UntChapter 2: Echoes of Corruptionitled Episode
1431 Words
The faint glow of dawn struggles to pierce Silvermist City’s dense industrial coal smog, spreading only a sickly pale grey halo over the sea of rooftops—a perfect mirror of the city’s unending decay and stagnation.
Elias dons the standard black robe of the Eternal Night Church. Fine silvery stellar runes embroider the cuffs of its tough fabric, and a cold iron Warden badge hangs from his chest. This uniform embodies dual order: mortal and supernatural. It stands for suppression and judgment, yet also bears the inescapable fate of every Warden: to endure lifelong Stardust Corruption, trapped between madness and an early grave with no middle ground.
The crimson void he witnessed last night was no empty hallucination.
The stellar bone throne suspended amid boundless scarlet mist, the silent summons etched straight into his soul—these impressions burned deep within him, tangible and unanswerable. Alongside them come ever-worsening looping visions that torment his mind day and night.
As he walks the slum’s cramped alleys, countless fragmented death scenes flicker at the edges of his sight: children drowning in filthy mud pits, deranged workers crushed by steam machinery, vagabonds whose bodies burst open to sprout crystalline spurs… Endless iterations of his own brutal demise cycle without pause, gnawing away at what little rationality he has left.
This is the true face of Stardust Corruption. Subtle, gradual, impossible to evade. It strips away sanity and humanity bit by bit, dooming every infected soul to become a mindless star-twisted aberration.
He returns to his cramped, ramshackle slum rental. The air reeks of damp rotting timber and the bitter tang of cheap herbal tonics. Lila curls beneath thin threadbare blankets, her skin pale almost to transparency. Beneath her slender wrists, silvery crystal threads snake and twist, pulsing slowly with alien stellar power undetectable to ordinary mortals.
Half-lost in drowsiness, her lips twitch nonstop as she murmurs incomprehensible whispers—the Void Star Tongue, audible only to those tainted by stardust, coiling around and warping her consciousness every hour of every day.
At the sound of footsteps, she blinks awake slowly. Her eyes are unfocused and distant, gazing straight through the walls and the choking coal haze toward the deep cosmic void hidden from mortal sight.
“Elias,” her breath is thin, her voice wispy as smoke. “The stars are whispering again. They say an empty seat has woken at last.”
A bone-deep chill crashes over Elias in an instant.
Ordinary stardust victims suffer only tormenting visions; none can sense the crimson void, let alone perceive the vacant seats surrounding the stellar bone throne. Lila’s corruption has long transcended all known mortal understanding.
“What empty seat?” He suppresses the storm of shock roiling inside him and asks quietly.
Lila pulls a faint, hollow smile, her voice light as fading smoke. “A round table. Made for all the wretched souls of this world—those cast adrift, hunted down, crushed by fate.”
Elias is about to press her for more when a shrill, piercing Warden whistle suddenly rips through the slum’s heavy silence.
The Church has sounded a deployment order.
His first official assignment has arrived.
Elias takes out the advance dose of suppressant issued by the Church. Its murky silver liquid can only shackle stardust corruption and slow the advance of crystallizing mutation, never cure his sister’s affliction entirely. He sets the vial beside her pillow, tucks the blankets tight around her, locks the door, and steps out into the ashen morning light.
His looping visions flare violently, countless gruesome deaths overlaying his field of vision: shattered bones from falls, crystal threads piercing throats, bodies dissolving into void mist… Omens of doom linger everywhere, a constant reminder that mortal lives are fragile beyond measure against stellar power.
He blinks hard to dispel the chaotic apparitions, his mind settling into a cold, unshakable calm.
He is no hero driven by grand justice, never dreaming of saving the world or upholding order. He is merely a penniless slum orphan, wagering his sanity, his life, and all his tomorrows for one single purpose: to shield the only family he has left amid endless corruption and inescapable fate.
Beyond this decaying reality forged from steam and coal ash, the boundless crimson void waits silently for his return.
