‘Let’s begin.’

What does that mean? Before Ryu could ask, The Other had already raised a hand.

“Later.”

The Other then flicked his fingers, and Ryu felt as if he was being pulled outward. Or maybe inward.

He didn’t know. And he did not have to contemplate. He had passed out.

Ryu woke to the sensation of solid ground beneath him and an unbroken silence pressing against his ears.

His eyes opened slowly. The air was thin, sharp, lacking the scent of soil or salt, the way any real place should smell. Instead, it was sterile, absent of anything familiar.

He exhaled, steadying himself before sitting up. His body ached. Not from injuries—there were none. Not from exhaustion—his breath was even. It was the kind of ache that came after long exertion, after movement that should have left behind some kind of memory, yet there was nothing.

That was his first problem.

His mind was blank where there should have been a before. What happened?

He glanced around. The terrain was uneven, fractured by deep fissures that ran along the surface like veins. The rock itself was pale, a dull, sunless gray that seemed worn but not aged, smooth in some places, jagged in others. Some areas had deep grooves, too deliberate to be erosion.

Ryu pushed himself to his feet. His movements were controlled, testing for injury, testing for anything abnormal about his body. There was none. He was in perfect condition.

That was his second problem.

His last memory was… unclear.

It was just out of reach, at the edge of his mind. He had been somewhere else, and then he had been here.

There was no transition. No dream. No impression of time passing.

Only a voice.

[Let's begin.]

It wasn’t someone else’s voice. It was his own.

‘Did I say something like this?’

He frowned. It didn’t make sense. There was no reason for him to be saying anything, much less that. But the voice had been too distinct, too sharp to be something imagined.

Then, something even stranger.

[Again.]

That one had been whispered, barely audible, yet clear enough that it couldn’t have been his own thoughts.

‘Ugh, both my mind and body ache!’

He looked down. His boots left no prints on the ground, despite the layer of dust covering the surface. He bent down, brushing a hand across the fine particles. They shifted, but there was no pattern of his movement—as if the dust reset itself.

A third problem.

Ryu straightened and took a slow step forward. Then another. He stopped, turned, and looked at his trail. There was none.

Ryu knew this wasn’t natural. And so, his brain sharpened.

The terrain was rough, filled with evidence of time—weathering, fractures, erosion—but the details contradicted each other. The cracks in the stone ran too deep for a stable environment yet had no sign of recent movement. The formations had clear patterns, but none that made sense for wind erosion or tectonic shifts.

It was as if the land had been shaped deliberately, but not by anything natural.

Ryu crouched beside a nearby rock face, running his fingers along its surface.

Deep within the stone, etched patterns wove in and out of the natural fractures, spirals and arcs that seemed almost accidental, but they weren’t. The depth of the markings was consistent. Their curves were too even to be random.

Of course, they were symbols.

He didn’t recognize them.

That didn’t matter. What mattered was that they were present. They weren’t a language, not something written at least, but they had been formed by something intelligent.

Which led him to his next problem.

If they had been made, who made them?

He exhaled, rising to his feet. The area was too open for him to determine if this place was inhabited or if it had been abandoned for years—or longer. The sky above was a muted gray, stretching infinitely, with no sun or moon to track time.

There were no trees. No water. No movement.

Just him.

He knew there was an order to these things, otherwise he wouldn’t have been this calm to be thrown into an unknown world. His first step had been assessment. His second needed to be direction.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

He didn’t know where he was, but standing still would give him no new information.

He took a slow breath, adjusted his stance, and walked forward.

One step.

Then another.

There was no wind.

There was no sound.

And behind him—still no footprints.

—

Ryu moved with controlled precision, his strides measured, every step an observation. He wasn’t wandering—he was testing the world itself.

Each movement confirmed the same fact: he left no trace. This fact annoyed him to no avail.

The dust beneath his boots shifted but settled instantly, without any mark of disturbance. The terrain around him remained unchanged, as if reality refused to acknowledge his presence.

That was a clear fucking problem.

Yes, it didn’t hurt him or prove to be problematic, hell, even some people could argue that his is a benefit as it leaves no traces behind.

But he still didn’t understand what the hell was happening.

He reached down, picked up a loose fragment of stone, and tossed it a few feet ahead. It landed as expected, a dull thud against the ground. A small puff of dust rose. That part was normal.

But when he stepped toward the area where it had landed, something was different.

The dust remained disturbed.

The world would not record him, but it would record anything else.

That was the problem.

Of course, Ryu still thought as annoying it is, it is still useful information. And so, he filed the information away.

His gaze moved across the horizon—or where the horizon should have been. The curvature of the land was subtle, barely perceptible, but wrong. Not like standing on a large hill. And it was not like being in a vast, open landscape. However, it was as if the world itself was bending away from him.

He exhaled slowly. Now, that he was calmer, he had to find a new order to things, and so he made a list in his head.

The first priority was to find something new.

And the second priority was to understand what was wrong.

Ryu thought he was an ambitious man so these goals did not faze him.

If this was a natural place, there should have been more variation. A shift in terrain, a change in the environment, anything that suggested an actual ecosystem. Instead, everything looked… consistent. The rocks were different in shape but identical in texture. The dust lay perfectly even across the surface. The sky remained a fixed, lifeless gray.

