For Volume 2 releases it will be 3 Chapters a week (Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday)

  As I am currently in the process of rewriting Volume 1.

  I sat on the branch and looked out over the horizon while the sun spilled gold across the nd I was meant to protect. The light caught on the tops of the trees, ran over the grassnds beyond, and turned the distant stone into something softer than it had any right to be.

  For once, nothing was chasing me.

  That alone felt suspicious.

  The baby birds beside me kept singing through mouthfuls of fruit, their tiny bodies vibrating as they sang. I watched them with a faint, reluctant amusement. They’d been screaming for food a moment ago like the world was ending. Now they were living pure moments of joy. I leaned back against the trunk, listened to their chirping, and let the breeze slide over me while I breathed in the fresh air of the forest.

  It felt alive. Not rotten. Not poisoned. Just the steady warmth of the sun climbing overhead. I felt the breeze slip through the leaves, and birdsong filled the gaps it left behind. I exhaled slowly and let it sit for a second. I should’ve been pnning. I should’ve been moving already. Instead I sat there like I’d earned rest. Maybe I had. Maybe I hadn’t. But I stayed anyway, letting my thoughts wander.

  I leaped from the branch and nded lightly on the ground below, my body taking the drop without compint. The impact felt clean, easy, almost pleasant, and I still wasn’t used to that.

  Something moved toward me—steady, unhurried. I felt it through the ground before I turned my head, the rhythm of the steps calm enough to tell me it wasn’t a threat.

  I didn’t move. I just let it come.

  A Bramblehart approached calmly, steady in its pace, then stepped into line beside me.

  I gnced over at his hide. The scars were still there where the withering poison had eaten into him—ugly, dark tracks spread through flesh and fur. But beneath them was proof of what had been saved. The scars were harsh, yet the fact they were only scars meant he had lived.

  Then something the System had said came back to me.

  Pure energy could halt the poison. It would not heal the damage already done.

  The words settled properly this time, and my curiosity cut straight through the calm. I focused on him and used Sovereign’s Sight.

  Thornel - Level 18

  Thornel?

  The name caught me off guard more than the level did. As I was staring at the name, something caught my eye that was unusual. I noticed the Level 18 wasn’t written normally. It was coated in red.

  I frowned.

  I’ve never seen that before.

  System?

  Its answer came at once, ft and precise.

  It means it cannot level up ever again.

  I stood there, my feet suddenly heavy, like the ground had turned soft under me.

  The words hit harder than I expected. The System said it the same way it might’ve told me the sky was blue. Just cold, factual information. Thornel would remain this level forever. Never knowing what it is like to evolve and grow. Trapped at that level because someone had tampered with its life force and the damage ran deeper than flesh.

  That wasn’t fair.

  I should’ve felt detached. It wasn’t my wound. It wasn’t my future. But sympathy came anyway, followed by something quieter that felt a lot like sadness. Thornel had survived, yes. But survival in this world didn’t always mean you got to live without losing something.

  I let out a low sigh and reached out, tapping a hand gently against his back.

  Another set of steps approached. I felt them before I saw them. Slower than Thornel’s had been, lighter in weight but… older somehow, the rhythm felt uneven.

  Thornel’s head turned first. My hand slipped from his back as he shifted, and I followed his gaze.

  The older Bramblehart approached from the entrance of the thorned walls. Thornel turned to him, and the two of them began exchanging low groans, rough sounds that carried meaning in their tone even if I couldn’t transte a single word of it. The elder’s eyes flicked to me once, just a lingering, uncertain displeasure—like he still wasn’t sure I belonged in this picture.

  Then he turned back toward the thorn walls.

  Thornel started after him, took a few steps… and stopped just before the entrance.

  He looked back at me.

  Thornel paused for a moment before he dipped his head in a small nod.

  I nodded back.

  Just the quiet understanding and respect for each other.

  Then Thornel turned and stepped through the thorns after the elder.

  It felt like goodbye.

  I watched the thorn wall sway gently in the breeze. I wish I could communicate with them. The thought did nothing but remind me of the gap still sitting between me and almost everything in this world.

  There are too many things I don’t understand.

  I turned away from the thorn wall and fixed my gaze in the direction of the fallen ruin of the dungeon. The thought had been sitting in me since I woke up.

