"This is not a light read.
Welcome to the beginning of Lord of THE Bleeding Tower — a narrative experience that bleeds between the limits of reality, identity, and madness.
This chapter is long — because it is dense. Because it is alive. Because it unravels as you read.
If you've made it this far, don't just read it… allow yourself to be infected."
Pain. A relentless, throbbing agony clawed Kaelen from the depths of a fractured, merciful unconsciousness. It wasn't a simple ache; it was a malevolent presence, a vise tightening around his skull, each pulse a fresh wave of torment that threatened to shatter his very thoughts. He tried to groan, to recoil, but his limbs were leaden, unresponsive, as if disconnected from the frantic signals his brain was desperately trying to send. *Am I… dying?* The thought, fragmented and laced with a primal terror, flickered through the searing pain. *A stroke? Cerebral hemorrhage?* He'd read about such things, distant horrors that happened to other people, in other lives. Not to him. Not like this.
He was adrift in a sea of disorientation, his consciousness a fragile raft tossed by violent waves. Was he dreaming? This agonizing helplessness, this crushing weight… it felt like the suffocating paralysis of a nightmare, where the will to move was a useless, impotent scream against an unyielding void. He fought, a desperate, internal struggle to gather the scattered remnants of his focus, to pierce the veil of darkness and confusion that clung to him like a shroud. The effort was immense, like trying to grasp smoke. His thoughts, insubstantial wisps, refused to be controlled, slipping away as random, terrifying notions bubbled up unbidden from the depths of his fracturing mind.
*Why? Why this sudden, unbearable pain? In the middle of the night… or is it day?* Time had lost all meaning, swallowed by the all-consuming agony. He remembered… nothing. A blank canvas where his immediate past should have been. Just this raw, unyielding present, defined by pain and a terrifying, encroaching sense of wrongness.
Slowly, agonizingly, the throbbing in his head began to recede, not disappearing, but dulling to a persistent, grinding ache, like a blunt knife slowly, methodically, slicing through his brain. The change, however slight, allowed a sliver of control to return. He could feel the faintest stirrings of immaterial strength, a nascent ability to direct his will. With a monumental effort that left him trembling, Kaelen forced his eyelids open.
His vision swam, a blur of indistinct shapes and colors, before slowly resolving. The first thing he registered was a faint, pervasive crimson glow, like the world viewed through a blood-tinted lens. It cast long, distorted shadows, painting the unfamiliar surroundings in hues of unease and latent menace. He was lying on something hard and unyielding, a surface that pressed uncomfortably against his back. He could feel a coarse texture beneath his cheek, rough and alien.
As his eyes adjusted, details began to emerge from the crimson haze. He seemed to be in a room, small and sparsely furnished. Directly in front of him, or what he assumed was in front from his prone position, was a simple wooden desk. An open notebook lay upon it, its pages yellowed and coarse, a stark contrast to the dark, almost black ink of a single, arresting sentence scrawled at the top. To the left of the notebook, a small stack of books, perhaps seven or eight, stood neatly arranged, their spines unreadable in the dim light. The wall behind them was marred by grayish-white pipes that snaked across its surface, culminating in a wall lamp of a style he vaguely recognized as antique, or perhaps just… old-fashioned. It was unlit.
Diagonally beneath the lamp, a black ink bottle rested, its surface embossed with a faded, blurry angelic figure, now bathed in the ubiquitous crimson glow. Beside it, a dark-colored fountain pen lay uncapped, its nib glinting faintly, next to a startling, incongruous object: a brass revolver. *A gun? A revolver?* Kaelen's mind, still sluggish from the pain and disorientation, struggled to process the anachronistic and alarming sight. This was not his room. He owned no gun. He didn't even know anyone who owned a gun.
Panic, cold and sharp, began to pierce through the layers of confusion. He realized the crimson glow was emanating from a window somewhere to his right, a window that seemed to look out onto… something else. Something terrifyingly alien. Subconsciously, he lifted his head, his gaze drawn inexorably towards the source of the light. His neck protested with a fresh stab of pain, but he ignored it, compelled by a dawning, horrifying dread.
Against a backdrop that resembled black velvet, impossibly dark and deep, hung a moon. But it was no moon he had ever seen or dreamt of. It was a perfect, luminous sphere of deepest crimson, like a freshly gouged eye weeping blood into the void. It hung high and silent, its light not the gentle, silvery caress of Earth's moon, but a baleful, watchful glare that seemed to strip away all pretense of safety, of sanity.
