Prologue

Three years had passed since the Fracture, the day the Core descended and fractured the Earth. In its wake, nothing was left but ruin and death. The ground had split, the land shattered into four fragmented regions, each isolated by the wastelands, the Void Realms. These barren zones, filled with chaotic energies, were deadly and impossible to navigate.

The Core's arrival shattered humanity. Monsters poured from the depths, beings born of nightmare and myth. Cities fell, governments crumbled, and the survivors were left to claw at life in the ruins of a dying world.

Hope was fleeting, and power was everything. Among the wreckage of civilization, the System emerged, a strange force offering salvation in the form of shards. Crystalline fragments, capable of granting unimaginable abilities, became the key to survival. They promised strength, power, and a chance to fight back.

But to those who lived beneath the weight of despair, the shards were both salvation and curse. Humanity, broken and fractured, was left to scavenge, to survive. Amidst them was a boy, his name lost to time, forgotten by the world.

He wandered the ruins, weak and frail, a ghost in a world that had no room for the weak. Abandoned, unwanted, he had become part of the landscape, just another survivor struggling against the storm of chaos.

The boy had seen it all. Cities burning. Lives extinguished. Families torn apart. But in this world, survival meant everything, and in this new, cursed existence, there was no place for mercy.

But the boy's fate was not his own.

On a day like any other, as he scavenged the wreckage of a fallen city, something changed. He found it, one of the Crypted Shards. Its glow was unnatural, beckoning him, promising an escape from the life he had known. But the shard did not offer freedom. It forced its will upon him, and in that moment, the boy's life as he knew it ended.

A transformation, brutal and irreversible, began. His body began to heal, regrow at a rate far beyond human comprehension. Death no longer had dominion over him. The boy became something else, something eternal.

No longer just a survivor, he was now a part of the dark power that had come to remake the world. A monster, forced to walk an endless path of suffering, with no hope of release.

The world had taken everything from him. But with the power of the shard, he would make it pay.