Father Malachi. So that was his name. I filed it away, a single, solid fact in the shifting uncertainty of my new existence.
"Now?" Father Malachi continued, his voice gaining a bitter edge. "Now, it's every soul for itself. The desperation... it's a sickness in the air. It makes people cruel. It makes them forget they have souls at all. They'd sell them for a warm meal and a safe corner to sleep in." He looked at me, his gaze sharpening, as if seeing me properly for the first time. "You remember the Miller family, Adam? Good people. Found them last week, all three of them... gone. The parents were bludgeoned, couldn't find the girl. Ah, she should be nearly twenty now. Maybe she escaped, maybe the Spell claimed her too. Maybe she killed her parents."
He sighed, the anger bleeding out of him, leaving only a profound exhaustion. "It's the world now, boy. It's grinding us down. The light is fading, and the shadows are getting longer and hungrier. And all we can do is hold on in here," he gestured to the crumbling walls, "and pray the doors hold for one more night."
He lapsed into silence, his monologue over, consumed again by his cough and his thoughts. He had given me more than just bread and a name. He had reminded me of the most basic pieces of the world's lore: this wasn't just a broken world; it was a world being consumed by a spiritual despair so potent it could kill. A world where desperation was a tangible force, and safety was a fleeting concept measured one night at a time. Gates, the Nightmare Spell, roving gangs not to mention the most banal of illnesses and disease. Starvation too, judging by his own appearance.
And I was trapped in it, my celestial potential silent, with only a sick old priest and a blank cross for protection. Klein often practised humility when he was scared or alone, didn't he? I was no one. I knew nothing other than the snippets G3 had fed us about the world. Hell, most of what the readers were told came out during the Domain War, when the Waking World was already being abandoned. Why had I ever agreed to this? Wait...the Curator had never actually said what would happen if I refused. Would I just die? Enter a mundane cycle of reincarnation? Be strung up as a puppet for forceful amusement? No, no need to think so negatively about the Curator. He had accommodated my questions and requests plenty in the Star Realm. Deciding to follow the Priest's advice, I lay down on the most intact pew and closed my eyes, regulating my breathe until I felt sleep overtake me.
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The days bled into one another, a grim tapestry of grey skies, grinding poverty, and relentless, gnawing hunger. Father Malachi's cough grew worse, a constant, wet percussion to our aimless wandering. We became ghosts in the sprawling, festering slums of the NQSC city, two figures in black moving through a world of rust and despair.
We sold alms, or rather, we tried. We offered blessings and prayers to those who would listen, which were few. Mostly, we simply… existed. We shared our meagre scraps of food with those who looked even worse off than us, a gesture that felt less like charity and more like a shared, silent understanding of the abyss we were all circling.
In the moments of exhausted respite, huddled in another abandoned shell of a building, I worked. My body, the young one named Adam, was slowly becoming my own. The initial weakness was being tempered, not into strength, but into a wiry endurance. I could walk for miles on an empty stomach now. My startling blue eyes, once wide with panic, had learned to observe without seeming to, to take in every detail of the oppressive city.
And I had confirmed it. This was the same city. The same mish-mashed dichotomous city The same sense of a world holding its breath, waiting for a nightmare to begin. Or maybe that was just me. We were just on the opposite side of the vast, stinking slum from where Sunny's story had started. His hell was my hell. We were ants on the same rotting log.
My internal work, however, had met with frustratingly little success. The grand power of the remained a locked door. I had the key—the knowledge of the potion formula—but no materials to fit it into the lock. The ingredients were nonsense words here: 100 grams of powdered black-sealed grass? The spirit of a Shadow Sea Flower? It was like trying to build a radio with instructions for a nuclear reactor. I didn't even recognise them as belonging to any Sequence 9 Potion.
The one thing I had grasped, through sheer, desperate repetition and half-remembered lore from the novel, was the most foundational step: meditation. The cycling of Spirituality. Or, as the Awakened of this world called it, Essence.
It was faint, thinner here than I imagined it would be in places of power, tainted with the metallic fear of the Nightmare Gates. But it was there. A faint, ambient energy that permeated everything. In our few quiet moments, I would sit, close my eyes, and try to still the panic in my mind. I would focus on my breathing, and in the space between the inhale and exhale, I would try to feel.
And sometimes, I could. A faint trickle of coolness, like the lightest stream of groundwater, seeping into the core of my being. I couldn't command it. I couldn't shape it. I could only acknowledge its presence and let it pool, drop by precious drop, within me. It was a pathetic reservoir, but it was mine. It was the proof that the Curator hadn't entirely lied. The potential was there, sleeping.
One evening, as we took shelter from a cold, acidic drizzle in the husk of a broken-down transport hauler, Father Malachi looked at me, his eyes fever-bright.
"You've been quiet, Adam. More than usual. It's like you're… listening to something I can't hear."
I looked at my hands, at the blank silver cross resting against my chest. I was listening. I was listening for the whisper of a power that refused to speak, in a world that was slowly but steadily being devoured by the vile Rot of the Void. What would the Goddess of War think now, I wondered. To see Her precious garden be overrun with Sorcery and Corruption. Probably pick up a weapon and wedge someone's skull open. Weaver's, perhaps, if She could find the slippery bastard.
"Why doesn't my cross have the Lord?" I asked suddenly, looking at Malachi with simple but focused eyes. The old priest raised an eyebrow and then frowned. "We just...didn't have another on hadn't when we gave it to you" he answered vaguely, scratching his chin with a dull look in his eyes. "Everybody knows what the cross represents anyways, and its not like it ever bothered you before. Why now?"
"No reason," I shook my head trying to appear foolishly solemn. "I just...feel there's a difference between me and you."
Malachi paused for a moment before laughing loudly, surprisingly avoiding a coughing fit. "Ha ha Kid, of course there's a difference! I'm nearly eighty years old, you turned fourteen only three months ago. And besides, I'm an Awakened. Of course we're far apart."
I was stunned by his sudden addition of possessing powers, but then found it unsurprising. A normal person couldn't survive to such an age in a place like this, none the less with a serious illness hanging over him. "What's your ability?" I asked curiously, afraid that "Adam" should already know the answer. Thankfully, Malachi just smiled at me. "My Dormant ability allowed me to see the rough strengths of others as blobs of light in their chests. My Awakened allowed me to roughly divide them into camps. Heh, I was pretty good as a Scout back when I was younger. You see, we didn't have the fancy naming system modern Awakened do. Sigh, I remember when the first Tyrant came through a Gate..."
I glanced over but said nothing, not probing about his Flaw. That would be too insensitive.
And only five days later, he died in his sleep