*Wh—* The sight was a physical blow. Kaelen felt an inexplicable terror seize him, a primal fear that bypassed reason and clawed directly at his soul. He tried to scramble to his feet, to escape this impossible, horrifying vista, but his legs, still weak and unresponsive, buckled beneath him. He fell back heavily onto the hard wooden chair he hadn't even realized he'd been moved to, or perhaps had awoken in. The impact sent a fresh wave of agony through his head, but it did little to dispel the image of that blood-red moon seared into his retinas.
Gritting his teeth against the pain, Kaelen propped himself up with his hands on the table, his knuckles white. He stood up again, more carefully this time, and turned around in a panic, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He had to understand. He had to see where he was.
The room was small, as he'd initially perceived. There was a brown wooden door on each side, their paint chipped and faded. Against the opposite wall, a simple wooden bunk bed stood, its blankets rumpled and disturbed, as if recently vacated in a hurry. Between the bed and the left door, a tall, narrow cabinet with two open doors on top and five drawers below leaned precariously. Next to it, at about the height of a man, another set of those strange grayish-white pipes ran along the wall, connected to a bizarre mechanical device with exposed gears and bearings, its purpose utterly inscrutable. In the right corner of the room, near the desk, were items that looked like a primitive coal stove, along with a collection of soup pots, iron pans, and other basic kitchen utensils, all coated in a thin layer of dust and grime. Across from the right door, a tarnished dressing mirror with two prominent cracks running across its surface hung crookedly. Its wooden base was carved with simple, unadorned patterns.
With a jolt, Kaelen caught his reflection in the cracked glass. Black hair, disheveled and matted with sweat. Brown eyes, wide with a mixture of terror and confusion. A thin, almost gaunt face he barely recognized, with sharper features than he remembered, a deeper outline to his jaw. He was wearing a simple, coarse linen shirt, unfamiliar and rough against his skin. *This… this isn't me. Or rather, it is me, but… different. Older? Thinner?* He gasped, his mind reeling, a flood of helpless, confused thoughts threatening to overwhelm him. The revolver on the desk. The classical, almost archaic Western decor. The impossible crimson moon. It all pointed to one, terrifying, inescapable conclusion.
*C-could I have… transmigrated?* The word, a staple of the fantasy novels he'd devoured in his youth, now tasted like ash in his mouth. He'd often fantasized about such scenarios, escaping the mundane drudgery of his own life for a world of magic and adventure. But this? This was no adventure. This was a nightmare. The stark, brutal reality of it, the crushing weight of its implications, was far harder to accept than any fictional tale. If it weren't for the persistent, grinding headache that kept his thoughts painfully sharp, he would have desperately clung to the hope that this was all just an elaborate, horrifying dream.
*Calm down, calm down, calm down…* He took a few deep, shuddering breaths, trying to force down the rising tide of panic. He had to think. He had to understand. As his mind and body began to settle, a strange phenomenon occurred. Memories, not his own, yet intimately connected to the body he now inhabited, began to surface, flooding his consciousness like a breaking dam. They appeared slowly at first, fragmented and disjointed, then with increasing clarity and coherence.
*Klein Moretti. A citizen of the Loen Kingdom, Northern Continent. Awwa County, City of Tingen. A recent graduate from the Department of History at Khoy University…* The name felt alien, yet the memories associated with it were vivid, detailed. *Father, a sergeant in the Imperial Army, died in a colonial conflict on the Southern Continent. Compensation money allowed Klein to attend a private grammar school, laying the foundation for university… Mother, a devotee of the Evernight Goddess, passed away the year Klein entered Khoy University… An elder brother, Benson, a clerk at an import-export company, currently supporting the family. A younger sister, Melissa, still in school… Their family, not wealthy, even struggling, living in a modest two-bedroom apartment…* As a history graduate, this Klein Moretti had learned the ancient Feysac language, considered the source of all languages in the Northern Continent, and, more pertinently, the Hermes language, often found in ancient mausoleums and texts related to rituals and prayers.
*Hermes language?* Zhou Mingrui—no, Klein Moretti now, he supposed, the distinction blurring in his disoriented mind—felt a jolt. His gaze snapped back to the open notebook on the desk. The text on the yellowed paper, which had initially seemed like meaningless squiggles, began to shift, to morph. The strange, alien symbols rearranged themselves, becoming familiar, readable. It was, indeed, written in the Hermes language.
