Chương 2: Chapter 1: Welcome Back, Old Bastard

Immortal Thunderlight Book One: No Sky Above ARC 1: RISE OR ROT Year 350 A. A. Crimeria — the last bastion of humanity. The first alarm Crimeria ever feared began with a dead man's heartbeat. It did not ring across the city at first. It started quietly: a forgotten system waking beneath thirteen floors of concrete, a sealed level breathing again, and a corpse refusing to stay classified. Above it all, Crimeria kept pretending to live. No one remembered what the sun looked like anymore.

Some said it had been a golden sphere hanging in an endless blue sky; others claimed it burned so brightly that looking at it would blind you, and children heard both versions beside older myths of grass growing without lamps and rain falling from somewhere called above. But Crimeria had no above, only layers of concrete, steel, and artificial light.

Millions of fluorescent lamps hung beneath rusted metal domes like sickly stars, while black cables crossed between them in vast webs and hummed with the fatigue of an old machine that had forgotten how to stop. The city never slept. Neither did its people. Pale workers poured out of Platform 47 after the evening train arrived, their faces washed in yellow light and their shoulders bent by years of low ceilings as they moved through cracked passages like ghosts reporting for another shift in hell.

The air smelled of recycled oxygen, hot metal, old sweat, and the bitter dust that cheap filters never fully caught. Flux dust. Most workers did not know its full scientific name. Prime Flux was something doctors and engineers wrote on warning labels before sending someone else to clean up the leak, while people down here called it bad air, lung glitter, or another reason not to breathe too deeply near broken vents. No one looked up. There was nothing worth seeing.

In a narrow alley between two rusted worker blocks, where the platform light failed to reach, an old man stood before a cracked wall and smoked as though the habit kept him alive out of spite. His name was John R. Most records said he was dead. Most records were optimistic. He was thin, hunched, and wrapped in a stained white coat that had survived too many laboratories, fires, and possible crime.

Half his body was still human, though even that half appeared to resent the arrangement, while the rest was machinery hidden beneath old fabric—joints, nerves, organs, and a cybernetic eye glowing faint blue behind rusted glasses. A cracked control panel rested in his hand. Its screen blinked red. [ACTIVATION CODE REQUIRED: TOP SECRET LEVEL / LEVEL Z] [IDENTITY VERIFICATION: JOHN R. / ZETA RESEARCH CENTER — REJECTED] John stared at the message and sighed through his cigarette.

"Yeah. Same as always." The rejection did not surprise him. The system had denied his credentials for decades. Officially, John R. had lost access after the Floor Thirteen Disaster. Officially, the Silent Sanctuary no longer existed. Officially, entering Crimeria's deepest level carried a sentence of immediate termination. Officially, a lot of people were idiots.

John reached behind his neck, pulled a thin cable from beneath his collar, and plugged the neural jack into the panel after it came free with a wet mechanical click. His cybernetic eye flared as lines of code crawled across the pupil. The security system resisted for four seconds, then remembered who had built it. The screen flickered from red to black, then green.

[EXCEPTIONAL AUTHENTICATION CODE / PRIORITY LEGACY / APPROVED] [UNLOCKING SHORTCUT TO LEVEL 13 — THE SILENT SANCTUARY] [WARNING: THIS AREA IS QUARANTINED] [WARNING: PRIME FLUX CONTAMINATION DETECTED] [WARNING: AMBIENT FLUX DENSITY — UNSTABLE] [WARNING: ENTRY IS FORBIDDEN] [WARNING: ALL UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL WILL BE TERMINATED] John smiled thinly.

"Good thing I'm authorized by people too dead to argue." Something clicked deep inside the wall. Another lock followed, then ten more. The concrete trembled. Dust spilled from old seams as a vertical crack opened with the sound of stone teeth grinding together. A hidden door appeared, revealing a passage that descended into complete darkness. Cold air rolled out. It carried rust, mold, old blood, ionized metal, and something organic that had no business remaining organic after so many years.

Beneath it lingered another scent, sharp, mineral, almost sweet. Old Flux residue. John unplugged the cable. Before entering, he reached inside his coat and touched two objects: a transparent violet crystal, warm as a heartbeat, and an old photograph sealed in yellowed plastic. He pulled out the photograph, and two figures looked back from a world that no longer existed.

