"The end came not with a scream, but with a whisper." "A whisper that did not echo, for even silence had abandoned the world."

  No one remembered the first time a star vanished.

  Not truly.

  They only remembered when the sky cracked—when the void began to drink light, swallowing gaxies as if the universe itself was being erased word by word, memory by memory.

  Xen stood alone on a bridge of shattered steel, the wind absent, the sun a pale ghost behind ash-filled clouds. He wasn’t afraid of death.

  He was afraid of dying meaninglessly.

  A girl cried nearby—bloodied, barefoot, no older than ten. Xen didn’t think. His body moved. He ran. He shielded her as the bck wave surged forward like a tide made of night.

  > "If I must vanish," he thought, "then let her remain."

  And then—

  Nothing.

  Not darkness. Not cold. Just… the absence of being.

  > [System Integration: 98%... 99%... Complete.] [Welcome, Host. You have been granted access to the Apocalypse System.] [Survive. Adapt. Transcend. Or be erased.]

  He gasped awake—lungs pulling in a strange air that smelled like incense and blood.

  His hands were small. Pale. Noble.

  His breath caught.

  A mirror beside him revealed a stranger’s face—youthful, silver-haired, marked with a faint crescent under one golden eye. Not his face. Not his body.

  But his soul… oh, it burned the same.

  He staggered to his feet. Outside the window, the sky had begun to crack—not metaphorically. There were fractures in the firmament, spreading like spiderwebs of light and void.

  And beyond those cracks… eyes. Watching.

  > [World Cssification: Grade-A Apocalypse World] [Camity Progress: 17%] [New Objective: Survive the Fall of the Dao.] [System Path Unlocked: Camity Devourer] You grow stronger through extinction, chaos, and colpse.

  Xen stood still, staring at the sky.

  The heavens were not blue. They were bleeding.

  And in his chest, something ancient stirred—a fragment of something forbidden. A shard of a memory not his own, whispering of gods who died screaming and stars that were never born.

  He closed his eyes.

  Then he smiled.

  "The first time I died, I died protecting a world that was already broken." "This time..."

  He turned toward the door, where chaos and destiny waited.

  "Let the world break itself."