They had been surviving for fifty days in a world that shouldn't exist.
Gray sat alone in the corner of the safe building, a salvaged notebook open before him, a pen clutched in fingers that trembled with exhaustion and something else. Something that felt like the weight of responsibility, of discovery, of the need to make sense of chaos.
Fifty days. He'd learned three things in that time.
First: the energy was real. It flowed through everything now, the wrong-color light that pulsed through the ruins, that gathered in pools and eddies, that responded to intention in ways he was only beginning to understand. He'd called it mana, a word that had felt right in his mouth, and the name had stuck. The others used it now without thinking, as if it had always been the word for this thing that had no business existing.
Second: the energy responded to intent. When Tala wanted water to move, it moved. When Mina wanted flesh to heal, it healed. When Gray wanted to see the hidden architecture of the world, his vision flooded with impossible complexity. The energy didn't care about the mechanism, only about the will behind it. It was like a language that responded to meaning rather than grammar, a force that shaped itself around desire.
Third: there were levels to how people interacted with it.
Gray had been watching, cataloging, trying to understand the patterns that emerged from the chaos. And what he'd seen was this: some people could barely sense the energy at all. The silent child flinched when the mana pulsed wrong, her body reacting to something her mind couldn't perceive, but she couldn't do anything with it. She was a receiver without a transmitter, a radio that could pick up static but no signal.
Others could shape the energy, could make it do things. Tala made water move. Mina healed wounds with a touch. Their abilities were different in expression but similar in kind: they took the raw stuff of the new world and bent it toward a purpose. They were shapers, molders, people who could impose their will on the chaos.
And then there were those who could see.
Gray's vision flooded with complexity when he let himself look. He saw the threads that connected things, the flows and eddies of mana through the ruins, the patterns that underlay the chaos. He saw the structure of the energy itself, the way it moved and pooled and responded to intention. His sight was different from Tala's shaping or Mina's healing. It was perception rather than action, understanding rather than change.
He needed names. He needed categories. Not for others, but for himself. A framework to organize what he'd learned, a structure to hang his observations on. The world had changed, and the old words didn't fit anymore. He needed new words for new things.
So he opened his notebook, uncapped his pen, and began to write.
"SPARK," he wrote, the letters careful and deliberate on the salvaged paper. "The first stage. When you sense the energy but can't control it. Small, unstable effects. Fear-driven. Survival casting."
He thought of the silent child, of the way she flinched at mana-pulses but couldn't shape them. He thought of Ren, whose pattern sensitivity was emerging but who couldn't yet do anything with what he perceived. He thought of the early days, when he'd first started seeing the wrong-color light and hadn't known what it meant.
Spark. The beginning. The first flicker of awareness in a world that had gone dark.
He wrote the next entry with more hesitation, his pen hovering over the paper. This one was harder. This one required him to name himself, to put into words what he'd been trying not to think about.
He thought of Laplace, the philosopher who had dreamed of knowing every particle's position and momentum, who had imagined a demon that could see the universe's mechanisms laid bare. A being that could trace every cause to its effect, every effect to its cause, that could see the clockwork machinery underlying all of existence.
He thought of how much it cost to see even a fraction of that truth.
The migraines that blinded him. The memory gaps that were growing larger, swallowing hours he couldn't account for, erasing pieces of himself he might never recover. The way his pattern-sight showed him the hidden architecture of reality but took something from him in exchange, a tax levied in the currency of self.
He wrote: "EYE OF LAPLACE. Pattern sight. Sees the structure of mana itself, the threads and flows and patterns that underlie the chaos. Cost: pain. Cost: memory. Cost: self."
He stared at the words for a long moment. They felt inadequate, a rough sketch of something too large to capture on paper. But they were a start. A name for what he was, what he did, what he paid to see.
He turned the page and began to write more. Observations about the corridors, about the way mana flowed around certain paths and places. Notes about the hollows, about how they seemed to track the "noise" that abilities produced. Speculations about the nature of the energy itself, about where it came from and what it wanted.
The Proof Codex was beginning.
He didn't know it yet, couldn't know that these scribbled notes in a salvaged notebook would become the foundation of a new understanding. That they would be copied and shared and debated, that they would grow into something larger than himself. He only knew that he needed to write, needed to organize the chaos in his mind into something that could be communicated, something that could help the others survive.
The sun set on the fiftieth day. The building grew dark around him, the wrong-color light pulsing faintly through the windows. Gray wrote until his hand cramped, until his eyes burned with exhaustion, until the words blurred together on the page.
And then, finally, he slept.
He didn't hear Mina approach, didn't feel her take the notebook from his slack fingers. He didn't see her read the words he'd written, her eyes moving over the careful letters, her expression shifting from curiosity to something deeper.
She read the entry about Spark, about the first stage of awareness. She read the entry about the Eye of Laplace, about pattern sight and its costs. She read the observations about corridors and hollows and the nature of mana.
And she understood, in a way that settled into her bones, that Gray had done something important. That he'd found words for things that shouldn't have names, that he'd created a framework for understanding a world that had stopped making sense.
She looked at his sleeping face, at the exhaustion carved into his features, at the faint lines of pain that never quite left him even in rest. She thought about the cost he'd written about, the pain and memory and self that his sight demanded. She thought about how much he'd already given, how much more he might have to pay.
Then she covered him with a blanket, her movements gentle, her touch careful. She took the notebook and set it aside, safe from the damp and the dark. And she took the first watch, settling by the window where she could see the wrong-color light pulsing through the ruins.
The group survived another night.
Behind her, Gray slept the dreamless sleep of exhaustion. Beside her, the notebook lay closed but not forgotten, its pages filled with words that would change everything.
Fifty days had passed since the world ended. And on the fiftieth night, in a ruined building at the edge of a corridor, a man who could see the structure of reality wrote the first entries of a codex that would become a legend.
He didn't know it yet. He only knew that he needed to understand, needed to find words for the chaos, needed to create something that could help the people he cared about survive.
And that need, that desperate hunger to make sense of the senseless, was the beginning of everything that would come after.
The Proof Codex had been born.