The Church’s steam patrol carriage jolted over crumbling flagstone roads, its iron wheels churning through puddles in the cracks to fling murky spray. The carriage interior was airless and oppressive, thick with the stench of metal, machine oil, and faint antiseptic—the familiar scent of the Eternal Night Church’s Starward Wardens, a mingling of order and death.
Three veteran wardens rode within, led by Sergeant Hale. A brutal scar sliced through his left eyebrow to carve across his eye socket; his right eye had long been ruined by Stardust Corruption, its pupil perpetually clouded ash-grey. He spurned the standard warden blindfold, facing every aberration in the world with his maimed sight, the coldest and most seasoned enforcer among the Church’s low ranks.
Hale tossed a thin dossier onto Elias’s lap, his tone flat and devoid of all emotion. “Your first rookie assignment. Low-tier relic breach, civilian residence aberration. Standard purge, sealing, and filing.”
Elias unfolded the dossier. Its neat, frigid script was stripped of all human detail, bearing only clinical symptom descriptions and risk classifications.
Case: Contamination from a Fallen Star Pendant Location: Residential Unit 3, Seventeenth Slum District Symptoms: Persistent insomnia, auditory hallucinations, stellar paralysis, superficial crystalline growth on limbs Risk Rating: Minimal
Minimal marked the lowest danger tier in the Church’s classification system. It denoted no violent mutation, no mass contagion, no fatal backlash. Most infected victims would simply slip into madness and waste away silently amid endless phantom whispers, sparking no public unrest.
This was Silvermist City’s most common hidden tragedy. Countless destitute folk chased the false luck of cheap stellar trinkets, purchasing shards of broken stellar remains circulated on the black market—only to pay for their reckless hope with their lives.
“Cheap street baubles,” Hale leaned against the carriage wall, his voice hollow. “Tourists buy them for blessings, commoners for wealth. They’re nothing but flaked star residue, sustained by feeding on mortals’ dreams and sanity. They lie dormant by day, devouring human minds after dark.”
A younger warden beside him let out a scoff, numb cynicism lacing his words. “The poor always think good fortune can be bought cheap. All they end up purchasing is madness and death.”
The carriage rumbled to a halt, and the suffocating silence of the Seventeenth District crashed over them.
The slum was far too quiet, unnervingly so. No children’s laughter, no laborers’ shouts, none of the bustle of street life. Every door and window was bolted shut, curtains drawn tight. The whole stretch of alley resembled a lifeless ghost town, with only the wind wailing through empty passageways.
That oppressive stillness seeped into their bones through every pore, more unsettling than any riot or screaming rampage.
Hale drew a short blade etched all over with stellar runes from his waist. Its edge glowed with a faint matte silver light, capable of temporarily suppressing low-grade stardust aberrations.
“Mark this, rookie,” he warned in a heavy murmur. “Ratings are only a reference, never a certainty. Every cataclysmic aberration begins as minimal infection. Stardust abides by no rules—only hunger and consumption.”
The three men climbed creaking wooden stairs. The stairwell was dark and damp, walls streaked with mold, faint silvery dust drifting suspended in the air. The higher they climbed, the thicker the stagnant atmosphere grew, as if even their breath was being slowly drained away.
The target apartment’s door hung ajar, swinging open at a light push.
The room was cramped and tiny, furnished with one table, two chairs, and a single bed—the sparse dwelling of an ordinary laborer. Though its few belongings were neat and clean, the air reeked of cold, alien star mist, jarringly out of place amid the slum’s usual rot and hearth smoke.
Dead center of the room, a silver six-pointed star pendant hovered weightless in midair, cordless and unmounted, spinning slowly on its own axis. Fine silver luminescence spilled from its surface, casting writhing stellar shadows across the walls that crawled and slithered like living creatures.
On the bed lay a laborer in his twenties, stiff on his back, eyes wide and unblinking, pupils bleached completely white, stripped of all trace of living vitality. His chest rose and fell in the fain...
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