It wasn’t natural. And if something wasn’t natural, that meant something had made it this way. Of course one could argue that with this reasoning then nature isn’t natural, as it was made by nature. Whatever that means. But what matters was that he deduced that this was most likely a problem. And if it wasn’t then that was for the best.

Ryu adjusted his pace. He didn’t let his mind spiral into pointless speculation. Observation first. Conclusion later.

After some time—minutes? Hours?—he saw something.

A break in the terrain.

A dark formation jutting from the ground in the distance, distinct from the pale landscape around it. Unlike the stones scattered throughout the area, this wasn’t a fragment. It was structured.

As he drew closer, details emerged. The formation was tall, the height of a man, its edges precise, as if carved rather than naturally formed. The color was different too—darker, untouched by the dust that coated everything else.

And that detail was important. If the dust reset itself, why hadn’t it covered this?

Ryu reached out, running his fingers along its surface. The texture was smooth. Not rock. Not metal. Something in between.

And then—at the base of the formation, nearly hidden in the dim lighting—he saw something else.

More symbols.

Unlike the ones carved into the stone before, these were sharper, cleaner. Still worn, still aged, but not eroded beyond recognition.

And with every symbol, there was pattern.

If the previous markings had seemed like remnants of something broken, these were intentional. They were a message, a boundary and a record.

The problem was, he still couldn’t read them.

Ryu let out a slow breath, pressing his fingers against the structure.

For now, he had only two things.

A formation, and a choice.

Move forward.

Or stay and try to understand.

—

Ryu traced his fingers over the surface of the structure again, this time more deliberately.

The material was too smooth to be natural, but not polished like metal. Not eroded, yet not pristine. It had depth—layers beneath the surface that suggested construction rather than formation.

He tested the edge of the structure, knocking against it lightly with his knuckles. It didn’t sound hollow. The density was strange.

More importantly, it didn’t match anything else in the environment.

That was the first verifiable inconsistency.

Everything else—the sky, the terrain, the dust—had followed a pattern of uniformity. This was an exception. And exceptions meant data.

He crouched again, inspecting the symbols more closely. The edges of each carving were sharp, but the grooves weren’t uniform. Some lines were deeper than others, not by time-worn erosion, but by deliberate variation in their original design.

This suggested a strucute, and that meant a system.

‘A langauge?’

He didn’t recognize it. That was only natural, if he had recognized it then that would be even weirder.

But recognition wasn’t the goal—pattern recognition was.

Ryu ran his gaze along the sequence, searching for recurring shapes, mirrored sections, or connections between the lines.

He did find something that resembled that.

Certain arcs appeared repeatedly, spaced evenly apart. Smaller markings clustered around central points, suggesting they weren’t isolated symbols but part of a larger unit.

‘Is it deliberate?’

He tapped a finger against one of the deeper grooves, running through possibilities. He already knew that this wasn’t random, and so this meant one of three things.

The first natural conclusion was that it was a language.

If this was a script, then it followed a structured set of rules. But written languages relied on context. Without a reference point—something to compare it to—it was unreadable. He had no documents, no inscriptions elsewhere, nothing to match these symbols against.

His eyes followed the patterns. Certain arcs repeated every few sections. A smaller set of symbols clustered near the base, separate from the main carvings. Modifiers? Suffixes? Or something else entirely?

Even if it was a language, he had no way of knowing if it was meant to be read. Some scripts weren’t meant for communication—they were labels, warnings, or markers.

And so, that led to the second possibility.

It was a code.

Not all symbols represented speech. Some were instructions. If this was a code, then these weren’t just symbols—they were triggers.

Ryu glanced at the structure again. If this was a mechanism rather than just a monument, then it was designed to interact with something. But with what?

There was no obvious opening, no visible mechanism or seam that suggested moving parts. If it had a function, then either:

1. It required a specific input—a material, a force, something precise.

2. It was already active, functioning without an external trigger.

He considered the second option carefully.

If it was already active, what was it doing? He had to find the answer, and if there was none then he would rule it out.

There were no moving parts. No visible energy. No hum of machinery. But there was one thing that made this different from everything else he had seen so far.

The dust hadn’t reset here.

He had noticed right when he saw it. After all, he had been paying too much attention to goddamn dust for god knows how long.

And so, the markings remained untouched. That meant this structure wasn’t affected by the same phenomenon.

Which led to the third possibility.

That it was a marker.

A boundary or waypoint for unknown reasons. If that was the case, then this wasn’t something to be read or activated, but perhaps it was something to find. A message left for whoever, or whatever, was meant to reach it.

Which meant there could be more.

He turned, scanning the surroundings. Nothing but flat terrain and more endless rock formations. No paths. No changes in elevation. No indication that this was anything other than an anomaly in an otherwise uniform landscape.

It looked the same. But that didn’t mean nothing else was here.

It only meant he hadn’t found it yet.

His grip on the stone tightened slightly.

If this was a starting point, then he had two choices. They were the same two choices he decided on before analysing the structure.

Stay and attempt to decipher the structure.

Or move forward and see if the pattern continued.

Neither option was ideal. He lacked information.

But Ryu wasn’t the type to stand still.

He took a step forward.

Then another.

And as he did, he made sure to watch for what the world tried to hide.