Must learn control. Must understand these skills. Can't just flick fingers anymore. Can't. She opened [THE INTERFACE], opened the Abilities sub-menu. A list of hundreds of skills unfurled. She touched [Void Severance] mentally. A description appeared: Energy slash splits space 200m straight. Ignores physical protection & Rare level barriers. Damage 600% INT. Cooldown 45 seconds.
600% INT. Her INT was 12,500. That meant... 75,000 damage? Whatever that number signified in the real world, clearly it was sufficient to erase four level 60-80 players with Epic gear. And that was merely a low tier skill from the auxiliary skill bank.
Main skills like [Death's Embrace]... that wasn't even damage. That was a verdict. I must not... I must not use it.
She closed her menu. Her eyes fixed on the obsidian floor reflecting her faint shadow. A figure with horns and wings. A figure that had just killed.
Suddenly, in the midst of that thick silence, a sound pierced through.
It was crying. The crying of a small child, shrill, desperate, muffled by distance and thick stone walls. That sound issued from somewhere outside the hall, from the same direction as the earlier door, but far. Very far. It should have been impossible to hear.
But Mara heard it clearly. Every sob, every halted breath. As if her ears—or her perception—had been amplified by inhuman statistics.
She raised her head, her gaze penetrating the obsidian wall, toward the source of that sound. That crying did not cease. It hung in the air like a plea, a fracture in this seamless reality.
[Internal Metric: External Anomaly Detected.
Audio Source: Juvenile Human.
Emotional Signature: Extreme Distress.
Distance: Approximately 5.5 kilometers.]
That crying persisted, slicing the silence, filling the empty space left by explosion and death.
That crying hung in the air like a slender thread connecting two realities that should not touch—the cosmic silence of the obsidian hall with the mortal destruction outside. Every sob felt more real than the insane statistics in [THE INTERFACE], more piercing than the memory of the four deaths she had just caused. Mara remained seated on the throne steps, hands clenched in her lap, listening to that sound tearing through the layers of artificial calm in Nyxaria's body.
Child. A child's crying. Outside. Distance 5.5 kilometers? Yet it sounded adjacent. Is this an effect of perception statistics? Or... did the system deliberately make her hear it?
Her eight thousand hours of gaming experience rebelled. This is a quest trigger. An NPC distress signal. But in this real world, does that signal a trap? Or is there truly someone who needs help?
She stood. This body moved with a fluidity that remained foreign, but this time a deeper awareness guided her movement. Not reflex. Not panic. A decision.
If I don't go out, and that child dies... That thought terrified her more than the memory of the sword shattering on her shoulder. Because the deaths she caused earlier were reflex, unintentional. But if she chose silence, to let it happen—that would be a conscious choice.
The giant obsidian door stood tightly closed, merging with the wall like a perfectly healed wound. But this body knew how to open it. Or more precisely, this region recognized its master. She raised her hand, palm facing the wall where the white light line had appeared earlier. No password, no ritual. Only an intention emerging from the core of her existence as Nyxaria—a command deeper than words.
Open.
With a low rumble vibrating the floor, the white light line reappeared, cutting a perfect rectangle into the black wall. Obsidian stone weighing thousands of tons shifted inward, slowly, with imposing gravity. The light of the outside world flooded in.
But this was not the clean white light from before.
This was orange-red light from fire, laced with black smoke writhing like a dying creature. And the scent—oh, God—that scent stabbed directly into her consciousness.
The smell of burning flesh. Charred wood. Feces. Blood. All mingled into one perfume of death so thick that Mara coughed. Nyxaria's body should not have coughed—but she did, a human reflex penetrating demonic physiology.
Fire. A burning village. Corpses.
Her first step out of the obsidian hall entered a broad corridor made of the same black stone, with a soaring ceiling adorned with carvings of twisted bones. At its end, a large arch opened to the outside world. From there, firelight flickered like a dying pulse.
She walked down that corridor, her boots echoing on the stone floor. Every step felt like an affirmation: I'm going out. I'm leaving the sanctuary. I'm entering the world.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
And that world was dying.
That gate arch was a horrifying gothic structure—carvings of suffering faces on every stone, small horns curving like a giant skeleton. But what lay outside was not the epic fantasy scenery she expected from Aeternum Online.
What stretched before her was a valley.
A broad valley with steep rocky slopes, and in the middle, scattered like toys shattered by a giant child's rampage, lay the ruins of a village. Straw roofs still burned, shooting sparks into the dusk sky fading to deep purple. Wooden walls lay collapsed, most already reduced to black charcoal. And among it all, bodies.
Many bodies. Some hung on broken fences. Others lay on the dusty dirt road, some clustered around a building that might have been a small church with a broken cross. All motionless.
Mara froze at the threshold of the gate. The night wind that should have been cool carried the heat from the blazing fire and the putrid scent beginning to emerge—the smell of death no longer fresh. She forced herself to analyze, as she always did when entering a new zone in the game.
Human village. Attacked. Recently—fire still burning. The perpetrator? Could be monsters, could be other players, could be...
No. Don't think that. She had just awakened. But the system had already categorized her as a Catastrophe. Did the world believe she did this?
That crying sounded again, clearer now because she had emerged. From somewhere in the heart of the ruins, more to the side, near a collapsed well with a bucket lying beside it.