  I need answers.

  I took one step and vanished from the sight of the young birds in the tree behind me, my movement too fast for their tiny heads to track. Their chirping cut off for a beat in startled confusion, and I almost smiled at that before the forest swallowed the sound.

  I moved through the trees with Shadow Step as if it had become part of my body rather than something borrowed. Each use carried me forward with a speed that still felt wrong in the best possible way. But my sharpened senses came with their own punishment. Even after several Shadow Steps put distance between me and the Bramblehart home, I could still hear the birds singing behind me.

  Everything pressed in at once. Wings fpping above me. Leaves brushing each other. Insects moving through bark. Distant paws scratching the earth. Wind changing shape around trunks. Each time I used Shadow Step, it felt like arriving inside a fresh wave of noise before I’d finished sorting the st one, like waking up in the middle of ten conversations and being expected to understand all of them at once. My bance stayed steady, but my focus frayed around the edges.

  I kept going anyway, because stopping in the middle of that wasn’t better. The forest around the dungeon opening changed as I approached, and I noticed it long before I stepped into the clearing itself. What had once been withered pnts, dead patches of earth, and a sickly silence now looked… alive. Grass pushed up through dark soil. Trees had begun to show their healthier colors again. Flowers were starting to open where the sunlight reached them.

  The nd was recovering.

  That should’ve felt hopeful. Instead it made the ruin ahead stand out even more.

  I continued forward until I reached the broken remains of the human encampment. The wreckage was familiar now, but familiarity didn’t make it easier to look at. As I approached, I noticed the bloodstained banner again—half-buried, torn, stiffened by old filth and weather.

  This time I wasn’t racing against death to find a cure.

  I crouched, picked up the banner, and studied it. The cloth was ripped nearly in half, and the crest on it showed what I first took to be a lion—but not quite. Only half a face remained. One eye. Part of a mane. Teeth frozen in an expression I couldn’t fully read because the rest was gone.

  I looked around, searching on instinct, and spotted another torn strip of cloth hanging from a broken piece of wood nearby. It filed weakly in the breeze, dirty and frayed but still intact enough to matter. I sprang up, grabbed it, and id both pieces side by side.

  Then the full image clicked into pce.

  It was a lion with two heads. One was roaring. One seemed calm.

  Red and gold.

  I frowned at it a little longer than I needed to.

  I wonder what kingdom this is from.

  I carried that thought with me as I moved deeper into the encampment. Bodies still littered the ground where the fighting had reached them. Armor dented. Limbs twisted. Some had died running, some where they stood, some where they’d clearly tried to make a st stand and failed badly. I walked past torn living spaces where beds had been shredded apart mid-struggle, the remains of daily life broken open by panic and violence.

  I moved into what seemed to be a more open space, somewhere people might’ve gathered to talk, eat, or pn. The shape of it suggested routine. The wreckage erased it. One body sat slumped there without armor, a pte of what looked like rotten food still near one limp hand as if death had interrupted a meal and never bothered to expin itself.

  They didn’t even know what was coming.

  The thought lingered while my eyes drifted over the room, and that was when I spotted something peaking out from under a colpsed table.

  I approached it and knelt down as I lifted the table which was wrapped in cw marks and flipped it to the other side of the room.

  I then looked down again and saw what it was, it was a book. It y near the corpse which seemed to have been crushed by the broken wooden table. The book sat under a yer of blood and dust thick enough to make it blend into the floor. I picked it up, and the dust loosened at once, spilling off in a dry cascade like gravity had only just remembered it existed. I blew across the cover to clear the rest, but some of it clung stubbornly where blood had soaked into the material.

  There was no title, just a boring pale cover of what felt like leather.

  I opened it, and the symbols inside stopped me cold.

  Not English. Not any nguage I knew. Strange characters bent and linked in patterns that should’ve meant nothing to me. But as I stared, something about them tugged at memory. I’d seen forms like this before.

  The circle.

  The golden runes in the spirit realm.

  They looked simir.

  For a moment I just stared at the page while that connection took shape. Then my eyes surged with energy—too much, too fast—and a thin sting fred behind them, like they were trying to hold more light than they were built for. I blinked hard and looked away from the book for a second, letting the pressure ease until it settled into something manageable.

