Zaric woke to the wrong ceiling.
For a moment, none of it made sense.
His brain reached for things that weren't there: the distant rush of traffic, a neighbor's TV through thin walls, the quiet hum of an old fridge. Instead, the air was thick with the smell of packed earth, ash, and dried herbs.
He blinked up at a sagging patchwork of reeds and cloth, mud pressed thick between rough-hewn beams. A narrow blade of morning light slipped through a tear and drew a pale line down the opposite wall. Dust motes drifted lazily through it like slow-falling snow.
Right.
Not a cramped apartment after a night shift. Not Earth.
A hut at the edge of a mine village in a world with beast riders and a black core radiating light now lodged in his chest.
Memory rushed back in layers: the tunnel collapse, the dulled glowing core, the grave of a boy with his name, Lyra's arms around him, their mother lying motionless behind a curtain of cloth.
His chest didn't hurt like it had yesterday. The bone-deep exhaustion was still there, but it had receded, like the tide dragging itself an inch away from shore. His lungs drew air without scraping. His limbs felt thin, but not hollow.
"Still here," he muttered.
A soft sound drew his attention. On the floor near the curtain to the back corner of the hut, Lyra was curled beneath a thin blanket, cheek pillowed on her arm. Her hair, the color of wet clay, had come loose from its tie, spilling over her shoulder. In the dim light she looked younger, almost like a kid who'd fallen asleep where she'd been sitting instead of the person watching over someone.
Behind the curtain, he could hear their mother's breathing: shallow, but steady. That fragile thread that refused to snap.
The sound anchored him more than anything else.
This is real, he thought. I really dug myself out of a grave into another world.
He tried to push himself upright. His limbs complained, but they held. Yesterday's bone-deep exhaustion had shrunk from "about to die again" to "every muscle hates you." Progress.
His shift against the bedding was enough to make Lyra stir. Her fingers tightened on the blanket; her eyes blinked open, unfocused for a heartbeat before they found him.
"Zac?" she whispered.
He tried for a reassuring smile. "Morning."
She pushed herself upright, stifling a yawn with the back of her hand. As she sat up, the blanket slipped from one shoulder, showing the thin line of her collarbone, the faint shadows under her eyes.
"How do you feel?" she asked. No teasing, no bravado. Just concern.
"Better," he said honestly. "Still tired, but I don't think the room is going to fall on me if I stand up."
Some of the tightness in her face eased. She let out a breath he hadn't realized she'd been holding.
"That's good," she said. "I was worried you wouldn't wake as easily today."
She rose and moved to the stove, checking the coals with practiced hands.
"You didn't have to sleep on the floor," he said.
"You needed the bed more." She shrugged without turning. "And besides, I've slept on worse. Remember when we took that job hauling ore overnight and I fell asleep on the cart?"
He opened his mouth to say no—then hesitated.
For a second, a fuzzy image surfaced that wasn't his: a girl younger than Lyra was now, feet dangling off a rattling cart, chin on her knees; a smaller boy nodding off beside her, his head bouncing every time the wheel hit a stone. The picture slipped away like a dream he'd forgotten before he was fully awake.
Zac's memories, he realized. They're still in here. Just… muddled.
Things like Cores, Veins, Radiance had all been words thrown at him last night. Now, when he nudged those words in his mind, they pulled up impressions—half explanations, overheard gossip, the way kids talk about things they don't really understand but hear adults complain about.
Enough to recognize terms. Not enough to know the system.
"You should rest more," he said. "You barely slept."
Lyra shook her head, reaching for the small sack of grain in the corner. It slumped in her grip, almost empty. "Can't," she said. "They'll be counting heads at the mine by now. If I'm not there, they'll give my spot to someone else."
She opened the sack and let a measured trickle of grain fall into the pot. The sound was thin, like distant rain.
"You could tell them—" Zaric began.
"That my brother came home and I stayed to watch him breathe?" She gave a faint, rueful huff. "They'd say I'm lucky you can breathe at all and ask if your hands still work. The work won't wait for us, Zac. It never does."
He knew that tone. He'd heard it in break rooms and locker halls, different words wrapped around the same truth.
He sat up fully, feet touching the packed earth floor. "Let me come with you," he said quietly. "If they expect two of us to work, then—"
She turned, setting the pot onto the stove ring, and the look she gave him was gentle but firm.
"You couldn't stand up by yourself yesterday," she said. "If you push it and fall in the tunnels, I'll have to carry you out again. I don't have the strength for that today."