One was a teenage boy with metal-rimmed glasses, standing too stiffly as he tried to look worthy of the older, bearded, broad-shouldered man beside him, whose eyes were sharp enough to make the cheap camera seem afraid of recording them even as one hand rested gently on the boy's shoulder. Master and student. Three hundred years ago, John had been the boy, and that hand had felt like protection. Now the man in the photograph had been dead longer than most civilizations survived.

John watched him until the cigarette burned down to its filter.

"You told me not to give up," he muttered.

"You really should've been more specific." He dropped the cigarette, crushed it beneath his boot, and lit another. Then he stepped through the hidden door. Behind him, Crimeria finally noticed. Red alerts flashed across command centers buried throughout the upper floors.

[UNUSUAL MOVEMENT DETECTED ON FLOOR 13] [EMERGENCY LEVEL S] [SEALING SYSTEM BREACHED] [PRIME FLUX QUARANTINE LINE DISTURBED] [ACTIVATE RAPID RESPONSE FORCE] [CALL IN ZETA SPECIAL TASK FORCE] By then, John had vanished into the dark, toward the floor erased from maps, the grave he had spent three centuries refusing to close, and the dead man waiting below. Level 13. The Silent Sanctuary. The deepest floor of Crimeria.

The city denied it, feared it, and buried it beneath enough concrete to make forgetting look like policy. Once, it had been humanity's final laboratory, where the best scientists, engineers, mages, and Awakened minds gathered to solve the problems that killed the surface world: Corruption, mutation, death, and humanity's slow extinction.

Prime Flux had been part of every equation: too much broke flesh, too little made miracles die, the wrong exposure awakened monsters, and the right control could power cities, heal wounds, bend matter, or turn ordinary humans into weapons. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. The Silent Sanctuary had tried to understand the difference. Then something happened. Official history called it the Floor Thirteen Disaster. The old survivors called it a betrayal.

John called it a mistake he had been too much of a coward to die inside. The shortcut tunnel narrowed until his shoulders nearly touched the walls, growing colder with every step while his breath fogged before him and rotted cables sagged from the ceiling, some still leaking faint purple arcs into the dark.

They were not ordinary electrical faults: old Flux conduits lined the ceiling like opened veins, and although their radiation had weakened after decades of quarantine, it had never vanished from the metal, mold, water stains, or dust. Prime Flux was like guilt that way. Given enough time, it settled into everything. Mold covered the walls. So did writing. The words had not been printed or carved. They had been written in dried black blood. THE GOD IS DEAD. AND WILL RETURN TO INCINERATE HUMANITY. John stopped.

His cybernetic eye clicked as it scanned the letters. More messages waited ahead. WE AWAIT THE AWAKENING. DEATH IS NOT THE END. HE WILL RISE. HE WILL JUDGE. HE WILL CLEANSE. John exhaled smoke through his nose.

"Heretics." The word was dry, but his fingers tightened around the panel. Cultists had been a problem even before the Sanctuary fell, when desperate minds began treating science like prayer, Prime Flux like divine breath, and resurrection theory like prophecy; after Floor Thirteen was sealed, those rumors hardened into faith. A dead god beneath Crimeria. A sleeping weapon. A savior waiting in the dark. John hated them, mostly because they were almost right.

"They worship the disaster," he muttered as he continued forward.

"Never the work. Never the cost. Always the damn miracle." A reinforced steel door blocked the end of the tunnel. Its warning symbols had faded almost beyond recognition. John connected himself to the lock again. This one resisted longer. The door remembered him too. It simply hated him more. After twenty-three seconds of silent warfare, the locks disengaged with a series of heavy clunks. Cold white light spilled through the opening. John stepped inside and forgot to breathe.

A three-meter capsule stood at the center of the circular laboratory, built from a grotesque union of machinery and flesh: metal plates covered parts of it, while other sections looked grown rather than assembled, with pale tissue stretched over bone-like supports and threaded by tubes of blue, green, and amber fluid. Violet conduits ran beneath the floor into the capsule's base, carrying condensed Prime Flux through filters old enough for a museum and illegal enough to become holy relics in the wrong hands.

Black ritual circles surrounded the machine, drawn in old blood. Science had built the capsule. Prime Flux had powered it. Magic had made it unforgivable. Inside floated a corpse. Long hair drifted around the dead man's head like a dark halo, framing a gray, burned body whose skin had been charred in patterns that looked as though lightning had crawled through him from the inside out. His chest was hollow.

