Chapter 1: The Ritual of Echoes

Chapter 1: The Ritual of Echoes

The rain was a cold, merciless curtain, washing the neon glow of Seoul's back alleys into slick, bleeding colours on the asphalt. It mingled with a warmer, thicker red that pooled beneath Jaehwan, turning the grimy ground into a canvas of his failure. Pain was a white-hot scream in his side, a ragged tear where a consecrated silver blade had ripped through muscle and organ.

Betrayal. The word was a fouler taste in his mouth than the blood he was choking on. He could still see their faces—men he’d called brothers, members of the Circle of Dusk. They had cornered him, their expressions grimly resolute, their weapons raised not against a monster, but against him. Their words echoed in his skull, sharper than the blade that had gutted him. “It’s for the greater good, Jaehwan. A necessary sacrifice.”

His own people. They’d left him to die in the filth like the very creatures they hunted.

His desire was a primal, desperate thing: live. But the obstacle was the life draining from him with every shallow, rattling breath. His hunter's constitution, honed through years of brutal training and minor alchemical enhancements, was failing. The wound was too deep, the silver's poison too potent. He pressed a trembling hand against the gash, but it was like trying to dam a river with a leaf.

He was twenty-three years old and his life was ending here, drowned in rain and his own blood.

Unless…

An image surfaced in his mind, dredged up from the deepest, most forbidden archives of the Circle. A folio bound in human skin, its pages filled with script that seemed to writhe if you stared too long. A ritual his mentors had warned him was heresy, a direct line to powers so ancient and hungry they made the common vampire look like a gnat. The Ritual of Echoes. It promised power, life, a second chance… for a price the text never fully dared to name.

It was his only choice. Death was certain. Damnation was just a possibility.

Action. With a groan that tore through his throat, Jaehwan dragged himself up, using the slick brick wall for support. His vision swam, a tunnel of wavering neon. He ignored the searing agony and dipped the fingers of his free hand into the deepest part of his own wound, coating them in his lifeblood.

He began to draw on the wall. The symbol wasn't complex, a spiraling sigil with a jagged, thorn-like core, but every line he traced felt like it was carving a twin into his very soul. As his blood-slick fingers completed the mark, he forced the ancient words from his lips. They were guttural, alien, a language that felt like swallowing gravel and glass.

“Anima Sanguine, Resona in Vacuo…” he rasped, the incantation a desperate prayer to a god he knew he shouldn't worship. “Voco te, qui dormis in silentio…”

The world answered.

The relentless drumming of the rain ceased, not gradually, but as if a switch had been flipped. The cacophony of the distant city—the blare of horns, the thrum of life—was snuffed out into an oppressive, tomb-like silence. The air grew heavy, thick with the scent of ozone and something else… something ancient, like dust from a forgotten crypt and the cold perfume of dried blood.

The bloody sigil on the wall began to glow, a malevolent, pulsing crimson that cast his pale face in demonic light. A tremor ran through the ground beneath him, and a cold deeper than the rain seeped into his bones, a cold that came from within. His vision tunneled into a pinpoint of black, and he knew no more.

When consciousness returned, it was not a gentle waking. It was a violent, instantaneous snap back into reality.

The first thing he registered was the absence of pain. The gaping wound in his side was gone. He frantically clawed at his shirt, tearing the blood-soaked fabric aside. The skin was pale and unbroken, save for a new mark: a faint, intricate scar that spiraled out from his hip like a faded, ghostly tattoo, the echo of the sigil he had drawn.

The result of his desperate action was survival. But the turning point was the price.

His senses exploded. He could hear the frantic heartbeat of a stray cat hiding in a dumpster two blocks away. He could smell the faintest trace of cheap perfume on a woman stepping out of a club on the main street. He could see with an impossible clarity, each individual raindrop hanging suspended in the air for a fraction of a second before it struck the ground. His own heart—it beat with a slow, powerful thud that felt alien in his chest. A deep, predatory rhythm that was not his own.

And he was not alone.

A voice, not heard with his ears but felt in the marrow of his bones, echoed through his mind. It was ancient, imperious, and laced with a profound, chilling arrogance.

A flimsy ritual for a dying rat, and you captured a god. You should be grateful, mortal.

Jaehwan staggered back, his mind reeling. “Who… who are you?” he thought, the question a panicked shriek in his own head.

A low, cruel chuckle was the answer. I am the will that now animates your flesh. I am the power that knitted your pathetic form back together. I am Kasian. And this body… this vessel… is now mine.

Horror, cold and absolute, seized him. This was the price. Not his soul, but his very self. He was a passenger in his own body, a prisoner in his own skull. He tried to fight, to scream, to push the invasive presence out, but it was like a mouse trying to fight a python that had already swallowed it whole. Kasian’s consciousness was a vast, dark ocean, and Jaehwan’s was a single, drowning drop.

Struggle, little hunter. It is amusing, Kasian’s voice mocked, laced with the boredom of a timeless being. You were a tool for your so-called ‘Circle.’ Now, you are a tool for me. Your purpose has simply been elevated.

Suddenly, Kasian’s amusement vanished, replaced by a sudden, sharp intake of… something. A scent? A feeling? Jaehwan’s head snapped to the side, his gaze fixed on the distant, glittering towers of the city, an action not his own. His new, predatory senses zeroed in on something far away, a thread of energy, a psychic resonance that felt both achingly familiar and utterly unique.

Jaehwan felt a jolt of recognition, a phantom pain across his collarbone, but the feeling was drowned out by the overwhelming, possessive surge from the entity within him. Kasian’s voice dropped to a low, possessive whisper, a sound more terrifying than any shout.

This scent… I know this soul. After all these centuries… buried in this squalid age… she is here.

A wave of emotion that was not Jaehwan’s own crashed through him—a timeless, obsessive hunger that was part adoration and part raw, predatory need. Images flooded his mind, unbidden: a throne of black stone, a queen with dark hair and eyes that held the stars, a cataclysm of blood and shadow.

My queen, the voice resonated, a vow of reclamation.

Before Jaehwan could even begin to process the vision or the impossible words, his body moved. It was a fluid, predatory motion, entirely unlike his own trained, human gait. With superhuman speed and grace, his legs coiled and launched him from the alley. He landed silently on a fire escape, his muscles burning with a power that terrified him.

“No! Stop!” Jaehwan screamed in his own mind, fighting for control.

Kasian paid him no heed. Jaehwan was a ghost in the machine, a helpless observer as his own hands gripped the cold metal railing and vaulted upwards, scaling the side of the building with effortless ease. From the rooftop, the sprawling city lights were a hunting ground. And Kasian, wearing Jaehwan’s face, had found his prey.

His silver-grey eyes, now bleeding to a glowing, blood-red, scanned the horizon.

We have found her, vessel. Do not fight me. Rejoice.

Jaehwan could only watch in terror as his own body began to move, a puppet pulled by the strings of an ancient sovereign, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, a shadow cutting through the rain-swept night.

The hunt had begun.