Elian Frost stood at the corner of a street both familiar and strange.The city shimmered in pale morning light—cleaner air, decaying towers, no trace of the blood or fire he remembered.
For a moment, he just stared, dazed.
Before his death, he had been a celebrated B-rank Psionic healer.
He could mend broken limbs and knit muscle back together with a touch.
His clients had been the sons and daughters of the Core Families.
He hadn't laid a hand on the filthy, unshaven soldiers of the outer zones for years.
But his partner back then—his official partner—had been one of them.
A C-rank warrior.
Damian.
The thought soured his mood at once.
That fleeting trace of nostalgia vanished.
Now, reborn, he was only E-rank—barely awakened, barely useful.
His healing could close a scratch, maybe stop a little bleeding.
Less miracle, more living bandage—a patch barely worth the name.
He looked down at the small cloth pouch in his hand.
Inside were low-grade crystal cores, dull and cloudy.
Damian had given them to him a week before the confession—as his allowance.
Elian held the pouch between two fingers as if it might stain his skin.
Twenty-two cores.
He hadn't even seen such cheap material in over a decade.
Whatever warmth he'd felt toward Damian.
Always low-grade. Always small.
That was Damian—talking about the future, handing over scraps.
The kind of man who could give you a home no bigger than a hundred square meters and call it love.
However, Cassian D'Armand—the man he was meant to be with— had once given him a high-grade core as their token:
flawless, luminous, priceless, its inner energy swirling like light trapped in ice.
A treasure worthy of a Core heir.
Elian tilted his chin, sneering.
Now he looked down at Damian's pitiful gift: twenty-two low-tier cores clinking in a plastic pouch, worth barely twenty-two thousand credits at the exchange rate.
The bag looked cheap under the fluorescent lights.
He stepped into the Core Exchange Center, the sterile light slicing across his face, catching the tired scuffs on his shoes.
When he came out a few minutes later, the credits were in his account, and even the faint ache of memory had vanished.
He turned toward the rental agency down the street.
He was reborn; heaven itself must have chosen him.
Without Damian, his new life would finally begin.
And far away, high in the mountains, the earth trembled between two cliffs.
Inside a battered truck caught in that narrow pass, Damian was about to move—
just as the ground beneath them split open without a sound—a silent roar only their bones could hear.