He opened his mouth to argue, then caught himself. She was right; his legs felt better, but even sitting up had left his head light.
Lyra seemed to read the conflict in his face. Her features softened.
She turned back to the pot. "Once we get a beast core, we can try to awaken yours," she said, more to the steam than to him. "Then you can work for real. Even at iron rank, the foreman pays more for anyone with lit veins."
Zaric's fingers hovered over the black core in his chest.
As far as she knew, his core was still dormant—like every other poor kid whose family couldn't afford a beast core or an awakened neighbor willing to risk pushing their own energy into a child.
No awakening. No ceremony. No glowing circle of elders chanting over a beast core like some VIP service.
And yet the thing in his chest pulsed, awake.
He wasn't ready to explain that. Not when he barely understood it himself.
Soon enough, the porridge began to steam. Lyra poured a thin portion into a chipped cup and brought it over with both hands, as if it might vanish if she wasn't careful.
"Careful," she murmured, setting it into his hands. "It's hot."
The smell was barely there, but his empty stomach clenched anyway. He sipped slowly instead of gulping it down, letting the faint warmth spread through his chest.
"What about you?" he asked.
"I'll eat with the others," she said. "Someone always leaves scraps."
He didn't believe that for a second. But he had spent enough time married to know the difference between an argument worth starting and one that would just bounce off a wall made of stubborn love.
"Lyra," he said instead.
She paused, halfway to the door.
"Thank you," he said quietly. "For… yesterday. For carrying me back. For… all of it."
For a moment her eyes glistened, but she blinked the shine away.
"Just get better," she said. "That'll be thanks enough."
She lifted the bar and eased the door open. Morning spilled across the floor in a pale wash, carrying with it the mixed scents of smoke, damp earth, and something frying in oil somewhere down the lane.
Lyra stepped out, pulling the door mostly closed behind her. Through the narrow gap she paused, looking back at him one last time.
"I'll be back before second bell," she said. "If you feel dizzy again, lie down. Don't… don't push yourself, all right?"
"I'll be careful," he said.
She nodded, then the gap shrank, leaving only a thin line of light along the jamb.
Zaric waited until her footsteps faded before setting the empty cup aside and shuffling to the door.
He nudged it open just enough to peer out.
The village—or whatever this place was called—stretched down the slope in a scatter of mud huts and crooked fences. Smoke rose in thin columns from a dozen patched roofs, smearing the sky. Beyond the last row of houses, bare fields gave way to the dark gash of the mine ridge.
People were already moving.
Men and women with sacks over their shoulders, children carrying baskets, older folk picking their way along with sticks. Their clothes were all some shade of worn brown or gray, patched and repatched until the original fabric was a rumor.
As he watched, something strange happened.
A man trudged past close enough that Zaric could see the sweat on his neck. For a moment, when the man stepped into a shaft of light, something under his skin seemed to glow—a faint, thread-thin line that ran from his chest up his neck toward his jaw, pulsing slow as a heartbeat.
Zaric blinked.
He rubbed at his eyes, then looked again.
Now that he was paying attention, he saw more of them. Faint lines of light beneath skin, tracing paths from chest to shoulders, down arms, into hands. Some were yellow, some had hints of red or blue. They pulsed softly, like coals breathing.
A word rose in his mind, half memory, half instinct.
Spirit veins.
He didn't remember anyone giving him a neat lecture about them, but he had the sense of boys in the village whispering about "lit veins" and "dormant veins," daring each other to show the faint lines when they finally woke. A boy's memory, not his.
A broad-shouldered man bent to lift a crate. As he strained, the faint yellow lines in his forearms brightened. He stamped his heel, and the packed earth at his feet darkened and firmed, like mud turning to stone. The crate slid more easily as he dragged it.
A woman smoothing a hut wall pressed her palm against a crack. The lines along her wrist flared, and the mud under her touch hardened, knitting together without fresh clay.
Awakened cores, Zaric thought. People who had… whatever this world called "magic," lit up and working.
He searched instinctively for Lyra.
He caught sight of her further down the path, basket slung over her back. Her blouse was patched at the elbows, her hair tied back, her stride quick but steady.
He looked for the faint glow he'd seen on the others.
There was none.
Her core was still dormant.
At fifteen, she should have ignited years ago—if there had been a beast core to use, or a kindly awakened willing to share Radiance and bear the risk. There hadn't been. So she carried her own weight and their mother's besides with nothing but muscle and stubbornness.
