5:00 PM.
The wall clock ticked softly.
Outside the window, the eastern sky glowed amber — that warm, transitional hue between afternoon and night. A soft breeze stirred the curtains, carrying the fragrance scent of simmering broth from a distant kitchen.
Inside the bedroom, everything was still.
Until he breathed.
Adrian Vale opened his eyes.
Not a gasp. Not a scream. Just breath. A single, shallow inhale, as if life had quietly resumed after a very long interruption.
The ceiling above him was faintly yellowed from years of light.
A small sticker of a smiling cloud peeled from the corner.
There was no machine hum, no white walls, no steel restraint.
This wasn't a hospital.
It was a bedroom. it was… warm. Lived-in. Peaceful in the way old grief can settle like dust on shelves no one dares clean.
He sat up.
And the world collapsed.
Not around him — into him.
A sudden, searing flood of memory poured through his mind like boiling ink, staining everything. He clutched his skull as images, sounds, smells, and words — foreign yet intimately real — forced themselves into place.
A diagnostic chart for borderline personality disorder.
The quiet tears of a patient he couldn't save.
A plastic model of the human brain on a clinic shelf.
The gentle laugh of a little sister showing him her sketchbook.
The weight of a stethoscope he never quite got used to.
Adrian Vale. Age: 25. Psychiatrist. Graduate of East Eltherion Medical Institute. Employed by the Benevolent Healing. A man with steady hands and trembling thoughts.
"God…damn it…" Adrian gasped, pressing his palms into his eyes. "It's too much—"
The memories weren't memories anymore. They were roots, threading through his own mind like vines strangling the old growth underneath.
Adrian gritted his teeth as it all poured in.
"Adrian Vale," he muttered. "Twenty-five. Psychiatrist. Employed by...
The Benevolent Healing Medical Center"
He let the words hang for a moment, blinking slowly.
Then he gave a soft, dry laugh.
"Of course," he whispered. "Of course your name is Adrian Vale too."
He leaned forward, one hand pressed to his temple.
"And you're a psychiatrist. Just like I was."
A sharp grin touched his lips — not joyful, but entertained in that bitter, surreal way only someone truly broken can manage.
"What are the odds? No — don't answer that. Knowing this world, they're probably zero. Or one."
The amusement lingered for a moment before fading into suspicion.
"Was this body prepared for me?" he asked the empty room. "Or is the Law messing with me again?"
He didn't expect an answer.
He wasn't sure he wanted one.
He stood and turned toward the small mirror mounted above the dresser.
His breath caught.
The man in the glass looked exactly like him.
Same sharp cheekbones. Same dark eyes. Same structured face and clean jawline. His hair was longer, unkempt, and the features were slightly younger — but it was unmistakably his face.
He leaned in.
"This isn't resemblance," he murmured. "It's a copy."
The eyes in the reflection stared back, calm but unnerving. It wasn't a stranger's body. It was his.
He reached out and touched the mirror, half-expecting it to ripple.
"What the hell are you trying to tell me?" he asked. "Is this body… me? Or was I always meant to become it?"
He didn't feel fear — not exactly. It was something colder. The kind of discomfort that comes when the impossible becomes too perfect to ignore.
"Same name. Same job. Same face."
He looked down at his hands. Real. Warm. Familiar.
"This isn't possession. This is… replacement."
And beneath it all — something darker.
A pulse.
A whisper.
A command without language.
End it.
It rose without drama, quiet and inevitable.
Jump.
Collapse.
Vanish.
His body remembered how to die — not in terror, but in routine. As if the thought had been rehearsed countless times already.
Adrian's gaze drifted toward the second-story window. His hand twitched.
"No," he said aloud, gritting his teeth. "Not this time."
But the suicidal impulse was clean. Familiar. It wore no mask. It simply was — buried in this body like a seed that had grown under pressure, watered by exhaustion.
He didn't know if the urge came from the original Adrian's trauma or from his own alien presence hijacking a soul mid-sentence.
Maybe both.
But before it could take hold—
Something cracked inside him.
Not pain.
Power.
A gentle twist in the gears of perception. A fracture blooming open.
[Ability Activated – Soothing Paradox]
"You are safe," he whispered, more to the body than himself.
"You are calm."
And suddenly, he was.
It wasn't real, of course. But the lie didn't care.
The false serenity washed over his nerves like warm mist, softening the suicidal pull into a fading echo. The thought of death remained — but hollowed, numb, disarmed.
Adrian blinked. Sweat traced a line down his temple.
"So that's how it works," he muttered. "A lie that makes you live."
He ran a hand through his hair, feeling its length — shaggy, unkempt, too soft for his old self. This wasn't a warrior's body.
This was a man who'd listened more than he spoke.
A man who lived with pressure behind his smile.
"Psychiatrist. Family. Work. Memories I didn't earn."
He scanned the room slowly.
A worn desk with stacked journals. A calendar still stuck on last month.
The faint scent of mint shampoo on the pillow beside him. He was in the real Adrian Vale's bedroom — in the family home.
And for now, he was alive.
But not alone.
The air grew cold.
