Chapter 123
Nille's laughter gradually faded as he climbed the ancient staircase leading out of the underground chamber. The conversations below became distant echoes, replaced by the quiet sound of his footsteps against weathered stone. Cool night air greeted him when he finally emerged onto one of the upper excavation platforms. For a few moments, he simply stood beneath the stars, allowing the silence to settle around him.
The discussion with Nhulla and Erma had changed something. Not dramatically, but enough that the countless mysteries surrounding him no longer felt like separate pieces scattered across a table. They felt connected. The World Tree. The Seed Bearer. Temria. The spirit imprint of Neda. The Celestial Cloth. The forgotten civilization. The strange visions. The lineage stretching back through generations. For years he had approached each mystery as its own puzzle, yet now he could see faint threads linking them together. He just didn't know where those threads ultimately led.
As he stared into the darkness beyond the excavation site, a memory surfaced from one of the visions. Not the people this time. Not the catastrophe. Not the emotions. The archway.
leaving behind the warmth of coffee and conversation. The stars hung overhead, silent witnesses to a world that had changed countless times since the age he had glimpsed through the visions. He stood upon the excavated ruins and looked across the landscape stretching beyond the settlement, his thoughts returning once more to the memories that had haunted him ever since he first touched the ancient relics.
This time, however, he was no longer focused on the people he had seen.
He was focused on the archway.
The immense dimensional gateway from the vision remained etched into his memory with impossible clarity. He could still see its towering structure rising into the sky, its silver-white framework covered in symbols that seemed alive. He remembered the crowds passing beneath it. Merchants. Scholars. Families. Workers. Thousands of people moving through it as naturally as modern people crossed a city bridge.
At the time, he had been overwhelmed by everything else happening within the vision.
Now he realized the gateway itself might be the most important detail of all.
Nille slowly scanned the darkness surrounding the excavation site.
Nothing matched what he remembered.
No colossal archway.
No grand avenue.
No bustling city.
Only hills, forests, scattered ruins, and centuries of accumulated earth.
Yet that did not discourage him.
If anything, it strengthened his conviction.
Thousands of years had passed since the civilization in the vision had existed. Rivers changed course. Mountains eroded. Forests expanded and vanished. Entire cities could disappear beneath layers of soil and stone. The landscape he stood upon was not the same landscape he had seen.
It was merely what remained.
His gaze drifted toward the excavation zone below.
Most of the ancient city they had uncovered had not been visible from the surface. Entire structures had been buried beneath centuries of sediment. Roads had vanished. Foundations had sunk. Buildings that once stood proudly beneath the sun now lay hidden beneath the earth.
Why would the gateway be any different?
The thought caused his pulse to quicken.
The more he considered it, the more likely it seemed.
If the gateway truly had existed, then there was a good chance it had not been destroyed completely. A structure of that size would leave traces. Foundations. Anchoring mechanisms. Fragments of dimensional runes. Something.
The challenge was finding it.
Nille closed his eyes and replayed the vision from beginning to end.
He remembered standing among the crowds.
He remembered the direction of the sunlight.
He remembered nearby structures.
The shape of distant towers.
The placement of streets.
The flow of traffic moving toward the gateway.
He searched his memory carefully, attempting to reconstruct the city as it had once existed.
The process felt strangely natural.
Almost as though the memories wanted to be remembered.
When he opened his eyes again, his expression had become thoughtful.
The vision had always activated under specific circumstances.
Not randomly.
Not without reason.
Each time he experienced one, he had either touched something significant or stood in a location connected to the memory itself.
The visions were not merely showing him history.
They were reacting to proximity.
Connection.
Resonance.
His thoughts immediately returned to the final moments of the gateway vision.
The memory had ended somewhere specific.
Not in the city as a whole.
Not in a random location.
A precise point.
A place his consciousness had occupied before the vision abruptly faded.
Nille's eyes widened slightly.
If he could locate that exact spot...
The place where the vision ended...
There was a chance the memory would continue.
The possibility sent a surge of excitement through him.
For all he knew, the next part of the vision could reveal what happened to the gateway.
