Chapter 90: Reminiscing
The flower pulsed, and The Wanderer watched it breathe.
He stood in the hollowed heart of the Gate Hub, surrounded by the architecture of his own design — the crystallize ash walls, the suspended cores rotating in their double-helix, the faces of dead hunters etched into bone petals that opened and closed with the rhythm of a heart that had never known mercy. The air was cold here. Not the cold of winter, but the cold of consumption, of heat and light and life being drawn inward, devoured, converted into something that served his purpose.
He had worn many faces since coming to this world. Duncan Carmichael’s was beginning to fray at the edges — the skin graying at the temples, the eyes developing that faint film that marked a vessel approaching its expiration. He would need a new one soon.
But not yet. There was still work to be done, and this face had become familiar to the humans he needed to manipulate. They saw Duncan Carmichael, the corrupt guild worker and the petty tyrant who had tormented students and sold porters to their deaths and now they saw the Ghost Of Valor.
The flower pulsed again, and The Wanderer closed his borrowed eyes and remembered.
The fracture had been small at first. A pinprick in the membrane between worlds, barely enough for a whisper to pass through. He had pressed against it, feeling the resistance of this reality’s laws, the stubbornness of its physics. The humans called it a Red Gate. They did not understand what it truly was — a wound, a tear, a place where the world’s immune system had failed.
He had chosen his entry point carefully. Johannesburg, the weakest of the seven sanctuaries. No powerful defender to hold the Tower. No one with the will to rule. Just corporate guilds playing at empire while the poor rotted in the shadow of Tower 14.
A city built on corruption, on the exploitation of the weak by the strong, on the systematic extraction of mana from those who could not afford to protect themselves.
Perfect soil.
His first vessel had been a low-level dungeon monster, something the humans called a Hobgoblin. He had pushed a fragment of himself through the fracture, ridden the creature’s primitive nervous system, felt the world through senses that were crude but functional.
He had needed to understand the terrain before he committed fully. The monster’s memories had been simple — hunger, territory, the constant low-grade fear of stronger predators. But through its eyes, he had seen the humans. Their classes. Their skills. Their pathetic hierarchy of F to S.
And he had seen the boy.
Even then, in that first crude vessel, he had sensed something wrong with Glen Mcdonald.
The F Rank Mimic classification was a lie — not a deliberate one, but a failure of the system’s diagnostic capabilities. The boy’s core was not empty. It was hungry. A void where a class should be, waiting to be filled. The Wanderer had not understood it then. He understood it better now.
He had abandoned the Hobgoblin quickly, letting it die in the dungeon so he could retreat through the fracture and plan his true entry. The monster’s death had been useful — it had created the chaos that allowed the boy to steal his first real skills, to evolve his class, to begin the transformation that would make him what he was now.
The Wanderer had not planned that. But he had learned, over centuries of consuming worlds, that the best gardens grew from accidents.
The flower pulsed, and The Wanderer opened his eyes. The memory of that first contact still pleased him. He had been operating blindly then, feeling his way through a new world’s rules. Now he understood them intimately.
Then the fracture had grown.
A disturbance in the local mana grid, a spike of anti mana that widened the pinprick into something larger. Something he could squeeze through. The Wanderer had not questioned the cause. He had simply acted, pressing himself against the expanded fracture, forcing his essence through the gap before it could seal again.
He had emerged in a cramped office, the air thick with cheap liquor and petty ambition. A man sat at a desk, pouring amber liquid into a glass, muttering about slum rats and licenses. Duncan Carmichael. D Rank Appraiser. Logistics manager. Parasite.
The possession had been effortless. Duncan’s will was weak, his core underdeveloped, his mental defenses nonexistent. The Wanderer had consumed his soul in a single breath, drank his memories like cheap wine, and slipped inside his skin like a hand into a glove. The glove had not even struggled. It had simply gone quiet, and then it had been his.
Through Duncan’s eyes, he had seen the city’s infrastructure. The guilds. The Association. The Tower. He had learned which humans mattered and which were disposable, which alliances were solid and which were built on mutual exploitation. He had used Duncan’s position to access gate schedules, to intercept promising hunters, to identify the ones whose disappearances would not be investigated.
And he had returned to the boy.
The Sunken Necropolis. The Wanderer had stepped through wearing Duncan’s gray uniform and dead silver eyes, and he had looked at Glen Mcdonald and seen what the Hobgoblin had only hinted at. The rot had grown. The piece of the void in the boy’s core was no longer a fragment — it was a bridge. Something that let him touch both worlds without being destroyed by either.
The Wanderer had looked at him and seen potential. Not the kind humans valued — strength, speed, tactical brilliance. Something rarer. The boy was a seed. A vessel that could carry more than one power, that could merge incompatible energies without being destroyed by the contradiction. The anti mana in his blood was not killing him. It was growing in him.
So The Wanderer had let him live. Had kicked him and his companions through the mutating gate with a warning to "grow" and "ripen." Had claimed the Necropolis as his nest and begun the slow work of cultivation.
He had not lied. The boy was weak. But weakness was not a permanent condition. It was a stage. A necessary precursor to strength. And The Wanderer was patient. He had consumed worlds that took centuries to fully digest. What were a few months of waiting for a seed to mature?
The flower pulsed, and The Wanderer opened Duncan’s eyes. The memory of that first encounter still pleased him. He had been operating with limited information then, feeling his way through a new world’s social structures. Now he understood them intimately. The Awakening System, with its classes and levels and rankings, was a cage — beautifully designed, ruthlessly enforced, and utterly predictable. It gave humans powers with defined limits, skills with fixed capacities, cores that could be measured and catalogued and consumed.
He had exploited that predictability from the moment he took his first true vessel.
The months after the Necropolis had been productive. Through Duncan’s face, he had hunted the city’s elite hunters — not the S Ranks, not yet, but the A Ranks and B Ranks who formed the backbone of the guilds’ operational capacity. The Ironclad. The Grimhunt teams. The Astra research expeditions. He had torn micro-fractures into their dungeons, stepped through wearing Duncan’s gray uniform and dead silver eyes, and harvested them one by one.
The humans had given him a name: "The Ghost of Valor." They thought he was a new type of monster, a mutation, something their system could eventually classify and kill. They did not understand. Classification was a human conceit, a way to pretend that naming something gave you power over it. The Lost were not monsters. They were not a species or a civilization or an army. They were a process. The natural conclusion of entropy given form and will.
And then had come the true performance: Elena Rostova.
He had killed her not for her power — though her A Rank core was succulent — but for her position. Her face had opened doors that Duncan’s never could. Through her, he had infiltrated the Astra Guild’s highest circles, learned their secrets, identified their weaknesses. And then he feasted upon theor cores and from their ashes rose the fiends.
But the Valkyrie had intervened, of course. The SS Rank Silver Valkyrie, her holy fire burning bright enough to wound even a Noble of The Lost. But she had not killed him. She could not kill him.
She was too weak.
So he left a seed and retreated to digest the cores of the hunters he had killed. And he had used that time to also deepen the Bloom’s roots, to expand the fracture, to prepare for the next act.
