The diner emptied slowly.
Rynn watched them go—survivors, every one of them, carrying their coffee cups and their trauma and their new understanding of a world that no longer made sense. A middle-aged man who'd wished for strength and now crushed his coffee mug without meaning to. A teenage girl whose eyes occasionally flickered to places that weren't there. A woman who'd wished for silence and now spoke in whispers, her voice stolen by a System that took things literally.
By dawn, only Rynn remained.
He'd eaten three eggs, toast, hash browns, and two slices of pie—comfort food, the kind his mother used to make when the world got heavy. It didn't help, but it filled the hollow in his stomach that wasn't related to Chaos capacity.
[Chaos Capacity: 1.9 Units]
[Chaos Control: 0.5%]
[Recommendation: Practice perception exercises]
[Recommendation: Locate additional Chaos resources]
[Recommendation: Establish safe shelter]
The System's recommendations scrolled past, helpful and cold. Rynn ignored them. He was thinking about Kaelen's advice. Start with perception. Learn to see Chaos before you try to touch it.
He looked at the salt shaker.
Ordinary glass. Ordinary salt. Ordinary diner condiment, probably older than he was, passed from waitress to waitress, customer to customer, through decades of eggs and coffee and quiet desperation. But beneath that ordinary surface, Rynn focused. Tried to see what he'd seen after the wish. The layers. The possibilities.
Nothing.
He tried again. Breathed slowly, the way his mother taught him. Let his eyes unfocus slightly, the way he did when staring at architectural drawings too long. Waited for something to shift.
The salt shaker remained a salt shaker.
Rynn exhaled frustration. "This is stupid."
[Perception failure recorded]
[Suggested alternative: Close physical proximity increases sensitivity]
[Suggested alternative: Minor Chaos expenditure may heighten awareness]
[Warning: Chaos expenditure at current control levels is not recommended]
[Warning: Chaos expenditure at current control levels may result in unintended consequences]
[Warning: Chaos expenditure at current control levels may—]
"Okay, okay. I get it. Bad idea."
But the suggestion lingered. Minor Chaos expenditure may heighten awareness. If he spent a little of his capacity, pushed it into his eyes the way he'd pushed it into that grey lightning, maybe he could see what Kaelen described. Maybe he could start learning.
Or maybe he'd unmake the diner.
The serpent stirred, interested in the possibility.
Rynn pressed his palms against the table and made a decision. Not here. Not surrounded by people and buildings and consequences. Somewhere empty. Somewhere safe.
Somewhere he could fail without killing anyone.
---
The outskirts of the city were emptier than they'd been the night before.
Rynn walked for an hour, passing abandoned cars and silent houses, the occasional body that he trained himself not to look at. The bleeding sky had faded to a pale, wrong-colored grey—not clouds, not smoke, just the permanent stain of dimensional integration. Somewhere overhead, things moved that he couldn't quite see.
He found what he was looking for on the edge of a farm field.
A barn. Old, wooden, leaning slightly in a way that suggested decades of neglect. No house nearby—the farmhouse had burned sometime in the night, its skeleton black against the horizon. Just the barn, empty and waiting.
Rynn approached carefully, knife out, listening for anything that might be hiding inside. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. The barn's big door hung open, and through it he could see dusty shadows and the shapes of old equipment.
He went in.
The interior was cavernous. Hay bales stacked against one wall, rusted tractor parts against another, a loft overhead that might have held animals once. Dust motes danced in the grey light, and the whole place smelled like time and decay.
Safe enough.
Rynn found a relatively clear space near the center, sat cross-legged on the packed earth floor, and closed his eyes.
Okay. Let's try this.
He focused on the serpent in his chest. It was easier now—he could feel it there, coiled and patient, waiting for him to figure out how to use it. Not a separate thing, he realized. Not a parasite or an addition. It was him. Part of him. The part that could reach into possibility and pull.
He tried to nudge it.
Nothing happened.
He tried again, focusing harder, imagining the serpent uncoiling just slightly, releasing a thread of that grey potential.
The serpent ignored him.
[Chaos Control insufficient for voluntary manipulation]
[Current control: 0.5%]
[Minimum control for basic manipulation: 5%]
[Recommendation: Continue perception training]
Rynn opened his eyes, frustrated. "How am I supposed to train perception if I can't—"
He stopped.
The barn was layered.