The dark ink, stark against the yellowed page, proclaimed a single, chilling sentence: "Everyone will die, including me."
*Hiss!* An involuntary gasp escaped Klein's lips. He felt an inexplicable, bone-deep horror, a primal fear that had nothing to do with his current predicament and everything to do with those stark, ominous words. He instinctively leaned back, trying to put distance between himself and the notebook, nearly toppling the chair in his haste. He grabbed the edge of the table to steady himself, his knuckles white. The air around him seemed to grow colder, more turbulent, filled with faint, almost inaudible whispers that brushed against his ears like ghostly fingers, reminiscent of the terrifying stories his elders used to tell in hushed tones when he was a child. The previous owner of this body, the original Klein Moretti… what had he been involved in? What terrible secret had led him to write such a despairing, final message before… before what? Before Zhou Mingrui had somehow taken his place?
Just as the chilling implication of the notebook's message began to solidify in Klein's mind, a cacophony of new sounds assaulted his ears, far more terrifying than the unsettling whispers. It started as a low rumble, a vibration that resonated through the floorboards and up his legs, making the very air in the small room tremble. Then came a series of sharp, tearing shrieks, like colossal sheets of metal being ripped asunder, followed by a deafening crash that sounded as if a mountain had collapsed nearby. The small room shook violently, dust and debris raining down from the unseen ceiling. The ink bottle on the desk rattled, its angelic embossment seeming to grimace in the crimson light. The revolver, a cold, metallic promise of violence, slid a few inches across the wooden surface.
Klein, still reeling from the notebook's ominous message, was thrown off balance, stumbling against the rickety chair. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat against the symphony of destruction erupting outside. *What now? An earthquake? A bombing?* The memories of Klein Moretti offered no immediate context for such cataclysmic events in the seemingly peaceful city of Tingen, at least not on this scale. Driven by a desperate need to understand, to witness the source of this new terror, he lurched towards the window, the one that bathed the room in the baleful crimson glow of the alien moon.
He reached the window, his breath catching in his throat, his hands trembling as he wiped away a patch of grime from the dusty pane. What he saw defied all reason, all sanity. The world outside was not merely chaotic; it was actively, impossibly, *unraveling*. The crimson moon, larger and more malevolent than before, hung in a sky that was no longer a cohesive canvas but a tapestry of tearing fabric. Great, jagged rents appeared in the inky blackness, revealing glimpses of… something else. Not stars, not void, but swirling vortexes of impossible colors, hues that burned the eyes and twisted the mind, like looking into the raw, exposed guts of reality itself. Below, the city of Tingen, or what he assumed was Tingen, was a landscape of surreal horror. Buildings, once proud and solid, twisted and warped like heated plastic, their structures groaning and shrieking as they contorted into Escher-esque nightmares. Streets buckled and split open, revealing chasms that pulsed with an oily, internal darkness. A nearby clock tower, a landmark Klein vaguely remembered from his new memories, tilted at an impossible angle, its hands frozen at a moment that no longer mattered, before it dissolved, not into rubble, but into a shower of shimmering, multi-colored particles that drifted upwards, defying gravity, towards the weeping wounds in the sky.
"This… this can't be…" Klein whispered, his voice a dry, cracked rasp. His mind, already reeling from the personal horror of his transmigration and the ominous notebook, struggled to comprehend the sheer scale of the cosmic insanity unfolding before him. This wasn't a localized disaster. This was the end of a world. Or perhaps, the birth of something far, far worse. The air itself seemed to shimmer and distort, and the crimson moonlight cast an unholy, blood-soaked pall over the scene of utter desolation. He felt a profound, soul-crushing despair, a sense of insignificance in the face of such overwhelming, incomprehensible power. *What kind of world have I been thrown into?*
His horrified gaze swept across the unfolding panorama of destruction, and then he saw them. People. Or what had once been people. Figures stumbled through the distorted streets below, their forms flickering like faulty holograms. He saw a man in what looked like a nightshirt run out of a collapsing building, his face a mask of pure, unadulterated terror. As Klein watched, frozen in horrified fascination, the man's form began to… unravel. It wasn't a violent explosion, nor a bloody disintegration. Instead, his edges seemed to fray, his substance becoming translucent, like old parchment held against a flame. Wisps of him, like smoke or steam, detached and drifted upwards, dissolving into the crimson-tinged air. His silent scream was etched onto his rapidly fading features, a rictus of unimaginable horror, before he was simply… gone. Erased. Not even dust remained.
