The water lay flat and dull beneath the morning sky, a sheet of lifeless grey that tasted of salt and iron.
For Alaric—or Valerius, as the mud on his face now claimed—the river was the only thing that didn't feel like a hallucination.
Back on Earth, it was just corporate branding the eight-petaled flower etched onto the sleek boxes of the Aura-Link 12. Minimal. Clean. A half-bloom reaching for a satellite signal.
Now, as he closed his eyes, the flower was whole.
It throbbed behind his eyelids, a heavy, golden pulse that felt less like software and more like a second heartbeat. It didn't feel like a device in his pocket; it felt like a new organ stitched into his nervous system.
"Did I bring the phone with me," he whispered, his voice a dry rasp, "or did the phone bring me?"
The question felt like ice in his chest. As he stared into the dark, the red flower icon began to spin. A loading animation.
It was agonizingly slow. As the circle turned, the warmth began to vanish from his arms and legs. Not in a metaphorical way his body was literally cooling down. His strength leaked out of him as if pulled through invisible needles. His knees hit the dirt. His lungs felt like they were being squeezed by iron bands.
This wasn't pulling from a lithium battery. It was pulling from him.
He crawled toward a patch of dry grass, shivering as his own life-force was stripped away and converted into raw data. When the Aura-OS finally flickered to life, the interface didn't appear on a screen. It projected itself directly onto his retinas.
A massive circular HUD bloomed across his vision—a radiant construct of golden light and rotating geometry. The Great Dial hovered before him like a clockwork eye. Glyphs spiraled out from the center—some looked like math, others like the occult seals you'd see in a dusty museum, or celestial charts of stars that didn't exist.
There were no words. No "Settings" or "User Guide." Yet, when he focused on a specific glyph, it hummed in the back of his brain, answering questions before he could even ask them.
Then the grief hit him.
Anything that required a signal the news feeds, the music, the browsers it was all gone. Not just "No Service," but erased.
There was no network here. No satellites. No bridge back to the world of glass and steel. That life was a closed book.
He looked at the outer rim of the dial. A hundred narrow segments made up the circle. Only seven were lit. They flickered in a bruised, sickly amber. Beside them, a number pulsed in a warning red.
7%
A cold dread coiled in his stomach. On Earth, a dead phone was a nuisance. Here, with the OS fused to his Body, he knew instinctively that 0% meant the end of his breath.
"I have to know," he muttered.
He focused on a glyph shaped like an eye.
The world shattered.
The river mist vanished instantly. The sun began to vibrate with colors he didn't have names for, and reality sharpened until it was physically painful to look at. The steam rising from the river fractured into tiny, crystalline motes. The water turned transparent, revealing silver fish deep below, every scale distinct, every flick of a fin predictable.
His vision lunged forward.
An oak tree hundreds of yards away rushed into his face. He saw the deep canyons of the bark, the microscopic veins in the leaves, and an ant marching across a twig like a soldier on a battlefield.
Distance: 267.432m
The data flickered at the edge of his sight, He pushed harder, trying to see through the wood, into the very heart of the tree.
The vision hit a wall.
Then—Beep.
The sound felt like a hot wire being dragged through his brain.
6%
"Stop," he gasped.
The world went dull. The colors bled out, replaced by the grey, suffocating reality of the riverbank. The loss of the "Eye" was violent, leaving him dizzy and half-blind. The interface collapsed back into a single red petal at the corner of his eye.
He sat there for a long time, his lungs burning. Hunger hit him then—a deep, hollow ache that felt like his stomach was trying to digest itself.
No money. A dying soul-processor. And a name that belonged to a drowned man.
Valerius stood up, shaking the mud from his tunic. A cold, sharp anger sparked in his chest. If this world thought it could just chew him up and spit him out.
He turned his back on the river and started the long walk toward the city.