Not dramatically—nothing like the overwhelming cascade of possibilities he'd seen after the wish. But there. Faint outlines of other barns superimposed on this one. The barn that had been painted red instead of grey. The barn that had collapsed last winter. The barn that still held animals, ghosts of cows and horses standing in ghost stalls.
He could see them. Just barely. At the edges of his vision, in the spaces between heartbeats.
Close physical proximity increases sensitivity.
The Chaos residue in this place. The years of existence, of possibilities accumulated and discarded. It was enough. Just enough.
Rynn held very still, afraid that moving would break whatever connection he'd found. He looked at the ghost barns, the ghost animals, the ghost farmers who moved through the hayloft doing ghost chores. None of them noticed him. None of them were real, not really. Just echoes. Just shadows of what could have been.
But they were there.
"Okay," he whispered. "I see it. Now what?"
[Perception achieved]
[Perception skill acquired: Chaos Sight (Rank 1)]
[Chaos Sight allows detection of probability shadows and Chaos concentrations]
[Current range: 5 meters]
[Current duration: Passive]
[Control requirement met for next stage: 0.5%]
[Recommendation: Practice maintaining Chaos Sight in varied environments]
[Recommendation: Learn to distinguish between harmless shadows and active threats]
Rynn blinked, and the skill description appeared in his vision alongside the notifications. Chaos Sight. He had an actual skill now. Something the System recognized.
He looked around the barn again, testing it. When he focused on the ghost barns, they sharpened. When he relaxed, they faded. Not completely—once seen, they couldn't be unseen—but controllable. Manageable.
He'd taken the first step.
---
He spent the rest of the day in the barn, practicing.
Chaos Sight was exhausting. Every minute of use drained something from him—not Chaos capacity, but something else. Attention. Will. The part of him that kept reality straight in his head. After an hour, he had to stop, his skull pounding, the ghost images threatening to overwhelm the real.
But each time he rested, each time he tried again, it got slightly easier.
By afternoon, he could maintain the skill for fifteen minutes straight. By evening, he'd learned to distinguish between different kinds of probability shadows—the faint traces of ordinary objects, the brighter echoes of things charged with emotion or significance, the dark smears where something had been unmade.
The barn had a few of those. Dark patches where, in some probability, animals had died badly. Rynn avoided them.
[Chaos Sight: Rank 1 → Rank 2]
[Control requirement met for next stage: 0.5% → 1%]
[Control required for next rank: 2%]
The notification appeared as the sun set, the bleeding sky darkening to something almost like night. Rynn sat in the barn doorway, watching the stars emerge. They were different now—new constellations, unfamiliar patterns, the sky of a world connected to a thousand others.
He thought about Kaelen's advice. Find others. People you trust.
Easier said than done when the only person he'd met since the awakening was a three-thousand-year-old alien who'd given him a magic rock and vanished.
Movement caught his eye.
At the edge of the field, half a kilometer away, something was crossing the open ground. Human-shaped. Moving carefully, deliberately, the way someone moves when they're trying not to be seen.
Rynn's Chaos Sight flickered on automatically, and he saw—
Not human. Not entirely. The probability shadows around this figure were wrong, layered with something else, something that didn't belong in a human form. The shadows showed claws where hands should be, fangs where teeth should be, a hunger that had nothing to do with food.
[Hostile entity detected]
[Classification: Wish-corrupted human]
[Estimated threat level: Moderate]
[Warning: Entity is searching for something]
[Warning: Entity is searching for prey]
Rynn's hand found his knife. His heart hammered. The figure was still half a kilometer away, still moving cautiously, but heading generally toward the barn. Toward him.
He could run. Could slip out the back, lose himself in the fields, hope the thing found someone else.
Or he could stay. Could watch. Could learn.
Could see what happened when wishes created monsters.
The figure was closer now. Four hundred meters. Three hundred. Rynn's Chaos Sight showed him more detail with every step—the warped probabilities, the hunger that radiated from it like heat, the wrongness that permeated its existence.
Two hundred meters. The figure stopped.
It turned, slowly, and looked directly at the barn.
At him.
Eyes glowed in the darkness—red, malevolent, fixed on his position with absolute certainty. Whatever this thing was, it had found what it was searching for.
Rynn stood, knife ready, heart pounding, and waited for it to come.
---
Mass Release till Chapter 10... Heheheheh