Who built it.
Where it connected.
Why the civilization disappeared.
Or perhaps something even more important.
He looked across the sleeping excavation grounds below.
Finding the location would not be easy.
The entire region had been transformed by time. Ancient roads were gone. Buildings had collapsed. Layers of earth buried almost everything that once existed on the surface. Even if he possessed a perfect memory of the vision, matching it to the modern landscape would be like comparing two entirely different worlds.
Yet the challenge did not seem impossible.
Not anymore.
Because for the first time, Nille felt as though he was no longer chasing scattered mysteries.
He was following a trail.
A trail left behind by people who had lived thousands of years before his birth.
And somewhere beneath the earth, hidden beneath countless years of history, he suspected the great archway still waited.
Silent.
Buried.
Forgotten.
If his theory was correct, then finding it would do more than uncover an ancient ruin.
It would allow him to step back into the past once more.
Nille quickly realized that his idea was far easier to imagine than it was to accomplish.
The vision had shown him a thriving city from an age long lost to history, but the world he stood in now was almost unrecognizable compared to what he remembered. Thousands of years had passed. Buildings had collapsed. Roads had vanished. Entire districts had been swallowed by the earth. Rivers may have changed course. Hills could have formed where plazas once stood.
Trying to locate the exact position of the dimensional archway using a memory alone was like searching for a needle in a haystack.
No.
It was worse.
It was like searching for a single grain of sand buried somewhere beneath an entire desert.
The only thing Nille knew with certainty was that the gateway had existed. He had seen it with his own eyes through the vision. The memory had been too vivid, too detailed, too consistent to dismiss as imagination. Yet knowing something once existed and finding its remains were two entirely different challenges.
He closed his eyes and replayed the scene once more.
The towering archway.
The crowds.
The avenue leading toward it.
The surrounding structures.
Every detail felt important.
Every detail might become a clue.
But without a reference point, those clues were nearly useless.
The city from the vision no longer existed.
Its streets were buried.
Its landmarks destroyed.
Its skyline erased by time.
For a moment, frustration crept into his thoughts.
Even if his theory was correct, that the visions continued when he reached the location where a previous vision had ended, how was he supposed to find that place?
The ancient city stretched beneath miles of earth and stone. Only a tiny fraction had been excavated. There could be thousands of locations matching the vague impressions he remembered.
Yet despite the difficulty, Nille couldn't shake the feeling that the answer was there.
Waiting.
Hidden beneath layers of forgotten history.
The gateway was too important to be a coincidence. A structure that massive would have been the center of an entire district, perhaps even the heart of the civilization itself. If any ruin was worth searching for, it was that one.
Nille slowly opened his eyes and looked across the excavation site below.
The task ahead was absurd.
Almost impossible.
But then again, most of his discoveries had begun that way.
With a question nobody could answer.
A clue nobody understood.
And a trail everyone else had overlooked.
Perhaps finding the gateway would take months.
Perhaps years.
Perhaps he would fail entirely.
But if there was even a chance that reaching the gateway could trigger the next vision and reveal what truly happened to the ancient civilization, then the search was worth pursuing.
After all, every mystery he had uncovered so far had eventually led him somewhere.
And something deep inside him, the same instinct that had guided him through countless discoveries, kept whispering that the archway was not merely another ruin.
The archway was only one piece of a much larger puzzle, and Nille was beginning to suspect it was far from the last. Every discovery he had made, the World Tree, the Seed Bearer, the ancient civilization, the dimensional gateway, the visions, and his own strange connection to them—felt less like separate mysteries and more like fragments of the same hidden truth. Each answer seemed to reveal two more questions, and the deeper he ventured, the more convinced he became that there were still countless pieces waiting to be uncovered.
The night remained dark and quiet around him. Most of the excavation teams had long since retired, leaving only a handful of distant rune lamps to illuminate the ruins. Nille knew that overthinking the problem now would accomplish little. The ancient city was buried beneath centuries of earth, and no amount of standing still and hoping for inspiration would magically reveal its secrets.