Further down the street, a woman, her hair wild, her clothes torn, clawed at her own face, her movements jerky and unnatural. Her features seemed to melt and reform, bones shifting beneath her skin like pebbles in a sack, her eyes migrating to her forehead, her mouth stretching into a grotesque, lipless gash that pulsed with an inner, sickly light. She let out a series of high-pitched, bird-like shrieks that pierced through the cacophony, a sound that scraped at Klein's sanity, before her body contorted at an impossible angle and then, with a soft, wet sound, collapsed into a heap of what looked like glistening, multi-colored glass shards. Each shard seemed to catch the crimson moonlight, refracting it into a thousand tiny, weeping rainbows, before they too began to fade, dissolving into the corrupted pavement.
Klein felt a wave of nausea so intense it buckled his knees. He pressed his forehead against the cold glass of the window, his breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. The sheer, unadulterated horror of it was a physical blow, stealing the air from his lungs, leaving him trembling and weak. This wasn't just death. This was… unmaking. A complete and utter erasure of existence, a perversion of the natural order so profound it felt like a blasphemy against the very concept of life. *Is this the Entropia the original Klein wrote about? Is this the fate that awaits everyone, including me?* The words from the notebook echoed in his mind, no longer just an ominous phrase, but a terrifying, imminent prophecy.
**Bloco 6: A Primeira Manifestação da Anomalia de Kaelen (Klein).**
The terror was a living thing inside him, coiling in his stomach, constricting his chest. He could feel it, the insidious tendrils of the unmaking force reaching for him, even through the relative shelter of the small room. A cold, skeletal touch brushed against his skin, and a wave of profound dizziness washed over him. His vision blurred, the crimson light outside swirling into a meaningless soup of color. He looked down at his own hands, the hands of Klein Moretti, and watched in abject horror as they began to shimmer, to turn translucent. The skin thinned, revealing the pale outline of bones beneath, which began to glow with a faint, sickly green luminescence. It was happening to him. He was dissolving, just like the man in the nightshirt.
*No! I don't want to die! Not again! Not like this!* A silent scream of pure, unadulterated desperation erupted in his mind. He had just been given a second chance, however bizarre and terrifying, and he wasn't going to let it be snuffed out before he even had a chance to understand. He fought against it, not physically, for his limbs were still heavy and unresponsive, but with the sheer, focused intensity of his will, a desperate, primal refusal to cease existing.
And then, something shifted. Deep within him, from the core of his being, a different sensation arose. It wasn't a surge of power, not a burst of energy. It was… a stillness. A profound, unyielding quietude, like the calm at the eye of a hurricane. It was a cold, empty void that seemed to absorb the encroaching tendrils of the unmaking force, neutralizing them, rendering them impotent. The sickly green glow in his hands faded. The translucency receded. His flesh solidified, though it still trembled violently. The dizziness lessened, and his vision began to clear, the crimson light outside regaining its sharp, terrifying focus.
He was still alive. He was… whole. Changed, undoubtedly. Scarred by the experience in ways he couldn't yet comprehend. But he hadn't dissolved. He hadn't been erased. He gasped, clutching his chest, not in pain this time, but in a mixture of profound relief and a new, dawning terror. The unmaking force was still out there, still rampaging through the world, but it hadn't claimed him. Not yet. *Why? What was that… stillness? That void? What am I?* The questions hammered at his mind, each one more terrifying than the last. He was different. In a world where existence itself was a fragile, fleeting thing, he was an anomaly. And in this dying world, being an anomaly could be a death sentence in itself, or perhaps, something far, far stranger.
Shaken by the revelation of his own anomalous nature, Klein—or Kaelen, the name from the original outline felt more fitting for this new, terrifying existence he was being thrust into—stumbled back from the window, his mind a whirlwind of fear and dawning, horrifying questions. He was an anomaly in a world that was actively unmaking itself. What did that mean? Was he a monster? A cure? Or just another victim waiting for a different, perhaps more drawn-out, demise?
