The "Branding" wasn't a mark of magic; it was the smell of burning flesh.
Matheo screamed as the white-hot iron, shaped like the symbol for 'Laborer,' was pressed into his shoulder. No one comforted him. The guard simply kicked him toward a line of men chained at the ankles.
"Move, Thirty-Silver," the guard spat.
Matheo was sent to the South Foundation. His job was simple and lethal: haul obsidian-wood logs from the mud to the stone masons. In the 1.5x gravity of Aetherion, a log that weighed 100kg on Earth felt like 150kg here.
By the end of the first 20-hour shift, his hands were raw, bleeding, and filled with splinters. He was thrown into a "dormitory"—which was nothing more than a shallow trench covered by a leaking tarp. He slept in six inches of cold mud, surrounded by the smell of unwashed bodies and the sound of men weeping in the dark.
He was fed once a day: a bowl of gray, watery grain mash that tasted like dust.The overseers were brutal. They carried whips tipped with shards of monster bone. If a slave slowed down, the whip cracked. Matheo took three lashes across his back on Day 7 because his legs buckled under a heavy stone.
The pain was incandescent. He felt the skin rip, the heat of his blood running down his spine. But that night, as he lay face-down in the mud, the "Itch" returned. It was more aggressive now. His body was desperate. It pulled the meager nutrients from his watery porridge and focused everything on the whip wounds.
By morning, the gashes were closed, but Matheo felt like he had run a marathon in his sleep. He was hollow. His ribs began to stick out. His eyes sank into his skull. He looked like a walking corpse.It happened during the midnight shift under the eerie glow of the Moon of Silence. The camp was deathly quiet, save for the rhythmic thud of hammers.
Matheo tripped. A guard immediately moved in, the whip raised. "Get up, you useless rat!"
Matheo didn't move. For a second, his mind slipped. He wasn't in the mud. He was back at the graduation party. He smelled his mother's perfume. He heard his best friend laughing about a stupid joke. He felt the warmth of a pizza box on his lap. It was so real, so bright...
The whip cracked across his shoulder, snapping him back to the filth.
That night, for the first time, Matheo broke. He crawled to the corner of the mud-trench, tucked his head between his knees, and sobbed. He didn't cry for his life; he cried for the 21-year-old kid who thought he had a future. He cried for the parents who would never know their son died alone in a hospital, only to be sold for 30 silver in a nightmare.
"I want to go home," he whispered into the mud. "Please... I just want to go home."
But there was no home. There was only the sound of the rain and the distant roar of monsters beyond the walls.Something changed in Matheo on the 13th day. The part of his brain—the part that had studied economics and psychology—finally clawed its way out of the grief.
He stopped crying. He started observing.
While he hauled stones, he counted the guards. He watched the mana-lanterns and realized they dimmed every six hours. He noticed that the slaves who died were the ones who fought back or the ones who gave up. To survive, he had to be a ghost.
His healing was working faster now, though still subtle. The splinters in his hands would be gone by morning. The bruising on his shins faded in hours. He was becoming a "perfect slave"—he never broke, he never got sick, and he always kept moving.
On the 17th day, the Governor of the settlement arrived. He was looking for 50 "Sturdy" laborers for a special task: a high-risk expedition to clear the rubble of the Dungeon Core that had caused the blast.
The guard walked down the line, hitting men with a stick. Most fell. Matheo stood. His eyes were dead, his body was a skeleton of muscle and scar tissue, but he stood.
"This one," the guard said, pointing at Matheo. "He's 30-silver, but he's got the constitution of a Rank-F. He hasn't collapsed once in seventeen days."
Matheo was unchained from the mud-trench and led toward a group of armored soldiers. He didn't know where he was going, but as he looked at the high walls, his "Cold Mind" made a promise.
You bought me for 30 silver, he thought, his eyes tracking the guard's throat. By the time I'm finished, this whole kingdom won't have enough gold to pay for what you've done to me.