There was no step.No door.No falling.Only absence.
Kiro passed through the gate—and everything ceased.
No breath.No sound.No self.
For a moment, he didn't exist.
Then—
—he opened his eyes.
He stood in a valley of bloodless sky.No stars. No sun. Only soft gray light spilling from a horizon that curved upward.
The world was wrong.
Floating islands of bone drifted overhead like forgotten thoughts. Rivers of solid mist ran through fractured terrain. And high above, suspended like a crown of ruin, hovered a war—frozen mid-collapse. Machines broken in the air. God-corpses impaled on divine spires. A battle that had never ended.
[First Dream of Kuni – Entry Confirmed][Core Recognition Initiated: Fragmented Divinity Detected][You are now inside a Memory Loop – Layer One]
Kiro took a step.
And the ground pulsed beneath his feet—soft, like flesh. A sound echoed through the valley, low and distant:
A drumbeat.
No—not drums.
A heartbeat.
He was walking through the ribcage of a god.
The thought came unbidden. Instinctual. As if his body remembered this place, even if his mind recoiled.
A whisper followed it:
[He bled so that no one else would.]
Kiro looked up.
In the distance, atop a hill of molten stone, stood a figure.
Not large. Not monstrous.
A man.
Barefoot. Red threads pouring from his arms like veins torn free. His face obscured by a mask of bone.
He was kneeling.
Hands plunged into the earth.
Kiro stepped toward him—but the world shifted.
Suddenly, he was back.
On his knees.
In a crater.
His hands buried in ash.
Someone was screaming.
His voice.
"Why did you make me remember this?"
But no one answered.
The sky broke again—showing a different moment. A child, blood-soaked, standing before a burning temple. A hand reaching down. A knife. A choice.
[You are witnessing ancestral residue. This memory belongs to the Blood God.]
[Caution: Identity Layer Breach Imminent.]
Kiro fell backward, heart hammering.
This wasn't just memory.
It was infection.
"Get me out—" he growled.
But the System was silent.
No interface.
No numbers.
Just silence... and the second figure now rising beside the first.
This one had no face.
Only a voice:
"You cannot leave.""Not until you know what he was."
Kiro gritted his teeth.
"And what was he?"
The faceless figure tilted its head.
"A god who chose to die with mortals... and in doing so, shattered the gates that held the true war back."
Behind it, the floating battlefield above the sky cracked.
And a single eye opened in the storm.
Watching.
Waiting.
The Void.