Volume 1: Earth Arc / Transition
Chapter 4: The Weight of Sand
Morning arrived not with the gentle warmth of a yellow sun, but with a blistering, unforgiving heat that immediately began baking the stagnant air inside the tent.
Shu awoke to the abrasive friction of a coarse woven mat against his cheek.
He groaned, a high-pitched, fragile sound that still made his skin crawl.
His tiny body ached with a dull, pervasive soreness.
Every intentional movement felt agonizingly sluggish, restricted by underdeveloped bones and limbs that lacked the muscle density to execute the sharp, calculated commands of his adult mind.
He pushed himself up into a sitting position, his small, dirt-caked hands trembling as they bore his meager weight.
The memories of the previous night—the blinding red screen, the catastrophic surge of 220-volt electricity, the crushing, suffocating darkness of the Void, and the terrifying revelation of his current coordinates in reality—crashed over him like a suffocating tidal wave.
He was in Icathia.
The epicenter of Runeterra’s most devastating cataclysm.
Slowly, he turned his head.
Sleeping soundly on the opposite side of the tent, her small chest rising and falling in a steady, peaceful rhythm, was Kai’Sa.
The future Daughter of the Void.
The girl who would eventually bond with a parasitic carapace just to survive the abyssal nightmare waiting beneath their feet.
Shu looked down at his own palms.
They were so small, tanned by a sun he had never walked under, and coated in a fine layer of pale desert dust.
He clenched his fingers into tight fists, feeling the weak, pathetic flex of his tiny tendons.
He wasn’t a hero.
He hadn’t been reincarnated with a magical system, an overpowered physique, or an ancient weapon.
He was just a frail child.
A child with a ticking clock counting down to the apocalypse.
Gritting his teeth against a wave of profound nausea, Shu crawled toward the entrance of the tent and pushed the heavy leather flap aside.
The blinding, oppressive light of the Shuriman sun forced him to shield his eyes.
As his pupils painfully adjusted to the glare, the sheer reality of his new world fully materialized before him.
It was a modest, struggling settlement clinging desperately to existence at the bottom of a dry, craggy valley.
Mud-brick dwellings and weathered animal-skin tents were scattered haphazardly across the rocky terrain.
Lean, sun-baked men and women moved methodically between the structures, their faces etched with the deep, permanent exhaustion of surviving in an unforgiving wasteland.
A few goats with violently curved horns gnawed stubbornly on sparse, yellowed scrub brush.
It was entirely ordinary.
A mundane, desolate village just trying to survive another day.
Yet, beneath this fragile veneer of harsh normalcy, Shu knew the horrifying truth.
Beneath the very earth these people walked upon, slumbering in the abyssal depths, were cosmic horrors that defied human comprehension.
And in roughly two years, the ground would split open, and the Void would swallow them all.
A small hand suddenly tugged at the back of his linen tunic.
Shu flinched violently, a jolt of pure adrenaline spiking through his small heart.
He spun around, his weak legs almost giving out beneath him, only to see Kai’Sa standing there rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
In her other hand, she held a piece of hard, unleavened flatbread.
“You’re awake early,” she mumbled, her voice thick with sleep.
She unceremoniously shoved the piece of bread toward his chest.
“Father will be back from the border patrol soon.
He promised to bring us sweet sap from the cactus today.”
Shu stared at the dry bread, and then up at Kai’Sa’s innocent, expectant face.
She had absolutely no idea.
She didn’t know that the father she was so eagerly waiting for would eventually be lost to her, or that her childhood would brutally end inside a subterranean slaughterhouse.
Slowly, his trembling fingers reached out and took the bread.
He bit into it.
It was incredibly dry, tasting faintly of ash and sand, completely devoid of moisture.
But Shu chewed it meticulously, forcing his small, protesting stomach to accept the nourishment.
He needed strength.
If he was going to survive the inevitable collapse of Icathia—if he was going to plunge into the Void alongside this girl and somehow claw his way back up to the surface—he couldn’t afford a single ounce of weakness.
He couldn’t afford to cry like a child, and he couldn’t afford to panic like the broken man he used to be.
The two-year timer had officially started.
And Shu was already miles behind.