First Light of a New Age

Chapter 140: Two Great Empires

Third Civilization Zone, Austronesia People's Empire, Austronesian Black Site, Classified Containment Bay.

2nd Year of God, Tuesday, 2nd Week, Month of Noah.

“U-urh…”

Mason’s eyes cracked open and a soft grunt slipped from his lips as consciousness clawed its way back.

He felt... wrong.

His body was heavy and stiff, almost as if he hadn't moved it in weeks. His limbs protested as he tried to move them, and his breath came slow, as if his lungs had forgotten how to work. His vision was a blur of white and gray at first, but gradually sharpened that revealed harsh lights above and metallic surfaces all around him.

Cold. He was lying on something cold.

He blinked a few more times and tried to reorient himself. It didn’t feel like a hospital bed, because the surface beneath him was too cold. The sheets, if they could be called that, were made of a material more suited for decontamination than comfort.

He shifted, sitting up with effort, and took in his surroundings.

"Where... is this?" he muttered roughly like sandpaper scraping metal.

As his eyes adjusted, he realized the room was no hospital. It was a containment chamber, one designed not for healing, but control. 

The walls was made out of adamantite alloy, layered with runes and glyphs that pulsed faintly in the corners. Mason didn’t need to be a mage to sense the enchantments laced into every inch of the space with magical suppression fields, radiation shielding, surveillance wards, and reinforced glass.

Everything here was built was to trap something dangerous.

And that something… was him.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed. Despite the stiffness, his muscles responded too well and fast. There was no soreness and no disorientation. Just a strange sense of strength buzzing beneath his skin, like his nerves were wired into something beyond human.

More than that, he could feel everything.

He could hear the electric energy in the walls, feel the steady thrum of mana drifting through the air like distant whispers, and even the vibration of machines, deep beneath the floor, pulsed in sync with his heartbeat.

"What the hell... happened to me?" he asked, louder now. “Why do I feel like I can hear the damn power lines in the walls?”

His hand rose instinctively to his forehead, and froze.

His fingers brushed against something solid and unnatural. A texture that didn’t belong. It was cold and smooth like bone.

There was something there, something that hadn't been there before.

He stumbled to his feet and looked around the room until he found a reflective panel built into the wall, like a mirror.

He approached it slowly, and what he saw made his stomach drop.

It was his face… but it had changed.

His eyes glowed faintly red, like embers smoldering behind flesh, and his skin, which was once tan, was now slightly paler, but the most horrorifying were the two curved bone-like horns sprouting from his head.

"No..." Mason whispered as he backed away from the mirror and his hands trembled. "No. No. This isn’t real.”

He turned and grabbed onto the edge of a nearby console to steady himself. His breath came fast and erratic as panic set in like cold water crashing over him.