He needed to get out of this room. The confining space, with its ominous notebook and the lingering scent of the previous Klein's despair, felt like a tomb. But where to go? The world outside was a canvas of cosmic horror, a symphony of destruction. As he grappled with this paralyzing indecision, his gaze was drawn back to the window, not by choice, but by an almost imperceptible pull, a subtle shift in the chaotic energies that permeated the air.
And then he saw it. Or rather, he *perceived* it, for it defied easy description, mocked the limitations of human language. Looming over the ravaged cityscape, piercing the bleeding sky like a shard of obsidian reality in a sea of madness, was the Tower. It was colossal, impossibly tall, its peak lost in the swirling, wounded clouds above. Its surface was not smooth stone or gleaming metal, but something that seemed to absorb all light, a perfect, matte black that drank in the crimson glow of the malevolent moon, giving nothing back. It wasn't a building in any conventional sense; it was a *presence*, an entity of stark, terrifying geometry that pulsed with a silent, unimaginable power. Strange, angular structures jutted from its sides at impossible angles, like the limbs of some colossal, petrified god. Around its base, the fabric of reality itself seemed to warp and distort, the air shimmering with a heatless energy. It felt ancient, primordial, and utterly, terrifyingly alien.
Kaelen stared, mesmerized and horrified. The Tower was not merely a structure; it was an anchor point in the chaos, perhaps even the source of it. It radiated an aura of profound dread, a palpable sense of cosmic indifference mixed with an almost sentient menace. As he watched, a section of its surface seemed to ripple, like disturbed water, and for a fleeting, sanity-shattering moment, he thought he saw… eyes. Countless eyes, opening and closing within the blackness, each one a pinprick of cold, ancient light, observing the dying world with a detached, almost clinical interest. The name, unbidden, yet resonating with a chilling familiarity, bloomed in his mind: *The Bleeding Tower*. It felt less like a name he'd conjured and more like a piece of forbidden knowledge, a memetic virus implanted directly into his consciousness. The sight of it, the *feel* of it, sent a fresh wave of terror coursing through him, a fear so profound it threatened to unhinge his already fragile sanity.
The Tower was a focal point of his dread, a monstrous enigma that dominated the ruined horizon. Part of him, a morbid, self-destructive curiosity, wanted to understand it, to approach it, to unravel its secrets. But a far stronger, more primal instinct screamed at him to flee, to put as much distance as possible between himself and that terrifying, obsidian monolith. Survival. That was the only thought that mattered now. He had to get away from this room, away from the immediate chaos, away from the all-seeing, all-consuming presence of the Bleeding Tower.
But where? In which direction did safety lie, if such a concept even existed anymore in this unraveling world? He scanned the devastated landscape visible from the window, searching for any sign of hope, any path that didn't lead to immediate oblivion. There was none. Every direction seemed to promise only more horror, more destruction. His mind raced, a frantic, desperate search for a plan, any plan. The memories of Klein Moretti were useless here; nothing in his mundane, scholarly existence had prepared him for an apocalypse of this magnitude. He was alone, terrified, and utterly out of his depth.
He glanced back at the notebook on the desk, its ominous message a stark reminder of the original Klein's fate. *"Everyone will die, including me."* Was that his fate too? To succumb to this madness, to be erased from existence? The stillness within him, the strange void that had repelled the unmaking force, offered a sliver of hope, a fragile defiance. He was different. He had survived what others had not. Perhaps… perhaps he could keep surviving. But not here. Not cowering in this room, waiting for the end.
With a surge of adrenaline born of pure, unadulterated terror, Kaelen made his decision. He wouldn't go towards the Tower. Not yet. He would try to find shelter, to find other survivors, if any still existed. He would try to understand what was happening, what he had become. He would run. He would hide. He would survive. He snatched the brass revolver from the desk, its cold, metallic weight surprisingly reassuring in his trembling hand. He didn't know if it was loaded, or even if he knew how to use it properly – Klein Moretti's memories were hazy on such practical matters – but it was a weapon, a symbol of resistance, however futile. He also grabbed the notebook, a morbid compulsion driving him to take the original Klein's final words with him. Then, he turned towards the least damaged of the two brown doors, the one that seemed to lead deeper into the building rather than directly out into the maelstrom, and, with a deep, shuddering breath, he pulled it open.