A brutal cavity gaped where his heart should have been—the wound that killed him, and the wound John saw whenever he closed his eyes. Yet the body had not decayed. No rot, no collapse, no mercy. It looked less dead than waiting. John approached the control panel beside the capsule. His hand trembled, and he had to force it still.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

"I kept you waiting." The corpse did not answer. Of course it didn't. John hated that part most. He connected the cable from his neck to the console, and the old system awakened. ████████████████████████ │ OBSERVER-IX SYSTEM │ │ LEVEL Z EXISTENCE LOCKED │ │ STATUS: DEATH — SEALED │ │ SOUL STABILITY: 3% │ │ BODY DECAY: 0% │ │ BLACK MAGIC LINKAGE: STABLE │ │ PRIME FLUX CONTAINMENT: DEGRADED │ │ BIO-SPIRITUAL SEALING ARRAY: STABLE │ │ RESURRECTION FAILURES: 247 │ ████████████████████████ UNLOCK RESURRECTION PROTOCOL?

[Y/N] John stared at the prompt. Two hundred and forty-seven failures. Two hundred and forty-seven attempts to recreate the impossible. Some had screamed. Some had melted. Some had lived for seconds before begging to die. One had smiled with the wrong mouth. None had been him. John's hand moved to the violet crystal inside his coat.

Prime Flux could awaken talent, mutate flesh, carry memory residue through blood, bone, and battlefield ash, power reactors, distort weather, and turn a dead city into a nest of gods and monsters. But it could not, by itself, give a soul permission to come home. That was what the rest of the ritual was for. That was what three hundred years of sin had purchased. This time was different. He had the final piece, and if God existed, John intended to cheat him personally. He pressed Y. The laboratory shook.

Machinery dormant for decades roared to life as lights flashed, pumps screamed, and the fluid inside the capsule darkened from pale blue to violet, then to a deep red that glowed as though blood had learned to burn. John drew out the crystal. It floated above his palm, transparent violet, warm, and pulsing beneath microscopic engravings that shifted whenever he looked too closely. Almost alive. Almost hungry. The nearest monitor flickered.

[PRIME FLUX RESPONSE: INCOMPATIBLE] [VIOLET CORE SIGNATURE: UNCLASSIFIED] [STANDARD AWAKENED ENERGY MODEL: FAILED] [WARNING: UNKNOWN VITALITY FIELD DETECTED] John ignored the warnings. He had written half of them and knew exactly how frightened the system was supposed to sound when something impossible entered the room. He began speaking in a language humanity had no right to remember. The words scraped his throat raw.

"O God of life and death…" The ritual circle answered with purple light.

"From the endless realm of eternity…" The capsule trembled.

"A small flame in the void…" The corpse's fingers twitched.

"Reborn from the ashes…" John's voice cracked.

"Return what was lost. Restore what was broken. Awaken from the sleep of death." The crystal lifted from his hand and drifted toward the capsule. It passed through the glass without breaking it, then settled into the hollow cavity in the corpse's chest. Perfectly, as though it had always belonged there. For one second, nothing happened. Then the dead man began to heal. Burned flesh knitted closed. Gray muscle rebuilt itself beneath pale skin.

Violet threads spread from the crystal, branching through ribs and nerves like veins made of lightning. The Prime Flux conduits surged in response, then stuttered. For one heartbeat, the entire system seemed confused. The old energy running through the machine had encountered something older, sharper, and unwilling to be named. John gripped the console.

"Come on…" The corpse's face changed. Wrinkles vanished. Skin tightened. The gaunt features of an old warrior softened and rebuilt themselves into the face of a man in his early twenties. Young. Almost beautiful. Terrifyingly still. John's eyes widened.

"That's… not supposed to happen." He had expected preservation, perhaps partial restoration, enough neural continuity to stabilize an identity. He had not expected youth, perfection, or the dead to look more alive than memory. Joy broke through his face. Then the corpse kept changing. The hair did not return to black. It turned platinum white. The skin did not regain warmth; it remained corpse-pale. Fingernails darkened into sharp black points while thin veins spread from the crystal like cracks in ice.

John's joy died. Zombie conversion, not complete, not yet, but enough.

