The desert had no mercy, but it had plenty of corpses.
Eiden walked barefoot across white sand that should have burned his feet to blisters but somehow didn't. The twin suns hung overhead like disapproving eyes, casting double shadows that twisted and overlapped with each step he took. He'd been walking for hours—or maybe days, it was impossible to tell in a place where time felt more like a suggestion than a rule—and the landscape refused to change.
Just sand. Just sun. Just silence.
And bones.
So many bones.
They jutted from the dunes like the ribs of some titanic beast, bleached white and carved with symbols that hurt to look at directly. Some were clearly human—femurs and skulls and the delicate fans of finger bones. Others were... not. Too large, too angular, with joints that bent in impossible directions.
Divine bones, Eiden realized with the same inexplicable certainty that had let him recognize the godling. These were the remains of gods.
"Gods can die," he murmured, kneeling beside a skull the size of a car. It had three eye sockets arranged in a triangle, and teeth that looked more like crystallized light than actual bone. "Or at least, they can be forgotten."
He reached out to touch it.
The moment his fingers made contact, something jolted through him—not electricity, but memory. Fragmented images slammed into his consciousness: a crowded temple, incense thick in the air, hundreds of voices raised in prayer. Please grant us harvest. Please protect our children. Please, please, please—
Then nothing. Silence. Empty pews. Dust settling on abandoned altars. The prayers growing quieter, less frequent, until finally they stopped altogether.
And with them, the god had stopped too.
Eiden pulled his hand back, gasping. His palm tingled with residual energy—that same colorless, formless sensation he'd felt when the godling had dissolved. It pulsed beneath his skin like a second heartbeat, foreign but somehow right.
"Faith as fuel," he said slowly, understanding crystallizing. "You don't worship gods because they're powerful. They're powerful because you worship them."
It made a terrible kind of sense. Back on Earth, religions had risen and fallen throughout history. Gods gained followers and lost them, their influence waxing and waning with cultural tides. He'd always thought of it as metaphorical—the "death" of old gods just meant people stopped believing the stories.
But here? Here it was literal.
Stop feeding a god with faith, and they starved. Let their name be forgotten, and they ceased to exist. These bones weren't metaphors. They were what remained when divinity ran out of believers to sustain it.
"What a fucking scam," Eiden muttered, standing and dusting sand from his legs. He was still naked, still weak, but the shock of his situation had worn off enough for grim amusement to seep back in. "The gods need humans more than humans need gods. And they convinced everyone it was the other way around."
He laughed—a short, sharp sound that echoed strangely in the empty desert.
Then he kept walking.
By the time Eiden found the temple, he was beginning to suspect the desert was actively hostile.
Not in an obvious way—no sandstorms, no sudden sinkholes, no convenient monsters to fight. Just a slow, grinding sense of wrongness that increased with every step. His body, already weak, was getting weaker. His thoughts were becoming sluggish, unfocused. He'd catch himself staring at nothing, losing minutes at a time.
The godling's warning echoed in his memory: You can't survive in Eryndor without alignment. You need Divine Favor or you'll just... fade.
"Not fading," Eiden growled through gritted teeth, forcing himself to keep moving. "Not giving you the satisfaction."
He didn't know who "you" was—the dead gods, the living ones, the universe itself. It didn't matter. Spite was as good a fuel as any.
That's when he saw it.
At first, it looked like just another dune—a rise in the endless white sand, maybe twenty feet high. But as Eiden got closer, he realized the shape was too regular, too angular. Geometric.
He scrambled up the slope, sand cascading down with each step, and at the top he found stone.
Gray stone, carved with patterns that writhed and shifted when he tried to focus on them. The kind of patterns that suggested this structure was older than old, built by hands—or whatever appendages—that understood geometry in ways human minds weren't meant to process.
Most of the temple was still buried, but what he could see was enough: a doorway, partially exposed, leading down into darkness. And from within, he felt it.
Pulse.
Faint, erratic, like a dying heartbeat.
Faith energy.