He let the door ease shut until the light narrowed to a thin line, then stepped back.
His fingers drifted back to his chest.
Whatever that black, gold-glowing thing was, it was doing something inside him. He'd felt it when he dug his way out of the grave—the way his arms refused to tire, the way the earth gave under his hands. It felt like the villagers' subtle tricks, just turned up and panicked.
Back in his old world, people joked online about status screens and systems like it was the most normal thing in the world to reincarnate with a menu.
Nothing wrong with trying, he thought, and immediately felt ridiculous.
He cleared his throat anyway.
"Status," he said.
Silence.
The hut stayed a hut.
"Open… system?" he tried. "Menu. Panel. Uh… character sheet?"
A tiny clump of dried mud fell from the roof and hit the floor with a sad little tap. That was the only response.
He pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Of course," he muttered. "I get the knockoff version."
He waited, half-expecting a glowing window to drop out of the air just to mock him.
Nothing.
"All right," he said, quieter now. "If shouting at the air doesn't work…"
He sat back down on the edge of the bed, closed his eyes, and focused on the core itself.
If there was any "system" here, it wasn't going to behave like the ones in those webnovels. No bright blue boxes. No dinging sound effects. It would be… older. Stranger. This was a world of veins and cores, not processors and LCDs.
Back on Earth, when the geology of a tunnel wall refused to make sense, he hadn't screamed at it. He'd mapped it. Drawn the strata, followed the fractures, until the pattern showed itself.
He did the mental equivalent now. He let his awareness sink toward that weight in his chest, feeling for the beat beneath his heartbeat.
The core throbbed once, then again, like a slow drum.
He concentrated on it—on the black roundness, on the golden light inside that wanted to leak out.
Do something, he thought at it. Anything.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the world tilted.
Not physically; his body stayed seated on the bed. But his mind lurched, like he'd stepped into a shaft he hadn't seen. A subtle tug pulled at his thoughts, drawing them inward, toward the core.
His breath caught. Panic flared for half a heartbeat, then simmered down as he realized he could still feel his body, the rough blanket beneath his fingers, the earthy smell of the hut. He just… also felt something else.
He let himself fall toward it.
Darkness swallowed his awareness—not the blind dark of a collapsed tunnel, but a soft, endless space.
In that blackness, a core floated: matte and shadow-deep, perfectly round, drinking in light. That was his core—black as burnt Iron, but thin lines of gold shimmered across its surface from within, crawling like molten metal in hidden cracks.
Around it, threads of light moved.
Thin, glowing veins looped and wove and braided in slow motion, forming spirals and bundles and nets around the core. Some curled close; some stretched outward and vanished into nothing.
He didn't know what he was looking at.
But his mind, built on years of reading rock layers and stress maps, offered guesses even without names.
These are… me, he thought. Or something inside me.
Another word surfaced from Zac's muddled memories: spirit veins. The pipes that carried "Radiance" through the body once your core woke.
He watched, mesmerized, as the little veins wound around each other, forming a pattern. It reminded him of woven cloth seen up close, or the way support beams intersected in a well-built shaft.
Or a Tapestry.
The word rose up from that same alien familiarity as before.
He didn't understand the pattern, but he could feel it.
Thicker bundles tugged at his sense of strength and weight, of how hard he could hit or lift. Finer meshes hinted at control, at delicate movement. Deep, slow arcs made some wordless part of him think of awareness, perception, insight.
It was like standing in front of a chalkboard covered in equations written in a language he didn't know, but somehow getting a sense of which ones were about weight, which about speed, which about pressure.
One section of the weave pulsed faintly brighter than the rest.
His attention was drawn to it without his consent—a cluster of veins just above the core, forming a compact knot of organized complexity. It wasn't ugly or twisted, It was tight, deliberate, humming with intent.
As he focused on it, something stirred.
A faint pressure bloomed in his forehead, like the feeling of squinting at fine print for too long. The pattern he was staring at answered his attention with its own, as if it had been waiting to be noticed.
A word that wasn't quite a word surfaced in his mind, carrying shape and purpose: Seismic… something.
The pressure behind his eyes clicked, like a joint sliding into place.
Suddenly, he wasn't just seeing the tapestry. He was reading it.
His awareness sharpened. The surrounding chaos of threads began to sort itself, as if someone had pulled on the loose ends.
Old habits caught fire.
Back in the mine, when faced with a messy wall of fractures and mixed strata, he'd mentally redraw it: lines, angles, layers, load paths. Now he did the same here, grabbing hold of the tangled impression and willing it to straighten, to diagram itself.