The corridor beyond the door was dark and narrow, the air thick with the smell of dust, ozone, and something else… something sweetish and cloying, like rotting fruit mixed with burnt sugar. The crimson light from the outside world barely penetrated here, casting long, dancing shadows that seemed to writhe with a life of their own. The floor was littered with debris – fallen plaster, shattered glass, and dark, unidentifiable stains that Kaelen desperately tried not to examine too closely. The building groaned around him, the sounds of tearing metal and crumbling stone a constant, unnerving symphony.
He moved cautiously, the revolver held tightly in his hand, every sense on high alert. He could hear scuttling sounds from the shadows, the faint, high-pitched whimpering of what might have been a small animal, or perhaps something far worse. As he rounded a corner, he stumbled upon his first encounter. A figure huddled in a doorway, rocking back and forth, muttering incoherently. It was a woman, or what had once been a woman. Her skin was a patchwork of sickly greens and purples, and one of her arms had elongated, a grotesque, boneless appendage that twitched spasmodically. Her eyes, wide and vacant, stared at something only she could see, her lips drawn back in a silent, lipless snarl. As Kaelen watched, a tremor ran through her, and her form began to shimmer, the edges blurring, before she dissolved into a shower of iridescent, oily particles that clung to the walls and floor like malevolent dew.
Kaelen recoiled, a choked gasp escaping him, the sweetish, cloying smell intensifying in the air. He didn't dare breathe, didn't dare make a sound. He pressed himself against the opposite wall, his heart pounding, and waited until the last of the shimmering particles had faded before inching forward again. Each step was a torment, each shadow a potential threat. He saw more horrors. A man fused halfway into a wall, his face a mask of frozen terror, his outstretched hand still clutching a tarnished silver locket. A child's doll, its porcelain face cracked and weeping tears of what looked like black tar, sitting in the middle of the corridor, its head slowly turning to follow him as he passed. He saw strange symbols scrawled on the walls in a substance that looked disturbingly like dried blood, symbols that seemed to pulse faintly in the dim light, their meaning unknown but undeniably malevolent.
He realized, with a dawning, chilling certainty, that the Entropia, the unmaking force, wasn't just a destructive power; it was a transformative one, a creative one, in its own horrifying, twisted way. It was birthing new realities, new forms of existence, from the wreckage of the old. And he, Kaelen, was somehow immune to its most immediate, erasing effects, a stable point in a sea of entropic flux. But for how long? And at what cost?
Kaelen eventually found himself in what might have once been a small, enclosed courtyard, now a debris-strewn pocket of relative silence amidst the cacophony of the dying city. One wall had partially collapsed, offering a jagged view of the crimson-streaked, wounded sky, but the remaining three offered a fragile illusion of shelter. He sank to the ground, his back against a cold, damp stone wall, the revolver still clutched in his hand, the ominous notebook tucked hastily into the waistband of his unfamiliar trousers. His breath came in ragged, shuddering gasps, each one a painful reminder of the horrors he had witnessed, of the sheer, overwhelming terror that had become his new reality.
For a long moment, he simply sat there, trembling, his mind a maelstrom of disconnected thoughts and searing images. The crimson moon. The unraveling buildings. The dissolving people. The terrifying, obsidian Tower. His own strange, unsettling immunity. It was too much. Too much for any sane mind to process. *This isn't real. It can't be real.* The denial was a fragile shield, already cracking under the weight of undeniable, horrific evidence. His world, the world of Zhou Mingrui, was gone. Annihilated. Replaced by this… this nightmare made manifest. And he, Kaelen, or Klein, or whatever name this new, terrifying existence demanded, was trapped within it.
He thought of his family – Benson, Melissa. Were they gone too? Erased from existence like the figures he'd seen in the street? The thought was a fresh stab of agony, a grief so profound it threatened to drown him. He squeezed his eyes shut, hot tears tracing burning paths through the grime on his cheeks. What was the point? What was the point of surviving, of being different, if everyone he knew, everything he loved, was gone? The despair was a suffocating blanket, heavy and cloying. The original Klein's words echoed in his mind: *"Everyone will die, including me."* Was this the fate he had merely postponed?
But then, the memory of the stillness within him, the cold, empty void that had repelled the unmaking force, resurfaced. He was different. He had survived. Why? The question burned in his mind, a tiny spark of defiance against the overwhelming darkness. There had to be a reason. He couldn't just give up. Not yet. He had to understand. He had to find out what had happened to his world, what this new, terrifying reality was, and, most importantly, what he had become. The pain in his head had subsided to a dull throb, a constant reminder of his altered state, but his mind, though battered and bruised, was still working, still questioning, still fighting.
