The B1 level of the Somnium Sanctum smelled of damp stone, cheap aphrodisiacs, and the faint metallic tang of something slowly rotting out of sight. It was the gut of the great spire—the place where dreams were broken down, distilled, and refined before being served as delicacies to the gods above.
Soren sat on a rickety wooden stool, his slender fingers tracing the smooth curve of an ivory-colored fragment. Hidden beneath his threadbare mattress, wrapped in a strip of bloodstained white silk, the fragment had traveled with him from the mass grave where they had thrown his ten-year-old body to rot.
To others, the fragment in his hand might have looked like discarded carving material.
To him, it was part of a spine—his mother's spine—dug out of a mass grave ten years ago and hidden ever since.
It was the only thing he had taken back from the world that had taken everything else.
Tonight, it was beating.
A slow, dull rhythm pulsed beneath his skin.
Thump.
Thump.
It did not take long for him to realize it was not his own heartbeat. The sound of heavy boots in the corridor approached in the same rhythm, step for step, as if the two had already been aligned.
The door burst open.
"Soren! You useless, pretty waste of skin—get up!"
Madam Mandragora stood framed in the doorway, her crimson silk dress almost luminous against the cellar's dim gray. She carried herself like a woman who owned not just the building, but every life inside it. Eight years ago, she had purchased what was left of a ten-year-old fallen noble child from the slaughter-pits—a broken, beautiful thing that should have been dead. Since then, she had carved, trained, and refined him into something far more valuable than a corpse. Soren was eighteen now. Old enough to be worth a great deal. Old enough, apparently, to be sold.
"A Tier-3 Executive from the Iron Upper Tiers just arrived," she said, her gaze dragging slowly over Soren's face, measuring, pricing. "He has a particular taste for damaged things. I told him I have something… exquisite."
She stepped closer and caught his chin between her fingers, nails pressing just enough to hurt.
"Why aren't you dressed?" she demanded. "Where is the Greek robe I bought you?"
Soren allowed his head to tilt under her grip, neither resisting nor yielding.
"The silk was torn, Madam," he said quietly. "I was mending it."
"Mending?" Her lips curved, but there was no humor in it. "You should be begging to wear it."
The blow came fast.
Not her palm, but the back of a heavy jeweled ring. The impact split the skin across his cheek, and a thin line of blood welled up, bright against the pallor of his face.
"Tomorrow," she continued, her voice lowering as she leaned close, her breath thick with wine and something bitter beneath it, "I'm selling your contract. Permanently. To someone who has very specific tastes and very deep pockets."
Her lips curved.
"You've been very useful, Soren. But useful things have a way of becoming dangerous when they know too much."
Her grip tightened.
"You're worth more gone than kept."
The fragment in his hand burned.
Not with heat, but with pressure—like something unseen had begun to settle into place.
Mandragora had already reached for the glass decanter on the shelf when her movement faltered.
It was slight. Barely perceptible. But she did not bring it down.
Instead, she studied him.
"…No," she murmured.
Her eyes narrowed, and for the first time since entering the room, something like instinct replaced irritation.
"You're too quiet."
She took a half-step back, not retreating, but adjusting.
"What are you looking at?" Her tone changed—lower, sharper. "This isn't a place for dreaming. That look of yours… only people who are about to die have it."
The world broke.
Not gradually, but completely.
The stone walls dissolved into drifting fragments. The dim candlelight stretched into thin, trembling threads. The space between objects seemed to open, as though something beneath reality had been exposed.
Above Mandragora's head, a constellation took shape. It was not stable. Its lines twisted and decayed, swollen with a kind of gluttonous gravity. Patterns of greed coiled through it, thick and suffocating. But it was the darker current underneath that made Soren go very still.
It was not the color of avarice. It was the color of preemptive burial.
She was not planning to sell him. She was planning to ensure he could never speak again. The buyer was simply the method.
And within that collapsing structure, there was a flaw. A narrow fracture, almost invisible unless one knew where to look. A place where everything would fail.