Eiden didn't know how he knew, but the knowledge settled into him with the same certainty as everything else in this world. Somewhere inside that buried temple, there was still a reservoir of belief—old, stagnant, probably toxic, but there. Alive in the way embers are alive, waiting for something to either fan them into flame or snuff them out entirely.
He should have been cautious. Should have considered that entering a half-buried temple in a desert called "The Desert of Forgotten Faiths" was probably a bad idea.
Instead, he started digging.
His hands were too weak, his body too frail, but he dug anyway. He tore at the sand with his fingers, scooped it away in handfuls, ignored the way his nails split and bled. The pain felt distant, unimportant. All that mattered was getting in, reaching that pulse, understanding what it meant.
The colorless energy beneath his skin—his Neutral Essence, though he didn't have a name for it yet—began to flow more actively, responding to his desperation. Where it touched the sand, the grains seemed to... loosen? Lose cohesion? He wasn't sure, but the effect made digging easier.
After what felt like hours but was probably only minutes, he'd cleared enough sand to squeeze through the doorway.
Eiden didn't hesitate. He dropped into darkness.
The fall wasn't far—maybe ten feet—and he landed in a crouch on smooth stone floor. The impact jarred his weakened body, sending spikes of pain up his legs, but he barely noticed.
Because the temple interior was glowing.
Not with normal light. With faith.
It clung to the walls like luminescent moss, pulsing in shades that had no name—colors between colors, hues that existed in the space where belief and reality overlapped. The air was thick with it, so saturated with old worship that Eiden could taste it on his tongue: sweet and bitter and metallic all at once, like blood mixed with honey and rust.
The chamber was circular, maybe thirty feet across, with walls covered in carvings of supplicants in various poses of devotion. At the center stood a statue—or what remained of one. It had been humanoid once, but time and abandonment had eroded it into an abstract shape, features worn smooth, arms broken off at the elbows.
And around it, pooling on the floor like liquid starlight, was concentrated faith energy.
This is it, Eiden thought distantly. This is what's left. The last dregs of worship for a god whose name no one remembers.
He took a step forward.
The energy reacted immediately. It surged toward him like a living thing, tendrils of luminescent faith reaching out, seeking. They touched his ankles and he felt them trying to enter—not violently, but desperately, like drowning swimmers grabbing for anything that floated.
They wanted a host. A vessel. Something to anchor to before they dissipated completely.
Eiden's first instinct was to pull away. This was divine energy, the exact thing he'd sworn never to accept. Taking it in would be the same as accepting that godling's blessing, wouldn't it? Binding himself to a system built on worship and dependence?
But then he felt his legs start to give out.
His vision was dimming at the edges. That slow fade the godling had warned about was accelerating, his undefined existence wearing too thin to sustain itself. He could feel the world trying to erase him, like a computer deleting corrupted data.
You can't survive without alignment.
"Fuck that," Eiden whispered.
And instead of accepting the energy, he devoured it.
It wasn't a conscious choice—more an instinct, like breathing. The Neutral Essence inside him surged outward, meeting the faith tendrils not as a welcoming host but as something else entirely. Where they touched, the luminescent energy began to change.
The colors bled away, draining into that same aggressive colorlessness that defined Eiden's power. The sweet-bitter-metallic taste vanished, replaced by something that had no flavor because it existed in the absence of definition.
The faith energy was being converted. Not absorbed as worship, but broken down into its base components and reconstituted as something neutral. Something unaligned.
Something that belonged to nothing and no one.
Eiden gasped as the converted energy flooded into him. It felt like ice water in his veins, like electricity without voltage, like drowning in air. His body, on the verge of fading, suddenly stabilized. The weakness that had plagued him since awakening began to recede—not entirely, but enough that he could stand without swaying, breathe without his lungs burning.
The luminescent pool on the temple floor shrank rapidly as he drew it in, converting faith into neutrality with a speed that should have been impossible. The carvings on the walls began to crack, their meaning fracturing as the energy that sustained them was torn away and repurposed.
And the statue...
The statue began to crumble.