  Instinctively my body had activated Sovereign’s Sight, but it felt different. The same wrongness I’d felt with being able to see Thornel’s name—it was unusual.

  I wonder.

  I pulled up my ability list, searching for the answer like I was hunting a scent I didn’t have. And there it was.

  Sovereign's Sight Tier 2

  It sat on the list like it had always belonged there, and suddenly the implication nded.

  It must’ve increased its tier after the golden light consumed me.

  I focused my eyes back on the symbols before me.

  I activated Sovereign’s Sight, letting the energy build—pressure pooling behind my eyes in a dull ache—until something in it finally clicked into pce.

  The symbols started to shift. Not like ink smearing—more like the writing was alive. The shapes flowed across the page, rearranging as my mind began to catch the words underneath. They kept moving for a few seconds longer, then—like the transtion had finished—they settled and solidified into pce.

  I could read it.

  The book described the encampment and what had happened here. It said a monster of unknown origin had entered this region and killed the known lord. That lord, according to the text, had been something called a Solvane—described as a protective ruler of its territory, the kind that kept the region stable. The entry even noted the dungeon had remained calm while it lived.

  I’d never heard of it. But from the way they wrote about it, it had been… good. Protective. The kind of ruler that kept things from falling apart.

  I kept going. Once the lord was defeated, the dungeon had become erratic. The people in this camp had been sent to investigate, and hunters from the Valmere Kingdom had been dispatched to hunt a massive beast said to tower over the treeline and create earthquakes when it walked.

  I remember this.

  The memory came back clearly—those humans speaking about another squad, another hunt, some massive creature out there in the region. Was it the same monster I’d seen? The same one they were talking about here?

  The thought lingered.

  As I continued to turn pages, something slipped free.

  A small letter. Nothing important at first gnce—orders, routine, the kind of dull message that only mattered because someone had bothered to write it down.

  My eyes caught the stamp at the bottom.

  A two-headed lion. One roaring. One calm.

  The same crest from the torn banner outside.

  The letter was signed with a neat, formal line: By order of His Majesty, the Kingdom of Rhydemar.

  So that was the name of the kingdom.

  The kingdom's name followed me as I turned the remaining pages. But the rest of the book offered less. Strategy notes. Dungeon approach pns. Reports of squads entering and failing to return. Then nothing. The entries ended abruptly, as if the writer had simply stopped mid-duty.

  Which, to be fair, was probably exactly what happened.

  I lowered the book and only then realized how much time had passed.

  The sun was gone.

  Night had swallowed the ruins whole, and the only reason I hadn’t noticed sooner was because my perception had lied to me. I could see in the dark so well now that dusk had slipped into full night without ever announcing itself. But my sharpened senses didn’t care about the light. They caught movement at once.

  Shuffling.

  More than one body.

  More than a few.

  From all directions.

  I didn’t hesitate. One step took me from the floor to the roof of the building I’d been reading in, my body moving before thought could get in the way. The air above the ruins felt colder.

  I looked out into the night and saw them.

  White eyes.

  Dozens at first. Then more. Then too many to count without effort.

  The same eyes I’d known for a long time.

  Mornaks.

  They stood at the edge of the ruins and between the trees and along the broken paths, hundreds of them watching in complete silence. No growls. No rustling. Just stillness so complete it made the scene feel staged.

  I stared back.

  They didn’t move.

  Not even a breath broke the shape of them.

  I took one step and appeared directly in front of the closest Mornak, so close I could see the slight flinch and the shift in its pupils as my movement finally caught up with its instincts. Its eyes snapped to me. Its body tensed. For half a heartbeat, the entire night held still.

  Then every single Mornak moved at once.

  In sequence, like one mind had pulled the strings.

  They raised one arm and pointed.

  All of them.

  Toward the same direction.

  Toward where I’d been born.

  I looked at the line of their arms, at the silent insistence in the gesture, and understood immediately.

  Something had entered my region without permission.

  Volume 2 has finally begun! Thank you to everyone who read through Volume 1 and made it this far. It means a lot to see people enjoying the story.

  The story is far from finished.

  Thanks for reading!