Four days passed like a breath held underwater.
He spent them carefully.
Academy in the mornings, quiet observation in the afternoons, long hours at the table in his room turning theory into preparation.
He read every book on Zayden’s shelves twice.
He mapped what he knew about the Aethernal System against what the diary suggested.
He watched Hash leave for the lumber mill each morning and return with aching shoulders and the expression of a man who had stopped expecting the world to make things easy.
He watched Zyla manage a household that would have broken most adults, and do it while maintaining top marks at her school as though neither thing cost her anything.
These people are remarkable, he thought, and immediately set the observation aside.
Sentiment was something he could afford later.
On Sunday, he told Zyla he needed supplies for a project.
“Take care,” she murmured, worry pulling at the corners of her eyes.
“Come back before seven.”
He turned toward the Bright Mountains instead.
The ruins outside Amber City were not supposed to exist in any useful sense.
The official history described them as a collapsed outpost from the early second epoch — nothing of value, strictly prohibited, dangerous ground.
The kind of official history that is written specifically to keep people away from something.
He evaded the patrols with patience and entered through a gap in the outer wall that suggested someone had used it recently enough for the stone dust not to have fully resettled.
Inside, the place was eerily well-preserved for something abandoned.
Walls that should have crumbled centuries ago stood clean and upright, as though they had been maintained by something other than human hands.
On one wall, text he had no reason to be able to read sharpened into clarity before his eyes.
Ancient Greek.
In a world that had no Greece.
Move the finger in a circle nine times, then tap ten times upon the centre.
He followed the instructions precisely.
A deep, grinding rumble moved through the stone beneath his feet.
The wall slid backwards and aside, revealing a hidden chamber cloaked in shadow, and something important rested at its centre.
The noise betrayed him.
Hurried footsteps — many — closed in fast from outside.
Guards.
He stood at the threshold for exactly one second.
Stepping back now means losing the only chance I’ve had.
He stepped through.
The entrance sealed behind him without sound.
No door, no seam — just cold, solid stone, as if the wall had never moved.
An otherworldly pressure settled over him immediately, thick and alive, brushing against his skin like the touch of unseen fingers.
The chamber felt severed from the world above, operating under rules of its own.
Soft golden light drifted through the air without visible source, illuminating nine ancient stone tablets embedded in the walls and one in the ceiling.
In the far corner stood a plain wooden table and chair.
On the table rested a simple, unassuming journal.
He approached carefully.
Analysed everything before sitting down.
Opened the journal.
The first page was written in Ancient Greek.
This language again.
In a world with no Greece.
He set the thought aside and read.
Instructions of the Black Lexicon:
This is the Book of Forbidden Knowledge.
To bind it to yourself, leave your blood fingerprint on the final page.
It has its own will.
Knowledge always demands a price.
Once claimed, it becomes your lifelong curse.
It will follow you wherever you go.
It grants answers — but only what you need in that moment.
Every day, it will ask you one random, private question.
It requires one drop of your blood daily.
To all others, it appears as nothing more than an ordinary diary.
It contains a shortcut to this hidden room.
He read it twice.
Turned it over.
Weighed every line.
A living book.
A curse.
The danger was not subtle.
But the promise of real answers — answers that might one day lead him home — was the only currency that mattered right now.
“I can manage this,” he murmured to himself, the way he had once murmured through problems at his office desk at two in the morning, before the world he knew had ended.
He turned to the last page.
One blood fingerprint already marked the paper, with a single name printed beneath it in faded ink.
Vex.
Something flickered in him — not fear, but warning.
He noticed it, weighed it, and steadied himself.
Then he read the small handwritten note on the back cover, almost hidden in the binding:
Never listen to the voices.
Believe in your soul and mind,
And accept the Nature.
He pricked his fingertip and pressed a clean print onto the page.
The name Everhart bloomed beneath it in glowing script, fresh and permanent, as though it had always been waiting there.
A sleek black pen appeared on the table beside him from nowhere.
He picked it up and wrote his first question.
What do you know about the Aethernal System?
The ink on the page shifted.