If there was one lesson his journey had taught him, it was that answers rarely came to those who waited for them.
They came to those who moved.
So rather than complicating matters further, Nille chose to trust the one thing that had guided him through countless discoveries before: his instincts.
Perhaps it was foolish.
Perhaps it was luck.
Perhaps it was something deeper that he still didn't fully understand.
Whatever the reason, following that quiet feeling had led him to more truths than logic alone ever had.
Taking a slow breath, Nille turned his gaze toward the distant section of the ruins where the vision of the World Tree had once appeared. The memory remained vivid in his mind—the colossal silver-white tree stretching beyond sight, its roots reaching into eternity and its branches touching the heavens. Even now, recalling it sent a faint shiver through him.
Without another word, he began walking.
His footsteps echoed softly through the sleeping excavation site as he made his way across the ancient stone pathways. The cool night air brushed against his skin while the stars watched silently overhead. He had no map, no certainty, and no guarantee that he was heading in the right direction.
Yet something told him to keep moving.
And for now, that was enough.
Perhaps he would find nothing.
Perhaps he would discover another dead end.
Or perhaps, hidden somewhere beneath the darkness and the weight of forgotten centuries, another piece of the past was waiting for him to arrive.
It was still dark when Nille noticed the landscape beginning to change. The ground beneath his feet was no longer damp and spongy as it had been within the swamp. The moist earth had gradually given way to firmer soil, and with every step, the trees became fewer and farther apart. What had once been a dense expanse of twisted trunks and hanging vines was slowly thinning into scattered patches of vegetation.
The dry grass and cracked soil were unmistakable signs that he had finally left the swamp behind.
Nille paused for a moment and glanced over his shoulder.
In the darkness, the swamp was no longer visible. The towering swamp trees that had dominated the horizon had vanished from sight entirely, swallowed by distance and the night. Had he not walked through them himself, he might have believed they had never been there at all.
The realization made him appreciate the sheer scale of Sector Twelve.
The territory was enormous.
Far larger than he had initially imagined.
Traveling through it on foot had given him a much better understanding of its true size. Distances that appeared manageable on maps felt entirely different when measured by hours of walking.
It also reinforced something he had suspected for some time.
The sectors were not divided equally.
Whatever civilization or authority had originally established them clearly had reasons for allocating different amounts of land to different regions. Some sectors were vast, while others occupied considerably smaller territories.
Sector Twelve alone covered an immense area, yet from what Nille had learned, Sector One was even larger.
Much larger.
The thought was difficult to fully comprehend.
If Sector Twelve already contained swamps, forests, ruins, rivers, and enough unexplored land to hide entire forgotten civilizations, then what exactly existed within Sector One's boundaries?
The question lingered in his mind as he continued walking.
Ahead, the terrain gradually rose into uneven hills and rocky outcroppings. In the distance, dark silhouettes stretched across the horizon, barely visible beneath the starlight.
A mountain range.
Nille slowed slightly as he studied it.
The peaks formed a jagged wall against the night sky, their outlines disappearing into darkness. From this distance, it was impossible to determine how extensive they truly were.
He found himself wondering whether those mountains marked the edge of this place.
Were they a natural boundary?
The end of Sector Twelve?
Or merely another obstacle hiding yet more territory beyond?
Given everything he had experienced so far, Nille doubted the answer would be that simple.
This world had a habit of appearing smaller than it truly was.
Every time he thought he had reached the edge of a mystery, he discovered there was something beyond it.
Something older.
Something larger.
Something hidden.
The mountains might be the border of the sector.
Or they might simply be another doorway waiting to be opened.
Either way, Nille intended to find out. As he turned his attention forward once more, he continued toward the distant horizon, following little more than instinct, curiosity, and the faint hope that somewhere ahead lay another piece of the answers he had been seeking.
A faint light flickered ahead in the darkness, small, unstable, almost fragile against the vast black expanse of Sector Twelve. At first, Nille slowed his pace, instincts sharpening instantly. The smell reached him moments later. Smoke. Wood. And beneath it… food. Freshly cooked, intentionally placed, drifting through the cold night air like bait.