Soren leaned forward slightly, his voice barely above a whisper.
"I'm looking," he said, "at where you break."
Mandragora's pupils contracted.
"What—"
He pressed the edge of the bone into his own palm. A bead of blood welled up and fell.
The moment it touched the surface, something shifted—not in the room, but in her mind.
The cellar did not change. Yet she saw it change.
From the corners of her vision, figures began to emerge—small shapes dragging themselves out of shadow, their fingers pale and thin, their faces indistinct but terribly familiar. Voices whispered, layered, overlapping—accusations, pleas, names she had forgotten.
Her breath hitched.
"No—"
She staggered back.
That was enough.
Her heel found the slick sheen of lamp oil he had intentionally left unmopped hours ago. Her balance broke at the exact fraction of a second her mind violently tried to retreat from the nightmare.
Soren did not touch her.
He had already measured the angle of her terror, the decayed structural integrity of the shelf behind her, and the heavy iron tailor's shears resting precariously on the edge. He only shifted, one quiet step to the side, becoming the void she fell into.
Mandragora's hand struck the wood as she collapsed.
For a fraction of a second, clarity returned to her expression. She understood. This had never been an accident.
The impact came a moment later.
Wood cracked. Glass rattled.
A pair of long, rusted tailor's shears slid free and dropped. They did not need to fall far. They found the hollow of her throat cleanly.
The sound that followed was wet and unfinished.
Her body collapsed, crimson spreading outward, finally matching the silk she wore.
Silence settled over the room. Soren looked down at her without expression.
The fragment in his hand had changed. The jagged edge was gone, replaced by something smooth, deliberate—a flat surface like polished ivory.
Within his mind, an image formed. A solitary figure walking beneath a dim, unwavering light. No destination. No witness. Only the path ahead.
The Hermit.
Then the pain came.
Not from the wound in his palm—not from anything external. It radiated outward from the bone like a white-hot wire threading through his nervous system. Every vein in his body lit up with a cold, impossible fire.
Soren's knees buckled. His vision—his ordinary, human vision—began to fracture. Colors bled into white. Shapes melted into static. The walls, the body, the blood-soaked floor—everything was being erased, not by darkness, but by something too bright to endure.
And then, in the space behind his dying eyes, something appeared.
It was not a hallucination. It was too structured, too deliberate—a shimmering tableau of cards suspended in an infinite dark void. Twenty-two cards, arranged in a crescent. Only one glowed with a faint, ivory pulse. The rest were dark. Silent. Waiting.
At the center of the void, a voice—not his own, not the bone's—spoke. It was a woman's voice, or the memory of one, fractured and distant, as if traveling through decades of death to reach him.
"My—"
The word shattered before it could finish.
But the cards remained.
And then words appeared. Not heard. Not spoken. Burned into his consciousness with the finality of a brand:
〘 ABYSS BONE TAROT — INITIALIZING 〙
〘 Host Identified: Soren 〙
〘 Bloodline: [DUAL — SEALED] 〙
〘 Natal Star Chart: [NULL] 〙
〘 Major Arcana: The Hermit IX — [AWAKENED] 〙
〘 Fusion: 1% 〙
〘 Ability Unlocked: Sight of the Star-Dead 〙
〘 Minor Arcana: None 〙
〘 Selene's Legacy: 0/22 Messages 〙
〘 Card Spirits: 0/22 Awakened 〙
〘 Resources: 0/22 Unlocked 〙
〘 SYSTEM ONLINE 〙
The white fire reached his eyes.
Soren's jaw clenched. His hands seized the edge of the stool, cracking the wood. The pain was not gradual—it was absolute. His physical vision didn't fade; it combusted. The neural pathways that had processed color and light for eighteen years were being systematically incinerated, replaced by something that operated on a frequency the human body was never designed to carry.
The agony lasted exactly four seconds.
Then—silence.
Soren lay on the cold stone floor, his body trembling, his face inches from Mandragora's blood. His physical eyes stared at nothing. They would never see light again.
