Sector 9 – Ascension Hall
The towers of Sector 9 sliced through the morning mist like black knives. Neon veins of gene-tech flickered across their glass surfaces, humming softly with life. The skyline was a jagged wound stitched together by cables and antennae, pulsing with data, drones, and powerlines. This was the Empire's capital of progress. The beating heart of the Gene Age.
And Raen Virell stood on the lowest rung of its golden ladder.
He exhaled, breath fogging in front of his lips as he waited for his name to be called.
"Candidate 981: Virell, Raen."
The voice echoed through the Ascension Hall's speaker columns. Monotone. Final.
He stepped forward, each footstep echoing unnaturally loud on the polished obsidian floor. Thousands of students stood in arranged hexagonal formations behind him, each wearing the ceremonial dark blue of the Genetic Awakening Day. Their expressions were varied—some nervous, some smug, many outright dismissive. Especially toward him.
Raen's clothes were a bit faded at the edges. He didn't wear a family crest. No engraved pendant. No nano-thread gloves. Just a stitched scarf over his neck and a single, cracked ID shard clipped to his belt.
He didn't belong here.
"Last year's dropout?" someone whispered.
"I heard his gene tests didn't even light up the scanner."
"They're letting Outer Slum kids take the test again now? That's cute."
Raen ignored them. He'd learned long ago that silence had weight. He reached the pedestal—a tall crystal spire wrapped in faintly glowing rings. Each ring represented a tier of the genetic hierarchy.
Bronze. Silver. Gold. Platinum. Obsidian. Divine. Transcendent.
Every child in the Empire was tested by age fifteen. Those with results above Silver entered military academies, cultivation colleges, or bonded with a beast core to pursue Ascendancy.
Raen was seventeen.
He'd been here before.
He'd failed before.
This was his final attempt—granted only by a minor legal technicality after the reform laws passed in Sector 9. It was supposed to be a kindness.
It felt more like an execution.
The examiner, a tall, lean woman with a chrome neural implant that spiraled around her skull, gave a slight nod.
"You may begin."
Raen took a slow breath and stepped forward. His hand hovered over the pedestal.
It was cold. Not physically—energetically. A dead kind of cold. Like touching metal that had been buried in snow for decades.
His fingers touched the surface.
The pedestal flared. Briefly.
A dull grey pulse rippled out across its crystal skin.
Then nothing.
Silence fell. Not the respectful kind. The heavy, disbelieving kind.
> [GENETIC COMPATIBILITY: NULL]
[GENETIC VALUE: 0.000]
[BEAST CORE COMPATIBILITY: NON-EXISTENT]
The air felt thinner.
"…What?"
"Didn't even get Bronze tier? That's not possible."
"He triggered the Null response—again!"
"Holy Void, he's Gene-dead!"
The examiner stepped back, her eyes flicking to her neural HUD, then to Raen. Her voice came over the speakers, too crisp. Too practiced.
"Candidate Raen Virell: Classified as Genetic Null. No measurable cultivation potential. This concludes your eligibility for the Ascendant Track. You are advised to seek basic labor education or apply for genetic correction trials under the Department of Biotech Welfare."
The pedestal's rings dimmed.
A flicker of static passed through the air.
Raen stepped back slowly, his hand still tingling from the contact. He didn't look at the crowd. He didn't need to.
They were already laughing.
---
Outside, the sky had turned a sickly grey, clouds writhing like smoke above the spires of Sector 9. Neon signs flickered between languages—Imperial Highscript and Common Tongue—advertising Beast Symbiotes, combat drones, gene-stitched blades, and radiant supplements for cultivating youth.
Raen walked.
He passed the glowing gate of the Ascension Hall, not even noticing as its gene sensors deactivated behind him. It would be the last time the city's central systems ever acknowledged his presence. His Citizen Score would plummet to its minimum baseline. No jobs. No security. No beast pairing. Not even eligibility for public AI assistance.
He would be moved to the Outer Fringe by nightfall. That was how the system worked.
Behind him, others were celebrating. They didn't care. The world only saw power. Those who had it ascended. Those who didn't were forgotten.
His feet took him to the tram lines, but he couldn't board without credits.
So he walked.
The path sloped downward, buildings becoming more rusted, walls covered in hand-drawn warding glyphs or gang sigils. Steam hissed from broken vents. The deeper he went, the more the world flickered—lights dimmed, drones flew slower, and the city's heartbeat faded into a background hum of dysfunction.
The Slum Sectors.
He reached a row of collapsed buildings where the gene-pylons no longer worked. These areas weren't monitored anymore. Power was rerouted to places that mattered.
He sat beneath an overhang, rain trickling through a fractured canopy of plastic and metal.
For a long time, he said nothing.
But in his mind, something pulsed.
