I am left alone in the basement.

  My breath trembles, thin and uneven, as I drag myself deeper into the darkness, away from the place where my blood pooled, away from the iron reek that will draw anything with teeth. Every movement grinds as a reminder that I am prey, already wounded, already dying.

  The building around me feels ancient. The walls sweat dust. The air tastes like powdered cement and mold. It cakes on my tongue and gums into my teeth, and somehow, the illusion has recreated it perfectly. It's disgusting, as if it wants me to choke on realism.

  I search the shadows for someone. Anyone. But the basement is a carcass of empty space. Only wooden beams, rotting crates, and darkness are arranged in shapes that look like people until I blink.

  Outside, the screams never stop. They stretch on in threads, and behind them are the roars. Those hungry, snarling roars that shake the ground, the kind of sound creatures make when they split spines or chew lungs while they’re still warm. Every cry makes my wound throb harder, as though my body wants to join the chorus.

  This is when I miss healing. I miss the way pain used to fade under my fingers, how wounds used to close before fear could settle in. Now, when I hold my breath, my lungs stab me with sharp, desperate reminders that I am breakable.

  And when I finally exhale, the air that leaves me is cold enough to feel like surrender.

  ‘This is an illusion. The pain isn’t real.’ I whisper it through clenched teeth as I drag myself toward a toppled cabinet. My fingers slip on dust and dried blood as I pry it open.

  Inside, there’s no medicine. I didn’t really expect any. But there is a small bottle of bleach hidden under a few blood-stiffened towels.

  I seize it immediately. The cap twists off with a crack, and the harsh chemical reek punches the air out of my lungs. My vision blurs for a moment. My wound flares angrily before I even touch it.

  Then I do the stupid thing. The desperate thing. I pour half the bottle over the metal rod stuck through my stomach.

  The liquid hits me like fire. Liquid knives. I feel the burn all the way to my spine. My nerves scream louder than the humans outside, but I don’t. Not a sound leaves me. I grind my jaw, breathe through my teeth, force my mind onto anything else. Numbers, colors, the memory of cool water, until the pain finally collapses into a throbbing ache.

  The towels are crusted and cold, but I use them anyway. Every wipe sends a jolt through me, but the bleeding slows. I’m grateful the rod missed anything vital. Grateful I’m still a moving corpse and not a still one.

  Another hour passes before I can stand. My legs shake like they don’t believe in me anymore. My head feels hollow, light in the wrong way—like something important has leaked out.

  I brace myself on the wall and lift one foot. It hovers there for a long, trembling second before the next one follows. Progress, pathetic but real.

  The story of the First Day drifts through my mind. Humanity’s favorite myth. The day we learned the constellations were not just lights. The day Nexus Events began. And the day every failure birthed a new calamity.

  Fitting, I suppose, that the illusion uses that day as inspiration for my fear.

  I can’t risk going upstairs—not with the screaming, not with the shadows moving above the floorboards. Anything could be hunting up there.

  So, to keep safe, I pour more bleach on myself to mess with the smell of blood. After that, I gather the same metal rod that Nico yanked from my body and add bleach to it, too. Any blood can get me in trouble.

  Before climbing the broken stairs, I peek upward. The hole I fell through is wider now. Like the building keeps collapsing around me on purpose. Most of what's left is nothing but cracked stone, twisted metal, and glittering shards of glass clinging to the frame like teeth.

  In this illusion, I look younger. Smaller. Sickly, even. My arms are thin sticks trembling under my own weight, and there’s a blue card hanging around my neck with ‘VISITOR’ stamped on it in bold, unfriendly letters.

  After I make sure nothing is lurking above, I begin to climb. Slowly. Quietly. The metal rod is still in my grip like a lifeline. Glass crunches under each shaky step.

  When the thick, coppery, and suffocating smell reaches my nostrils, my breath turns ragged. It clings to my throat like warm syrup. It feels wrong. Too real. Still, I keep going.

  I force myself to whisper. It’s not real, it’s not real, until I reach the first floor.

  “Oh gods.” The words escape me before I can swallow them.

  The white tiles are drowned in red. Blood splashed, smeared, soaked into every crack. The floor is cluttered with freshly dismembered limbs—arms torn off at the shoulder, legs bitten clean through, torsos ripped open like split fruit. Some pieces have been chewed down to bone. Others lie untouched, tossed aside like discarded toys.

  I step forward, and something bursts under my shoe with a wet pop. I look down. It's an eyeball. My heel sinks into it, and blood and jelly ooze out across the tile.

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  I gag so hard my stomach knots, but nothing comes out. The bodies, what’s left of them, are mostly adults. A few are children. All of them wear the same blue VISITOR cards as I.

  Fuck. They didn’t just die. They were turned into meat.

  Their final moments must’ve been. No. I don’t even want to imagine it. But the room forces me to.

  A memory surfaces, something a scientist once told me, voice cold and amused:

  “The first Nexus Event started by turning humans into monsters, only proving one thing: we were always our own worst enemy.”

  Staring at the carnage, I believe him.

  The person who slaughtered everyone here… wasn’t a creature at the start. It was a human. Someone who just happened to inconveniently turn into a monster the moment the Nexus Event was lost.

  Which means the butcher responsible for this massacre, according to history, was a Silverblood who was twisted into something ravenous.

  That’s when the realization hits me like a blunt strike to the ribs. I haven’t even checked myself. Not once.

  My hands shake as I pick up a shard of glass. I raise it. And there I am, still the same.