The threads responded.
They grouped and aligned, folding in around that active pattern. Columns formed where there had been swirls. Meshes settled into neat grids. The whole tapestry rotated and compressed, packing itself into a more organized shape.
At last, the weave folded in on itself, compressing into a floating slab of woven light. Symbols rippled across its surface, not letters or numbers exactly, but arrangements of meaning.
His mind obligingly turned them into something he could understand.
Not a blue screen. Not numbers typed in some divine spreadsheet.
A Vein Tapestry.
Lines glowed and dimmed in sequence as he focused on different parts, reweaving themselves into neat rows and columns for his benefit. Shown in the only way an earth-bound mind like his could read it:
It looked, more or less, like this:
Name
Zaric Terran
Age
12
Race
Human
Spirit Vein
Earth
Core Rank
Iron
Radiance
47%
Skill
Rank
Seismic Sight
Prismatic
Skill: Seismic Sight [Prismatic]
The moment he focused on it, the weave dissolved, unfurling into meaning:
Core of Aetherion—the sleeping core of a world—this art lends its bearer the earth's own perception, reducing all forms to what lies beneath: the flow of veins, the fractures in their channels, and the pressure lines of Radiance that hold them together or tear them apart.
He didn't know when he'd learned terms like Iron Rank or Radiance or Prismatic. They slotted into place anyway, not as clear definitions but as weights, impressions.
Iron felt like… first step. The bottom rung. Earth was obvious enough—he'd felt its pull every moment since he woke in this body.
Radiance, whatever it really was, matched the golden light he'd seen in the villagers' veins and the glow struggling to escape his black core. It was the stuff that moved along those lines, the energy this world ran on.
Forty-seven percent, he thought. Almost half a tank.
Prismatic sat heavy in his mind in a different way. High. Sharp. Like the top of a scale instead of the bottom.
"The sleeping Core of a world," he said under his breath.
The words felt right and wrong at the same time: right because they were carved into the tapestry, wrong because they sounded too big to be shoved into a boy's chest.
Seismic Sight pulsed faintly on the slab, wanting attention.
The tug on his awareness loosened.
Zaric opened his eyes.
He was back on the bed, in the hut, staring at the familiar patchwork roof. The core in his chest was warm, and the word Seismic Sight hummed quietly at the edge of his thoughts like a tool hanging on a peg, waiting to be used.
His head ached faintly, but he was… intact.
"All right," he whispered. "So no menu… but something close enough."
If Seismic Sight was anything like what the name suggested, An appraisal skill, then. Not for names and levels, but for the hidden structures under the surface.
His pulse kicked up.
If it could show him the veins in his core… could it show him what was broken in his mother?
The thought pulled him to his feet before he had fully decided.
The curtain brushed his fingers as he pulled it aside.
The back space was small and gray in the thin morning light leaking through a crack in the wall. The lamp Lyra had lit last night had burned out, leaving only the shape of the narrow bed, the crate that served as a table, and the bundles of dried herbs drooping from the low rafters.
His mother lay as she had before: thin, motionless, chest rising and falling in shallow, stubborn breaths. Her clay-brown hair had been smoothed back and braided. Lyra's doing.
Up close, the fine lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth were easier to see. Traces of a life lived awake before this three-year sleep.
Zaric sat on the crate and took her hand.
It was warm. Not the scorching heat of a raging fever, but the dull, tired warmth of someone who'd been sick for far too long. Her fingers stayed limp in his.
"All right," he whispered. "Let's see what the earth sees."
He let his awareness slide toward the pattern in his core, reaching for the knot that had called itself Seismic Sight.
It answered.
The world shifted.
The edges of the small room blurred. Color drained away. Then lines bled through reality—soft, glowing lines, like someone had drawn the world in light instead of ink.
His mother's body was no longer just flesh and bone. She was a lattice of light and shadow: a network of blue and pale spirit veins running under skin that had become almost transparent. The main channels began at her chest, thick and bright, then branched out along limbs, spine, skull.
Where the light moved freely, it flowed in smooth currents. Where it didn't…
His attention snapped to her chest.
There, nestled at the center, he saw her core.
It was larger than his and a different color entirely: gold, rich and deep, like a coin held up to the sun.
He didn't know what that meant. Iron, bronze, silver, gold—the words floated through his head like memories, stories about "core ranks," but they had no solid hooks to hang on. Maybe color meant strength. Maybe it meant something else.