He stopped.
Nothing in this region made sense as "safe."
And yet, someone was here.
Or something.
Nille continued forward, but his steps were quieter now, more controlled. The terrain narrowed into a small clearing where the trees thinned unnaturally, as if the land itself had been cleared to create space. In the center stood a modest hut made of woven wood and earth, its structure too deliberate to be abandoned ruin and too isolated to be ordinary settlement. A small fire burned outside, its orange glow trembling in the wind.
By the fire sat a woman.
And beside her, a child, barely two years old, yet already standing and walking with an unsettling steadiness, too coordinated for its age. The child moved in slow circles around the firelight, as if familiar with the ritual of waiting. The woman stirred something in a pot, humming softly, her face calm, almost comforting in its normalcy.
But Nille recognized the pattern instantly.
A trap.
Not a military ambush. Not bandits.
Something older.
Something local.
An Aswang lure.
He had heard fragments of such tactics before, stories passed down in whispered warnings, half dismissed by elderly people mostly in the province, yet never fully disproven in region such as this one.
A lonely home in the wilderness. A motherly figure. A child. Warm food. Safety offered in the middle of nowhere. And always, the same outcome for those who stepped too close.
He did not turn away.
Instead, he stepped forward willingly.
Because fear alone did not erase curiosity.
And more importantly… he needed information.
As he approached, the woman finally looked up. Her eyes lingered on him for a moment longer than normal, studying him carefully. Nille kept his expression dull, his posture relaxed, letting the Celestial Cloth suppress his presence. To her senses, he would appear unremarkable, a low-level awakened student, exhausted and wandering, exactly the kind of prey such a place would attract.
The woman smiled gently.
"Lost traveler?" she asked softly.
Nille nodded slightly, playing the part.
The child stopped moving.
It tilted its head toward him.
Not like a child.
Like something listening.
The warmth of the fire suddenly felt colder.
The woman gestured toward the hut.
"You should rest. Eat. The night is dangerous."
Her voice was soothing, practiced.
Nille stepped closer.
Inside the hut, he could already sense it, the faint distortion of spiritual residue, subtle but wrong, like reality bending slightly out of alignment. A sealing pattern hidden beneath the floor. Something prepared in advance. Something waiting to close.
Still, he continued.
The moment he crossed the threshold, the atmosphere changed.
The door slid shut behind him without wind.
Silence thickened.
And then, The woman was no longer smiling.
The child was no longer playing.
The hut's walls seemed tighter, as if the space itself had shrunk.
"You are alone," the woman said, voice now colder, stripped of warmth. "Weak aura. No escort. No protection sigils."
The child turned its full body toward him.
Its eyes were wrong.
Too still.
Too old.
Nille exhaled slowly, not resisting as faint bindings—spiritual threads woven into the floor—began to coil around his legs and wrists. He allowed it. Even relaxed slightly, lowering his head as though the pressure was overwhelming him.
A performance.
Perfectly believable.
The woman stepped closer now, her form subtly shifting, bones and posture adjusting in ways the human body should not. The child followed, its movement no longer playful but synchronized, predatory in silence.
"You wandered into the wrong place," the woman whispered. "But you will still serve a purpose."
Nille let out a small breath, almost like surrender.
Inside, however, his mind was already calculating.
The binding was crude.
The disguise was deliberate.
And most importantly, They were not afraid of him.
Which meant they believed he was insignificant.
That belief was his opening.
The woman knelt slightly, reaching toward his face as if inspecting livestock.
"Tell me," she said, voice soft again, "are you part of the excavation group near the swamp ruins?"
Nille paused.
Just long enough to make it believable.
Then he spoke weakly.
"…yes."
A flicker of interest passed through her expression.
And that was all he needed.
Because now he had confirmation.
They were watching the excavation.
They were connected to the ruins.
And whatever lay beneath Sector Twelve… was already being guarded by things that did not belong to human civilization.
The child tilted its head again.
The hut creaked.
The bindings tightened slightly—
Not to kill.
But to hold.
To wait.
To prepare.