  Bright red eyes glowing like open wounds. Skin pale and smooth like poured milk. Silver hair. It's long, soft, too perfect, glimmering even under the sick yellow haze leaking through broken walls.

  Even with dust and blood tangled through it, I look like something delicate. Sculpted. Untouched by the filth around me.

  A perfect face. It disgusts me. A part of me wants to drag the glass across my cheek, tear that perfection apart, smear the beauty until it matches the horror I’m standing in. But I can’t. Not with the suffocating reek of blood thick enough to draw every hungry thing within a mile.

  I also need to remember that this is an illusion. A cage crafted by the Darkest Night. It doesn’t just want to make me afraid. It wants me broken. Broken so badly that I hand myself over willingly.

  Surrender could be as simple as letting myself die here. Rejection… might mean killing the thing designed to kill me.

  A spark of an idea blooms in my mind. If I kill the monster that’s supposed to end me, maybe that’ll tear open the illusion. Maybe I’ll snap back to reality.

  I gather what I can. Shards of glass, broken metal, anything that can serve as a weapon, and step out of the ruined building. The street is a trail of carnage. Blood smeared in handprints across walls. Limbs tossed like discarded meat. Torsos dragged until they left long, dark streaks behind.

  I follow the chaos. The sky hangs low and sickly, a dark yellow sulfur stain smothered by smoke. And overhead, projected across the clouds like some divine threat, is a giant message:

  [YOUR PLANET HAS BEEN SELECTED AS THE LAST PLANET TO JOIN THE OTHER 1,000,097 PLANETS IN THE SINGULAR NEXUS SYSTEM. PREPARE TO BE BLESSED BY THE CONSTELLATIONS.]

  I know they’re just words, but seeing them for the first time, illusion or not, something tightens in my chest. A cold, instinctive terror. This is my history. The darkest day of humanity. And I’m walking through it like a ghost trapped in someone else’s nightmare.

  The possible future illusion failed to make me surrender, so now the creature is dragging me backward into the first wound humanity ever suffered.

  The towering structures still stand, skeletal silhouettes against the sulfur sky. A few burn, vomiting black smoke. The streets look abandoned, hollowed out of life.

  Did that thing kill everyone except me in such a short time? No. That’s impossible. The average population of a human megacity back then was around thirty million. Back when overpopulation was still our biggest problem. There’s no way a handful of monsters killed all of them in a single day.

  Which means the Darkest Night isn’t recreating the entire world. It recreated the scenario just for me. A tailored nightmare loop to force a specific reaction as it tries to mold me into whatever it wants.

  ‘Let’s see…The first illusion was built on what it thought was my greatest desire. It assumed everyone from Bloodhaul wanted the same thing. Meaning the Darkest Night can’t truly read minds.’

  “Not instantly, at least.”

  It needs time. It can build illusions around desire, but since my real desire is to die, it has no choice but to keep me alive. Keep me breathing. Keep me terrified. So it is using my death as a method of my surrendering.

  And to trap me here, it stole the name of my weapon. The name that anchors my mind.

  Bastard. Unbelievable how easily it got to us. I can now see how Sasha and Dan could’ve succumbed to it without noticing it. They had already been fed their greatest desires, and hence why they were so ready to rush into death for Adam and whoever this Ashmael was.

  I follow the trail of blood smeared across the pavement, sticky and dark. The day never shifts. The light never moves. The illusion is frozen, like time is holding its breath, waiting for me to make the wrong choice.

  I switch my weapon to a short sword. It's a small, balanced, and most importantly…familiar. Better suited for close-quarters. And safer. My hands know this weight. My regressions carved the movements into my bones.

  Guns from this era are worthless anyway; star ether hadn’t been officially discovered or converted into energy yet, so bullets bounce off most monsters like pebbles.

  However, because it is the First Day, it exists. And since I am still a silver child in this illusion, I can reach it if I focus hard enough. The connection sleeps like a buried nerve, but it’s still there. I am one of the Empress’s children, after all.

  I know she can sense me, even here in a fake world. Constellations transcend illusions, realms, memories, everything.

  I mean… that’s how one of them cursed me with immortality in the first place. They touched me from beyond reality, like flicking an ant.

  As I follow the trail, I start noticing fresh footprints. Deep, warped, wrong. The creature has changed since I last saw the aftermath of its attack. It has grown. Perhaps even evolved. The size of the holes crushed into the street makes it obvious: it’s bigger now. Much bigger.

  And the number of prints… It has grown extra limbs.

  It has consumed enough.

  ‘Crap.’

  I move forward carefully. The silence thickens like fog, weighing down the streets, pressing in on my skull. With every step, the city feels less like ruins and more like a graveyard that hasn’t realized it’s a graveyard yet.

  The deeper I go, the fewer bodies I see—but the destruction remains brutal and recent. Imploded storefronts, cars crushed like tin, claw marks scratched down entire walls.

  But no corpses. They’ve all been taken, devoured, or dragged.

  My senses aren’t heightened in this illusion. My once sharp instincts are dull, so I can’t tell how far the monster is, only that it’s near. Too near. A predator that eats silence as it stalks.

  I grip the short sword tighter, breath shallow, following the widening carnage like a breadcrumb trail meant to guide me into the dark.

  And soon, I make it to a single house on the side of the nameless street. The low growls coming from it are proof that my predator is waiting for me beyond the entrance, which is surprisingly still intact since the creature is bigger than an elephant.

  I walk up to the widely open door and draw on the ether I could. It flickers a bit around the sword.

  It's familiar with who I am, a Silverblood.