Chapter 3
Where the Sky Bleeds Red
Anan Srisuwan and Mali Buathong had been watching it unfold for weeks.
At first it was rhetoric. Maritime disputes. Airspace violations. Fleets posturing in contested waters. Analysts on every channel insisted it would never escalate. Too much trade. Too much at stake. Nuclear deterrence still worked, they said. It always worked. Anan wasn’t sure if Thailand had nukes.
Then the feeds began to change.
Satellite images leaked. Carrier groups repositioned. Western alliances activated joint drills that looked less like exercises and more like rehearsal. China answered with missile tests and “defensive deployments.” Commentators smiled tightly while maps behind them filled with red arcs.
“It won’t happen,” one anchor said the night before the first strikes.
“Thailand is safe,” another anchor said.
It happened anyway. Thailand wasn’t safe.
The fighting ignited far from Thailand, over open water, over disputed islands, over pride. Thailand wasn’t a major power. Beaches and temples and backpackers. Street food and monsoon seasons. It had nothing to do with superpower brinkmanship.
But nuclear fire doesn’t care about relevance.
When a detonation struck northern Australia, officially “contained,” officially “limited” - atmospheric models shifted overnight. Winds carried particulates across the sea. Radiation maps bloomed outward like bruises.
By the time the plume reached Siam, no one was pretending anymore.
The ocean had taken Bangkok in three waves.
Three black walls rose from the Gulf, swallowing highways and towers alike. Broadcasts cut mid-sentence. Southern islands vanished from satellite feeds. Then silence.
In the mountains of northern Thailand, there was no water.
Only smoke.
Anan stood on a ridge east of Chiang Mai, where the land folded into layered green mountains and mist pooled between terraced rice fields like pale breath. Pine trees mingled with dense jungle growth. Red earth showed through wherever roots had broken the soil.
Anan and Mali had come north from Bangkok for a university field project, trading traffic, concrete, and heat for cooler air and open horizons. They studied at the same university and had chosen the mountains as the focus of their research. What was meant to be a few quiet weeks of data collection and shared notes had turned into something else entirely.
When the world turned upside down, they were not in lecture halls or crowded streets. They were here, high above the city, surrounded by wind, forest, and the long spine of the mountains. The nearest village clung to a narrow mountain road a few kilometers behind them, wooden houses on stilts, tin roofs reflecting dying light.
Mali held her phone in trembling hands. They’d come farther up the mountain, hoping for a better signal.
“I think Bangkok is gone,” she whispered.
“There’s still no signal,” Anan said quietly.
“My uncle was there.” Her voice cracked. “He worked near the river. He wouldn’t have had time.” She let her phone drop. Then she sat.
Anan swallowed. “Maybe he got out,” he said, sitting beside her.
She shook her head slowly.
“He called me when the first wave hit. I could hear water. People screaming.” She laughed once, hollow. “He said he was climbing to the roof. Then it cut out. He always hated Bangkok. He loved the mountains. The cold air.”
Silence stretched between them.
“I don’t have anyone else now,” she said finally. “My parents died when I was ten. It was just him.”
Anan didn’t know what to say. He'd known Mali for years. He knew her parents had died, but he didn’t think she was actually talking to him.
Anan swallowed, throat tight. The air felt heavy, thick with humidity and something unspoken. He searched her face for the Mali he knew, the sharp-tongued one, the one who laughed too loud in lecture halls and rolled her eyes at his worst jokes, but this version of her was stripped down to something fragile and unfamiliar.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally, hating how small the words sounded.
She gave a faint nondismissive shrug. She was exhausted.
Anan shifted his weight in the damp soil. The jungle pressed close around them, vines coiling like patient serpents, leaves broad enough to swallow the sky.
“You’re not alone,” he said.
The words left him before he could examine them.
Mali’s eyes flicked to his. There was no immediate gratitude in them. No relief.
“He would like you,” she said after a moment.
Anan blinked. “Your uncle?”
She nodded.
“He thinks most people are idiots.” A faint ghost of a smile touched her lips. “But he likes people who ask questions. You ask too many.”
Despite everything, a breath of laughter escaped him. “That’s not a compliment.”
“It is.”
The small shared moment hovered between them, fragile and temporary, but real.
Anan became acutely aware of the sounds around them. Cicadas shrilling in layered rhythms. Something larger moving through undergrowth far off to their left. A constant dripping of condensation from leaf to leaf.
Life. Everywhere.
At university, Anan and Mali majored in environmental biology, and that semester’s project centered on alpine insect populations. Pollinators at elevation. Adaptive morphology. Behavioral shifts in isolated ecosystems. It was the kind of work that required patience more than brilliance; long hours crouched over leaf litter, careful cataloging of beetles and moths, netting dragonflies near streams and labeling specimens beneath a headlamp.
Mali loved it.