Rearranged itself.
The answer formed in clear, deliberate lines.
The Aethernal System grants command over nine primal elements:
Firmus (Fire)
Earus (Earth)
Wirfius (Air)
Etricus (Electro)
Cirmus (Ice)
Hetrious (Water)
Ligtirs (Light)
Darkims (Shadow)
and Vireon (Nature)
Powers are unlocked through ancient rituals and marked by unique coloured badges.
Only badge bearers can wield an element or perceive the badges of others.
The nine churches control this knowledge absolutely.
After claiming one badge, every subsequent ritual becomes one and a half times more difficult.
Most people obtain only one badge in a lifetime.
Exceptions exist.
His eyes narrowed.
That explains the officers’ badges.
But he’d been able to see those before earning any badge himself.
That ability had to be tied to the transmigration — to whatever had carried him across the boundary between worlds and deposited him here.
He pressed a drop of blood to the page as instructed.
The book absorbed it instantly, then recorded his full identity — father’s name, birthplace, nationality, current badge count: empty.
One drop and it held the complete shape of his life.
One drop.
And it just learned everything about me.
Terrifying.
He continued with measured questions.
The book recommended Ligtirs — light — based on his nationality and explained the ritual in stark, unsoftened terms: stare directly into the sun for three unbroken hours without blinking.
The risks were listed plainly.
Permanent blindness.
Death from brain failure and overheating.
Worth it, was his internal verdict, delivered without drama.
Power is not ambition.
It is the only path home.
He asked about the moon’s strange glitch and the diagram from the diary.
The book refused.
Gain power first.
Then ask.
Then it turned on him without warning.
You silly bastard.
My turn now.
What kind of woman do you want in your bed?
He stopped.
Something ached behind his ribs — sudden and involuntary — as his thoughts drifted to Lauren before he could catch them.
The way she laughed when she thought no one was listening.
The weight of her hand in his.
He wrote honestly: The one who completely overwhelms me.
Ohh, the book replied, and there was unmistakable amusement in the ink itself.
Excellent taste.
He asked about Mark’s death.
The book knew and withheld it.
He asked about reading the stone tablets.
Same answer: more power first.
He asked how to leave.
The book demanded three drops of blood for future access to the hidden room.
He gave them.
Darkness swallowed him.
He blinked awake in the ruins.
The diary lay beside his hand.
The sky above burned orange and deep red, the sun long past its peak.
Real.
All of it was real.
He slipped through the patrol lines undetected and ran back through the streets of Amber City.
A few minutes later, he knocked on the Everhart front door.
Zyla flung it open, eyes wide with relief and storm-force worry meeting on her face at the same time.
“It’s already eight o’clock! Hash and I have been worried half to death—” She pulled him inside by the arm, warm hands briefly cupping his face before she pulled back and crossed her own arms.
“Where have you been, you impossible boy?! I was imagining the most horrible things!”
“I’m sorry,” he said calmly.
“The market was busier than expected.”
She huffed, visibly unconvinced, but softened anyway.
“Fine. Wash your face. Dinner is cold and it’s entirely your fault.”
At the table, Hash looked up.
“Where today?”
“Academy supplies.” A careful pause.
“Needed a few things.”
Hash gave a short nod.
“Good. Keep studying.”
After dinner, alone in his room, the diary had already reappeared on the bed.
The curse was real, and it had wasted no time proving it.
He sat at the table and stared out the window at the unnaturally large, blood-red moon hanging low over the rooftops.
The moon glitches.
The same symbol appears in the diary and on hidden underground tablets.
A system of power the churches control absolutely.
A friend who was silenced with poison.
And a book that already knows my blood.
It’s all connected.
Every thread leads somewhere I can’t see yet.
Exhaustion won before he could think further.
But as he lay down and closed his eyes, one thought surfaced with cold clarity and refused to go:
Someone named Vex bound this book before me.
And that name — I’ve seen it somewhere else.
I just haven’t remembered where yet.
First impressions can be deceiving.
Sometimes the people who seem ordinary hide stories far greater than our own