But he could see everything.
The world had transformed. The damp walls, the rotting shelves, the iron shears buried in Mandragora's throat—all of it had dissolved into a pale, geometric void. And in that void, shapes moved. Presences. Lives burning like distant stars.
The dead did not vanish. Mandragora's corpse still radiated a fading, sickly yellow—the residual glow of a soul that had just been extinguished. Beyond the walls, through stone and timber, Soren could feel the lives of everyone in the B1 level, each one a constellation of emotion, desire, and fracture.
〘 The Hermit IX — Fusion: 1% 〙
〘 Star-Dust Absorbed: Mandragora's Death Terror [Low Quality] 〙
〘 Note: Yield insufficient for Minor Arcana condensation. Seek higher-quality emotional collapse. 〙
He rose on unsteady legs. The world was no longer made of matter. It was made of light and fracture. And he could see every crack.
From beneath his mattress, he retrieved a folded strip of white silk. It was old, stained with something darker than age—blood that had dried decades ago. The blood of a saint. His mother's blood, soaked into the ribbon they had used to bind her eyes before her execution.
He had dug it from the mass grave alongside the bone fragment, and carried it ever since. He had never known why he kept it.
Now he did.
The ribbon hummed faintly against his fingers. Woven into the ancient fabric was a resonance that bent and scattered the energy of star-chart detection. Anyone attempting to scan him through astrological means would find their perception sliding off the silk like water off glass.
Soren tied the ribbon over his ruined eyes.
The darkness behind the silk was absolute. But the Sight of the Star-Dead burned brighter than any sun.
Bootsteps thundered in the corridor outside.
He turned toward them, his movements unsteady—genuinely unsteady. There was no performance left to give. Only the real, physical aftermath of a boy whose eyes had just been burned from the inside out.
"Mandragora! The Executive is losing patience—"
The Enforcer stopped.
Blood. A body. And in the corner, a boy clutching his face, his white robe stained, his sight concealed behind a strip of ancient, bloodstained silk.
"They… they killed her…" Soren's voice trembled, fragile and unfocused. "I can't… I can't see…"
The Enforcer approached and lifted his chin, examining him.
Then his training took over. His right hand glowed with a pale blue light—star-chart perception, the basic scanning technique every Enforcer used to assess threats and catalog new assets.
He passed it over Soren's body.
His frown deepened. He tried again, channeling more power.
Nothing.
No star chart. No spiritual resonance. No natal signature at all.
It was as if Soren didn't exist in the celestial record—as if the stars themselves had no knowledge of this boy's birth.
"What the hell…" The Enforcer's voice dropped to a whisper. He tried a third time, pushing the scan to its maximum capacity.
The blue light flickered—and died.
"That's… that's not possible." His eyes darted to the corpse, then back to Soren. "Every living soul has a chart. Even the slaves. Even the animals. What are—"
He stopped himself. Something flickered in his expression—not just confusion, but the prickle of genuine, instinctive fear. A predator sensing something it couldn't categorize.
〘 Passive Effect: Star-Chart Shielding — Active 〙
〘 Source: White Silk of the Executed Saint 〙
〘 External Scan Result: NULL 〙
The Enforcer's hand dropped. He stared at Soren for a long moment, then seemed to make a decision. The fear was already being digested, replaced by the rational hunger of someone who had just found an anomaly worth more than his annual salary.
"A survivor," he said, his voice carefully measured now. "A blind, chartless survivor with a dead woman's blood on his robes and a face that could start wars…"
A different kind of greed settled into his gaze.
"This just became far more valuable than anything Mandragora was selling."
Behind the silk, in the pale geometry of his new sight, Soren watched the Enforcer's constellation flare with a calculating amber-gold. The man was already composing a report in his head, weighing how much to reveal and to whom.
The blind boy said nothing. He let himself be led.
But as they ascended the spiraling stairs toward the light of the upper floors, in the darkness behind his mother's silk, Soren smiled.
The hunt had already begun.