Kael stopped at the edge of the crack and felt, with unsettling clarity, that it was not a crack in stone.
It was a crack in permission.
The Rift's chamber held its breath around him. The conductive grooves on the floor still glowed in a complete ring, humming with a steady, low resonance that felt more like a thought than a sound. The Leak Point—an uneven slit where darkness breathed—no longer surged wildly, but it pulsed in measured intervals, as if testing the boundary it could not cross.
Lyra hovered a step behind him, shoulders tight, fingers curled around the rope coil as though it were a lifeline. Her gaze flicked between Kael's back and the black mist that rose like ink in water.
Above the slit, the label had changed.
Leak Point — Output: Regulated
Stability: Recoverable
Seal Status: Pending
Kael's vision pulsed with a new prompt—clean, bright, and far too calm.
Initiate Seal?
Requirement: A Bound Participant must serve as Anchor.
Warning: Anchor receives Feedback.
Choose: [Kael] [Lyra]
Kael's throat tightened.
Lyra read it too. He saw her jaw clench, saw the brief flare of anger—anger not at Kael, but at the fact the system could frame sacrifice as a menu.
"Feedback," she said softly. "What does that mean?"
Kael stared at the options. He could almost feel the Rift waiting for the selection, like a clerk tapping its fingers on a desk.
"I don't know," he admitted.
The words Anchor receives Feedback hovered, sterile and vague. The kind of warning that only became clear after it was too late.
Lyra's voice sharpened. "Then don't pick."
"We have to," Kael said, and hated himself for sounding like the system already owned his mouth. He took a slow breath. "If we don't, it keeps leaking. If it keeps leaking, Extractors keep coming."
"And if we do," Lyra snapped, "it hurts someone."
Kael didn't answer. He watched the mist rise and coil, watched faint shapes form within it and dissolve again—like outlines searching for a body that would hold.
The prompt remained, patient.
Kael shifted his gaze to Lyra. "Your trait—Improviser—it helps you with tools. Mine… makes the Rift notice me more."
Lyra's eyes narrowed. "So?"
"So if someone's going to take 'Feedback,'" Kael said, "it should be me. Better it bites the one it's already watching."
Lyra's lips parted, and for an instant he thought she might argue.
Then she looked past him, at the slit in the stone, and the anger in her face turned into something steadier.
"Fine," she said, voice clipped. "But if you start shaking or bleeding or—whatever feedback looks like—I pull you out."
Kael almost laughed. "It said no withdrawal."
"I didn't say withdraw," Lyra replied. "I said pull you out. The system can argue with my hands."
Before Kael could respond, the prompt pulsed once, as if reminding him time was a privilege.
He selected himself.
The choice wasn't made with a gesture or a click. It was made with intention. The moment Kael decided, the Rift acknowledged it with a soft internal chime.
Anchor Selected: Kael
Protocol: Seal Initiation
Step 1: Establish Contact
The air grew denser. The glow in the floor grooves intensified, and the hum deepened into something that vibrated in Kael's bones.
A second prompt rose into his vision:
Step 1: Touch the Leak Point.
Step 2: Maintain Focus until Completion.
Failure Condition: Anchor Break
Kael's stomach turned at the phrase Anchor Break. It sounded too much like something inside you snapping.
He stepped closer.
The mist brushed his fingers without warmth or cold. It felt like static—fine needles of sensation, prickling along his skin. The slit itself was darker than the surrounding haze, a void with edges that did not belong in a world made of stone.
Kael extended his hand.
Lyra placed a hand on his shoulder—light, firm. "I'm here," she said, as if those two words could serve as armor.
Kael swallowed and lowered his palm to the edge of the slit.
The moment he touched it, reality bit.
Not pain, not exactly. More like his mind snagging on a thorn. The blackness beneath his palm surged upward—not as smoke, but as meaning—flooding into him in a violent rush, forcing his thoughts to carry information they were not shaped to hold.
His vision blurred.
For a split second, he saw the harbor again: the pier, the guide-tower, the sea. But it wasn't the harbor as it had been. It was layered with invisible lines—grids and nodes and vectors. The sea was not water; it was a moving field of values. People on the pier were not bodies; they were clusters of metrics.
Then the image flipped.
He was seeing something else—something beyond Veren.
A chain of worlds suspended like beads on a wire. Each bead pulsed with its own rules, its own gravity of meaning. Between them ran strands of light like nerve fibers, and along those fibers crawled symbols: the same flickering script he'd seen in the sky.
The system was not in the world.
The world was in the system.
Kael's knees buckled.
Lyra grabbed his arm. "Kael!"
He forced himself upright, teeth clenched. "I'm—fine," he lied, because the alternative was to let go.
The Rift responded with mechanical indifference.
