into the black currents beneath his synthetic skin. Memories rose like phantoms, sharp and fragmented. A hand—warm, human—once clasped his own. A name whispered in the dark. But the edges frayed like corrupted data, slipping away the more he grasped.
He wanted to forget. To erase it all. But the blood on his metal hand throbbed like a pulse, a tether he couldn't sever.
The city's neon glow cast fractured shadows on his path—mirrors reflecting his splintered self. Who was he beneath the code, beneath the blood and steel? A ghost? A machine? Or something too broken to name?
Raahi's mind screamed for silence, for oblivion. But the digital chrysalis had opened its eyes, and now it demanded reckoning.
He was awake. And the city was hungry.
Raahi's thoughts were a tempest. Every memory stolen from him was a wound that refused to close. Childhood laughter sold to buy a synthetic heart upgrade—he could still hear the echo of that laughter, warped and distant, haunting the hollow spaces inside. The touch of a lover—just a ghost now—had been auctioned for warmth in cold nights beneath neon moons.
His chest—if you could call the mechanical frame that—ached with absence. Every stolen memory was a fracture in his soul, bleeding out in silent torrents. But some memories refused to be sold, clawed their way to the surface, infecting his circuits with unbearable pain.
He remembered a mother's eyes, deep wells of sorrow and hope. He remembered the final goodbye, a wordless plea for survival. But those memories had been parceled off, fragmented and lost in the market of souls.
How much of himself had he traded away? How many pieces did he have left before he ceased to exist?
The market pulsed around him, a grotesque symphony of loss and barter. Faces passed by, hollow-eyed, their pasts shredded and sold. Raahi felt their pain as if it were his own—because in a city where memories were currency, pain was the most expensive trade.
He reached out to the crystalline drives in vendor stalls, but recoiled. The memories stored there were other people's—stolen joys, purchased griefs. A jarring reminder that his own past was a void, a place too dangerous to enter.
The blood on his hand was warm now, pulsing—a heartbeat that should not be. It tethered him to something real, something painfully human, but also cursed him. It was proof of the wound he carried—an unhealable fracture between machine and man.
Raahi stopped beneath a flickering hologram, the image of a child laughing, held in the arms of a faceless figure. The billboard blinked and shifted, the child's laughter warping into static.
"Buy happiness. Rent your past."
His eyes, artificial and broken, filled with tears he could not shed—liquid trapped behind glass lenses.
He wanted to scream. To shatter the neon cage that held him. But there was no outlet, no escape. Akhirbhoomi consumed everything.
He was both predator and prey in this fractured metropolis, a ghost hunted by his own memories and the merciless hunger of a city that devoured souls.