— Novalis Sector, Maximum Security Penitentiary —
This place cages sinners so vile that even the air refuses to breathe around them.
Minimum sentence: twenty years.
Maximum sentence: death.
The noon sun sliced through the blinds, piercing the dim monitoring room.
A wall flickered with a ghostly blue matrix of surveillance feeds—
each screen, a window into a cage of sin.
Officer Aveline Ward bit the cap of her pen, eyes drifting across the displays.
Everything was routine—
until it wasn't.
Hiss—
Every screen erupted into static at once.
A piercing screech tore through the air,
like a thousand needles stabbing her eardrums.
Aveline flinched, scrambling to adjust the frequency,
but the chaos refused to fade.
Then, as suddenly as it began, the feeds snapped back to life.
Her breath caught.
Above the prison, something churned—
a writhing stream of black energy twisting in the sunlight.
It wasn't smoke.
It wasn't cloud.
It was as if countless sentient particles of shadowed dust
were writhing, crawling, and coalescing into form.
And then—
as if called by something unseen—
they surged toward one place:
the deepest cell in the penitentiary,
where no light had ever touched.
There, awaiting execution,
was a single prisoner—
Eren Kai.
---
— Three Days Ago · The Judgment —
"The defendant, Eren Kai—
accused of rape and the brutal murder of thirty-two victims.
The evidence is irrefutable. The crimes—unspeakable.
This court hereby sentences you to death.
Transfer to maximum security shall be immediate, pending execution."
The judge's voice rang cold and final, like iron locking a coffin.
A dead silence swallowed the courtroom.
In the defendant's chair, the young Eren sat motionless.
His eyes were dry wells, reflecting no light—only the weight of silence.
He simply bowed his head,
as if he had long accepted that the world no longer had a place for him.
Across the room, on the victims' side,
Lyra Veyne's eyes were bloodshot, her fists trembling white.
Tears and hatred tangled as she glared at him,
her stare sharp enough to set him ablaze.
As if feeling that heat,
Eren's lips twitched, revealing a fleeting, fractured expression—
pain woven from guilt... and confusion.
---
—Seven Nights Ago · The Manor Massacre —
Eren Kai had once been a rising star.
A top graduate in Bioengineering from Novalis University,
he was handpicked by HelixPharm, one of the largest pharmaceutical corporations on the continent.
His research had already earned the company major breakthroughs—
and the admiration of its young CEO, Lyra Veyne.
Just days earlier,
to honor his achievements,
Lyra's father—Lucien Veyne, patriarch of the powerful Veyne family—
had personally invited him to a private banquet at their estate.
That night,
Eren drowned his sorrows over a failed relationship.
He awoke at dawn—
naked, disoriented, lying beside a trembling Lyra Veyne.
Her scream cut through the air as she shoved him away,
her voice cracking between fury and tears:
"Monster! Stay away from me!"
Eren's mind was fog. He had no memory of what had happened.
Before he could speak,
armed police stormed the room and tackled him to the floor.
Only later did he learn the truth—
the Veyne family, all thirty members and their household staff,
had been slaughtered in a single night.
Lyra was the sole survivor.
And the security footage—
it showed everything.
And the killer's face on the footage—was unmistakably his.
Lyra fell to the floor,
shrieking for his life to end. The officers restrained her—otherwise, she'd have torn him apart with her bare hands.
But only Eren knew the truth.
He had been framed.
From start to finish, he was caught in an invisible snare.
He couldn't comprehend—
what force could wipe out a powerful family,
rewrite evidence,
and choose him—a nameless orphan—as the scapegoat?
Countless questions burned in his mind,
but he spoke none of them.
No one would believe him anyway.
So he waited for the verdict—
like a man watching his own story reach its final page.
---
— Three Years Together · Betrayal's Kiss—
Deep down, he knew where the first domino had fallen.
Seraphine Lark—
the woman he had loved for three years.
"Eren, it's over.
I'm done being poor.
Lucien Drax—heir to the Drax family—has money, power, a future.
You? You can't even afford a car.
I won't be your burden anymore."
