SQUELCH... CRUNCH...
Heavy leather boots sank into the damp, decaying moss of the southern forest.
Alden moved through the dense, oppressive wilderness like a phantom. The deeper he travelled South, the darker the world became. The towering canopy of the Elderia wilderness blocked out the afternoon sun entirely, casting the jagged ravines and twisting roots into a permanent, eerie twilight.
He didn't mind the dark. Right now, the dark was his only ally.
CRACK!
Suddenly, without any warning, a sickening, sharp sound echoed through the silent woods.
Alden stumbled, his right knee buckling entirely as he pitched forward into the dirt. A blinding, white-hot flash of agony exploded from his right femur. The bone had just snapped clean in half.
If an ordinary human had suffered this, they would have screamed until their vocal cords tore. They would have gone into instantaneous shock, their brain shutting down from the sheer, unadulterated trauma of a major bone shattering out of nowhere.
Alden didn't scream. He didn't even gasp.
He just gritted his teeth, his single red eye narrowing in sheer annoyance.
Sizzle... hiss...
Instantly, from deep within his marrow, a terrifying surge of dark-gold energy erupted. The Chaos mana, raw and unfiltered, swarmed the broken fracture. In less than two seconds, it violently forced the bone back together, melting the calcium and fusing it stronger, denser, and thicker than it had been a moment before.
Alden slowly pushed himself up off the damp forest floor. He dusted the dirt off his trousers and rolled his right leg. It was perfectly fine.
'Damn it,' Alden thought, letting out a long, exhausted sigh.
'That's the fourth time today.'
This was the reality of his new existence. The Chaos Mana Core sitting near his dantian was only at the D+ Rank, but the quality of the energy was so astronomically high, so incredibly hostile to the laws of reality, that his human-turned-Nephalem body was constantly struggling to contain it.
The Chaos force was a paradox. It was inherently destructive, constantly trying to tear its own vessel apart. It would randomly shatter his bones, snap his tendons, or rupture his veins just by circulating. But simultaneously, the SSS+ Rank Fallen Angel bloodline possessed a terrifying regenerative property. It healed the damage just as fast as the Chaos broke it, forging his body into something increasingly indestructible with every painful cycle.
He was trapped in an endless loop of breaking and mending. He had simply gotten used to the pain. What used to be torture was now just background noise.
RUMBLE...
Thunder echoed in the distance, but Alden knew it wasn't the weather. It was the volatile energy humming under his own skin.
He leaned against a massive, ancient oak tree and looked down at his trembling hands.
'Why won't you just listen to me?' he mentally cursed at the abyssal vortex spinning in his core.
Before the Sifting, when he was just an A-Rank awakener with ordinary mana, controlling it was like holding water in his cupped hands. It took focus and efficiency, but it flowed where he willed it.
Now? The Chaos mana refused to follow his commands.
He raised his right hand, pointing his palm toward a thick cluster of thorny vines blocking the path ahead. He narrowed his eye, focusing his intent, trying to draw a simple thread of dark-gold energy from his core to his palm to blast the vines away.
...
Nothing happened. The abyss in his chest spun lazily, completely ignoring his mental command. It felt exactly like a stubborn, mischievous child throwing a tantrum and crossing its arms, refusing to listen to its parent.
Alden clenched his jaw. He pushed harder, demanding the energy to rise.
Thump-thump. His heart beat heavily, but the mana remained locked inside. It refused to emit.
"Screw you, then," Alden muttered aloud. He stepped forward and just used his raw, physical A-Rank strength to grab the thick, spiked vines and violently tear them out of the earth with his bare hands, tossing them aside.
It was incredibly frustrating. It was a psychological torture all its own.
'It feels like having the absolute power to crush a mountain into fine dust right at my fingertips...' Alden thought, his fingernails digging into his palms.
'But I can't break it because I don't have the creator's permission. I have the weapon, but no trigger.'
The only time the Chaos mana actually emitted from his body was when he didn't want it to.
When he slept.
Lately, his dreams had become vivid, apocalyptic nightmares. He would see visions from the First Rebel's memories—a dying world, skies bleeding purple fire, and massive, holy beings falling from the heavens with their wings torn to shreds.
During those nightmares, his subconscious would lose its grip. The chaotic mana would leak from his pores. He had woken up two nights ago to find the entire campsite around him—the grass, the trees, the rocks—reduced to a perfectly circular crater of fine, dead grey ash. If he hadn't woken up when he did, he might have accidentally leveled a chunk of the forest.
