Chapter 1: The Invisible Giant
The humidity in New Raven City was a thick, suffocating shroud of iron dust and industrial exhaust. At the Miller Heights construction site, the air was a toxic symphony of grinding steel and the desperate, guttural shouts of men pushed to their limits. Stanley McCain moved through the grit with a mechanical, haunting efficiency that made the other laborers give him a wide berth.
He was "Big Stan," the quiet giant who could haul four-hundred-pound steel beams as if they were made of balsa wood. He knew he was stronger than an average man—significantly so—but with five years of his memory missing, he simply assumed he was a freak of nature. He didn't know that his strength was actually the dormant remnants of Body Tempering, a relic of a lost era when Earth was a world of cultivation.
A thousand years ago, this planet had been a realm of immortals who could split mountains. Then came the "Great Harvest." Synthetic robotic invaders, sent by human-descended aliens from galaxies away, had descended to strip the planet of its spiritual essence. They suppressed the laws of nature, turning a world of masters into a world of mortals who believed history began with the Industrial Revolution. Today, the majority of the population lived in blissful ignorance, unaware that the "aliens" were merely waiting for the next harvest.
Stanley remembered none of this. His life had effectively begun five years ago in a remote forest where an old man had found him broken and bleeding near a pile of metallic wreckage. That old man, a simple hermit with no ties to the world, had nursed Stanley for three years. Before he died, he had made one request: that Stanley marry his daughter, Sarah, to ensure she was protected.
For the last two years since the old man's death, Stanley had been a ghost. He worked double shifts at the harshest sites to pay for a house in the suburbs and Sarah's expensive lifestyle. Yet, in those two years of marriage, Sarah had never allowed him to touch her. Not once. She treated him like an unwanted tenant—useful for the paycheck, but unworthy of a place in her life.
"McCain! Someone's here for you! Again!" the foreman, a greedy man named Kola, shouted from his elevated shack.
Stanley wiped grease from his forehead with a soot-stained rag. Standing by the perimeter fence was a man in a sharp, slate-grey suit named Marcus. This was their second meeting in a week. During the first, Marcus had spoken in riddles about "returning to duty." Stanley had dismissed him as a scam artist—a predatory agent who recruited desperate men for illegal labor.
"I told you to get lost, Marcus," Stanley growled as he approached. "I'm not interested in your illegal rigs. I have work to do."
"I'm not here to pitch you today, Stanley," Marcus said, his voice like cold silk. "I'm here because your 'family' is waiting in the office. And they didn't come to bring you lunch."
The air in the foreman's office was ice-cold. Sarah stood there, dressed in a designer coat that Stanley's overtime shifts had paid for. Beside her was her mother, a woman who looked at Stanley as if he were a stain on an expensive rug. On the desk sat a stack of legal documents and a tattered, oil-stained duffel bag.
"Sign them, Stanley," Sarah said, her voice brittle. "My father is gone, and so is my obligation to keep you around. You're a laborer. You're a man with no past. You're beneath the life I've decided to lead."
Stanley looked at the papers. Divorce Papers. Next to them were the documents for the house—the very house Stanley had bled for. They were stripping him of his "new life."
"You want me out?" Stanley asked, his voice low and vibrating with a strange power.
"We want you gone," her mother hissed. "We've brought the junk my husband found you with. Take it and go."
Without a word, Stanley picked up the pen and signed. He didn't argue. He felt a sudden, strange sense of relief. He grabbed the duffel bag and walked out into the dust.