It was an ordinary morning in a jungle that knew no mercy; what its native inhabitants saw as a daily routine, a stranger saw as a challenge standing between him and death. Harten inhaled the damp air, and as he watched the faint glow of the sun through the branches, Joe's voice came steady and decisive:
"Carve my words into your mind well, Harten... here, memory is the difference between survival and extinction."
Harten replied, a mix of the thrill of the unknown and primal terror surging in his chest: "I'm ready, Joe. What is my first lesson? Will I learn to fight? Or to hunt?"
Joe offered only a cryptic look and said quietly: "Come with me."
They walked together, away from the cave, away from the familiar scent of fire and that safe haven Harten had begun to think of as his new home. They stopped at the edge of a towering cliff, overlooking a bottomless chasm that swallowed the light at its base. Joe turned to the young boy and asked in a tone devoid of emotion: "Are you absolutely certain of your desire for power? For the road to it is paved only with pain."
The question echoed in Harten's mind: Does he mean grueling exercises? Or a struggle with a beast? But he quickly cast the doubts off his shoulders. He remembered the shame of living with the nickname "The Rat," and the bitter taste of the ants that had promised him change.
"Yes... I want power, even if the price is my soul," he said in a solid voice he had never heard from himself before.
Joe looked deep into Harten's eyes, as if reading the sincerity of his resolve, then asked one last time: "Are you sure?"
Harten nodded firmly. Suddenly, everything changed.
Harten felt his body lift off the ground; he found himself in Joe's strong hands, held over the abyss. In that moment, time stopped completely. The reel spun backward—to the shaking of the plane, his mother's scream, and his first fall. But the difference was in the eyes: his mother's eyes had been drowning in tears of helplessness, while Joe's eyes were dry, resolute, and held a terrifying gaze befitting a master casting his pupil into the bowels of hell to forge him into a man.
In the blink of an eye, Joe released his grip.
It was a thunderous plunge toward the void, a fall that reenacted the tragedy of his life but for a completely different purpose. "Drinking water for thirst quenches you, but drinking it while you are suffocating might save your life; the act is the same, and the water is the same, but the purpose is what creates the miracle and changes the taste of the experience."
As his body plummeted, Joe's voice reached him from above as if from another world: "Don't hate me, Harten! I am not bullying you; I am melting you in the furnace of power. The challenge is to survive in this desolate pit for an entire week. If you succeed, Level Two awaits you... you might even leap to the Third... or die."
Joe added with a manic laugh tinged with excitement: "And if you make it out before four days, you will reach a level even I haven't achieved! It has a name I'll tell you then... haha, sorry, I got carried away!"
Joe's footsteps faded slowly, leaving Harten alone with the terrifying silence of the jungle.
"Why? Why did he do this to me?" his old, trembling voice screamed.
But a new voice, coarse and harsh, cut him off sharply: "Shut up! Have you not realized yet that 'Ahmed' died in the plane wreckage? Damn you, get out of my head! Let me cry alone if I must, but I will not be you anymore. You represent my human weakness... and I have become the beast now."
Silence finally prevailed. Harten rose from the hard ground and brushed the dust from his wounded body. He looked around at the dark, frightening place where he would spend his coming days—the place that would witness the final burial of "Ahmed" and the sacred birth of "Harten."