As Kaelen wrestled with his despair and burgeoning resolve, a subtle shift in the atmosphere of the small courtyard caught his attention. The air, already thick with the scent of ozone and decay, seemed to grow heavier, colder. The faint, almost inaudible whispers he'd heard earlier, the ones that had seemed to emanate from the very fabric of this dying world, grew slightly louder, coalescing into something that was almost… speech. It wasn't a voice he heard with his ears, but rather a series of impressions, of concepts, forming directly in his mind, cold and alien.
*"Anomaly… seed of change… the Tower bleeds… a new song in the silence of the end…"*
The "words" were fragmented, disjointed, their meaning obscure, yet they resonated with a chilling familiarity, echoing the strange, implanted knowledge of the Bleeding Tower's name. Kaelen looked around wildly, his hand tightening on the revolver. Was someone there? Was this another survivor? Or was it the Entropia itself, a sentient, malevolent force, toying with him before his inevitable demise?
*"You are not of the unraveling… you are of the becoming… a broken cog in the great machine of dissolution… or perhaps… a new gear…"*
The impressions faded as quickly as they had come, leaving Kaelen trembling, his mind reeling. He was alone in the courtyard. There was no one there. Had he imagined it? Was he finally succumbing to the madness that had claimed so many others? Or was this a genuine communication, a message from… something? The cryptic phrases offered no comfort, no answers, only more questions, more mystery. *A seed of change? The becoming?* It sounded less like a promise and more like a terrible, inescapable destiny.
The unsettling "whispers" had one undeniable effect: they shattered Kaelen's fragile sense of momentary respite. He couldn't stay here. He was exposed, vulnerable. And the Tower… its oppressive presence seemed to loom even larger in his mind, a silent, obsidian sentinel observing his every move. The fear it inspired was a cold, physical thing, urging him to run, to hide, to escape its unseen gaze. Yet, intertwined with that fear was a morbid, almost irresistible pull. The whispers, the name, his own anomalous nature… it all seemed connected to that monstrous edifice. If there were answers to be found in this dying world, he suspected they lay in the shadow of the Bleeding Tower.
His internal conflict was a silent, agonizing battle. Flee, and perhaps survive a little longer in ignorance and terror? Or approach the source of his dread, and risk immediate annihilation for a chance, however slim, at understanding? The memories of Klein Moretti, the scholar, the seeker of knowledge, warred with the primal instinct for self-preservation. But Zhou Mingrui, the man who had dreamt of escaping the mundane, who had devoured tales of adventure and mystery, felt a flicker of something else: a desperate, almost reckless curiosity.
He looked down at the revolver in his hand, then at the notebook. Symbols of a past life, of a desperate end. And then he looked towards the partially collapsed wall, towards the sliver of crimson sky and the distant, impossible silhouette of the Tower. The whispers had called him an anomaly, a seed of change. Perhaps it was time to find out what that meant.
With a newfound, albeit terrified, resolve, Kaelen pushed himself to his feet. His legs still felt weak, his body ached, but his mind was clear, focused. He would not run blindly. He would not cower in the shadows, waiting for the end. He would seek answers, however terrifying they might be. He took one last look around the small, debris-strewn courtyard, a fleeting sanctuary in a world gone mad, then stepped out through the jagged opening in the wall, back into the heart of the unraveling city.
As he emerged, the crimson moonlight seemed to intensify, casting his long, distorted shadow before him. He took a tentative step, then another, his gaze fixed on the distant, menacing silhouette of the Bleeding Tower. He didn't know what he would find there, or if he would even survive the journey. But as he walked, a strange sensation began to spread through him, starting from the cold, empty void within his core. It was a faint, almost imperceptible vibration, a resonance with the chaotic energies that pulsed through this dying world. He looked down at his hand, the one not clutching the revolver. As a shimmering, multi-colored particle of dissolving reality drifted past, he reached out, not in fear, but with a strange, instinctual curiosity. The particle, instead of passing through him or causing him harm, seemed to… hesitate. It swirled around his outstretched fingers, drawn to him, before being absorbed into his palm, vanishing without a trace, leaving behind only a faint, tingling warmth and a single, chilling thought that was not his own, yet resonated with the core of his new, terrifying existence:
"The hunger begins."