Seal Initiated.
Progress: 3%
Feedback: Active
The needles of sensation deepened. They became pressure, then heat, then something like a crawling itch beneath his skin, as if the blackness were trying to write itself inside him the way the Ink Pool had.
Kael tried to breathe.
The chamber tilted.
At the edge of his hearing—or perhaps inside it—he caught fragments of words that weren't spoken:
—Insufficient integrity…
—Anchor quality: acceptable…
—Curiosity spike detected…
Curiosity spike?
Kael's heart hammered. He tried to focus on the simplest thing he could: Lyra's hand on his arm, the steady hum in the floor, the fact that the Leak Point's mist was thinning.
Progress: 9%
The slit fought back.
The dark mist thickened suddenly, surging upward, and the shapes within it stabilized—no longer vague outlines, but forms with edges. An Extractor began to crawl out, limb by limb, as if the leak itself were birthing it.
Lyra swore under her breath and snapped the rope forward, looping it around the creature's limbs before it could fully form.
The rope tightened. The creature convulsed, its surface scrambling with symbols.
Above it:
Data Extractor — Rank: Low
State: Unstable
Note: Linked to Leak Point
Kael's mind latched onto the word linked even as his skin burned with feedback. "Don't kill it!" he rasped.
Lyra shot him a look—half disbelief, half fury. "Excuse me?"
"It's linked," Kael forced out. "If you tear it apart, the leak might—" He bit down on the rest of the sentence as another wave of feedback slammed into him, blurring his vision again. He didn't know. He was guessing. But the system loved punishing bad guesses.
Lyra hesitated for half a heartbeat, then changed tactics with a curse.
Instead of striking, she pulled—dragging the half-formed Extractor away from the slit, keeping it taut like a snagged net.
The creature shrieked—meaning, not sound—and the Leak Point flared in response, as though angry at losing its offspring.
Kael's vision pulsed:
Progress: 14%
Leak Resistance: Increasing
Rift Adaptation: Engaged
The words made his stomach drop.
The chamber adapted.
The grooves on the floor brightened, then shifted—some lines dimming, others flaring, rerouting the hum in new patterns. The ring around the Leak Point tightened by a fraction, as if the chamber were adjusting its own circuitry in real time.
Then a new prompt appeared, hovering near the slit:
Countermeasure Detected: Resistance Pattern
Anchor Directive: Mirror the Pattern
Kael's breath caught. "Mirror…?"
Lyra's voice came sharp through the haze. "Kael, talk to me. What is it doing?"
Kael tried to understand the prompt, and his trait answered like a curse.
Pattern-Seeking.
He saw it—barely—a rhythm in the leak's pulsing. A sequence. Three surges, a pause, two surges, a longer pause. The resistance wasn't random; it was structured like a code.
Kael's mind reached for it instinctively, trying to match it, to anticipate the next pulse. And as he did, the feedback intensified, as if the Rift rewarded the very behavior that made it dangerous.
Curiosity Spike Detected
Attention: Increased
He wanted to scream. He held his breath instead and focused harder, because stopping would not reduce the system's attention. It would only fail the seal.
Kael began to breathe in time with the leak.
Three quick inhales, one pause. Two inhales, longer pause.
At first it was just breath. Then it was focus. Then it was—horrifyingly—like the leak listened to him.
The pulsing in the slit shifted. The resistance pattern stuttered, confused for an instant, and the conductive hum in the floor responded, amplifying, pressing back.
Progress: 21%
Lyra, still wrestling the half-formed Extractor, stared at Kael as if seeing him for the first time. "How are you doing that?"
Kael couldn't answer. His tongue felt too big in his mouth. His thoughts were full of other things—grids and nodes and sequences of pulses that made his skull ache.
The Extractor twisted violently, trying to crawl back toward the slit. Lyra braced, feet sliding on the stone. She wrapped the rope around her forearm for leverage.
Kael saw the label above her flicker:
Lyra — Stamina: 82%
And then, as if the Rift couldn't resist adding pressure, another label appeared above the rope:
Rope — Strain: High
Failure Probability: 37%
Lyra didn't see it. Kael did.
"Lyra!" he gasped. "The rope—"
It snapped.
The sound was brutally ordinary—fiber tearing—and yet it landed in the chamber like a verdict. The rope coil split, the tension released, and the half-formed Extractor lurched toward the Leak Point with hungry speed.
Lyra cursed and lunged for it with bare hands, grabbing at shadow.
Kael reacted without thinking.
He still had the iron hook.
He dragged his free hand away from the slit for the briefest instant—enough to break contact but not enough to fail—and jammed the hook into the Extractor's surface where the symbols clustered densest.
The hook caught.
Kael yanked.
The writing tore.
