[SERADHIEL — INSIDE THE SEAL]
Three thousand years.
That was how long she had been imprisoned.
No light. No sound. No Essence to draw upon. No body to move, no army to command. Only the crushing weight of seven ancient seals and the faint heartbeat of a world that had forgotten she existed.
Seradhiel Voss, the Crimson Empress. Ruler of the Demon Bloodlines. The woman who had gone undefeated for two centuries of war.
Now she was nothing more than a consciousness trapped inside a ring.
The first hundred years were spent in fury.
The second, in endless schemes to break free.
After that, time lost its meaning.
She waited.
Over the centuries, the ring found new owners. She remembered every one of them.
A greedy noble tried to drain her Essence like she was nothing more than a spirit stone. She burned him alive from within with the tiny fragment of power the seals hadn’t stolen.
A Celestial agent believed he could turn her against her own race. He died just as painfully.
A relic hunter sold the ring to the highest bidder without ever realizing what rested inside it.
They all wanted to use her.
None of them survived.
She never regretted their deaths.
Still, three thousand years was enough to wear down even an immortal. As centuries passed, fewer hands found the ring. The silence stretched longer each time, until she began to wonder if she had been buried forever. That’s so far how the myth goes.
But for the first time in three thousand years something unheard of happened...
_ _
[KAEL — VALDENMOOR]
The first thing Kael registered was the smell.
Dirt. Bark. Something green and wet. The kind of smell that meant outdoors, which was wrong, because he had fallen asleep at his desk with a half-eaten convenience store sandwich beside his keyboard.
He opened his eyes.
Trees. Massive ones, older than anything he’d seen outside of a nature documentary, their canopies so thick the sky was barely visible through the gaps. Pale morning light filtered down in thin columns, illuminating a forest floor covered in blue-grey moss.
Kael sat up slowly.
’Okay,’ he thought. ’That’s new.’
He checked himself quickly. Both hands were there. Both legs worked. His head was still attached, and aside from a dull ache, he didn’t feel concussed. He patted his chest and searched his pockets.
Nothing.
His phone, wallet, and keys were gone. So was the convenience store coffee. Even the sandwich he’d barely started had vanished.
What remained in his possession was a foreign unknown ring.
He noticed it when he lifted a hand to rub his face.
A black metal ring circled his left ring finger.
He frowned. He didn’t own any rings. He’d never been the type to wear jewelry. Yet the band fit perfectly, resting against his skin as if it had always been there. It was strangely warm despite the cool morning air.
He grabbed it and tried to pull it off.
It didn’t budge.
He twisted it, braced his finger, and pulled harder. Still nothing.
Holding his hand closer, he examined it. There was no seam, no clasp, nothing that explained how it had gotten there. Just a smooth black band etched with faint patterns that seemed to blur whenever he tried to focus on them.
"Fine," he muttered.
A ring. I’ll deal with it later.
He got to his feet and took stock of the situation with the calm detachment he’d learned from years of dealing with problems one step at a time.
He was in a forest.
No supplies. No weapon. No phone. No idea where he was. The grey office shirt and slacks he’d been wearing minutes ago weren’t exactly made for the wilderness.
He’d been in bad situations before. Different circumstances, same approach but never anything quite this brutal.
He looked at the twin moons hanging low on the horizon, then at the trees that were far too tall, far too blue, and far too wrong to be anything on Earth.
’From the looks of this,’ he thought, ’I’ve been transmigrated to another world with nothing but my clothes.’
"Sighhh"
He let out a slow breath through his nose.
"My day couldn’t get any worse," he said.
He stood and surveyed his surroundings with the quiet focus of someone used to dealing with the unexpected.
The wrinkled office shirt, loose tie, and coffee stain on his sleeve made him look like any exhausted office worker. They hid what he had once been.
In his previous life, Kael Morrow had worked as a black-ops intelligence analyst alongside private military contractors on missions across four continents. He had crossed hostile territory with little more than a compass and a sidearm, and walked away from situations that should have ended with his name on a casualty report.
A forest in another world was unfamiliar, but the problem itself wasn’t.
Find high ground. Get my bearings,Water, Food and Shelter before nightfall if I’m still here hoping this is just a dream that feels real.
There was no point wasting energy on panic. It wouldn’t change anything.
Kael glanced through the canopy, located the sun, fixed his direction, and started walking.
He’d taken barely forty steps before he found a body.
Kael crouched beside the body.
The man couldn’t have been older than his early twenties. His leather hunting gear was reinforced at the elbows and knees, a short sword hanging undisturbed at his hip as though he’d simply stopped in the middle of a patrol. There was no blood, no obvious wound, no signs of a struggle. Whatever had killed him had done it quickly enough that he’d never even drawn his weapon.
Kael pressed two fingers to the man’s neck.
Nothing.
The body was cold, but not stiff enough to have been lying here all day. Less than six hours, if he had to guess.
He exhaled quietly.
"Sorry man but I think I might borrow some of your stuff."
The dead had no use for equipment..
He unbuckled the sword, took the hunting knife from the man’s belt, then removed the small satchel clipped behind his waist. Inside were dried rations, a flint-and-steel kit, and a leather-bound booklet.
The writing across its cover should have been meaningless.
Instead, he read it as naturally as if he’d spoken the language his entire life.