"No," he whispered as warnings filled the system. [NECROTIC AWAKENING DETECTED] [SOUL STABILITY FLUCTUATING] [HUNGER RESPONSE FORMING] [SUBJECT IDENTITY: UNSTABLE] [PRIME FLUX CHANNELS: REJECTED] [UNKNOWN VIOLET FIELD: OVERRIDING BIOLOGICAL DECAY] John moved. His fingers flew across the console as he increased containment flow, flooded the capsule with anti-necrotic agents, reinforced the ritual linkage, and redirected power through every channel that had not already burned out.

"Don't you dare." The corpse convulsed, and John slammed one hand against the console.

"Three hundred years," he snarled.

"Three hundred years, you old bastard. Two hundred and forty-seven failures. I did not crawl through history just to watch you wake up stupid." The crystal flared. The body arched inside the capsule.

"Wake up." A crack split the glass. John's voice rose.

"Wake up." The floor trembled harder.

"WAKE UP!" Light exploded from the capsule. Violet lightning struck metal, glass, bone, blood, and wire while the ritual circle spun until its symbols blurred into a ring of purple fire and old Flux conduits burst beneath the floor in showers of sparks. Whatever was waking inside the capsule was no longer feeding from the system. It was forcing the system to kneel. For one impossible moment, John believed he had done it. Then Crimeria's security network joined the screaming.

[WARNING: SUBJECT Z-69 HAS DETECTED LIFE SIGNS] [WARNING: ACTIVATE FULL LOCKDOWN ON FLOOR 13] [WARNING: DEADZONE MODE ENGAGED] [WARNING: PRIME FLUX QUARANTINE FAILURE] [DEPLOYING COUNTERMEASURES] John ignored every alert. He stared only at the capsule, at the face of the man he had buried in his nightmares, and at the master he had spent three centuries trying to drag back from death.

"Open your eyes," he whispered. The laboratory door exploded inward. Twelve soldiers in powered armor poured through the smoke. Rifles rose, and targeting lasers painted John's chest, skull, and remaining organic parts in red.

"Unauthorized intruder identified," the team leader said through his helmet speaker.

"Step away from the capsule. Hands where we can see them." John turned slowly and raised both hands.

"You got me. Congratulations. Very dramatic entrance."

"Identify yourself." John looked offended.

"That hurts."

"Identify yourself!"

"Dr. John R." The soldiers hesitated for half a heartbeat. John saw it. Good. Somewhere in their files, someone had preserved enough history to be afraid. The leader spoke into his comm.

"Command, this is ZETA-01. Intruder claims identity John R. He is alone. No visible weapons. Resurrection chamber active. Prime Flux containment unstable. Awaiting orders." John smiled faintly.

"You boys may want to hurry." Several rifles shifted toward him. The team leader stepped forward.

"What did you do?" John looked past him toward the cracking capsule.

"I kept a promise." Then they heard it: a heartbeat, neither soft nor human. A violent pulse slammed through the chamber, shaking the targeting lasers while fluid boiled inside the capsule, the young man's spine arched at an impossible angle, and black nails scraped down the inner glass. One soldier whispered,"What the hell…" The corpse opened his eyes, emerald green, without pupils or human recognition. Only hunger burned behind lightning. The capsule shattered.

A scream tore through the chamber, not pain or fear, but birth. Z-69 ripped free from glass and metal in a storm of violet electricity as nutrient fluid burst outward, hissed against the ritual circle, and carried lightning from his naked, corpse-pale body toward every conductive surface in the room. Every Prime Flux sensor died at once. Not overloaded. Silenced. Z-69 fell to one knee and inhaled. Every soldier froze. John did too, because the breath was wrong. It was not a man learning to breathe.

It was a predator smelling meat. Z-69 raised his head. His gaze passed over the soldiers, their weapons, their armor, and the fear beneath it. Then he looked at John. For the briefest instant, something flickered inside those green eyes: recognition, a ghost of old memory, a master looking at his student. Then hunger drowned it. The violet crystal pulsed once, and the lights dimmed. ZETA-01 opened fire. John watched the first bullets strike Z-69's skin.

He watched the wounds close before blood could fall and lightning gather around the resurrected monster's shoulders like a storm choosing where to strike. Despite the gunfire, alarms, corpse fluid, blood magic, dead sensors, and the very real chance that he had just doomed what remained of humanity, John smiled. His voice trembled with relief, terror, and awe.

"You old bastard…" Z-69's jaw opened too wide. Far too wide. John's smile cracked.

"…welcome back." The first soldier screamed. It did not last long.