Chapter 1: Death and a Book
[A/N: Atlas is not from Earth!]
- - -
The hand pierced through Atlas’s stomach before he even understood that the monster had moved.
One moment, he was standing inside the lower passage of the Eternal Ruin with his rusted sword raised in front of him. The air had already become hard to breathe after entering deeper, but Atlas had thought it was only the pressure of the ruin. The next moment, his body stopped responding properly, and a cold feeling spread from his stomach to his chest.
Atlas slowly lowered his head.
A black arm had gone through his stomach from the front. It was thin and long, almost shaped like a human arm, but the fingers were stretched too far and the joints looked wrong. Blood slid down those fingers and dropped onto the ancient stone beneath him.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
It was his blood.
"Khh—!"
The pain reached him a second later. His knees weakened, his sword hand shook, and his breathing broke apart at once. The wound was not shallow. The arm had pierced through his flesh, organs, and muscle as if his body had no resistance at all. Atlas tried to pull back, but the monster’s arm held him in place.
He forced his eyes upward.
The creature in front of him only looked human because it stood on two legs and had two arms. Its body was too thin, its limbs were too long, and its joints bent in a way that looked copied from a human body but made wrong. Where a face should have been, there was only a smooth black hollow. There were no eyes, mouth, nose, or expression.
Atlas tightened his fingers around his sword, but the weapon had already lost meaning. The monster had crossed the distance without sound, without warning, and without giving him time to react. That told him enough.
The gap was not something effort could fix.
It was speed.
The creature was too fast.
That thought had barely formed before the monster lifted him off the ground. His boots left the stone floor, and his entire weight hung from the wound in his stomach. The pain became worse immediately, and his grip loosened around the sword.
The sword fell.
Clang.
The sound echoed once through the passage before fading into the darkness.
Atlas looked down at the sword through blurred vision, and the situation became clear. He was not injured in a way he could recover from. He was dying now. His chest still moved, but every breath came out broken and wet. Blood rose into his throat. His limbs twitched, but they no longer followed his will properly.
As he hung there, the things that had happened before entering the ruin began connecting in his mind.
The old Scout had been nervous from the beginning. The Royal soldiers had stayed near the entrance instead of entering with him. No one had questioned the order when Atlas was told to go first. At that time, he had thought they were simply using him as a disposable commoner to test the path.
That was already enough to make him hate them.
But now he understood the actual reason.
The first person to enter the Eternal Ruin would awaken the Boss Monster.
That first person would become the target.
A noble heir would never be sent first. A trained Revenant with value would not be wasted like that. A Royal soldier would not accept the role unless forced. So they chose Atlas, a slum-born commoner from Ormolio with no backing, no noble name, and no one powerful enough to ask questions if he disappeared.
He had not been chosen to explore.
He had been chosen as bait.
The monster’s fingers flexed inside him.
Then it swung its arm.
Atlas’s body ripped free from the black arm, and the wound in his stomach opened wider as he was thrown across the passage. Blood scattered through the darkness while the force carried him backward faster than his mind could follow.
His only thought was simple.
’Damn them...’
Then his back hit a boulder.
The stone exploded.
His body smashed through it instead of stopping, and broken fragments cut across his shoulders, ribs, and face. Several bones cracked from the impact. His vision turned white for a moment, then returned in broken flashes as his body continued rolling across the jagged floor.
He hit the ground once.
Then again.
Each impact took more strength from him, but the force behind the throw had not ended. A moment later, the ruin floor disappeared beneath him, and Atlas fell into a deeper section of the Eternal Ruin.
The passage above vanished quickly.
The lower space was not a normal pit. It was too wide, too dark, and too quiet. Atlas could not see the walls or guess how far the ground was below him. He only knew that he was still falling, and his blood trailed behind him in thin red strands.
His body had already stopped trying to protect itself.
It continued falling because death had not finished taking him yet.
Atlas’s eyes flickered weakly.
After everything he had survived in Ormolio’s outer slums, this was how he would die. Not from hunger, sickness, a knife, or a guard beating commoners because there would be no consequences. He would die because the Royal Family needed one worthless body to trigger an Eternal Ruin.
That was the part that kept his anger alive even when his body had almost nothing left.
In the slums, being treated as lower than others was normal. Stronger people took food. Adults with knives took whatever they wanted. Children disappeared, and most people moved on because everyone was busy surviving. Atlas had learned long ago that the world was unfair.
But this was different.
This was planned.
The Royals had looked at him and decided his death was useful. They did not need to know his life. They did not need to remember his face. To them, he was only a commoner who could be thrown into danger so someone more valuable could enter later with less risk.
His fingers twitched.
The rage was there, but his body had no strength left to use it.
Then he saw light below.
It was faint and still, not like a torch or any normal relic glow. As Atlas fell closer, the shape beneath the light became clearer.
A monolith.
