Chapter 5 : The Paradox of Affection: System Failure
"Noooooooooo!"
An animalistic scream tore through the cavern's silence, echoing off the damp stone walls and forcing everyone to recoil instinctively. The sound didn't seem to originate from human vocal cords; it was the lament of something being split apart at an atomic level.
"GFGSAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"
"What was that?!" someone shouted, their voice shrill with panic as they stumbled over the uneven rocky ground.
"He… he's breaking!" another said, their voice trembling, watching Yukeli's silhouette under the pale light of the lanterns.
Yukeli arched his body violently, as if invisible hooks were pulling him from the inside, stretching his spine to the breaking point. Memories of a profane place, vast and cold, seeped into his brain like tiny worms gnawing at the core of a rotten apple. The knowledge didn't just invade his mind — his physical body protested in agony; his muscles locked in rhythmic spasms, as if every nerve were being ripped out, cleaned, and rewritten by force. The pain didn't just come from the flesh — it was deeper, more ancient, as if a giant hand were churning the sludge at the bottom of his existence.
"Someone hold him!" a woman's voice cried out, desperation cutting through the air.
When they tried to approach, a frigid and invisible pressure pushed them back with the force of a rising tide. The air around Yukeli rippled like asphalt under the midday sun; the oxygen became heavy, metallic, turning every breath into a Herculean effort for those present.
A cold voice, devoid of any trace of humanity, erupted directly in the center of his skull.
[Warning: initiating System integration into the Host's Three Absolutes.]
Yukeli felt the presence of a place he couldn't describe; a void that was, at the same time, an absolute fullness. His body surrendered and collapsed against the cold floor. The pain grew, expanding beyond the limits of the nervous system.
"Hey, superman!" someone called, but the voice seemed to come from miles away, muffled by an ocean of static.
[Warning: Absolute of the Body confirmed.] [Access to Strength granted.]
Yukeli's bones snapped with a dry, terrifying sound, like tree branches breaking in an ice storm.
"This isn't normal…" one of the survivors murmured, paralyzed by horror. "His bones… they're moving on their own beneath the skin."
Yukeli's blood boiled. He felt his veins throb against his skin, dilating as his body desperately tried to adapt to that ancestral memory… or simply fall apart into a mass of flesh and bone fragments.
[Warning: Absolute of the Mind confirmed.] [Access to Consciousness granted.]
"He's having a seizure!" Yukeli heard the shout, but reality had already fragmented.
If the lash on his body was unbearable, the state of his mind was a million times worse. Thoughts that didn't belong to him tried to impose themselves; memories of eras he never lived struck his consciousness like rocks thrown against a stained-glass window. He felt torn apart. What kept him functional was a cruel artifice of the process: every fragment of memory that surfaced was erased as quickly as it appeared, leaving only the fiery trail of pain and an empty space where meaning once resided.
In the midst of the whirlwind, echoes of names and titles reverberated in his soul:
'Ordvinis.'
'Heretic.'
"Ahsghsfahshshgshahjabahajah!" Yukeli howled. It wasn't a human sound; it was the clamor of a cosmic creature being forced into a clay mold.
The howl vibrated through the cavern walls, making some cover their ears.
"Enough! If this continues, he's going to die!"
"We can't touch him! Don't you see? We don't know what the hell is happening here!"
[Warning: Absolute of the Soul confirmed.] [Access to Will granted.]
When the announcement echoed, the cavern's atmosphere changed drastically. The air wasn't just heavy; it became sacred and terrible. Some fell to their knees, the weight of Yukeli's existence crushing their physical resistance.
"What… is this?"
"I… I can't breathe…"
In the System's logical sequence, the memories had subjugated the body and mind; but, upon touching the soul, something broke the order. Something deep and dormant awakened in response. An invisible weight pressed upon Yukeli's essence, as if his soul were being weighed on a scale that existed beyond time and space.
And then, against all logic of pain, Yukeli felt… loved.
It wasn't a gradual feeling. There was no reason or context. It was an absolute presence — an embrace of warmth and acceptance that filled every crevice of his being. The sensation was an unquestionable fact: it wasn't a comforting memory or a delusion of trauma. It appeared and remained — for a millisecond — so pure that his mortal senses refused any tradition or comparison.