He was a walking, ticking time bomb, and he didn't even know how to set his own timer.
Alden shook his head, forcing the frustration down. If he let it consume him, he really would go insane.
He reached into the deep pocket of his dark ranger's cloak and pulled out two items.
In his left hand sat the crystal sphere he had found in the ruins. The twin wisps of blue and gold resonated inside, shining softly and revolving in their eternal dance. It felt warm, a comforting anchor in a body that was constantly at war with itself.
In his right hand lay his ruined storage ring. The metal was warped, and the spatial crystal was cracked and milky dead.
Alden stared at the ring, his red eye hardening.
This was the primary reason he was walking straight South, navigating the most dangerous, unmapped territories of the continent.
He was heading toward the Dwarf Empires.
The human domain was currently hunting him like an animal. If he stepped foot in a human city, the Inquisition would be on him before he could even buy a loaf of bread. But the Dwarves? They didn't care about the High Council's politics. They cared about craftsmanship, ore, and ancient secrets. More importantly, they were the undisputed masters of spatial forging and runic mending. If anyone could fix the shattered matrix of his storage ring and recover Alisia's photos and his billions of gold, it was a dwarven grandmaster.
But there was a second, much deeper reason pulling him South.
Alden tapped his temple with his index finger.
The Coordinates.
Back in the Academy, when he had opened the demon Alister's hidden box, a fragment of parchment had dissolved into light, burning ancient, impossible coordinates directly into his mind.
'Liam stole my Void-Walker Authority. He stole my Stellar Mana Authority. He ripped the system's gifts right out of my soul,' Alden thought, a cold, murderous aura briefly flashing around him.
'But he couldn't steal this. The coordinates were imprinted on my memories, not my soul.'
But even that victory came with a bitter, agonizing cost.
Alden closed his eye, trying to visualize the exact numbers, the specific angles of the map that had flashed in his mind that night.
It was like trying to look at a painting through a thick, heavy fog. The details were blurred, the numbers jumbled and shifting.
Liam's torture in the Black Cell hadn't just broken his body. The cycle of having his skin flayed, his bones crushed, and his mind broken, only to be healed and broken again thousands of times, had severely degraded his cognitive retention. His brain had been forced to suppress memories just to survive the sheer trauma.
'I used to have [Stellar Mental Resistance],' Alden thought, a hollow ache settling in his chest.
'If I still had it, my mind would be a steel fortress. I would remember every single digit perfectly.'
But the resistance was gone. When the SSS+ Rank Fallen Angel bloodline had crashed into his body, it had been so overwhelmingly powerful that his frail human vessel couldn't contain it. To survive the integration without vaporizing, the Chaos element had aggressively melted down his passive skills, including his [Stellar Mental Resistance], permanently fusing them into his new biological makeup just to keep him from dying.
He had traded his perfect memory and absolute mental defense for a body that could house a god-killing element.
Pity for his own state momentarily washed over him. He was a broken boy, stumbling through the dark, chasing a blurry map in a mind that had been tortured to its absolute breaking point.
'No,' Alden aggressively shoved the self-pity aside.
He opened his red eye, and it practically glowed in the forest twilight.
He refused to lose his sanity. He refused to be the tragic victim in this story. The High Council, the SS-Rankers, Liam von Ravel—they all thought they had erased an anomaly. They thought they had buried a coward.
"I remember enough," Alden whispered into the silent forest, his voice carrying a heavy, vibrating absolute truth. "The beacon points South. Deep into the Dwarven mountain ranges. That's all I need."
He slipped the crystal sphere and the broken ring back into his pocket.
Alden straightened his posture. The wind howled through the ravine ahead, whipping his dark cloak around his legs.
He wasn't just surviving anymore. He was forging a path. He was going to reach the Dwarf Empires. He was going to fix his ring. He was going to find whatever ancient, world-shaking secret lay at the end of those coordinates. He was going to tame the Chaos tempest roaring inside his chest, even if it broke his bones a million more times.
And once he was strong? Once he figured out how to unleash the tsunami?
'I won't just come back for a petty revenge,' Alden thought, stepping forward, his boots crushing the stones beneath him.
'Killing Liam isn't enough. Not anymore.'
He was going to return to the human empire, and he was going to show the entire world, every arrogant noble and hypocritical High Council member, exactly what they had created.
He would show them what a true, S-Rank Existential Threat actually looked like.