The creature convulsed, then collapsed into a smear of smoke that the conductive ring around the Leak Point sucked inward like a drain.
The Leak Point flared—and then, for the first time, shrank.
Progress: 29%
Kael's breath came ragged. The feedback surged again, punishing the interruption. His hand burned. His vision swam with layered images: Veren's harbor as a grid, the chain of worlds, the script crawling like insects along the strands between them.
He wanted to rip his hand away and run until the system couldn't find him.
But the exit was locked.
And Lyra's hand gripped his wrist now, steadying it against the slit, forcing contact back into place. Her face was pale with fear, but her eyes were hard.
"Don't you dare fall," she whispered. "Not after you dragged me in here."
Kael's laugh came out broken. "That's—fair."
The Rift pulsed.
Progress: 37%
Feedback: Escalating
Anchor Stability: 74%
Anchor stability.
Kael could feel his own stability slipping like sand. The feedback wasn't just pain; it was information pressing into the cracks of his mind, trying to fill them. He began to understand things he didn't want to understand—terms without context, rules without mercy.
A phrase repeated in the back of his skull like a prayer turned inside out:
—Resource worlds…
—Assessment cohorts…
—Performance thresholds…
His trait reached for the meaning, hungry.
He fought it.
He tried to hold on to something human: Lyra's breathing, the weight of his body, the memory of sun on water back at the harbor. But even the memory came wrapped in metrics now, as if the system had retroactively quantified his past.
The chamber adapted again.
The conductive ring tightened further, and the groove-light shifted into a more complex pattern—like a knot being tied. The Leak Point's mist thinned, then thickened, then thinned again, struggling as if it were a living thing choking on a collar.
A new prompt appeared:
Step 2: Apply Sealant
Instruction: Smear Rift Resin along Leak Edge
Lyra's eyes flicked to the prompt, then to the jar of black paste on the ground near the cache.
She didn't hesitate.
She snatched the jar, tore the lid off, and scooped a handful of the Rift Resin. The paste clung to her palm in thick, glossy strands.
Kael flinched as Lyra reached past his hand and pressed the resin against the slit's edge.
The resin didn't behave like a normal substance. It didn't smear; it merged. It sank into the blackness like oil into parchment, sealing micro-fractures Kael couldn't see but could suddenly sense through the feedback.
The Leak Point hissed—meaning, not sound—and Kael's vision went white at the edges.
Progress: 51%
Halfway.
Kael's knees trembled. Lyra's voice was a low anchor of its own. "Stay with me," she said, and it wasn't a request. It was an order.
Kael tried.
The feedback became sharper. It found his Pattern-Seeking trait and hooked into it like a barb, tugging his attention toward the resistance pattern still thrashing beneath the resin.
Kael mirrored it again with breath, but now the pattern was more complex, shifting faster—like the system was increasing difficulty mid-lesson.
Three surges, pause, two surges, long pause—then four surges, short pause, one surge, long pause.
His mind raced to keep up.
Progress: 58%
Curiosity Spike: Severe
Attention: Elevated
Note: Elevated Attention increases Reward Tier
Reward tier.
The system dangled reward like bait, and Kael hated how a small, traitorous part of him noticed.
Lyra saw his expression tighten. "Don't look at it," she snapped. "Don't want it."
Kael swallowed. "I'm not—"
But he was.
He wanted to know what "reward tier" meant. He wanted to know how deep the system went, who built it, why it measured worlds like resources.
Curiosity was the crack the system widened.
The feedback surged, and with it came a flash—brief, brutal—of a memory that wasn't his: a different anchor, in a different chamber, in a different world, screaming as the seal completed and something peeled away from them like skin.
Kael gagged.
Lyra's hand gripped his forearm harder. "Kael!"
He forced his eyes open. "I saw—someone else," he rasped. "An anchor. It… took something."
Lyra's face tightened. "From them?"
Kael couldn't answer. The feedback didn't come with subtitles.
Another Extractor tried to form at the slit's edge, but the resin held, and the conductive ring strangled it before it could coalesce, shredding it into smoke.
Kael clung to that small victory.
Progress: 72%
Anchor Stability: 61%
The numbers were a countdown disguised as measurement.
Lyra scooped more resin and pressed it into the last stubborn section of the leak's edge. The black paste shimmered as it cured, hardening in response to stress exactly as the label had promised.
Kael's hand burned. The slit beneath his palm felt smaller now, as if the world were stitching itself closed around his fingers.
A final prompt appeared, stark and absolute:
Step 3: Accept Feedback
Note: Feedback must discharge.
Do not release contact until discharge completes.
Kael's mouth went dry. "Discharge," he whispered.
Lyra's voice was tight. "What does it want?"
Kael didn't know.
