Lian did not know how many days he had been dead.
Or maybe this was not death either.
Because dead people should not be able to think.
It was dark around him, but it was not the kind of darkness caused by the absence of light. There was nothing here for light to fall on at all, no ground, no sky, no walls and not even a distance that could be used to say that something was near or far.
He could not see his hands, because he had no hands, he had no legs and he could not even breathe, because he could not feel anything called lungs. He was not even sure if he still had a face that could open its eyes.
The only thing that remained was thought.
And that was enough to know that he still existed.
Lian remained floating in that darkness for an unknown amount of time. Maybe hours, maybe days; the concept of time had become almost meaningless in a place where he had no body.
Even so, he was not completely separated from the outside world, he could hear sounds, very far away and muffled, sometimes like someone was speaking from behind several thick walls.
Sometimes he felt pain, of course it was not his own pain, but the pain of his body, a body that was no longer under his control.
Everything that Black Silence saw, heard or touched through that body, a very weak part of it also reached Lian.
At first the images were so unclear that it was hard to understand them.
A shadow.
A movement in the light.
A feeling of the ground under his feet.
The pressure of the wind on his skin.
Then they slowly became clearer, and he understood, his body still existed, it was just no longer his.
The last thing he clearly remembered was not darkness.
It was hunger.
A hunger that was not his own.
When Black Silence started eating him inside the cocoon, Lian had not even realized what exactly was happening at first.
There were no teeth, there was no pain like his flesh being torn apart but things were disappearing from him.
First, unimportant things, the name of an alley that he had passed through once years ago.
The face of a man he had once seen in a store, the taste of a food he had liked when he was a child.
A moment later he knew he had forgotten something, but he could no longer even understand what it had been.
Then the bigger memories started.
The Academy, the day his Awakening had failed, the sound of the laughter of those who had looked at him after his failed Awakening.
Names.
Faces.
Parts of his family.
Liana, Seraphina, Seris, One and every time a part of them became weaker.
Lian had tried to hold on to them, but how could he hold onto something when he had no hands, no control over his mind or even full control over his own thoughts?
Black Silence did not steal memories, he ate them and that was the difference, anything he ate no longer remained anywhere.
In the end, something even more basic started to disappear...the feeling that "I" existed.
He was no longer sure why he was resisting, why he should preserve something, why disappearing was bad.
Then the last word that remained in the middle of the collapse of his mind started to break.
Lian.
Vorhelm.
His own name.
Its letters slowly lost their meaning one after another, its complete disappearance meant his absolute death, and right at that moment—
[Warning.]
[The Host’s identity is on the verge of complete collapse.]
Lian had almost not noticed that message at the time, not because it had not appeared, but because there was almost nothing left of him that could understand why it was important.
Then the second message came.
[Anomaly detected.]
And then something deep inside his existence reacted.
Not a soul, not a class and not any legendary artifact, but something that even he did not know existed.
[Ruined Heart activated.]
And the world collapsed.
Lian could never understand exactly what had happened later.
He had only felt that a very small part of what was still "him" had suddenly moved out of Black Silence’s reach.
It was like a city where everything was being eaten, and the last building had sunk into the ground before the collapse and was hidden under thousands of meters of rock.
Black Silence continued, he ate the remaining memories, searched for the threads of his identity but found nothing.
Because what remained of Lian was no longer in the same place as before.
He had fallen inside something else, something closed, something that the Calamity could not see.
And there he had been able to think again.
It had taken a long time for him to understand what had saved him, at first he had only seen its name.
Ruined Heart.
It was familiar but very unclear, like a name you had seen once years ago and immediately forgotten.
Then a memory of a very distant place rose in his mind.
Blood.
Stone.
Pain.
A fallen wolf that had died several meters away, the Ruined Realm, the first day he had been summoned there.
Lian saw the same scene again, his body had been pierced, he had lost a lot of blood, his breathing had become difficult.
But behind all that pain, the system panels had appeared one after another, his first Awakening had failed years ago, he had been sixteen at the time.
He had lived for two full years with that "Failure" mark.
His second attempt at the Academy had also failed, according to the known rules, this should have been the end, more than two attempts at Awakening was not something that was supposed to happen.
But that day in the Ruined Realm, the system had tried again.
The third attempt.
And that had also failed.
The memory of the panel in front of Lian’s mind became clearer.
[Awakening process started.]
[Failure.]
[Third attempt failed.]
At that time, he had barely remained conscious, even then, part of his mind had understood that this was the end.
If he had failed three times, what else could remain? The fact that he had managed to attempt Awakening three times was already remarkable.
But then a panel appeared that, among the blood, pain and chaos, he had almost paid no attention to.
[Ruined Heart activated.]
[Fourth Awakening started.]
Something that should not have existed.
The fourth attempt.
And then—
[Awakening successful.]
[Class: Monster.]
For a few moments, no thought formed in Lian’s mind and then a very simple sentence passed through the darkness.
"So it was you." he said inside his own mind and focused his attention on the thing surrounding his existence.
The entire day of his Awakening in the Ruined Realm suddenly had a different meaning, he had thought that the system had somehow given him another chance.
But no.
The system had not even started the fourth attempt until something called the Ruined Heart had activated.
Why?
Lian had no potential and even three attempts at Awakening had failed.
So how had this thing made Awakening possible?
And why was the result the Monster class?
A class that no one had ever heard of, a class that had no place in the normal structure of the Awakened.
Lian thought about his strange condition.
Race: Human.
Class: Monster.
Two things that had been placed together from the very first day, without him really knowing the reason.
Maybe the answer had been there from the beginning.
The Ruined Heart.
But the answer to one question only created ten more questions.
What was this thing? Since when had it been inside him? Since birth? Had someone put it inside him?
Was it related to the Vorhelm family? Or had it not been related to his family at all?
If it had existed inside his body from the beginning, why had it never reacted until that day?
And more importantly, why did the system have no information about it?
Lian tried to check the same name.
[Ruined Heart]
[Information unavailable.]
He tried again and this time a different message appeared.
[The identity of this entity is not registered in the system.]
It was not registered.
The system had names for Monsters, it had names for Calamities, it had information about creatures from other worlds.
Even Black Silence, although much of its information was hidden or incomplete, could be identified.
But the thing inside Lian did not even have an identity.
"Great, you don’t even know what the hell is inside my body and I have been living with it this whole time?." Lian said dryly inside his mind.
He was not ungrateful toward this thing, after all, it had caused his Awakening and now it had saved him too, but the feeling that something unknown was living inside him was not exactly pleasant either.
He looked around, he was currently in the place where the Heart was located and slowly the image of the thing protecting him became clearer.
It was not a heart.
At least not a heart made of flesh and blood.
In the dark space inside his existence, something huge and broken was there.
A black heart, its surface was full of cracks and parts of it looked like they had broken centuries ago and then been joined together again.
A very weak light flowed inside the cracks, not white, not golden, but a color that Lian could not clearly identify.
And on the walls of the Heart, five dents could be seen, five dents that looked more like places for something to be placed inside.
And he was inside it, or maybe a part of his existence had been stored inside it.
An invisible boundary existed around the Heart, outside that boundary, Black Silence was everywhere.
At first, the young Vorhelm could only feel its presence.
But now that the Calamity had been completed, for the first time he could see its reality and true face, and what he saw looked nothing like a human body.
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( A/N : The first appearance of the Ruined Heart was in Chapter 4. )
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