The Ash Mines of Krozos were never meant to house life.
They were engineered to strip it away.
Far beneath the crust of the Third Layer, the mine stretched like a wound carved into the planet's bones. The air was thick with sulfur and ash, heavy enough to cling to the lungs. Every breath tasted of metal—copper and decay—like the world itself was bleeding.
Light existed here only as a tool of control.
Artificial lamps flickered overhead, suspended from rusted rails. Their glow was harsh, white, and unforgiving, revealing jagged walls embedded with glowing veins of crystal: Certainty Shards—solidified fragments of stabilized probability. The most valuable resource in the Seven Layers. The currency of empires.
Kayan swung his pickaxe.
Once.
Twice.
Again.
Each impact sent a dull vibration up his arms, rattling bones already pushed far beyond exhaustion. His muscles burned, not with the sharp pain of injury, but with the deep, grinding agony of something slowly being erased through repetition.
He had stopped counting the swings cycles ago.
Seventeen years old.
That was his age, at least by the broken calendar carved into the mine's stone walls. But his hands were rough, split, and scarred like those of men who had lived entire lifetimes underground. His shoulders were narrow, his frame lean to the point of fragility—but his eyes told a different story.
They were hollow.
Not empty.
Hollow.
Eyes that had learned early that the universe did not respond to prayers.
Around him, the other miners worked in silence broken only by coughing fits and the dull clang of tools. Every single one of them glowed.
Not visibly—not to normal sight.
But in this world, reality was layered.
And on the layer beneath flesh, existence left a trace.
Every miner emitted a faint aura: translucent, shifting, alive. These were Probability Traces—the measurable resonance of a being's presence within the universal equation.
Old Man Harl, two rows to Kayan's left, glowed a dim bronze. Weak. Unstable. His probability of survival was thinning, his life-thread fraying at the edges. The mine would claim him soon.
The guards were different.
They burned.
Crimson, sharp, aggressive. Their Probability Traces cut through the gloom like open wounds in reality itself. They didn't just enforce order—they imposed it. The mine bent around them, subtly aligning events in their favor. Slips happened near prisoners. Tools failed. Accidents became inevitable.
Probability obeyed power.
Then there was Kayan.
He did not glow.
He did not flicker.
He did not exist—at least, not according to the System of the World.
Where others radiated presence, Kayan was an absence. A gap. A distortion so complete it felt like staring at a hole torn into the fabric of reality.
To the eye, he was there.
To the universe, he was a mistake.
They called him Null-Blood.
The lowest classification of life. An anomaly born without a Probability Trace. A being the world could not calculate, reinforce, or protect.
A disposable thing.
"Still scraping dirt, Zero?"
The voice slithered through the mine like poison.
Kayan didn't look up.
He recognized it anyway.
Jax.
A minor overseer. Too weak to command respect among real enforcers, too cruel to be ignored by the miners. His Probability Trace oozed around him in an oily yellow haze—unstable, opportunistic, parasitic.
In Jax's hand coiled a weapon that made even veteran miners flinch.
A Lash of Certainty.
Forged from compressed probability, its surface shimmered with a dull crimson glow. If it struck a normal human, it wouldn't merely cause pain or injury. It would force the outcome.
The probability of damage would be set to absolute.
One strike.
One result.
Total collapse.
Kayan kept working.
That, more than defiance, was unforgivable.
"I'm talking to you, ghost!" Jax snapped.
The lash cracked through the air.
Reality screamed.
The miners turned away instinctively, shielding their eyes. They knew the sound that followed—flesh rewriting itself, bones shattering not because they broke, but because the universe decided they had.
The lash descended, a jagged line of enforced destiny, aimed straight at Kayan's spine.
It struck.
And the world… stopped.
There was no scream.
No impact.
No tearing of flesh.
For a single, impossible heartbeat, the mine held its breath.
The glowing tip of the Lash of Certainty touched Kayan's ragged tunic—and the light began to drain.
Not explode.
Not disperse.
It was pulled.
The crimson glow flowed inward, vanishing into Kayan's body like water into a bottomless pit. The weapon dimmed, its radiance unraveling thread by thread until nothing remained but dead leather hanging uselessly from Jax's hand.
Kayan felt it.
Deep in his chest, where there had always been a cold, silent void…
Something moved.
It wasn't pain.
It wasn't strength.
It was awareness.
The sensation of a predator opening its eyes for the first time.
Jax staggered back, staring at the lifeless whip. His Probability Trace flickered violently, destabilizing in sharp pulses.
"My—my lash," he stammered. "What did you do? What did you do, you freak?!"
Kayan turned slowly.
His eyes, once dull and grey, were now terrifyingly still. Not glowing. Not blazing.
Empty.
And yet, in that emptiness was authority.
"I didn't do anything," Kayan said quietly. His voice was rough, unused, like a mechanism long rusted shut.
Jax swallowed. "Then why—?"
"It didn't happen."
"What?"
"The strike." Kayan straightened to his full height. His shadow stretched across the glowing crystals, long and distorted. "The probability of you hitting me…"
He took a step forward.
"…I set it to zero."
The mine trembled.
Far above them, a deep, tectonic groan rolled through the stone—a sound that made even the guards stiffen.
The Great Alarm had been triggered.
A Dimensional Irregularity had been detected.
In the upper layers, Overseers would already be mobilizing. Observers would turn their gaze downward. The System of the World had finally noticed the glitch it had ignored for seventeen years.
The Zero had made a sound.
And the universe was beginning to tremble.