Darkness wrapped around him like a warm sea.
He drifted — weightless, endless — cradled in the Cocoon of Authority, slumbering at the heart of the Silent Abyss.
And somewhere, deep inside the layers of his being,
he dreamed.
It was raining.
Not the silver rains of the Abyss, but something smaller — warmer — dripping onto cracked pavement under a leaden sky.
He stood on a street corner, hands shoved deep into the pockets of a tattered jacket,
watching the world move past him without ever touching him.
He was…
human.
A boy — maybe seventeen, maybe eighteen — tall, a little too thin, with hair that curled just slightly when it was wet.
His eyes — gold and ancient even then — watched the world with a distant kind of longing.
He remembered now.
Not in full, but enough.
He had lived.
Before the Throne.
Before the Plane.
Before the stars bowed at his name.
He had walked among mortals.
He had eaten cheap ramen under flickering neon lights.
He had scraped coins together to buy secondhand manga.
He had stayed up all night, binge-watching anime that filled the aching silence he could never explain.
Naruto.
Bleach.
One Piece.
Fairy Tail.
Stories of heroes.
Of gods and monsters.
Of power and destiny.
He had dreamed of escaping — of becoming something more than a nameless face in a sea of ordinary lives.
He had dreamed…
without ever knowing that the universe was listening.
He remembered sitting on the frayed couch in his tiny, crumbling apartment —
watching Luffy declare he would become King of the Pirates,
watching Naruto swear he would become Hokage,
watching Ichigo reach deep inside himself and pull power from places no one else could reach.
And he had laughed —
a small, broken laugh —
because some part of him had believed.
Some part of him had known.
"I don't belong here," he had whispered to the empty room,
his voice almost breaking.
"I'm meant for something else."
The dream shifted.
Memories fractured and reformed like glass under heat.
He saw flashes —
a strange meeting under a blood-red sky,
a coin pressed into his hand by a woman with silver eyes,
a doorway opening where there should have been none.
A choice.
A calling.
And then…
The Throne.
The Void.
The Black Plane.
The birth of Seraphis.
The forging of Caelora.
Veyrath.
His true name, waiting for him in the marrow of existence itself.
He stirred slightly within the Cocoon.
The Plane trembled — not from violence,
but from the sheer pressure of memories returning.
Yet he did not wake.
Not yet.
The system flickered gently within his dreaming mind:
[Host Emotional Core: Stabilizing.]
[Memory Integration: 0.01% Complete.]
[Primordial Soul Harmonization: In Progress.]
He drifted deeper into the dream, into himself,
the mortal echoes of who he once was blending into the king he had become.
The lonely boy on the street corner was gone.
The dreamer beneath the neon lights was gone.
But their hopes —
their desperate hunger for meaning —
remained.
Carved into every throne.
Every mountain.
Every river of silver light.
They had not been lies.
They had been promises.
And Veyrath intended to keep them.