It had begun back at the pedestal.
A flicker. A glimmer.
No… not light. Not sound.
It was pressure.
A presence that shouldn't exist.
It coiled in his blood like a dream he'd fo
rgotten.
And then, something blinked in the air—right in front of him.
A single point of black static.
Raen's eyes widened.
The static blinked again.
Just a flicker in the corner of Raen's eye—like the universe hiccupped for a millisecond. Then it repeated. This time closer.
He stood.
The alleyway stretched ahead into the shadow of two broken apartment stacks. Rusted steel groaned overhead, and loose planks shivered with the wind. It was the kind of place the city pretended didn't exist—a tear in the perfect simulation of progress.
But that flicker… it felt real.
It pulsed again—like a heartbeat, except it wasn't just sound. It struck the air with a force that rattled in Raen's teeth. His knees almost buckled, not from fear but some deep-rooted instinct.
Go.
He didn't know where the word came from.
It wasn't in his head.
It was in his blood.
Raen stepped forward. The static intensified. The shimmer grew clearer—like a veil woven of fractured glass and threads of midnight. It hovered in the space between two ruined support columns. And as he approached, the wind stopped.
No breeze. No hum of city drones. No far-off coughs or footsteps.
Only silence.
He reached out.
And the world shattered.
---
His body plunged forward—into a tunnel that wasn't a tunnel.
The space bent around him. Glyphs scrolled across invisible walls, not written in any language he knew. They pulsed with meanings he couldn't decipher but felt bone-deep. The kind of truths ancient things whispered to stars before humans ever existed.
The tunnel wasn't physical. He wasn't walking. He was falling sideward through a dimension that rejected the idea of direction altogether.
Then he landed.
Not with impact. With purpose.
He stood in a circular chamber that couldn't possibly fit inside any building he'd ever seen. The air glowed faintly purple, and beneath his feet was a cracked black surface that hummed with a sound too old to name.
Before him hovered a cube.
Small. Worn. Leaking trails of silver mist and threads of corruption. Its surface crawled with engraved circuits like veins. It trembled slightly, as though barely holding itself together.
Raen took a step toward it—and his vision split.
He saw his own body still standing at the edge of the alley. Motionless. As if caught in time.
But here, in this place, his real self moved. Breathing. Thinking. Changing.
The cube pulsed.
And a voice—not human, not electronic—spoke inside his mind.
[GENETIC INTERFACE FAILURE: 100%]
[NO COMPATIBLE GENE-LINE FOUND]
[NO BEAST CORE DETECTED]
[NO EXISTING SYSTEM SUPPORT AVAILABLE]
[SEARCHING ALTERNATE PATHWAYS…]
[ERROR]
[CLASSIFICATION: NULL]
[RESPONSE: LEGACY CODIFICATION INITIATED]
Raen blinked. His body felt heavy—like he was being poured into something ancient and unfinished.
[Binding Protocol Engaged]
[ASCENDANT CODEX: PRIMORDIAL THREAD IDENTIFIED]
[Warning: You are not authorized to access this data]
[Override accepted. Legacy Host Confirmed.]
The cube cracked.
A single line split across its surface.
From within spilled light—not bright, not golden, not holy.
Dark. Deep. Endless.
It wrapped around Raen's arms, then his chest, then slid under his skin like liquid shadow. He couldn't scream—his lungs refused to obey. His veins bulged, glowing with ancient script that seared itself into his flesh before fading into transparency.
The cube collapsed into ash.
And a new window formed before his eyes.
---
> [Ascendant Codex: Bound]
Host Name: Raen Virell
Gene Classification: UNKNOWN
Legacy Status: Ghost-Threaded
Codex Tier: Forbidden Prototype
Beast Core Slot: Locked
Coreline Pathways Available: [1]
Warning: Standard cultivation systems will no longer function. You have exited the Genetic Grid.
Raen dropped to his knees, gasping for air.
"What… what is this…?"
[Welcome, Null-Class Host.]
[You are now the sole bearer of a Primordial Thread.]
A second interface bloomed behind the first—sharper, more abstract. Not UI. More like a thought-structure. His mind felt filled with interlocking gears suddenly spinning into motion.
He understood nothing.
But something in him did.
---
Time passed.
Maybe seconds. Maybe hours.
Eventually, he stood.
The chamber faded. Space collapsed inward without force or violence—like it had never been real.
And he was back.
Rain splashed across his skin. The alley remained unchanged, except for the air. It tasted different. Laced with iron and ozone and something older than either.
Raen touched his chest.
His heartbeat… wasn't normal.
It echoed.
Double beats. One real. One not.
Then, under the dripping edge of the overhang near his bed, he saw it.
An egg.
Rough, black, with faint violet cracks running along its shell.
It hadn't been there before.
He crouched.