Not weathering over centuries, but actively decaying in real-time, as if Eiden was accelerating its dissolution. The stone surface turned to dust, flaking away in sheets. The vaguely humanoid shape collapsed inward, facial features that were already eroded disappearing entirely.
Within seconds, nothing remained but a pile of gray powder.
Eiden stood in the center of the now-dark chamber, breathing hard, his entire body humming with stolen-but-not-stolen energy.
"Holy shit," he said to the darkness.
Then, from somewhere in the dust pile, something moved.
Eiden tensed, the Neutral Essence responding to his alarm by pooling at his fingertips. It didn't manifest as flame or lightning or any other dramatic element—it was simply there, a pressure in the air around his hands, waiting.
The dust shifted. Rose. Coalesced.
A figure formed—vague, ghostly, barely holding its shape. It had the outline of the statue, the humanoid form, but no details. Just a silhouette of compressed dust and fading faith.
When it spoke, the voice was like wind through broken glass.
"What... are you?"
Eiden stared at the ghost of a forgotten god. "I'm the guy who just ate your last meal."
"You are... not aligned. Not Light. Not Dark. Not... anything." The figure tilted its head—or what passed for a head. "You are hollow. Empty. You are... ERROR."
"So I've been told." Eiden kept his hands raised, ready to... do something. He wasn't sure what, but the energy responded to intent, so intent would have to be enough. "You going to try and kill me for stealing your faith?"
The figure was silent for a long moment. Then, impossibly, it laughed—a sound like sand sliding through an hourglass.
"Faith? That was not faith. That was... residue. The dregs of worship so old the prayers had forgotten their own meaning." It drifted closer, and Eiden fought the urge to step back. "I have been dead for three thousand years, mortal. What you consumed was not my power. It was my corpse."
"Necrophagia," Eiden said flatly. "Great. That's a fantastic start to my new life."
"And yet..." The figure reached out with a hand made of dust, not quite touching Eiden's chest but hovering inches away. "You converted it. Not consumed, but transformed. Faith into... absence. Belief into void." Another laugh, this one tinged with something that might have been awe. "You do not worship. You unmake worship itself."
"Is that a problem?"
"A problem?" The figure pulled back, its form flickering like a candle in wind. "Child of Error, you are the greatest problem this world has ever seen. You are the antithesis of the divine order. You are—"
It stopped mid-sentence. Its form froze, then began to destabilize rapidly.
"Ah," it said, almost fondly. "My time ends. Even ghosts must fade."
"Wait—" Eiden started, but the figure was already dissipating, dust scattering into nothing.
Its final words hung in the air like an epitaph:
"When they come for you, remember: the throne was never meant to stay empty."
Then it was gone, and Eiden stood alone in the dark temple, surrounded by nothing but gray powder and the lingering scent of ancient worship.
He looked down at his hands. They were still glowing faintly with that colorless light, and beneath his skin, he could feel the converted energy settling into something more permanent. Not cultivation in the traditional sense—he wasn't building a core or forming meridians. He was doing something else, something the world's system didn't have a framework for.
He was creating a foundation built on the absence of belief.
"The throne was never meant to stay empty," Eiden repeated softly.
He didn't understand what that meant. Not yet.
But standing in a dead god's temple, with stolen faith humming in his veins and the world already marking him as an error to be corrected, he felt something he hadn't felt since before Earth ended:
Purpose.
Not given to him by divine mandate. Not earned through worship or prayer. Just... there. Clear and cold and entirely his own.
"Alright," he said to the darkness, to the ruins, to whatever vast and terrible things were watching. "Let's see how long I can survive being a mistake."
He turned and began climbing back toward the surface, leaving behind nothing but dust and the fading echo of a god who'd learned to laugh in death.
Behind him, carved into the temple wall in a script no living being could read, a new symbol began to glow—not with faith, but with its opposite.
The mark of the Vessel Who Devours.
And in the space between moments, in dimensions mortals couldn't perceive, divine beings across seven realms felt an inexplicable chill run through their eternal souls.
Something impossible had just taken its first real breath.
And the system that governed all of reality had absolutely no idea what to do about it.