Something was growing inside Hajin.

It started small, a faint warmth blooming somewhere deep in his chest that had nothing to do with the light pouring out of his body.

He couldn’t explain it, couldn’t trace it back to any mana pathway or system function, but it was there and it was spreading, moving through him like water soaking through dry cloth until it reached every corner of his body.

’What is this?’ he thought, his hands trembling slightly as he looked down at the glowing tattoos winding up his arms.

This was the complete opposite of pain, it was warmth, overwhelming and suffocating in the best possible way, and beneath it was something even stranger that felt disturbingly close to love.

Not the desperate or fleeting kind but the deep, steady kind that had existed long before he was ever born, like an emotion that had been waiting for him and finally found its way home, and no matter how hard he searched for a rational explanation, he had absolutely nothing to match it against.

A few minutes passed before his legs finally gave out completely, dropping him to his knees while sweat ran freely down his face and neck.

The golden light was still pouring off him in waves but the feeling inside his chest was reaching a new unbearable intensity, making his vision blur at the edges.

"What is going on," he breathed, his voice barely carrying as he pressed one hand flat against the flower-covered ground and stared down at the dirt, trying to anchor himself to something real.

"Uhhh... Master."

The woman’s voice came out oddly careful, like someone who had just witnessed something they weren’t entirely sure how to react to.

He lifted his head and found her standing a few paces away, her eyes wide and her basket completely forgotten at her feet, one hand raised and pointing behind him.

"What is she looking at so stunned?" He turned his head slowly and floating several feet off the ground directly behind him was a woman.

She was hovering there completely naturally like gravity was a concept that simply didn’t apply to her, with two enormous wings spreading out on either side of her body.

Not sharp or angular like the wings of a predator but wide and soft, covered in dense white feathers that looked impossibly fluffy, catching the light from his body and scattering it in every direction.

She was smiling down at him with an expression that was calm and patient, like she had been waiting for this exact moment for a very long time.

"What the hell," was all he managed.

The cyan-haired woman was undeniably stunning, otherworldly and beautiful in the way ancient things tended to be, but this woman was something else entirely.

There was no word that comfortably fit her. Beautiful felt too small and inadequate, like trying to describe the ocean as wet. She existed in a category that his brain hadn’t previously needed a label for, and just looking at her made the warmth in his chest flare so hot it almost knocked the air out of his lungs.

’Who the hell is she?’ he thought, unable to look away. ’And why does it feel like I know her?’

The connection he felt was completely irrational. He had never seen this woman in his life yet something deep and instinctive inside him recognized her the way his body recognized breathing, like she was the reason a specific hollow feeling had always sat somewhere in his chest without him ever knowing it was there.

She tilted her head slightly, those enormous wings shifting with a soft sound as she descended toward him, closing the distance until she was hovering directly in front of him.

She was inches from his face when her hand reached out, two fingers tucking gently under his chin and lifting it so his eyes met hers.

Up close her eyes were unlike anything he had ever seen. The pupils were cubic, perfectly square, rotating faintly as they moved across his face like she was reading something written directly on his skin.

The irises around them were a deep, luminous gold that seemed to generate their own light.

The warmth in his chest surged so violently it almost hurt.

She studied him for a long, quiet moment while the flowers around them swayed in a nonexistent wind, before a small, soft smile settled on her face.

"So," she said, her voice carrying a resonance that seemed to exist on multiple frequencies at once, landing somewhere inside his chest rather than just in his ears. "You are my last bloodline."

The word cut straight through the overwhelming warmth flooding his chest, snapping him back to reality as his brow furrowed deeply.

Bloodline?

He stared at her, that resonant voice rattling around in the back of his mind while his thoughts raced, piecing things together slowly until they landed somewhere he hadn’t expected and his eyes widened slightly.

"Wait," he said, his voice coming out quieter than intended. "Could this be... are you the Goddess?"

"Yes," she said simply.

He opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again, "but that’s impossible," he managed. "You’re dead and the fragment recovery is still at one percent, so how are you here right now?"

She didn’t look offended by the bluntness of the question, instead withdrawing her hand from his chin and folding it neatly in front of her while she held his gaze.

"I am still dead," she said. "What you are seeing is not me. I am a fragment of the original, a piece of consciousness that separated from the whole long before the end came and embedded itself into the bloodline to survive."

He stayed very still, listening.

"Every descendant from my bloodline carried a fragment inside them," she continued, her voice taking on a quieter, heavier quality.

"As long as they lived, I lived in pieces, scattered across all of them. But one by one they were killed, each death extinguishing another fragment until the last one burned out and only one remained."

Her pupils settled on him with a weight that was impossible to ignore.

"You," she said. "You are the only one left, which means the only fragment that still exists in this world is the one inside you."

He held her gaze for a long moment, the weight of what she had just told him settling slowly and heavily into his chest. He didn’t have a dramatic response to it, no outburst or denial, just a quiet, sober understanding of exactly how significant those words were.

His entire bloodline, wiped out, until it came down to one person who had wandered into this world without even knowing what he was carrying.

He exhaled slowly through his nose, looking back down at his hands.

"Then why are you appearing now?" he asked. "The fragment recovery is still at one percent."

"Because you finally met the conditions," she said, folding her hands in front of her as she drifted slightly closer.

"The system I embedded into the bloodline was designed to trigger a projection the moment the last remaining host achieved three things simultaneously. Surviving contact with a Transcendent-tier item, absorbing a hostile essence above 4 shard rank as they now call it, and crossing the threshold into the second mana ring. You accomplished all three within the span of a single night."

He thought about it for a second and realized she was right. The Spirit Ring, Maren’s demonic core, and the EXP threshold, all of it stacked on top of each other in rapid succession. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

She had designed the conditions specifically so that only someone with the bloodline and the strength to survive what was coming would ever trigger the projection, and there was no point appearing to someone who would simply die.

He had nothing to say to that, so he didn’t try, and before he could even form another question she simply reached out and opened his system panel with the same casual ease someone might use to flip open a book, the full interface blooming into the air between them without any input from him whatsoever.

He watched her eyes move across the screen with calm, practiced familiarity, swiping through his stat page like she owned it.

She scrolled past his mana output reading, paused briefly on his skill list, tapped the entry for the Chains of the Goddess and read through the weapon’s growth log without a word, and then continued past his inventory without stopping until she reached something that made her slow down.

The stream chat history.

She tilted her head, her pupils rotating faintly as she scrolled through the archived comments from past broadcasts.

[ ShadowMage44: bro is taking beastkin traits ]

[ DarkBlade: that was the craziest thing I have ever seen ]

[ CringeSlayer91: he’s literally flying right now ]

[ ShadowMage44: broke the guild’s most expensive artifact and got away with it lmao. legendary. ]

[ NewViewer_02: the stats... look at her stats! ]

A small, quiet sound escaped her, something that took him a full second to recognize as a suppressed laugh.

"Your audience is very invested," she said, swiping the chat window closed and returning to his stat page with the same unhurried composure.

"Please don’t read my chat," he said nervously.

She ignored him entirely.