Somewhere in Eastern Europe – Unknown TP Observation Facility.
Renji Kurogane didn't wake up.
He detonated into consciousness like a virus rebooting an old machine. One second: static. The next: nausea, vertigo, blood in his mouth, and a dozen screaming alarms in his skull.
A voice followed. Familiar. Unforgivable.
—"Vital signs returning. Heart rate: unstable. Memory matrix: corrupted. Subject is... alive."
He hated being referred to as a "subject."
Especially by people who used words like "matrix" and "unstable" with that clinical cheerfulness reserved for psychopaths and IKEA assembly guides.
He opened his eyes.
Bright lights. Pale walls. No windows.
And on the opposite side of the room, a woman with a clipboard and the look of someone who hadn't slept since Y2K.
"Hana," Renji croaked, "you look like death warmed over and left in a microwave."
She didn't smile. She never smiled when he was like this.
"You almost bled out. Again."
"Cool. Where are my relics?"
Silence.
He sat up too fast. A wave of nausea punched him back into the cot.
"Renji," she said slowly, "you triggered the Gem of the Name. You saw something. Said things in a language we don't even recognize. And then you passed out, clutching it like a holy grenade."
Renji rubbed his eyes.
"Sounds like me."
Hana dropped the clipboard. Walked over. Sat down at the edge of the cot.
"You don't remember what you said, do you?"
He stared at her.
"No. But I remember something worse."
She raised an eyebrow.
"I remember that I believed it."
Three Hours Later – TP Briefing Room Epsilon-7
They gave Renji coffee. Mistake. Bad idea. The man shouldn't have caffeine and trauma in the same bloodstream.
A hologram of a map glowed in the center of the room.
Hana stood next to it, arms crossed. Renji paced like a junkie with academic obsession.
"Five relics," he muttered. "Two in my possession. Three out there. Spectra has one confirmed. Kael Vortiger may have another."
"And the fifth?" Hana asked.
"I don't know," Renji replied. "But I had a dream last night. Black stairs. An altar made of teeth. A door that blinked at me."
"Renji…"
"It blinked at me, Hana."
Silence.
Renji turned to face her. For a second, he looked almost… lucid.
"I need to go back."
"To the ruins?"
"To where it all started. Valemont Academy."
Flashback – 2000, Valemont Academy, Romania
Fifteen-year-old Renji was the kind of student teachers both admired and feared. Brilliant, solitary, sarcastic. The perfect student… if your goal was to raise a sociopath with a God complex and a library card.
Valemont wasn't Hogwarts. It was more like if Hogwarts was run by the TVA, built on a cursed necropolis, and funded by old aristocratic families with way too many skeletons—literal and metaphorical.
Renji's dorm room had a secret compartment.Inside: a book no one could read and a fragment of a metallic shard that sometimes hummed when he had nightmares.
He was already dreaming of symbols. Already hearing names in his sleep.
One of them... was Jin.
Back to Present – TP Base
Renji stood in front of the TP agent board. Photos, timelines, coded symbols.
"Do you know what 'Jin' means in Sumerian proto-script?" he asked.
Hana frowned. "You can't possibly know that."
"I didn't," Renji said. "Until the Gem showed me."
He picked up a marker. Wrote on the board:
JIN = THE AWAKENING THAT SHOULDN'T REMEMBER ITSELF.
Hana stared.
"That's not translation. That's prophecy."
Renji shrugged.
"Same difference."
—
Suddenly, the lights flickered.
An alarm buzzed low and wrong.
Renji looked at Hana.
"That's not a drill, is it?"
"No."
A voice came through the intercom. Panicked.
—"Containment breach in Sector 3. Subject Nocturna has vanished. We have no visual. Repeat—she's inside the base."
Renji turned to Hana.
"You've got a Spectra assassin in your closet."
Hana grabbed a pulse weapon from the wall.
"And you've got five minutes to remember who you were before she does."
Renji grabbed the relic case and muttered something in a forgotten tongue.The Gem pulsed.
From the ceiling vent, something purred.
Then whispered his name.
"Renji… Kurogane…"