His mind was still muddled, memories of his old life fading in and out like a signal that couldn't hold. And yet, underneath the fear, there was something else, a strange, unplaceable familiarity with this broken world, as if he'd walked it before in some other life he couldn't quite reach. He pushed the thought aside. Fractured memories. Nothing more.
Outside, darkness stirred.
Groans echoed somewhere beyond the walls. Whispers slithered in through the broken windows, too soft to belong to any language. Something with too many legs scuttled over shattered glass, unseen. A shrill cry cut through the night like a rusted blade dragged across stone.
Grey's hands shook. He let them.
Panic was a luxury he couldn't afford, but his body could still tremble while his mind stayed clear. His leg was shattered, his skin torn, his muscles one bad move from giving out entirely. If he couldn't move by dawn, dawn wouldn't matter.
He uncorked a battered water bottle and drank, the liquid tasting faintly of rust, and let it ease the dryness clawing at his throat. Then he straightened his leg.
Pain exploded up through his hip. He bit down on his lip hard enough to taste blood and forced the bone back into place, inch by inch, the seconds stretching into something closer to hours.
When it was done, he wrapped a filthy strip of cloth around the break, his shirt soaked through with sweat, his skin gone pale as moonlit snow.
He was alive. That would have to be enough for tonight.
"…Now I can look at this crystal properly," he murmured.
He lifted the purple stone. Even in the dark, it caught what little light there was, glowing faintly against his palm. When he pressed it to his chest, warmth spread outward. It soft, ancient and undeniable. The pounding in his skull eased. The ache in his leg dulled. Somewhere beneath his skin, his wounds began, slowly, to knit themselves shut.
It was agonizing in a different way than the leg had been, a long, crawling kind of pain instead of a sharp one. But by the time it finished, most of his smaller injuries were gone. Only the worst of them remained.
Exhaustion took him before he could think about what any of it meant. Outside, things prowled the dark. But Grey slept anyway.
---
He woke with a sharp inhale, half-expecting his old room, his old ceiling, his old life. Dust and rust and dried blood grounded him instead. The crystal pulsed faintly somewhere inside his chest, a slow, steady rhythm, like something had decided to stay.
"So this is real," he said.
He went through what little the previous Grey had left behind... a jade slip, a handful of trinkets, food long past saving. The jade slip held his attention. The symbols carved into its surface were alien at first glance, but the longer he looked, the more they folded and reshaped themselves into words.
*Sky Mist Cultivation Art.*
A method for guiding Qi, meant to speed up cultivation even short of its full potential. Nothing extraordinary. But it was a foothold, and right now a foothold was worth more than anything extraordinary could be.
For the first time since waking in this world, something in Grey's expression eased.
He had survived. And with a crystal humming in his chest and an art he could actually read, he had more than that now, he had a chance.
---
On the second day, Grey turned his attention to cultivation properly.
In this world, only cultivators survived — that much was clear even from his patchwork memory. Since the hand had descended, nearly every intelligent life on the continent had turned to the art in one form or another, and cultivation itself had twisted along with everything else it touched.
He read through the jade slip again. He'd already reached the Second Level of the Sky Mist Art once, though he had no memory of doing it — but the more he read, the more fragments surfaced, like sediment stirred up from the bottom of a lake.
"Not that difficult, in theory," he murmured. "Controlling the breath is the foundation. This art wants mist to move fastest, but there's no safe mist here. Normal cultivation, then."
He crossed his legs, closed his eyes, and reached for the spirit energy threading through the air. It came to him easily enough; his body remembered even where his mind didn't. He fell into the rhythm of steady breathe in, hold, release, and let the energy gather and pull toward him, absorbed one careful thread at a time.
He didn't let his thoughts wander. Four hours passed without him noticing.
By the time he opened his eyes again, the sun should have been high overhead. In the Corroded Zone, it made no difference. Thick red clouds swallowed the light before it ever reached the ground, and the world stayed the same dim gray it always did.
A faint depth lingered in his eyes as the meditative state faded, and a thin wisp of white mist slipped from his lips as he exhaled. He glanced around. Everything was still where it should be.
He let out a slow breath of relief.
"I can feel it," he said quietly. "Not much. But it's there."
There had been something else in the air too, while he cultivated, not quite energy, closer to substance, something with a weight spirit energy didn't have. The jade slip had warned him about it: a corrosive presence that clung to the world since the hand's descent, impossible to avoid drawing in alongside spirit energy no matter how careful he was.
"So that's the price," Grey murmured. His gaze stayed steady, but something wary had crept into the gray of his eyes. "A little more understanding of this world for a little more of that inside me. Fair enough for now."
He was close to the Third Level. He could feel it, the same way he could feel a storm building before the first drop fell.
Then the pain hit. It was sharp, sudden, at his wrist.
He looked down. A small black spot had formed on his skin, hissing faintly, the sound of flesh dissolving in slow motion under something that didn't belong there.
Grey watched it without flinching. He'd known this was coming because the jade slip had been clear enough. A decay point, born from the corrosive substance he'd just pulled into himself along with the spirit energy. Left unchecked, it would end one of two ways: his body twisting into something no longer human, or rotting apart from the inside out.
Neither option left much room for a second chance.