And as the woman leaned closer, smiling once more—this time not human at all—
Nille realized something worse.
This was not a random trap.
He had been expected.
The woman's voice lowered to a whisper.
"Then tell us what you found inside the buried city…"
The fire outside suddenly flickered out.
And in the darkness of the hut, something beneath the floor began to respond.
Aswangs were never just monsters in the stories people told to frighten children.
Nille knew the horrors facing these creatures
They were Malignants, mutated, unstable lifeforms that had once been something else, something closer to human, before hunger and corruption rewrote what they were. Their vice was simple and absolute: flesh. Fresh, living human flesh. It wasn't just sustenance for them. It was addiction. Compulsion. A need that consumed reason and replaced it with instinct.
And worse, they were not the only ones.
Gabunan, ghouls, shared the same darkness, but in a different shape. Where Aswangs craved the warmth of living prey, Gabunan preferred what was already gone. Rotten meat. Corpses. Battlefields. Burial grounds. Places where death lingered long enough to become a resource. They were slower in thought, heavier in presence, but no less dangerous. Hunger made them patient. Patience made them worse.
Aswangs, however, were something else entirely.
Mutations.
Shapeshifters.
Predators that could wear any face, mimic any voice, become anything that would make their prey lower its guard for just a moment too long. That was what made them feared even among awakened societies. Not their strength alone, but their adaptability. Their willingness to become whatever the situation required—mother, child, wanderer, victim—anything that would invite trust before the strike.
Nille's gaze stayed lowered, but his mind was no longer passive.
He hated them.
Not fearfully.
Not hesitantly.
But with a quiet, controlled disgust that came from understanding exactly what stood in front of him.
The bindings around his body tightened slightly, as if responding to the shift in atmosphere. The Aswang woman still knelt in front of him, her face calm, almost patient, as though she were observing a meal that had not yet realized it was already trapped. The child stood nearby, still unnervingly still, its head angled in that unnatural way that made it difficult to tell whether it was listening or calculating.
The hut itself felt wrong now.
The wooden walls no longer seemed like shelter but containment.
A space designed to isolate prey.
Nille allowed his breathing to remain shallow, controlled. His aura stayed suppressed beneath the Celestial Cloth, maintaining the illusion of weakness. To them, he was nothing more than a tired student who had wandered too far into the wrong territory.
A mistake.
An opportunity.
The woman's smile returned faintly.
"You're shaking," she said softly. "Don't be afraid. We don't waste what we take."
Her words carried double meaning.
Nille finally looked up at her, just enough to meet her eyes.
And for a brief instant, something passed between them.
Recognition on her side.
And calculation on his.
She still didn't understand.
He wasn't trapped because he failed to notice the danger.
He was trapped because he chose to step into it.
The child shifted slightly, the first movement in minutes.
The bindings tightened again.
And somewhere beneath the hut, something older than the fire stirred faintly, reacting to the presence of a living being held in place.
Nille felt it.
Not fear.
Opportunity.
Because Malignants were predictable in one thing.
They fed.
Which meant they revealed themselves eventually.
And information always came from things that believed they were in control.
The woman leaned closer, voice turning gentle again, almost caring.
"Tell me what you saw in the ruins," she repeated. "And maybe we let you keep your life a little longer."
Nille didn't answer immediately.
Instead, he let a small pause stretch between them, just long enough to feel like hesitation.
Then, quietly:
"…what would you like to know first?"
The fire outside the hut flickered back to life.
But this time, the flame burned a darker shade than before.
When Nille was sixteen, Bulacan still felt like it belonged to the normal world.
Rice fields stretched wide under the sun, small barangays stayed quiet at night, and people still believed that danger only came from bandits, accidents, or human mistakes. Awakened matters were distant rumors, things discussed in schools and dismissed in the same breath.
That belief didn't last long in the places Nille ended up visiting.
It began with a report that no one wanted to believe.
A remote family of five had gone missing near the edge of a farming settlement—parents, two children, and an elderly grandmother. At first, the local police assumed kidnapping. Then they assumed wild animals. Then they stopped assuming anything at all.
Because the smell came first.
