The Abyss was never meant for souls like his.
It wasn't just a place, or a void between worlds. It was the final grave for the forgotten—the broken echoes of code and spirit cast aside by gods who had long since abandoned their creation. A place where time itself dissolved into endless loops of corruption, deletion, and decay.
Veyr Crow's consciousness stirred in that emptiness—fragmented, flickering like a dying program struggling to load after centuries of silence.
He was dead.
Not once, but twice.
Executed for crimes no man should live long enough to commit. Betrayed by those he called brother, discarded by the very systems he had built. And yet, here he lingered—an aberration, a ghost in the machine.
His awareness was a tangle of broken commands and corrupted memories. Every second was a battle to hold on, to resist the erasure that gnawed at his essence. There was no hope, no promise of return—only the void stretching endlessly before him.
And yet, faintly, impossibly, something flickered.
A pulse.
A whisper.
A fragment of light in the endless dark.
Far above the world, Ark Veil hung suspended in the night sky, a fragile city held aloft by ancient mana chains that groaned beneath their burden. It was a monument to humanity's stubborn defiance—gleaming towers of glass and steel etched with glowing runes, glittering like stars caught in a cage.
But below, the slums sprawled like a wound across the city's underside—a maze of rusted pipes, shattered concrete, and flickering neon, where shadows swallowed hope and life flickered like dying embers.
There, in the deepest corner of Sector 9B, a boy knelt alone.
Ash.
No last name. No origin. Just a forgotten shard of humanity clinging to a broken body.
He was barely alive.
Blood dripped from cracked lips, mixing with the grime beneath him. His chest rose and fell in ragged gasps, heart hammering weakly against ribs fractured and bleeding. Around him, the world blurred—a sickly swirl of distant sirens, whispered curses, and the metallic taste of fear.
Ash should have died that night.
The purges were relentless, sweeping through the lower sectors with merciless efficiency. Null Beasts hunted like predators, and the Execution Units—cold, unfeeling enforcers of the System—had already passed him by.
He was worthless.
Unclaimed.
Forgotten.
But in the depths of his failing core, a pulse stirred.
Cold. Dark. Unnatural.
A shard of corrupted code embedded deep beneath his ribs—a relic from another time, another world.
It throbbed, calling out.
[CORRUPTED CODE CORE DETECTED]
[BINDING PROTOCOL INITIATED]
[DO YOU WISH TO ATTEMPT BINDING? Y/N]
Ash's fingers twitched.
His mind, fractured and fading, barely comprehended the prompt. But somewhere, deep inside the chaos, a choice flickered.
He reached out.
He said nothing.
But his soul screamed.
And the system obeyed.
The connection snapped like a lightning bolt.
In that instant, Veyr Crow was pulled back from oblivion, dragged across the void between death and life. His fractured consciousness surged, flooding into the broken vessel of a dying boy.
It was a jarring rebirth.
Pain exploded through the boy's body—not the familiar pain of flesh, but the raw shock of ancient machinery rebooting. Nerves sparked. Bones cracked. Muscles twitched, awakening from long dormancy.
Veyr's mind swirled with sensation: the weight of a failing body, the sharp sting of memories not his own, the cold certainty of a new beginning.
He was no longer just a ghost trapped between worlds.
He was a cipher.
A fusion of corrupted code and fragile humanity.
An anomaly in a world ruled by order.
System Initialization...
Error.
Identity Conflict Detected.
Overriding Primary Core...
Emergency Protocol Activated...
A voice echoed inside his fractured mind—not human, not divine, but something else entirely. A guardian. A jailer. A guide.
"Welcome back, Cipher V-0."
Veyr's new body shuddered, trembling as ancient systems reignited. The alley around him smelled of smoke and rot. Distant sirens screamed like banshees mourning the forgotten.
He rose unsteadily, limbs heavy but responsive.
The pulse beneath his skin flickered—a dim blue light emanating from the Cipher Core nestled deep inside.
It was unstable. Damaged. Severed from the great web of System Nodes that sustained most cultivators.
But it was alive.
And that was enough.
His vision blurred, then cleared.
The slum stretched out before him—a labyrinth of shattered data streams, corrupted programs, and lost souls.
The System's eyes were everywhere. Silent watchers scanning, hunting, purging.
But they did not see him.
Not yet.
Veyr flexed his fingers, feeling the weight of borrowed flesh and tethered spirit.
It was fragile. Flawed.
But it was his.
From the depths of that broken vessel, he summoned a flicker of power.
A simple rune, nothing more than a spark.
But it burned bright in the shadows.
The world had been reset. The board cleared.
It was time to rewrite the rules.
Far above, inside the dim glow of a towering Archive Spire, an old man stirred.
His crystal eye flared red, scanning endless streams of cascading code.
One line stood out.
[Unauthorized Cipher Reconnection Detected—Source: Sector 9B, Slums]
His lips tightened.
"Veyr Crow," he whispered. "Thought you were gone."
He reached for the command console—but the trace was gone.
Erased.
Rewritten.
The old man's hands trembled with rage and fear.
Back in the alley, Veyr—now Ash—walked forward, shadows trailing like whispers.
In his palm, the first rune blossomed, glowing faintly with raw, untamed energy.
It was crude.
Unrefined.
But it worked.