That child was still alive. Amidst all this.
Her veteran gamer logic spoke loudly: This could be a trap. Quest bait. An injured NPC luring you into an ambush. But... the sound of that crying... too real. Too human.
She stepped down from the stone platform of the gate, onto the loose valley ground. Dry grass beneath her boots crunched, breaking into dust. The sky above was the Aeternum sky she knew—purplish blue with two moons already beginning to appear, one large and white like a pearl, one small and reddish like a wound. But beneath that sky, a small hell played out.
Every step closer to the ruins felt like a violation of something sacred. The air changed—pressure increased, as if this region still held the trauma of violence that had just occurred. She could feel unseen eyes from within the shadows of the ruins, but when she turned, there was nothing. Only corpses whose empty eyes stared at the sky with frozen expressions of shock.
They died quickly. Some still clutched weapons—hoes, kitchen knives, wooden sticks. Not soldiers. Farmers. NPCs.
She reached the edge of the village. A signboard lay on the ground, half burned. Faded paint read: "Elmwood Village." No name she recognized from the game wiki. Perhaps a generic village, filler content for low level quests. But now its contents were real.
She had to pass the first body. An old man with a disheveled gray beard, lying face down, his back torn by something with large claws—three parallel deep gashes, penetrating the ribs. Blood had already dried to a dark brown on the ground, soaking into the earth like an unwanted offering. Mara stopped, staring at him. In the game, bodies would disappear after a few minutes, or at least become undetailed sprites. Here, she could see every fold in his wrinkled skin, every stain on his ragged cloth, every strand of beard matted with blood.
This is not a texture. This is flesh. This is a person.
Her stomach churned again, but this time Nyxaria's body reacted slightly—a small spasm in the diaphragm, like a physiological system trying to reject something foreign. Alright, so there is a limit. A level 999 demon body can feel disgust.
She turned her face away, forcing herself to continue. That crying guided her. Through a path littered with debris and ceramic shards, passing a half-destroyed house where she could see its interior—an overturned dining table, scattered broken plates, a cloth doll swept into the corner with its hair threads partially burned.
Then she saw her.
In the middle of a small field that might have been the village square, sitting on a collapsed foundation stone, a little girl.
Her hair was pale white—not blonde, not gray, but white like dirty snow, disheveled, full of dust and soot. She wore a simple dress of rough cloth already torn in several places, revealing small knees that were scraped and dirty. Her tiny hands hugged her knees, her face hidden between her arms. Her thin back moved up and down with muffled sobs, as if she had been crying so long that no voice remained.
Around her, total destruction. But she herself bore no injury. No open wounds, no blood. Only dirt and dust.
Mara stopped about ten meters from her. Age nine, ten years. NPC? But why was she alone? Why hadn't the monsters killed her? Or... had she just arrived after the attack?
She tried to access information about that child. No status window appeared. No level, no name, no affiliation. Only a presence that felt... empty. Like a signal lost between the world's data.
Anomaly.
[System Feedback: Anomalous Entity Detected. Scanning...]
That notification appeared in the corner of her view. Then the next text appeared after a delay of several seconds, as if the system was struggling to process something unusual.
[Scan Inconclusive. Entity Classification: Unregistered.
Threat Level: Null.
Recommendation: Observe.]
Mara took a careful step closer. Gravel crunched beneath her boots, its sound sharp in the silence broken only by the hiss of small fires and the child's sobs.
The child did not react. Her crying continued to flow, as if she had already surrendered to everything—to the death surrounding her, to her loneliness, to the world that had suddenly become a nightmare.
"Hey," said Mara, and Nyxaria's voice that emerged surprised even her—deep, echoing with unintentional authority, but this time she tried to soften it. The result was a strange contrast between the tone of a demon queen and an attempt at warmth.
The child did not move.
"Are you... alright?" Mara asked again, closer now. She knelt, although this body was not designed for it—her movement remained graceful, but she felt tension in joints unaccustomed to this posture. Her black robe pooled on the ground, her wings drooping behind like a canopy of darkness.
The little girl lifted her face.
And for the first time since awakening as Nyxaria, Mara felt something inside her—not Mara, not Nyxaria, but something in between—pulled into the vortex of two eyes gazing at her.
Eyes of heterochromia. One was gold like liquid honey under sunlight, full of an inner light that should have been warm but instead felt cold and analytical. The other was pale gray like a tombstone on a foggy morning, dead, empty, like cracked glass. Both eyes were equally unblinking, brimming with tears that left clean white trails on her dirty cheeks. Her face was small, thin, with sharp cheekbones and cracked lips.
Then, with a slow movement almost robotic, that child extended her hand. Not to shake hands, not to ask for help. Those small dirty fingers reached for the edge of Nyxaria's robe touching the ground, clutching it gently, like a small child holding the corner of their favorite blanket on a frightening night.
"Ma... ma..." her voice was hoarse, raspy from too much crying and probably also from dust and smoke.
Mara froze. She's calling for her mother? But her mother must be... among these corpses. Or missing.
"Ma... ma Ghost," the child whispered, those two words emerging like a deep confession, a name given with innocent acceptance.
Mama Ghost? What? Why is she calling me that?