Chapter 1: The Price of a God's Tooth

Chapter 1: The Price of a God's Tooth

The air in Singapore, even filtered twenty-eight stories up, tasted of money, ozone, and orchids. Kaelen Cross, perched in the ventilation shaft above the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple’s most sacred chamber, tasted only the metallic tang of recycled air and his own focus. Below him, the heart of the heist lay bathed in a soft, reverent glow: a single, luminescent canine tooth resting on a bed of golden threads, encased within a stupa of solid gold.

Two million dollars for a tooth. Kael smirked into the darkness. His anonymous client, a voice on an encrypted line who called himself ‘Mr. Silk,’ certainly had expensive taste in dental work.

The chamber was a masterpiece of security, a fusion of ancient reverence and bleeding-edge technology. Infrared sensors, tuned to a whisper, painted the air in invisible tripwires. The floor was a single, weighted plate, calibrated to the gram. Even the air pressure was monitored. A sneeze could trigger the lockdown. For anyone else, it was a fortress. For Kael, it was a puzzle box, and he was a master of finding the seams.

Desire. The two million was more than just money; it was freedom. Freedom from the ghost-like existence of a master thief, freedom to finally disappear and build a life where he didn’t have to look over his shoulder.

His chronometer, a vintage mechanical piece he’d restored himself, ticked silently on his wrist. 03:00:00. The precise moment the temple’s backup power cycled, creating a 1.7-second window of sensory lag. Not an outage, just a hiccup. But a hiccup was all he needed.

He dropped from the vent, a shadow detaching from other shadows. His carbon-fiber boots, soled with pressure-dispersing gel, made less sound than a prayer. He moved in a practiced, fluid dance between the invisible beams, his body a whisper on the edge of detection. This was his art. The thrill wasn't in the prize, but in the performance.

The golden stupa sat on a marble pedestal. Kael’s custom-built scanner, no larger than a pen, projected a faint blue grid over the casing. He’d studied the schematics for weeks. It had a biometric lock tied to the Abbot’s heartbeat, a thermal trigger, and a microscopic vibrational sensor. Touching it was out of the question.

Obstacle. The fortress was as impenetrable as advertised. But every fortress has a secret door.

Kael didn’t try to crack the lock. He bypassed it entirely. From his belt, he unspooled a filament of phased monomolecular wire, a black-market military toy that cost more than a luxury car. He looped it around the base of the stupa’s glass cover. With a soft click, he activated the emitter. The wire vibrated at a frequency that tricked the glass into believing it wasn't solid. It didn't cut; it simply phased through. The vibrational sensors remained silent, blissfully unaware that their protective shell had been fundamentally compromised.

A perfect circle of glass lifted away with a faint hiss of displaced air. The air in the room grew thick, heavy with an energy he couldn't explain. It was like the hum of a high-voltage transformer, but felt ancient, alive. He dismissed it as nerves. Professionalism was about ignoring the ghosts in the machine.

His gloved fingers, nimble and sure, hovered over the relic. The tooth seemed to pulse with a light of its own, a pearlescent glow that defied the physics of the room. This was it. The final move.

Action. He reached in.

The moment his fingertip brushed the cool, smooth surface of the tooth, the world broke.

It wasn't an explosion. It was a sound, a crystalline crack that echoed not in the room, but inside his skull. The soft lights of the chamber fractured, splintering into a million rainbow shards. The very fabric of the space around him seemed to tear open like fine silk, revealing a swirling, golden void filled with geometric patterns and what looked like burning script.

Panic, a cold and unfamiliar viper, coiled in his gut. He snatched his hand back, but it was too late. The tooth didn't move, but a searing, golden light shot from it, engulfing his hand, his arm, his entire being. It wasn't a burn; it was a flood of pure information, of raw existence pouring into him.

Then, the interface appeared.

Floating in his vision, as real as the splintering room around him, were glowing golden letters. They weren't English, but a flowing, intricate script that looked like Sanskrit, yet he understood them perfectly.

[SYSTEM INITIATED: DHARMA INTERFACE]

[SOUL-BINDING IN PROGRESS... 12%... 37%... 68%...]

[ERROR! UNAUTHORIZED HOST DETECTED. FORCING SYNCHRONIZATION...]

[WARNING: COSMIC LOCK INTEGRITY COMPROMISED. REALITY ANOMALY DETECTED AT HOST COORDINATES.]

[SOUL-BIND COMPLETE. WELCOME, WARLOCK.]

Warlock? The word was alien, nonsensical. Kael stumbled back, his heart hammering against his ribs. His thief’s mind, a finely tuned machine of logic and angles, had just been sledgehammered by the impossible. This wasn't a security system. This was something else entirely. Something wrong.

Result. He had the key, but it had unlocked a door he never knew existed.

The alarms finally blared, a screeching, mundane sound in the face of cosmic madness. Red lights strobed through the fractured reality, casting bloody shadows on the walls. But the alarms weren't the real threat.

A flicker in the corner of the room. A distortion, like heat haze on asphalt. The air shimmered, then solidified.

Three figures coalesced from nothingness.

They wore simple, ill-fitting grey suits, the kind that made a man forgettable. Their faces were smooth, almost featureless, their expressions utterly blank. They didn't carry guns or knives. One held a simple, metallic rod that hummed with a bone-deep vibration. Another’s hands were empty, but shimmered with the same reality-distorting haze from which they had appeared.

Turning Point. These weren’t temple guards. They weren’t police. They didn’t move like men. They moved like programs executing a command, their steps silent, their focus absolute. And it was all aimed at him.

The system in his vision flashed a new, terrifying message in stark, crimson script.

[WARNING! CLASS-G JANITORIAL UNIT DETECTED!]

[THREAT LEVEL: TERMINAL.]

[RECOMMENDATION: EVADE. SURVIVE.]

The figure with the rod raised it. It didn't fire a bullet or a laser. A wave of shimmering energy washed out, and the solid marble pedestal it touched didn't break or explode. It simply ceased to be. One moment it was there, the next, it was gone, leaving nothing but undisturbed air. They weren't here to capture him. They were here to delete him.

Surprise. His two-million-dollar heist had just become a fight for his very existence against men who could erase reality.

Kael’s survival instincts screamed. He threw himself sideways, crashing through a display case of lesser artifacts. The sound of shattering glass was a comforting anchor to the world he knew. He scrambled to his feet, his mind reeling. All his skills, his stealth, his gadgets, his years of experience—they were all useless. How do you pick the lock on a man who can walk through walls? How do you sneak past an enemy who can un-exist you?

He sprinted for the exit, his body a blur of desperate motion. Behind him, there was no sound of pursuit, only the chilling, silent advance of the men in grey.

He’d come here as a ghost, the best thief in the world, to steal the tooth of a god. Now, bleeding and hunted by impossible assassins, he was starting to understand the price.