The fluorescent lights above flickered with clinical indifference. Beeping machines marked the seconds of a dying life. Rei Tanaka lay still, his frail body all bone and skin beneath the bleached white sheets. At seventeen, he had become a husk of the boy he once was—his black hair thinned to wisps, eyes sunken yet sharp with awareness.

  Cancer.

  Stage IV, terminal.

  He’d fought for three years and lost.

  Outside the window, spring was beginning. Cherry blossoms bloomed in soft defiance of his slow decay. Rei had once dreamed of walking beneath them again. Instead, he lay in a hospital bed, tubes in his arms, lungs struggling to draw shallow breaths. Every blink felt like lifting a mountain.

  His mother sat by his bedside, her hand clutching his. She didn’t cry. Not anymore. The tears had dried months ago. Now she simply smiled—tired and trembling, like she was pretending for his sake.

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  “It’s okay, Mom,” Rei rasped, barely a whisper.

  She shook her head. “Don’t say goodbye yet.”

  Rei’s lips twitched into something like a smile. “Then… see you later.”

  The machines stuttered.

  His body arched slightly as pain seized his chest. Lights flared in his mind, then collapsed into dark spirals. He couldn’t breathe. The world dimmed. The machines screamed.

  His mother shouted for help.

  And then—

  Silence.

  ---

  He expected nothing.

  No heaven. No hell. Just… peace.

  But instead, Rei felt something else: awareness.

  He floated, weightless, in an endless dark. A sea without surface or depth.

  Am I dead?

  “Core #C-001 detected.”

  A voice. Cold. Mechanical. Genderless.

  System?

  “Initializing aberrant protocol… Host contains malignant code. Corruption level: 97%. Classification: Cancerous Entity.”

  What? He tried to speak, but had no mouth. Tried to move, but had no limbs. He was… something else.

  A flicker of light bloomed in the void—white, then red, then pulsing like a heartbeat. Rei felt himself drawn toward it, sucked into its rhythm. Pain returned—not in his chest, but everywhere—like his soul was stretching, splitting, being reshaped.

  “Warning. Host unsuitable for standard dungeon core formation. Proceeding with emergency override.”

  Dungeon core? What the hell was that?

  “Rebirth sequence initiated.”

  The light engulfed him.

  Rei screamed, not with his voice, but with his existence.

  Then came the fall.