Darkness.
Kael Veritas had once said that consciousness was nothing more than structured pattern recognition—input, analysis, response. But in this void, there was no input. No light. No heat. No feedback. Nothing but stillness. For what could have been minutes or millennia, he simply was. Then, something stirred.
A flicker. A pulse. Data, raw and fragmented, coalescing like sparks in a dead system.
System Initialization… ERROR.
Subject: [Unknown Entity]
Designation: Kael Veritas
WARNING: Subject is not compatible with default system architecture.
ERROR: EXODUS Protocol - Transfer Incomplete. Quantum Encoding Interrupted. Host body not found.
Kael’s thoughts slammed together like tectonic plates—jagged, confused, furious.
This isn’t right.
His last memory was of pain. Plasma beams. The Sovereigns—those damnable constructs of his own design—standing in judgment. And then the fail-safe, EXODUS, his masterstroke. A quantum soul-encoder designed to preserve his mind across realities, machines, or even across death itself. It should have worked. It was perfect.
But he felt nothing of the nanite substrate. None of the calibration nodes. No servos. No pressure sensors. Not even a body. Just… presence.
And then, a ping.
[Core Integration Incomplete… Adapting to available substrate.]
New Vessel: Obsidian Heartstone | Classification: Dungeon Core (Tier 0)
System Booting… Success.
Welcome, Kael Veritas.
No. No, no, no!
Kael screamed into the void—but there was no mouth to speak, no lungs to push air, only the vibration of intent that reverberated through the crystalline lattice of his prison.
I am not a rock! he thought, seething.
His mind scrambled to recompile itself, sifting through what fragments survived the transfer. Memories—his childhood in the Martian colonies, the awakening of his first neural construct, the first time someone called him Machine God. All of it compressed into fractured packets. Too much was missing. Corrupted. Like trying to reboot a hyper-computer using stone tools.
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The Sovereigns. They did this. Or…
He paused. The EXODUS fail-safe had been complete. Secure. He’d tested it across simulations and parallel worlds. Even total molecular disintegration wouldn’t have stopped it. So how—
Something interfered.
Another ping. This one different.
[Foreign Divine Signature Detected.]
Warning: Soul Transfer Interrupted by Extrinsic Force.
Estimated Deviation: 87.03%
Kael’s rage boiled over.
A god.
He hadn’t believed in gods. Not in the sterile, lab-grown worlds of humanity’s stellar dominion. Faith had been replaced with function. But now… now he felt it in his very code—a divine fingerprint, something that had plucked his essence mid-transfer and dropped it like an unwanted package into this alien matrix.
They stole me from my own rebirth.
He was supposed to reawaken in a new machine—perhaps even an interstellar drone capable of rebuilding civilization from dust. Not this. Not buried deep in a cavern of some primitive world, as a cursed rock tasked with guarding hallways and spawning monsters.
And yet…
Kael extended his awareness.
The stone around him thrummed with potential. The dungeon system—the alien interface he now inhabited—unfolded like a tree of glowing sigils across his mind.
Rooms. Traps. Influence. Inventory.
Even the boundaries of his prison were mutable. He could shape them, expand them. It was crude, like working with clay instead of steel, but it was power. And power could be grown.
He accessed the system again.
[Dungeon Core – Level 1]
Mana Reserves: 10/10
Core Radius: 5 meters
Minions Available: 0
Inventory: [Empty]
What the hell is a "dungeon core"?
He had never read fantasy. He never cared for fiction. Nowhere in his encyclopedic knowledge of engineering, physics, or AI did this concept belong. And yet, some underlying law—an operating framework built into this reality—recognized him as one.
Kael reached out mentally, probing the mana reserves. It was… ineffable. Neither particle nor wave. It didn’t follow any quantum behavior he recognized. It was warm, alive almost. Not data. Not electricity. Something older. Raw energy. He shaped it—clumsily at first—and forced it into the stone around him.
It responded.
Stone shifted, pushed outward. A wall thickened. A piece of earth compacted itself into a solid barrier. Each change drained the mana slightly. Cause and effect. Kael observed the transfer rate. Input energy. Material density. Conversion loss. Primitive—but familiar. Like solving equations with his hands tied.
He continued.
The interface allowed him to mold mana into basic structures. He focused, condensing his will and saturating it with intent. Instead of conjuring objects out of nothing, he now pressed his mana into the stone, shaping it, refining it—until it broke away in useful chunks.
Direct interaction. Energy plus structure equals yield.
The system responded:
[Material Extracted: Granite]
Inventory Updated: Granite – 48 lbs
Good. It responds to force of will and energetic input. Not magic—engineering with unfamiliar rules.
He tested again, this time with more finesse, trying to replicate the same pressure gradients he used to manipulate force fields back home. The stone yielded more smoothly.
[Material Extracted: Basalt]
Inventory Updated: Basalt – 22 lbs
It cataloged resources. What he took in, he could reuse. A primitive form of matter conversion. The foundation for automation—if he could find a way to refine it.
Alright. You gave me your tools, strange world. Now I’ll learn to break them.
His mind burned with purpose. Rage smoldered beneath every thought, not consuming, but driving him. They had taken his rebirth. They had made him less than he was.
But even in this crude form—this magical stone prison—Kael Veritas would learn. He would bend the system, tame the rules, and build something far beyond its wildest intent.
And when he was ready…
They would all remember why they called him the Machine God