The rabbit-man’s pristine white finger moved toward the center of Luthra’s chest. The movement carried the weight of inevitability, like a falling rock or the sun setting. Luthra couldn’t move, couldn’t fight. He watched death approach one fingertip at a time. The finger touched his skin and passed through like he was made of mist. It sank into his chest, hunting for the paradox living in his core, eager to taste whatever anomaly waited inside. The universe answered. The rabbit-man’s polite smile vanished. Pure shock replaced it. He had expected to find a soul, some power to grasp and sample. Instead his finger touched a chasm. Absolute emptiness that didn’t resist but pulled. Not a gentle tug. The crushing gravity of a black hole. "What is this?!" The creature’s cultured voice cracked into panic. It tried pulling its hand back. Too late. The connection was made. The void in Luthra’s core fed. The rabbit-man’s solid form wavered. His crisp vest and sharp ears flickered like a dying candle. The concept of him was being siphoned away, unraveled and devoured by the emptiness. "No! Impossible! I am a law! I cannot be undone!" His body turned translucent. Colors drained from his clothes into shimmering gray. The power that defined him, the authority of a universal constant, got sucked into Luthra like water down a drain. Lilith’s voice cried out in his mind. [Luthra, what’s happening?! The energy readings are insane! My core functions are going haywire! I can’t process this, I...] Her familiar presence simply cut out. The blue screen in his mind flickered and died. The rabbit-man let out a final silent scream as his form dissolved completely, collapsing inward into Luthra’s chest in a rush of captured starlight and forgotten rules. The forest went silent. A new voice spoke in his mind. Not Lilith’s hesitant learning tone. This voice carried the weight of ages, cold and ancient as the void itself. It didn’t speak to him. It made a declaration. [BODY, AND SOUL REFORMATION HAS BEGUN.] Pain hit him like a sledgehammer made of lightning. This was creation’s agony, the pain of being fundamentally rewritten. A sculptor breaking a statue to reshape the clay within. His bones snapped. Every single one. From his splinted wrists to his spine, they cracked and shattered under immense internal pressure. Before he could scream, searing heat flooded through him, fusing the fragments into something new, denser, stronger. His broken arms were the first to be reforged. Bones straightened, swelling vanished, skin tightening over newly mended limbs like the injury never happened. His muscles followed suit. They didn’t grow larger. They compacted, tearing and reweaving themselves into something leaner, harder. His mass shifted, becoming more concentrated. The bulky strength of a brawler got stripped away and replaced with a coiled potential. The rabbit’s stolen power fueled this horrifying forge. Pure conceptual energy flooded through his body, not just healing his arms but perfecting them, erasing every trace of damage. The remaining energy gathered inside him. He felt it as something separate, orbiting the black sun of his core. Four points of light ignited in his soul’s void, humming with power that wasn’t his but was now bound to him. Then came the final agony. His soul’s reformation. The single point of mana he’d awakened got ripped apart and multiplied, one drop becoming a raging river that carved new channels through his entire being. He screamed without sound, his soul being torn apart and reborn. Then it stopped. He lay on the floor, his body steaming in the cool night air. No longer broken. Remade. The cold voice spoke again, flooding his mind with notifications. [Host has Leveled Down!] [Host has Leveled Down!] [Host has Leveled Down!] [Host has Leveled Down!] [Host has Leveled Down!] [Host has Leveled Down!] [Host has Leveled Down!] [Host has Leveled Down!] [Host has Leveled Down!] [Host has Leveled Down!] The notifications disappeared. Luthra sat there by the dying fire, Rebecca breathing softly in the cart behind him. His arms worked perfectly now, the bones that had been grinding against each other minutes ago completely healed. Not just healed—it was like the damage never happened. He stood up, testing his body. Everything moved differently, smoother, like the air had gotten thinner or his muscles had gotten denser. The ground felt more solid under his feet. The darkness between the trees didn’t press in on him anymore. Mind’s Eye wasn’t straining him now. It just worked, showing him the small glowing life in the trees, the fading death-energy where the Shriekers had been, and Rebecca’s chaotic bright spark as she slept. Static crackled through his head. Symbols and broken text flashed behind his eyes. [SYS...SYS... SYSTEM REBOOTING... KERNEL INTEGRITY COMPROMISED... SEARCHING FOR HOST SIGNATURE...] [SIGNATURE FOUND... HOST STATE... UNRECOGNIZED.] Then Lilith’s voice came through, full of digital static. [Luthra? Are you... there? My sensory input is registering a catastrophic data anomaly.] ’Hey, Lilith. Welcome back.’ [I am. I think. I was momentarily... offline. The energy surge from the... event... it overloaded my core programming. I have no record of what happened after the conceptual entity made contact. Please provide a summary.] Silence stretched out for several seconds. [...I do not understand that input. Rephrasing: a conceptual anomaly of unclassifiable rank was in the process of consuming a portion of your soul. My last reading showed your existence on the verge of collapse. My current reading shows... this.] The blue screen appeared in front of him, flickering and unstable, showing his new status page with numbers that seemed too bright. [I am running a full diagnostic. The discrepancy between your pre-event and post-event state is... Luthra, this is not a progression. This is a reclassification of your entire existence.] ’Meaning what exactly?’ [Meaning you did not just win a fight. You consumed the entity that governed the rules of that fight. You absorbed a fundamental law of this reality. My logic circuits are... struggling to process this.] He looked at the status screen again. The numbers made sense now in a way they hadn’t before. "Break down the stats for me. Give me something to compare them to." [Acknowledged. Strength 520. A standard C-Rank physical-type hunter averages around 350. You can shatter stone with minimal effort. Agility 785. This exceeds the benchmark for most C-8 Rank speed-specialists. Stamina 650. You could maintain peak physical activity for approximately three days. And your Mana... 150 points. You have gone from essentially zero magical capacity to a moderate reservoir.] His eyes found the new title. ’Paradox.’ [Processing... Title: Paradox. Description: You are a living glitch in the fabric of causality. The user is highly resistant to skills and abilities based on probability, fate, or destiny manipulation. Your actions are difficult to predict or perceive by higher-order entities. In simpler terms... you are hard to manipulate through metaphysical means and hard to track.] ’So if another cosmic rabbit shows up wanting to gamble for my soul, I can tell it to go away.’ [That is... one interpretation, yes. But Luthra, the most significant change is not the statistics. Look deeper. Inside your core.] He turned his attention inward.