Without warning, the Scripture of Fractured Truth shimmered into view — not physically, but as a concept burned into space. It hovered beside him, its cracked-glass surface warping the room like heat over pavement.
A new message pulsed into his vision:
[SYSTEM WARNING]
SOUL POSSESSION INCOMPLETE
CURRENT POSSESSION: 70%
ORIGINAL SOUL: ACTIVE — RESISTING
Adrian stared.
"Seventy percent?" he repeated, flatly. "Seriously?"
Of course it wouldn't be simple. Of course there'd be leftovers.
"Didn't I crawl for a hundred goddamn years for this?" he growled.
"And now I have to share my skull?"
Then — the voice came.
Soft. Bitter. Human.
"Who are you…?"
"Why the fuck are you in my body?"
Adrian froze.
It wasn't a ghost. It wasn't an echo. It was a living soul. Still clinging. Still coherent. The original Adrian Vale.
And he was not happy.
"…Persistent," Adrian said slowly. "You shouldn't still be conscious."
He closed his eyes. Focused.
A second pulse of power sparked.
"It's okay," he whispered. "You're safe."
[Ability Re-Activated – Soothing Paradox]
The resisting soul groaned — not in sound, but in silence. A surrender in the shape of sleep.
[ORIGINAL SOUL STATUS: Dormant – Stabilized (Sleep State)]
Adrian exhaled, long and bitter.
He looked at the ceiling again.
"5:00 PM," he muttered. "And I've already lied to a soul, buried a man alive, and talked myself out of suicide."
He paused.
Adrian stood at the bedroom window.
The sky outside glowed a soft orange. The sun hung low, halfway past the horizon. Its light bathed the street below in gold. The world looked peaceful. Normal.
Cars passed quietly. Birds coasted across the rooftops. The wind nudged the branches of a tree outside his window. A family two houses over was setting the table for dinner.
It was the kind of moment most people would find comforting.
But Adrian didn't feel comfort.
He felt dread.
Because to him, the sun wasn't a sun.
He knew what it really was.
He'd seen it in the void — before his soul had landed in this body, before the world wrapped itself around him like skin. The thing he'd seen there wasn't light or fire. It was alive. Its surface had been made of massive, white worms, endlessly crawling over each other in patterns too perfect to be random.
And they weren't just moving.
They were speaking.
Not in sound, but in shapes. In spirals. In shifting eyes. In symbols that dissolved the longer he tried to understand them.
It had looked straight at him.
Not physically — spiritually. Intimately.
And then it spoke into him, carving the words deep into the back of his mind:
"Fracture."
"Death."
"Old friend."
Even now, standing here in this body, in this house, in a world of phones and sidewalks and dinner at five, the memory of that moment was still fresh.
Too fresh.
The sun looked normal now. Just a warm light in the sky. Harmless. But Adrian knew that wasn't what it really was.
"The world is hiding it," he muttered. "Distorting the truth."
He didn't know how. Maybe it was a natural effect of being inside a system built to protect its people. Maybe it was the Law itself, reshaping perception.
But whatever the reason, everyone else could look at the sun and feel warmth.
He looked at it and felt like something was breathing on the back of his neck.
"If the sun isn't what it seems…" he whispered, "how many other things in this world are like that?"
That was the thought that shook him the most.
It wasn't just fear of the sun. It was fear of the unknown.
Of how much of this world was fake — not illusion, but deliberately filtered. Cleaned up. Polished. Made safe.
Not for him.
For everyone else.
He took a shaky step back from the window.
His nose began to bleed again. A thin red stream ran from his nostril down his lip.
"Shit—" He grabbed a tissue and sat down on the bed, holding his head.
The pressure behind his eyes was worse than before. One of the Oracles in his skull was starting to tremble. If he let the memory grow any clearer, it might cause a breakdown.
"Even thinking about it is dangerous," he muttered. "Even remembering it is a risk."
He'd fought through fire. Through oceans of the dead. Through years of crawling in the dark.
But this — the feeling that something was watching him through the sky, hidden behind a layer of false sunlight — this was worse.
It felt hopeless.
He looked at the ceiling.
"What kind of world is this?" he asked. "Where the sun is a monster pretending to be kind?"
He shut his eyes.
The memory was clawing at his mind, trying to stay alive. Trying to remind him of what he saw. The worms. The voice. The gaze.
He had to cut it off.
He reached inward, not gently, but urgently.
[Ability Activated – Soothing Paradox]
"The sun is normal."
"You imagined the rest."
"There is nothing there."
He buried the truth under soft lies. He wrapped the memory in false calm.
And slowly — painfully — the pressure faded.
His nose stopped bleeding.
His breathing returned to normal.
He opened his eyes.
The sun looked harmless again. Like any other day.
But the fear didn't disappear.
It just went quiet.
He stood and walked to the bathroom, rinsing his face in cold water.
When he returned to the mirror, he looked at himself. His expression was calm. Steady. He looked fine.
But that wasn't the truth.
He was afraid.
And worse — he was starting to believe he was right to be.
"If the sun is like that," he said softly, "then there are probably more."
"Other things. Hidden. Watching. Waiting."
He looked back at the golden light on the wall.
"This world isn't safe," he whispered. "It's just wearing a mask."