The silence that settled over the cliffside after the slaves died was heavy and absolute.
The wind continued to howl through the jagged pine needles, carrying the bitter cold straight through Sunny’s threadbare burlap tunic, but the surrounding terror felt frozen in time.
The corpses of the dozen slaves who had devoured the Bloodbane berries lay stiff against the snow—their skin turned a dull, calcified gray like cracked statues, their mouths frozen in silent, foaming screams.
Over by the main fire, the guards barely bothered to look over.
To them, a handful of dead slaves was nothing more than a minor administrative inconvenience, less notable than a spilled cup of cheap ale.
A few lower-ranking soldiers simply spat into the snow, muttered a curse about having to clear the frozen bodies in the morning, and went back to tearing into their roasted meat.
Sunny remained seated against his cold boulder, completely still.
His dark blue eyes, unaffected by the pitch-black darkness around him, scanned the dead men without a trace of fear or pity.
Idiots, Sunny thought, his inner voice dripping with cold, unyielding practicality.
In Sector 25, if you see a bright red piece of trash sitting in a gutter where everything else is gray, you don’t eat it.
You check to see who’s using it as bait.
In a world full of monsters, greed is just a short cut to an early grave.
He let out a slow, steady breath, watching the faint white mist of his exhalation rise into the icy night air.
The blonde man was still whimpering in the snow a few feet away, shaking furiously from the near-death encounter, while the calm, priest-like slave had already sat back down, closing his eyes in silent prayer or detachment.
With theImmediate distraction cleared and the camp settling into a tense, icy rhythm, Sunny finally turned his attention inward.
It was time to figure out what the hell the Nightmare Spell had done to him.
Closing his eyes slightly, Sunny focused his mind on the hovering, golden light he had glimpsed earlier during their forced march.
The moment he concentrated, the faint, shimmering runes materialized once more, floating quietly against the dark backdrop of his mind like embers suspended in deep space.
Unlike the chaotic, terrifying visions of reverse time or the brutal reality of iron shackles, these golden symbols felt strange—orderly, ancient, and deeply terrifying in their absolute clarity.
He called forth his status.
[Name: Sunless]
[True Name: None]
[Rank: Common]
[Class: None]
[Attributes: Fated, Mark of Divinity]
Sunny paused, his consciousness narrowing onto the text.
Sunless.That was his name—or at least, the name the streets had given him.
But the line beneath it caught his eye immediately.
True Name: None.
True Name?
Sunny pondered, his analytical instincts grinding into gear.
Why would the Spell explicitly track whether someone has a ‘True Name’ or not?
If standard names exist, a True Name must be something far more fundamental… something tied to the very essence of a person’s identity in this realm.
He set the thought aside for a moment, letting his attention drift downward to the line that truly mattered: his Attributes.
In the real world, the elite families and wealthy legacy Awakened spoke of Attributes as divine gifts—rare, innate traits passed down or forged through immense trial that defined a warrior’s fate, strength, or affinity.
Sunny, a nameless street rat who had survived on scrap wood and scavenged bread, had never possessed anything of the sort.
Now, he had two.
Focusing his intent on the first word, the golden runes shifted, expanding into a full paragraph of glowing text.
[Attribute: Fated]
[Attribute Description: You are a nexus of impossible probabilities. The threads of fate weave around you with terrifying density, pulling distant destinies, catastrophic tragedies, and unimaginable miracles toward your path. Where others walk a linear road, your existence is an absolute whirlpool of fate.]
Sunny stared at the glowing golden text in the dark, his brows furrowing so deeply his forehead creaked.
Nexus of impossible probabilities?
Whirlpool of fate?
He nearly snorted out loud in sheer bitterness.
“What kind of garbage trait is this?” Sunny muttered internally, his cynical mind picking apart the flowery language with absolute disgust.
“It’s just a fancy, poetic way of saying I have the worst luck in human history!”
It made a twisted kind of sense.
Out of millions of people in Sector 25, he was the one who happened to contract the Nightmare Spell on the exact day he bought a cup of overpriced coffee.
Out of all the places in the First Nightmare, he was thrown into a slave caravan chained to a dozen men destined to freeze or bleed to death on a forgotten cliffside.
Fated doesn’t mean I’m a hero, Sunny realized, a cold shiver running down his spine that had nothing to do with the alpine wind.
It means the universe is going to constantly throw insane, deadly, improbable nonsense directly at my head, and I’ll have to bleed just to survive the crossfire.