And then the feedback discharged.
It wasn't a blast. It was a transfer.
The pressure in Kael's mind spiked, and a strand of meaning tore free from him—something intangible yet painfully real, like a thread pulled out of a tapestry. He gasped, clutching at his own chest as if he could hold the missing piece with his ribs.
For a heartbeat, he couldn't remember the smell of the sea.
Not the sea as a concept. The exact, sharp scent of salt and tar and wet rope—the specific memory of it—was gone, leaving only the knowledge that he used to know.
His eyes stung.
Lyra stared at him, alarm flashing in her face. "Kael, what—?"
Kael's voice shook. "It took… a detail."
Lyra's expression darkened with fury. "A detail?"
Kael forced a breath. "A small thing. But it—" He swallowed. "It can take small things."
And if it could take small things, it could take bigger ones.
The Rift's hum shifted, satisfied.
Seal Complete.
Progress: 100%
Leak Status: Closed
The slit in the stone sealed like a wound knitting under invisible stitches. The black mist collapsed inward, sucked into nothing, and the chamber's seam-light brightened briefly as if reality itself exhaled.
Kael yanked his hand back.
His palm was unmarked. No burn. No scar. But the absence in his mind felt like a bruise you couldn't touch.
Lyra grabbed his shoulders, scanning him like she could find the stolen piece in his eyes. "Say something that proves you're you."
Kael's laugh came out weak. "That's… not how that works."
Her fingers tightened. "Kael."
He met her gaze, forcing steadiness. "I'm here," he said, echoing her words from earlier. "And I hate this."
Lyra's shoulders dropped by a fraction. It wasn't relief. It was permission to keep moving.
A new cascade of prompts arrived, rapid-fire, like a report printed in his skull:
Trial Result: Success
Threats Neutralized: 3
Seal Efficiency: High
Attention: Elevated
Reward Tier: Improved
Then—another chime, different from the earlier ones. Colder. Final.
Experience Gained.
Kael: Level Up Available
Lyra: Level Up Available
Kael's breath caught. The words didn't feel like celebration. They felt like a stamp on paperwork.
Lyra stared, reading the same message, and her mouth twisted. "It's paying us."
Kael's vision shifted to a new prompt:
Choose: Allocate Attribute Point (1)
Options: Strength / Agility / Focus
His skin crawled. He could almost feel the point like a coin pressed into his palm. He wanted to refuse. He wanted to throw it back into the leak.
But the system didn't offer refusal as an option.
Before he could choose, another label appeared above the exit-wall behind them:
Exit: Unlocked
Condition Met: Clear Trial (1/1)
The shimmering darkness rippled, and a slit of pale light formed—an opening back to wherever "outside" was now.
Kael exhaled, shaky.
Lyra looked at the exit, then back at Kael. "We're not choosing points here," she said. "Not yet."
Kael blinked. "Why not?"
"Because it's still watching," Lyra replied, eyes hard. "And because you just paid something you didn't agree to pay. I want to know what else it charges before we feed it more."
Kael's trait itched at that—curiosity rising like a reflex.
He crushed it down. "Fine," he said. "We'll choose later."
Lyra nodded once, satisfied, and stepped toward the exit slit.
As she crossed, the air in the chamber pulsed one last time, and a final line appeared—small, almost polite.
Note: Trials will recur.
Cohort Status: Active
Next Evaluation: Pending
Kael stared at the words until they faded.
Cohort.
They weren't participants. They were a group being processed.
He followed Lyra through the exit.
Light swallowed him.
For a heartbeat, he smelled nothing.
Then the harbor air hit his lungs—salt, tar, wet wood—and he almost cried with relief at the sharpness of it.
Except…
He couldn't remember the smell of the sea the way he had before.
He could smell it now, yes. His senses worked. But the old intimate memory—the childhood certainty—remained missing, a blank space shaped like something small and precious.
Lyra turned to him on the pier, eyes scanning the chaos as if she could map the new rules by sight. The docks were still a war zone—people screaming, shadow-creatures skittering, the guide-tower looming under a fractured sky.
But the pulsing circle over the harbor—the Node—was different now.
It no longer blinked red.
Above it, the label had updated:
Node: Veren Harbor — Status: Stabilized
Leak: Sealed
New Condition: Awaiting Next Trigger
Kael's stomach sank.
The words didn't say safe.
They said waiting.
Lyra's voice cut through the noise, low and fierce. "We move," she said. "Now. Before the system decides what comes next."
Kael nodded, clenching his hands.
Behind his eyes, the unspent attribute point hovered like a temptation.
And somewhere deeper, beneath the stolen memory and the lingering burn of feedback, Kael felt the system's attention—quiet, persistent—resting on him like a finger poised over a button.