[Confirming infusion of basic System knowledge.]
There was a cutting silence, a vacuum in sound and pain. Then — as if the System realized a fundamental anomaly too late — the voice announced:
[Warning: TASK FAILURE.]
For the first time, the timbre lost its robotic neutrality, acquiring a tone of procedural urgency.
[Alert: detection of Superior Order data corrupting the Absolute of the Mind.] [Reason: influx of unauthorized external wisdom.] [Classification: PRIMORDIAL WISDOM.] [Collapse of consciousness: IMMINENT.]
The agony exploded again, but this time it was sharp, electric, as if that moment of peace had been a sin requiring punishment. Yukeli screamed until his throat became raw flesh, unable to process the presence devouring him from within.
In the center of the chaos, a disconnected recollection assaulted him. For a brief moment, before the final collapse, the pain had ceased. He had felt whole. The question danced in his mind like something strange, almost ridiculous in the face of death.
'Fuck… hadn't the pain stopped?' he murmured between harsh groans, the words trailing off as he tried to grasp that sensation slipping away like sand through fingers.
[Warning.] [You have received Ancient Wisdom.] [At the host's current level, this wisdom is impossible to endure.]
The System's voice hesitated. A microsecond of silence that felt like human doubt.
[The System will assume the burden of this wisdom to protect the host.] [Do you accept this action?]
No answer came from the fallen man. Only the dry sound of suffering and the scent of ozone in the air.
[Warning.] [Warning.] [Warning.]
And then, without transition, reality bent.
[Detecting external intervention…] [Identity: ?????]
The System recoiled, like a machine encountering a superior and incomprehensible code.
[The System is being updated to an Order superior to the host's.] [Cause: interference from the Witch of ?????.]
Something vast, ancient, and formless observed the scene from a plane beyond the veil.
[Action confirmed by GENESIS ORDER.] [An evaluation is being granted.]
The pain ceased so suddenly that the silence that followed felt deafening. The veil of agony dropped. Yukeli, lying on the cavern floor, felt that presence again — the same feeling of being loved — but this time, it brought a clarity that left him stunned.
He understood with his very essence, not with intellect: that feeling that had reached him moments before hadn't been an anticipation of what was to come. He had been touched in the past by something happening now, at this very second. The intervention was so powerful that it broke the linearity of time, casting its touch backward to save the Yukeli who, minutes ago, was about to perish.
"So… it wasn't before," he whispered, his breath shallow, eyes fixed on the cavern's dark ceiling. "it was… after… and yet it reached me."
The primordial wisdom that threatened to obliterate his sanity had been, for the most part, extirpated by the System and the Witch. What remained did not disappear, but became unreachable. For Yukeli, looking at these fragments of knowledge was like being a child observing an image heavily censored by black blurs; he saw the shapes, noted the density of what was there, but possessed no mental tools to interpret what he saw. They were logicless stains in a sea of mystical clarity.
[Congratulations.] [You have acquired a new Attribute.]
The words rang with a weight that made Yukeli's soul vibrate like a church bell.
[Attribute: Beloved of ????? — Integrated successfully.]
The System's voice returned to its icy neutrality, as if the previous tumult had been merely a corrected miscalculation.
[Congratulations.] [The System has been successfully installed.]
"He… he's breathing." someone said, their voice full of cautious hope.
"Yukeli? Can you hear us?"
He opened his eyes slowly. His pupils, one gold and one red, glowed with a new intensity in the gloom. The pressure crushing the others was gone. Air began to circulate again.
"Thank the gods…" someone whispered in the background.
In the darkness of that stone tomb, Yukeli inhaled the damp air. The realization was a new coldness in his chest: the danger hadn't passed, it had only changed shape. He had nearly died, but he had been saved — he had been reached. And, without knowing it, he now walked with something ancient, mystical, and sentient by his side.
What happened to Yukeli was not something a human should survive. And, as he felt the new power flowing through his rewritten veins, the doubt hung in the air:
Could he still be considered human?