The chapel at Vel's Crossing had seen better centuries.
Its stone walls had turned grey-green from river damp.
Three of its windows were boarded up. The wooden doors at the front had warped so badly in last spring's flood that they no longer closed properly. They just leaned against each other and pretended.
The priest who ran the place was seventy-four years old, half-deaf, and went to bed at the eighth bell without exception.
It was currently the sixth bell. Varek crouched at the chapel's side entrance; a servant's door, unlocked because the priest had lost the key sometime in the last decade and simply stopped caring.
He listened for thirty seconds. Nothing moved inside. He pushed the door open and stepped in.
Dark. Smell of old candle wax and stone that had never quite dried out. Rows of wooden pews. A simple altar at the far end with a cheap iron idol of whatever minor deity this region paid lip service to.
He didn't look at any of it. He walked straight to the center of the chapel floor and stopped.
Pressed the toe of his boot against a specific flagstone on the third row from the left wall, four back from the altar.
It looked identical to every other flagstone. Same grey, same worn edges, same chip on the bottom corner from when something heavy had been dragged across it.
He'd put that chip there himself.
A marker. One he'd placed knowing that if he ever came back - in any form, in any era, he'd recognize it. He crouched, pressed two fingers to the stone, and exhaled slowly. He wasn't accessing the System. He wasn't calling up a skill. He was simply remembering the specific vibration of something he'd sealed inside his own blood, pressed into stone and earth ten thousand years ago.
The flagstone moved.
Shifted, half an inch to the left, the seal releasing like a breath held too long finally let go.
[!! HIDDEN STRUCTURE DETECTED]
[Sub-floor cavity: Depth 6.2 meters]
[Contents: UNREGISTERED | Threat Level: ???]
[Recommendation: RETREAT IMMEDIATELY]
He ignored it all proceeded to lifted the stone.
Below: a drop of about twenty feet, and a narrow tunnel carved through solid rock. The
walls were smooth; not from natural erosion but from intentional work, the kind that
required patience, heat and hands that didn't get tired.
At the tunnel's end, just slightly visible in the absolute dark, something pulsed. It was faint. Slow. Like a heartbeat that had been waiting a very long time.
Varek dropped into the hole.
He landed without sound, his knees absorbing the impact easily despite the body's weak stats; old instinct, muscle memory from a life that dwarfed this one.
The tunnel was barely wide enough for his shoulders. He walked it in thirty-four steps, which was exactly how long he remembered it being.
The chamber at the end was the size of a large closet.
And in its center, resting in a cradle of ancient stone he'd carved himself, sat the Ashen Shard.
It was smaller than most people imagined divine relics to be. About the size of a fist,
dark grey, shot through with veins of something that wasn't quite red and wasn't quite gold. It looked like cooling magma that had been given a second to think about what
shape it wanted to be and settled on something modest.
It was, in its current sealed state, unreadable to The System.
In the novel, Doan Solace would locate this chapel via a tip from an NPC, descend with a team of four high-level players, spend two chapters fighting the automated defenses Varek had built into the seal, and finally extract the Shard at the cost of one party member's progression reset.
There were no defenses now.
Varek had unmade them when he pressed his fingers to the flagstone above.
He reached down and picked the Shard up.
The moment his skin touched it, the chamber went absolutely still. Then the Shard pulsed once. Hard, like a second heartbeat slamming into his chest and went quiet.
It recognized him.
Of course it did. It was made from him.
[ITEM ACQUIRED: ??? (Unclassified)]
[Item cannot be identified.]
[Item cannot be appraised.]
[ Item cannot be stored in System Inventory.]
[Warning: Item appears to be draining System resources. Please discard.]
The Shard sat comfortably in his coat pocket.
He climbed back out of the tunnel, replaced the flagstone, and walked to the chapel's
side door.
He paused. Looked back at the altar. At the cheap iron idol, the melted candle stubs, the whole small sincere effort of people trying to reach something bigger than themselves.
He'd been the thing people like that were reaching toward, once.
A long time ago.
He pushed the door open and stepped back into the cold morning.
* * *
He felt the drain start at noon.
He was at the village market moving through it slowly, mapping faces, noting who
was who against the character profiles he'd memorized from the novel when the
System pinged without warning:
[DRAIN ECHO — ACTIVE]
[Nearby soul: PLAYER 「 Torren Vask 」 Level 14 Fighter]
[Passive absorption: 0.3% of target's accumulated EXP]
[Transfer complete. Source: UNREGISTERED]
Varek slowed his pace.
He looked across the market to the source — a broad-shouldered man in leather armor,
maybe twenty-five, moving through the stalls with the lazy confidence of someone who'd
leveled enough to stop worrying about anything this village could throw at him.
A Player.
The kind who logged in on weekends for the combat, stayed for the economy.
The man suddenly stopped. Frowned. Opened his own System interface.
Varek could see the faint flicker of it across his eyes and stared at something in it with visible confusion.
He'd felt it. A tiny drop. Barely anything. The kind of thing you'd normally blame on lag.
He looked around the market, suspicious, and his gaze passed directly over Varek
without stopping.
A Classless Level 1 child. Not worth a second look.
Varek turned away and kept walking.
So. The Drain Echo had activated on its own. He hadn't called it, hadn't even known it
would manifest in this body this quickly.
But there it was. Passive. Invisible. Pulling
fractions of experience from anyone nearby with a meaningful level gap, funneling it
into whatever the System was calling his unregistered void inventory.
It wouldn't make him level quickly. The amounts were too small for that.
But it would never stop. And it left no trace. And it worked on every person within a
twenty-meter radius simultaneously.
Varek thought about that for a moment.
Then he thought about what happened when you put someone like him in a city of ten
thousand players and let that run for six months.
He allowed himself a very small, very private smile.
Then he put it away and went to find somewhere to eat.
Doan Solace arrived in two days and nineteen hours.
There was still a great deal to do.