It pulsed.
Raen's
eyes widened as a thin thread of black vapor coiled from the shell and looked at him. Not floated. Not drifted.
It focused.
And he knew.
It had been waiting.
Raen reached for the egg.
It was warm—not in a comforting way, but in a pulsing, alive kind of way. The surface was rigid like cooled obsidian, yet slick to the touch, like it bled energy. Thin strands of black mist curled from its shell and recoiled at his fingers, not as a warning—but as curiosity.
It recognized him.
No—it had chosen him.
And as soon as his skin made full contact, something snapped.
The mist surged inward, coiling around his wrist like a chain of whispers. Raen gasped as a heat shot up his arm, not burning but shifting. Like his cells were being rearranged to accept something they'd never been designed to contain.
[Primordial Coreline Detected]
[Voidbeast Embryo Recognized]
[Codex Sync: Incomplete]
[Would you like to initiate Coreline Fusion? Warning: This process is irreversible.]
Raen didn't hesitate.
"Do it."
---
His vision shattered.
He wasn't in the alley anymore.
He stood at the edge of a vast emptiness—a void stretching to infinity. No sky. No ground. No time. Floating in front of him was the egg, still pulsing, but now vast, cosmic in scale. It cracked with every breath it took, not from fragility, but from potential too great to remain caged.
Then came the voice.
Not words.
Intention.
A whisper in the soul, so raw and ancient it bypassed thought entirely.
It was not alive.
It was beyond life.
> I was devoured once… I remember your shape. You are not them. You are unmade.
Let me sleep in you. Let me rise again.
Raen's answer was simple.
"I don't care what you are. If you're strength… then take me."
The egg cracked open.
---
Pain.
Pure, soul-rending pain.
Raen's body convulsed. The Coreline began forming—a link between his genetic foundation and the beast's embryonic essence. But there was no pattern to follow. No System template. No safety net.
He wasn't evolving like others.
He was being rewritten from the outside in.
---
[Codex Fusion Underway…]
[Coreline Status: Active]
[Symbiotic Layer Unstable]
[Threaded Feedback Detected]
[Initiating Emergency Calibration]
Bones bent. Organs realigned. Veins glowed black beneath his skin, then gold, then violet. His vision flashed between dimensions. He saw his own DNA—billions of strands unraveling and reforming in fractal patterns he couldn't begin to comprehend.
Then, for a single heartbeat, he died.
His chest stopped.
No breath.
No thought.
---
And then it returned.
With a second heartbeat layered atop the first.
The egg had vanished.
Or… no. It hadn't.
It had merged.
---
Raen collapsed onto the wet alley floor, gasping like a drowning man breaking the surface. Steam rose from his body. His skin shimmered faintly with ancient runes that flickered once—then disappeared under his skin.
The Codex interface hovered in his vision, clearer than ever.
---
[Ascendant Codex: Coreline Formed]
Voidbeast Coreline – Stage 1 (Unhatched Form)
Status: Incomplete Symbiosis
Mutation Path: Primordial Nullbound
Trait Unlocked: Shadow Respiration
Trait Unlocked: Neural Echo Perception (Dormant)
Codex Functionality: Limited Access Enabled
WARNING: Your genetic profile is now classified as ANOMALOUS.
You are no longer recognized by any official genetic registry.
System Sync: DENIED.
You have exited the Grid.
Raen read it all in silence.
Not out of fear.
But awe.
He could feel it—inside his blood, his nerves, even his breath.
The Codex was alive. Not sentient, maybe, but responsive. It had a logic deeper than code. And he, Raen Virell, the Gene-dead Slum Failure, was now carrying something the world had forgotten how to name.
He reached out with his mind—just a flicker of curiosity.
Something deep answered.
A shape in the dark. A growl with no mouth. A form with no form.
His beast.
Still unborn.
Still sleeping.
But aware.
"I'm coming," it whispered.
And Raen smiled.
---
Later that night, under a dripping canopy of scrap metal, Raen stared at the city lights far above—the glowing towers of those who'd laughed at him, who'd marked him 'Null' and cast him aside like defective tech.
They had no idea.
They were still bound by systems, by rankings, by bloodline limits and pre-approved Ascendant Tracks.
He was beyond that now.
Not Divine.
Not Transcendent.
Something forgotten.
---
Codex Entry Logged:
[You have taken your first step on the Path of the Forbidden.]
[Survival Probability: <4%]
[Codex Note: Unpredictable variables detected. Monitoring will continue.]
Trait Evolution: Shadow Respiration – Basic (Active)
Breathe without drawing attention. Your presence
naturally fades into ambient energy. Lowers detection in sensory scans.
Mutation Progress: 0.03%
Raen didn't understand half of it.
But he knew one thing—
He wasn't weak anymore.