It was made of dark stone, smooth and unmarked, floating slightly above the ground. There was no dust on it, no cracks across it, and nothing from the ruin seemed able to touch it. Even inside the Eternal Ruin, the monolith looked separate from everything around it, as if the whole chamber existed only to hide that one thing.
Atlas hit the ground a few moments later.
The impact should have killed him. Maybe it almost did. His body struck the cold stone floor heavily and stayed there. Blood spread beneath him from the hole in his stomach and the cuts across his body. His ribs burned. His back felt broken. His head rang so badly that even lying still felt unstable.
He could not stand.
He could not crawl properly.
He could barely move one hand.
The monolith hovered only a short distance away. Close enough to see, but far enough that reaching it felt impossible for his current body. There was no voice calling him, no system window appearing, and no blessing descending from somewhere above. There was only the dark monolith and the blood leaving his body.
Atlas’s arm moved.
Barely.
His fingers dragged across the floor and left a red smear behind. He did not know why he reached for it. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe his anger refused to let him die without touching the thing hidden in this depth. Maybe the ruin itself had arranged his fall.
His fingertips brushed the monolith.
It was cold.
Then his blood reacted.
The blood on his fingers did not simply stain the stone. It moved. Thin red lines crawled across the monolith’s surface, spreading upward like roots. The blood pooling beneath Atlas also shifted, pulling toward the monolith in small threads.
Atlas’s pupils trembled.
’What...?’
The monolith answered with a pulse.
It was not a sound. It was pressure, a heavy beat that passed through the stone, the floor, and Atlas’s broken body. His slowing heart suddenly slammed once inside his chest.
THUMP.
Thin cracks appeared across the monolith. Crimson light leaked out from within, dark and deep, nothing like the clean golden glow nobles liked showing when displaying their relics. This light did not look holy or safe. It looked like something sealed because people once understood it was dangerous.
The cracks spread faster as Atlas’s blood crawled into them.
The monolith was not opening because of a chant, key, or royal bloodline.
It was opening because of blood.
His blood.
Then the stone collapsed inward.
It did not break like normal rock. It folded into itself, compressing without sound until the monolith’s shape disappeared. Space bent around it for a moment, and the darkness nearby pulled inward as if something at the center was swallowing the stone.
When the distortion ended, a book hovered where the monolith had been.
Atlas stared at it with fading eyes.
The book was dark, ancient, and completely still. Its cover was not leather, metal, or any material he recognized. Crimson vein-like lines moved beneath its surface like blood beneath skin. There was no title, no emblem, and no mark from any kingdom or noble house.
Beside the book, another object formed from condensed crimson light.
A pen.
No, it looked closer to a crystal stylus.
It was translucent and sharp, and inside it moved a slow red liquid that looked exactly like blood.
The book opened by itself.
Atlas’s breathing had almost stopped, but his eyes stayed open.
A single blank page appeared.
Then the stylus began drawing in his blood.
Not from a bottle or inkpot.
From him.
Thin strands rose from the wound in his stomach, from his torn clothes, and from the floor beneath him. They moved through the air and entered the crystal stylus. As the stylus filled, the blank page began to change.
Letters formed.
At first, the symbols shifted too quickly for him to understand. They distorted several times, as if the page was searching for a form his mind could read. Then the first clear word appeared.
**[ LOCKED ]**
Atlas stared at it.
He did not know what was locked. He did not know what the book was. But he understood one thing immediately.
This was not a normal relic.
Normal relics did not drink blood before showing their function. Normal relics did not hide beneath an Eternal-Class Ruin inside a sealed monolith. Normal relics did not feel alive.
The page pulsed once.
Atlas felt something looking at him from inside the book.
It was not the faceless monster from above. It was not the Royal soldiers who had thrown him here. It was something closer, something bound within the book itself. It did not pity him or promise to save him. It simply observed him, as if deciding whether the dying commoner in front of it was worth opening for.
Atlas’s fingers dug weakly against the ground.
His body was failing. His blood was still being pulled into the stylus. His consciousness was slipping away.
But the anger remained.
The Royals had thrown him here because they believed he would die quietly. The Scout had known. The soldiers had known. Everyone outside that entrance had understood the truth except him. If he died here, they would enter later, take whatever the ruin offered, and forget his name before the day ended.
Atlas’s teeth clenched weakly.
No.
Even if his body could not move, that word stayed inside him.
No.
He did not want to disappear like another nameless commoner used by nobles and buried by silence. He wanted to live. He wanted to crawl out of this place. He wanted the people who threw him away to learn that their bait had not died the way they planned.
But as those thoughts continued, his eyes began closing on their own.
Through blurry vision, he looked one last
time at the book hovering above him.
The page turned by itself.
The blood-filled stylus moved closer.
And in the deepest part of the Eternal Ruin, the thing hidden inside the monolith finally opened its first page for Atlas Mariorett.
