Autophagy

A hoarse cough from a hoarse throat resounded. The darkness rolled and churned, accompanied by the endless silence of the stale air that had been circulating in the same, enclosed space for who knows how long.

Occasionally, a whisper would fill his ears. The whisper of someone dear, a whisper from the dead, a whisper from those who are to come, a whisper of now, and the endless possibilities of the impossible.

He could imagine. He could imagine the fact that outside, everything continued as always, not batting an eye on him nor any other person. The wind howled as always, with dark yellow clouds blanketing them from the unknown. They moved, but to where?

In an endless world where no one knew the end to the endless lines of concrete, a peculiar apartment stood out; Not to the untrained eye, maybe. However, to those who knew how the gears of fate turned, it was like a vortex. A vortex that caused reality to abhor, to do its best to stay away. However, it was there. Existence was a bitch, even to existence itself.

And amidst all these sat a peculiar young adult, right inside the eye of the storm. Protected from the harsh reality of the situation (somewhat).

He coughed once more, wiping his mouth slightly before closing his eyes to gather his thoughts, to calm his heart down. That wasn't easy to do. He knew, he knew that he had to overcome the harsh reality one way or another.

He couldn't stuff it away into a further corner of his soul and hope it would go away. No, that wouldn't work. Such emotions would always come back and bite him in the back.

For this reason, he sat there. Engraving the scene of his friends' deaths; how their expressions looked. Even in a place like the New World, he could see fading bits of hope in their eyes. Those bits of hope were there, even when they were dead, somewhere far away, fleeting away like stardust.

At least that was what Song Lei hoped. That was what he wished for to be true

"*Sigh"

From his lungs, through his trachea, right out of his mouth came a deep sigh. Expelling turbid air all the while acting as a sigh that indicated his worries of the future. He had great power in his hands.

Looking to his right, he saw a transparent screen floating in the air silently, without acting as a disturbance.

[With constant practice, your Control stat has risen!]

"That makes it five..." He mumbled as he read the line of words written on the transparent screen. Although not much, it gave him a slight amount of relief, a relief that came from the fact that he was still progressing.

"It has already been a week, huh..." Song Lei muttered. He had recently gained this habit of talking to himself. Talking out his own thoughts seemed to be an awkward way of relaxing, however, it worked nonetheless.

For the last week, he had been constantly sitting or lying on his bed. Other than showering and eating occasionally, he would spend all of his time practicing his control over his soul energy. If he could, he would've left the apartment to take a short walk. Fresh air would serve him well. Unfortunately, his strength wasn't that up to the task yet. He wanted to get a little bit stronger and make sure that he could go up to the roof with a single jump.

Of course, there was always a more 'basic' way to do this. He could go to the stairwell and start ascending all the floors, one by one. As long as he were to keep his distance from the entrance of the floor, he wouldn't get pulled into a dream space.

There was a 'slight' problem with this though.

If he were to get that close to the apartment manager who lived on the uppermost floor (probably), he would get noticed. What would happen after that? He didn't know. However, it would most definitely not be an enjoyable experience.

As another deep sigh escaped his mouth, Song Lei got up and decided to pay Aston a visit. He had recently visited Isabel, however, it had been a long amount of time since he had seen Aston. The reason was him not wanting to disturb his research.

The last time he saw Aston (before their fight with the hazes), he was, once again, having an intense research session. He had even ordered some materials from the system shop, making Song Lei even more curious about his research.

Traversing the dark and eerie stairs quickly and dashing into the floor that was covered with blue circuit lines that were now repaired from the damages caused by the intense fight, Song Lei found his way into Aston's room without knocking on the door.

Aston was there, as always, staring at a monitor that seemed relatively modern. On it, weird graphs and long lines of mathematical equations continued rolling, imparting some knowledge that Song Lei had no idea how to understand.

Opposite to him, Aston was absorbed. He had a smile that usually appeared only when he was researching on his face. Song Lei knew that this was what Aston was. Although he still deeply cared about his friends, science was something divine to him.

Song Lei sat there and watched Aston study the graphs on the screen while wearing a lab coat. He was so concentrated that he hadn't even realized the fact that Song Lei was there.

As the computer kept beeping and the data kept rolling, Aston's eyes started shining brighter and brighter.

He would even occasionally mutter words such as 'interesting' or 'weird' on his own.

This put Song Lei at an ease. It was like a type of meditation for Aston, putting aside every distraction in his mind and focusing on only one thing.

Sitting in his place, occasionally changing his sitting style, pacing up and down the room from time to time, he waited for Aston to finish his job.

"This..." Aston muttered as he pushed himself away from the table. To make sure that he was reading the data correctly, he took a closer look. After inspecting it for some more time, he finally realized that what he had found was, indeed, true.

Slumping down over his office chair, Aston pushed himself to the middle of the room and spun the chair in excitement.

This action caused him to realize that Song Lei was there, watching him from behind carefully with a wide smile on his face.

"Huh... Since when were you there?" Aston asked with a raised brow. It wasn't usual for him to not be able to notice someone's presence.

"Since when? About the time when you were staring at that blanket-like image on the screen," Song Lei said.

"I've been doing that since... Oh sorry, I must be a bit too tired to understand your jokes now..." He muttered.

"Wait... Tired?" Song Lei asked, confused about how a ghost could feel tired.

"Well, hungry, to be exact," Aston said. He got up from his chair and went to a corner of the room, taking out a glass bottle from what seemed like a fridge. Inside it was blank soul fragments that Song Lei had given to them as food. "This stuff is really good. Now that I'm properly eating, it feels weird to be hungry again..."

"Tell me whenever you need more," Song Lei said. Even with the current consumption rate, he would get much more blood beads passively than he spent them on food.

"Mm..." Aston nodded as he chugged down the bottle of soul fragments.

Making a loud noise of satisfaction after finishing drinking, he put the bottle back into the fridge to refill at a later date.

"The apartment has been recovering well," Aston said out of nowhere. Thinking about it for a second, Song Lei realized what he was talking about. During the attack from the Secret Blood Order where the person named Andres used centipedes to take over, the apartment itself was badly hurt. The Secret Blood Order's goal was to take over the apartment, however, they were also hurting it badly while doing so.

Although with time, those wounds closed up, they didn't heal fully. With the attack from the hazes reopening the wounds on the apartment, it was weaker than ever.

"I asked before but you didn't answer," Song Lei said. "What happens if the apartment 'dies'?"

"One of the most discerning abilities of a living being is that it has inner organization," Aston started explaining without waiting. "If the apartment dies, it loses its ability to achieve homeostasis. Shortly, the insides of the apartment become one with the outside."

"That means..."

"Yeah," Aston said without waiting for Song Lei to finish his sentence.

"If the apartment dies, outsiders will enter. Whatever horrors there are in the outside, they'll all come in and fill the apartment."

"If that happens, we're doomed...."