Her words, ten days ago, were sharp, almost beautiful—
—precisely because they killed something inside him.
Eren once believed love was the purest thing in the world.
Now he knew —
it could rot,
tainted by greed and power.
And now, here he was—
condemned to death.
Every move on the board had already been played.
As the verdict echoed in his ears,
a single, ancient proverb whispered through his mind:
"Beyond the light lies the shadow that devours it."
---
— Solitary Confinement · Awakening of the Sigil —
The cell was as narrow as a coffin—cold enough to bite through bone,
a black hole swallowing even the faintest trace of light.
The air reeked of damp rot and rust.
The chill was almost tangible, like Death breathing softly against his neck.
He tried to move—
the iron shackles ground against his wrists.
A jolt of pain lanced up his arm like an electric current.
Warm blood slipped between his fingers, dripping onto the stone floor.
He opened his mouth, wanting to scream—
but it came out as a dry, bitter laugh:
"What's the point...? I'm already a dead man walking."
Slowly, he lifted his wounded hand.
Around his neck hung a small obsidian pendant—the only thing he'd kept since childhood.
Whenever he'd asked Granny Lucy at the orphanage about it,
she'd just chuckle and say, "Some things choose you, child."
Then, suddenly—
A searing heat burst from his palm.
The edges of the pendant began to glow—dim at first, then blinding.
The light swelled and twisted,
until twin streams of sapphire and silver energy entwined like living fire,
shooting straight between his brows.
Silence fell.
His consciousness was dragged into a boundless void.
At the center floated a blurred pattern; no matter how hard he focused, its outline could not be discerned.
Just as he was about to give up,
something began to emerge from the chaos—
a black disc ringed with a faint white halo.
It resembled an Eastern Taiji, yet also the fabled seal of ancient Greece.
The surface was carved with countless inscriptions—
some like Sumerian cuneiform, others like ancient Eastern seal script—
light and shadow pulsing through them like the breath of a galaxy.
Then, the symbols converged, folding inward until only three lines remained:
Obsidian Sigil,
Feasts on sin,
Burns with evil.
Eren's pupils constricted.
"What... what is that pattern? And this Sigil—what is it?"
Before he could react, a flood of knowledge crashed into his mind—
not just facts, but the echo of an entire civilization:
- The art of channeling energy.
- The craft of alchemy and potion-making.
- The blueprints of runes and geometry.
- The bridge between herbs and modern science.
- The patterns of stars woven with code.
- The link between thought and quantum light.
Symbols, equations, and ancient words spiraled together—
East and West, tradition and technology,
merging into a harmonious, pulsating resonance.
"This... this is unbelievable."
Even someone as composed as Eren could not hide his awe.
It felt as if a universal database had been unlocked within his mind—
no power required, no machine connection,
just thought, and access.
This wasn't a gift.
It was a miracle.
His breath quickened.
"Could it be... the sigil reacted to my blood?"
Shock gave way to a blazing determination.
With this, he might not only survive—
he could clear his name...
and reclaim everything that had been stolen.
Eren forced down the storm of emotions and summoned a cultivation technique from his "mental database"—Meta Dipper, a method for refining inner energy.
As for the origin of its name, he had no time to wonder.
Following the instructions for the First Layer, he immediately sat cross-legged and closed his eyes,
sinking his awareness into the Root Ocean, the deepest energy center of his body.
As the Obsidian Sigil's light flared,
the entire prison seemed to awaken.
Black mist oozed from the prison's shadows—guilt, hatred, sickness, malice—
all drawn toward the solitary cell like a rising tide.
Eren felt the mist pierce his skin, scorching through his veins, reshaping muscle and bone.
Every nerve burned, every cell trembled.
Then he understood—
this technique allowed him to absorb corrupted energy
and refine it into pure vitality.
He could resist decay... even heal others.
His heart surged with hope.
He was about to dive deeper into cultivation—
Clank—
The heavy iron door creaked open.
Eren's eyes snapped open.
A figure stood in the backlight—slender, still, almost unreal.
The sunlight traced her form in gold.
For a heartbeat, even the darkness seemed to hold its breath.