Even before the patrol reached the house, even before they saw it, the wind had already carried something wrong through the trees. A heavy, metallic rot that made trained officers pause mid-step, hands instinctively covering their noses.
Nille was with them that day.
Not as a fully recognized investigator, but as a young awakened student attached to a response unit, quiet, observant, already learning the difference between theory and reality.
When they arrived, the house stood intact.
Too intact.
No broken doors. No signs of struggle outside. No scattered belongings. Just a small wooden home sitting in the middle of stillness, as if waiting.
The silence was the first warning.
The second was the absence of animals.
Not even insects moved near the perimeter.
Inside, the officers entered cautiously.
Nille followed behind.
The living room looked normal at first glance. A table. Chairs. Family photos still hanging on the wall. A half-finished meal left untouched, as if the people had simply stood up and vanished mid-sentence.
Then someone opened the back room.
And the illusion of normality broke.
There were no bodies in the way people expected to see them.
There were fragments.
Displacement.
Evidence of feeding rather than killing.
The walls were streaked in uneven patterns—too high for a human attack, too chaotic for anything organized. The floorboards had darkened in places where blood had soaked deep enough to never fully dry. Something had moved through the room with deliberate efficiency, not rage.
One of the officers stepped back immediately and vomited into his hand.
Another froze completely, unable to speak.
Nille didn't move.
He had seen reports before.
But reports never prepared anyone for smell.
Or silence.
Or absence of dignity.
The children's room was the worst.
Small furniture overturned. A bed frame broken inward rather than outward. Not collapsed—compressed. As if something had pressed down with enough force to make the wood give way without splintering outward.
There were no intact remains.
Only signs that something had fed slowly, methodically, without interruption.
The grandmother's chair had been overturned near the doorway.
Claw marks, deep, uneven, ran along the wall beside it, as if she had tried to crawl away before being pulled back.
One officer whispered a prayer under his breath. Another called for backup that would arrive too late to change anything.
Outside, villagers gathered but refused to come closer.
They already knew what the smell meant.
They just didn't want to name it.
When the specialized response team finally arrived, they were already too late to do anything but confirm what everyone feared.
The leader, a hardened investigator who had seen awakened incidents before—stepped into the house, took one look, and went silent for nearly a full minute.
Even he didn't speak at first.
Not until he stepped back outside and removed his gloves with shaking hands.
"We don't classify this as human anymore," he finally said.
No one argued.
Because inside, there was nothing that suggested human restraint had ever existed there.
That night, the team stayed longer than they should have.
Not because there was hope of finding survivors.
But because no one wanted to leave first.
Nille stood near the edge of the property, watching the darkness between the trees.
That was when he saw it.
Not clearly.
Not fully.
Just a movement where no movement should be.
A shape that did not belong to anything natural.
For a brief moment, it wore the outline of a woman stepping out from the tree line.
Then it wasn't a woman anymore.
Just hunger given form.
And it was watching the house.
Not what remained of it.
But what it had already finished with.
Nille remembered the feeling that followed.
Not fear in the usual sense.
Something colder.
Understanding.
Over the next weeks, there were more incidents.
Not always the same form.
Sometimes a wandering child.
Sometimes a grieving widow.
Sometimes a tired traveler asking for help.
Each one ending the same way once people got too close.
And each time, when the aftermath was discovered, it was never clean enough to call it nature.
The worst part was not the violence.
It was the intelligence behind it.
The awareness.
The patience.
The way it learned what humans trusted, and became it.
Nille's earliest direct encounter came later.
He never spoke about the details openly, even years afterward.
But what stayed with him was not the attack itself.
It was the moment the thing stopped pretending.
The moment it stopped being a person at all.
And the realization that followed:
that these things did not hunt like animals.
They hunted like people who understood animals.
By the time the police units officially labeled the region "unstable due to unknown predatory Malignant activity," half the officers had already requested reassignment.
The others stopped asking questions.
And Nille, still only sixteen, learned something that would never leave him:
that there were beings in the world that did not fight for survival, they fought for appetite.
And appetite did not negotiate.