A ‘whirlpool of fate’ just means everyone around me—including myself—is in constant danger of getting sucked down into the drain.
He let out a long, silent sigh, feeling the crushing weight of the attribute settling over his shoulders like an invisible chain far heavier than the iron bound to his wrists.
Fine.
Fate wants to play games?
Let it try.
I’ve been dodging death since the day I was born.
Turning his attention away from the cursed trait, Sunny focused on the second line of text.
[Attribute: Mark of Divinity]
[Attribute Description: A faint, ancient ember of the divine spark rests within the depths of your soul. Though faint and unawakened, your soul carries the subtle aura of the ancient gods, granting you heightened perception, affinity with shadows, and the capacity to perceive that which is hidden from mortal eyes.]
Sunny’s breath hitched slightly.
Divinity?
He blinked, reading the description three times to ensure his tired eyes weren’t hallucinating.
The gods of this world were long dead—or so the fragmented histories claimed—yet a trace of their spark was sitting inside his malnourished, street-grown soul.
Suddenly, several strange anomalies he had experienced since entering the Nightmare began to fall into place like pieces of a dark puzzle.
My vision, Sunny realized, his eyes darting across the pitch-black clearing.
While the other slaves were practically blind in the mountain dark, stumbling over rocks and crying in terror, Sunny could see everything with razor-sharp clarity.
The shadows stretching across the snow didn’t obscure his line of sight; rather, they seemed to step aside, rendering the terrain in crisp shades of silver, gray, and black.
He could see the intricate iron filigree on the guards’ armor across the clearing.
He could see the faint, rhythmic rise and fall of the horses’ chests.
He could even see the tiny, translucent veins of crimson sap frozen on the stems of the deadly Bloodbane plants down the cliff.
Affinity with shadows… heightened perception…
Sunny tested the thought, looking down at his own hand resting in the dark dirt.
When he looked closely, he noticed that the shadow cast by his arm wasn’t behaving quite like a normal shadow.
While the light from the distant bonfire flickered, causing the other slaves’ shadows to dance and stretch in sync with the flames, Sunny’s shadow seemed slightly delayed—darker, denser, and subtly clinging to his skin as if it were a living creature whispering secrets to his mind.
So that’s why I can see so clearly in the dark, he thought, a rare spark of satisfaction flickering through his cold chest.
The darkness isn’t an obstacle to me.
It’s a refuge.
He continued to explore the golden text, probing deeper into the Spell’s interface to see if there was anything else—a weapon, an ability, a skill, anything that could help him break the iron shackles biting into his wrists.
[Aspect: None]
[Spells/Memories: None]
[Echoes: None]
Sunny grimaced.
No weapons.
No magical items.
No combat abilities.
He was still just a malnourished sixteen-year-old boy in tattered burlap rags, bound by iron, surrounded by heavily armored soldiers and lethal wilderness, carrying an attribute that practically guaranteed a catastrophe was right around the corner.
No Aspect yet, Sunny analyzed calmly, his mind rapidly sifting through the implications.
That means I haven’t completed my trial or unlocked my soul core’s true potential.
I’m operating on pure baseline human strength—or rather, a starving street kid’s baseline strength—plus whatever small passive edge this ‘Mark of Divinity’ gives my eyes and instincts.
He closed the golden interface, letting the light fade back into the dark corners of his mind.
The silence of the night returned in full force, punctuated only by the distant, eerie howling of the mountain wind through the ravine below.
Sunny leaned his head back against the frozen rock face, staring up at the bruised, cloud-choked sky.
The cold was clawing at his limbs, turning his toes numb, but his mind was working faster than it ever had in the slums of Sector 25.
He looked at the dead, stone-like slaves.
He looked at the oblivious, laughing guards drinking by the fire.
He looked at the thick, unnatural white fog slowly creeping up from the edge of the precipice, swallowing the lower rocks foot by foot.
Fated…
Sunny thought, a dark, dangerous smile pulling at the corner of his chapped lips.
If my fate is a whirlpool of tragedy, then this peaceful night isn’t going to last much longer.
Something is coming out of that fog.
He shifted his weight silently, testing the slack of the iron chain connecting him to the blonde man and the priest.
He needed to be ready to move, to react, to kill or crawl the second the world exploded into chaos.
Because in a world ruled by monsters and gods, a slave without power had only one weapon left:
The absolute, unyielding refusal to die.