What he did understand was that hers looked older than his. Older and… tired.
Inside the core, suspended in the space of her chest, hung her tapestry.
He saw it as veins of light woven in a complex pattern, looping and crossing in careful repetition. Even as a beginner, he could tell most of it had been built carefully, line by line, over time.
And then one section on the left side drew his gaze like a wound
There, the threads knotted.
Lines that should have flowed around the core were yanked sideways into a tight, ugly tangle. They twisted back over themselves, forcing their way into a shape that didn't match the rest. It was like someone had tried to stitch a completely different pattern onto an already finished quilt using whatever thread they could grab.
Radiant light tried to move through that section and got stuck. It pooled, eddied, leaked into places it shouldn't. Downstream, the spirit veins branching from that side of the core were thin, almost empty.
Her core itself was dim. It flickered now and then, but each pulse was swallowed by the knot before it could spread.
Zaric's chest tightened.
He didn't know the rules here. He didn't know what "right" was supposed to look like. But he knew broken things when he saw them.
"That…" He swallowed. "That doesn't belong, does it?"
The wrong section of tapestry looked… out of place. The rest of the weave had a rhythm—loops, crossings, a repetition that felt instinctively right, the way properly spaced beams made sense in a shaft. This knot broke that rhythm. Its angles were harsh where the rest were curved. It felt… forced.
"You tried to do too much," he whispered.
The words surprised him, but once they were out, they felt right.
He didn't know the proper terms—skill, art, whatever this world called the tricks grown-ups used when their tapestries developed. But some fragment of Zac's memories fluttered at the edge of his mind: hushed talk about adults "weaving new patterns" into their cores, trying to add more power, more techniques, more ways to earn.
If you did it wrong, the other boys had said, you could "twist your veins" or "put your core to sleep."
Vein-sleep. Vein-sickness. The healer's words, second-hand through Lyra.
He looked again at the knot in his mother's tapestry.
It was more than a twist. It was a foreign shape shoved into a living pattern. A patch that didn't match the original cloth.
"You wove something into yourself that doesn't fit," he said softly. "And it caught everything around it."
Her gold core flickered faintly, trying to push radiance along the veins that were choking it.
The longer he stared, the more strain dug into his forehead. The glow around everything sharpened at the edges. Tiny threads of golden light—not hers, but his—slipped down his arm where it touched her hand, wrapping around a few of the weakest, dimmest veins near her wrist.
They didn't untie any knots. They just held things up. Like a desperate miner shoving scrap wood under a sagging roof, buying time.
Her breathing hitched once, then steadied.
Zaric winced as the ache in his skull sharpened. A warning buzzed along his thoughts: enough.
He let the sight go.
The glowing lines faded. Flesh and cloth returned. The little back room snapped back into gray and brown. His mother lay exactly as before, chest rising and falling in shallow waves, hand limp in his.
He sagged a little on the crate and wiped sweat from his brow. His heart pounded faster than it should have for someone who hadn't moved.
He didn't know enough to fix anything. He barely knew the names for what he'd just seen. But he had eyes, and he had spent half his life looking for places where structures failed.
Her core wasn't empty. It was still there, gold and flickering, smothered by a pattern that didn't belong.
Her veins weren't just "sick." They were being starved by a knot in the tapestry around her core—an extra piece, incompatible with the rest, bent and twisted and choking the flow.
"Everyone thinks you just… drifted away," he murmured. "That something invisible broke and that was that."
He squeezed her hand gently.
"But you're not gone. You're just stuck inside your own mistake."
Back in the mines, if someone stuck the wrong brace in the wrong place, you could hear the tunnel complain. It would groan, shudder, throw dust from the ceiling. You didn't need an engineering degree to know something was wrong. You just had to listen.
This felt the same.
He reached down and traced in the packed dirt beside the bed with one finger: a rough circle for her core, a ring of crossing lines for the tapestry, a clumsy knot off to one side. Then he added a smaller circle for his own core, with faint lines stretching toward hers.
It wasn't a real diagram. Just something to keep the shape in his head.
Outside, a bell rang faintly—the thin metallic clang of a shift starting or ending. Voices rose and fell, swallowed quickly by distance and walls.
Zaric looked at his mother's sleeping face.
For now, all he could do was watch her breathing and replay the pattern in his mind, over and over, memorizing every wrong bend and knotted thread.
He had spent his life listening to the earth.
Now, he would learn what the earth saw inside people—and how to set it right.