His expression didn’t change.
It felt useful.
He opened the booklet as he resumed walking.
It turned out to be an introductory guide issued to newly registered Hunters of the Kingdom of Valdris. The first pages covered basic survival procedures around Gates, followed by monster classifications and a brief explanation of the kingdom’s cultivation system. It wasn’t written for veterans; it assumed the reader knew almost nothing, which made it exactly the sort of book Kael needed.
Iron.Bronze.Silver.Gold.Platinum.Diamond.Sovereign.
Seven ranks.
According to the guide, Iron was the first stage at which a person could perceive and manipulate Essence. Most Hunters never advanced beyond Silver, while Gold-ranked individuals were respected throughout the kingdom.
Kael closed the booklet and followed the instructions from memory, trying to sense the current of Essence flowing through his own body.
Nothing answered him. He waited for some sign—a flicker of warmth, a pulse of unseen energy, anything at all—but his body remained stubbornly silent.
Am I unranked?
According to the primer, some people were born incapable of cultivating. Their bodies lacked the pathways required to sense or absorb Essence, leaving them permanently cut off from the power that saturated the world. They were simply called Unranked, and the author hadn’t bothered to hide what he thought of them. To most of the kingdom, they were little more than ordinary civilians with no place on a battlefield.
He accepted the conclusion without disappointment. Knowing where he stood mattered far more than wishing the answer were different.
Sliding the booklet back into the satchel, he continued through the forest.
Nearly twenty minutes passed before the trees finally began to thin. Shafts of sunlight broke through the canopy ahead, hinting at an open space beyond the treeline. Kael slowed his pace automatically, one hand resting on the hunting knife as he approached with measured steps, careful not to announce his presence before he understood what lay ahead.
The clearing was roughly thirty meters across..At its center hung a Gate.
The booklet had described them as tears in reality through which monsters entered the world, but words hadn’t prepared him for the sight. The air itself had been ripped apart, leaving behind a vertical wound nearly four meters tall whose edges crackled with dark crimson energy. Shadows shifted on the other side, enormous shapes pacing just beyond the opening.
Between Kael and the Gate, a young woman was fighting for her life.
She couldn’t have been much older than he was. Brown skin, short dark hair, and hunter’s gear similar to the dead man’s, though hers had clearly seen years of careful maintenance. A short spear flashed through her hands as she held off three wolf-like creatures with unnerving speed.
They were too large to be ordinary wolves, their limbs bending at impossible angles beneath matted black fur, their mouths packed with rows of jagged teeth that looked built for tearing through armor rather than flesh.
She moved well.
Even from this distance, Kael could see the faint shimmer surrounding her body. She might be an Essence user — if the booklet had been accurate about what that looked like.
But she was losing.
Blood soaked the sleeve of her left arm, and every exchange stole a little more precision from her footwork. She compensated well enough to survive another few seconds, maybe another half-minute if nothing changed, but experience told Kael what exhaustion looked like long before the person feeling it admitted the truth.
He watched for exactly two seconds.
Then he bent down, picked up a rock roughly the size of his fist, stepped out from the cover of the trees, and threw it.
His aim had always been one of the few things he trusted without question.
The stone struck the nearest beast squarely across the skull with a sharp crack.
Its head snapped toward him.
The distraction lasted barely an instant, but it was enough.
The young woman drove her spear through the throat of the second monster before it could recover, while the third froze in place, instincts forcing it to reassess the appearance of an unexpected threat.
Kael drew the dead hunter’s sword.
’I’ve never fought monsters,’ he thought. ’But I’ve fought people. And I’ve slayed wild predators.’
Let’s see how much difference that makes.
The beast lunged.
He stepped sideways instead of backward, allowing its momentum to carry it past him before driving the sword into the base of its neck. The blade punched through with surprising ease, and the creature collapsed almost immediately, twitching once before going still.
Kael straightened up and looked down at it.
"They don’t even pack a punch," he said mockingly.
Across the clearing, the young woman yanked her spear free from the second corpse.
Only the first beast remained.
For a heartbeat, neither of them moved.
She stared at him with the stunned expression of someone who had fully expected to die moments ago.
She stepped closer, observing him with close intensity, her eyes moving over him the way someone might study a puzzle they hadn’t expected to find interesting.
"You’re unranked," she said.
It wasn’t a question.
Kael glanced at her. "Is that what I am?"
She blinked. "You didn’t know?"
"I had a suspicion," he said. "Didn’t have anyone to confirm it."
She stared at him for a moment, her expression caught somewhere between disbelief and amusement. ’Is this guy serious right now or is he messing with me?’
"And you walked out of the forest," she said slowly, "and threw a rock at a Gate beast. Unranked."
"It worked, didn’t it?"
She let out a short laugh, shaking her head. "You’re quite something. Throwing rocks at it — what did you even expect to happen?"
Grhghhh!!
The surviving monster snarled interrupting them mid conversation.
It sprang.Kael never heard it coming.
The impact slammed into his back like a charging bull, driving him face-first into the dirt. The sword flew from his hand as crushing weight pinned him to the ground, and a pair of enormous jaws closed around his left forearm.Around the ring.
Pain exploded through him, so bright and complete that it washed every other thought from his mind.
So this... is how I die...