She had always loved precision. Clean data sheets. Perfectly labeled samples. Citations memorized without hesitation. She finished top of every class she touched and carried herself with the quiet confidence of someone who never submitted an assignment late in her life.
Anan… did not.
He understood the material. Sometimes more intuitively than he let on. He could glance at a wing structure and guess its evolutionary pressure without checking the text. But he drifted. Missed morning lectures. Submitted field notes at the last possible hour. He relied more on instinct than discipline, more on pattern recognition than memorization.
When they worked side by side in the field, their differences balanced. She recorded. He observed. She organized the specimens into clean rows of data. He noticed when something behaved differently than it should. When migration timing felt off. When the cicadas emerged two days earlier than last year’s survey suggested.
Mali drew her knees up slightly, wrapping her arms around them.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
The question landed heavier than anything she had said about her uncle.
Anan stared out over the layered green mountains. Smoke from distant fires blurred the horizon in a faint gray haze.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“If nukes are falling everywhere…” She swallowed. “Do we go back to the village? See if anyone’s organizing something?”
The village. Wooden houses on stilts. Narrow road. No hospital. No bunker. Just people and prayers.
“Organizing what?” he asked gently. “We don’t even know what’s really going on.”
She looked away.
“What about the temple?” she tried. “Up the ridge. The monks might know something. People always go there when things get bad.”
Anan almost smiled.
“I’ve never gone to temple,” he said.
“That’s not the point.”
“It kind of is.”
She exhaled through her nose. “Religion is not really my thing, either.”
He nudged a loose stone with his boot. “If the world is ending, I don’t think it’s going to stop because we finally show up for chanting.”
She shot him a look that was half irritated, half grateful for the normal tone.
“So what?” she pressed. “Do we just sit here and wait for the sky to fall?”
He didn’t answer right away.
Wait here for the world to end.
The phrase felt absurd and terrifying at the same time.
“I don’t know,” he said again, quieter now.
“What about Chiang Mai?” he said suddenly. “It’s the biggest city near us. If there’s still a government response, emergency broadcasts, military coordination, it would be there.”
Mali frowned slightly. “You think they know more than we do?”
“I think they’ll at least know if we’re supposed to run,” he replied. “Or hide. Or leave the country. Or… something.”
She followed his gaze toward the winding road that cut down the mountain.
“Sure,” she said after a moment. “So we get back on your motorbike and head there.”
Her tone was almost defiant.
He glanced at her. “You’re okay with that?”
She gave a hollow half-shrug and stood up.
“Nothing else to lose,” she said.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
The words settled between them, heavier than the humidity.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll go to Chiang Mai. It’s… familiar.”
He almost said more.
He rose to his feet, brushing dirt from his palms. The cicadas continued their relentless chorus. Wind moved through the canopy in slow, whispering currents. Somewhere deeper in the forest, a branch snapped under unseen weight.
Anan took one more breath of thick, wet jungle air.
The layered rhythm of the forest shifted, almost imperceptibly.
The jungle noise began thinning.
Not fading, thinning.
One cicada stopped mid-rattle. Then another. The wind shifted direction without actually moving. The air pressed against Anan’s ears like he’d descended too deep underwater.
He swallowed. The back of his throat tasted metallic.
Mali rubbed her forearms. “It feels like static.”
Anan nodded slowly. The hairs on his arms were standing up. Not from fear.
From charge.
The sky above the northern hills shimmered, not from heat, from distortion. As if something enormous were breathing on the other side of reality.
Then the sound stopped entirely.
Complete absence of sound.
And that was when the sky began to move.
Not drift.
Move.
Constellations stretched and bent as if pulled from beneath. Lines of pale silver light carved across the heavens in rigid, intersecting geometry.
Mali tightened her grip on his sleeve.
“Anan… do you see that?”
“Yes.”
The lattice converged over the eastern ridgeline.
And then the sky split.
It peeled inward.
A vertical tear opened across the heavens, and through it was red light, thick and dust-choked.
Beyond Earth’s atmosphere was another sky entirely.
Hazy. Rust-colored. A dry world beneath a dim red sun. The red dust filled air was visible, but it seemed to just stop at the tear in the sky.
The Nexus descended slowly toward the mountain peaks, hovering just above the forest canopy like a suspended blade.
Anan stared into it.
And saw movement.
Far beyond the tear, through drifting crimson haze…
A shape crossed the sky.
Wings vast enough to blot out the sun. A long serpentine body trailing behind.
It vanished into dust.
“That’s not real,” Mali whispered.
The Nexus pulsed.
The vibration struck through bone.
And then:
[SYSTEM INITIALIZING]
[CASUALTY THRESHOLD: MET]
[ENERGY CONVERSION: STABLE]
[PLANETARY BIOSPHERE: PRESERVED]
[WORLD DESIGNATION: EARTH]
[STATUS: UNCLAIMED]
[SURVIVOR POPULATION: SUFFICIENT]
[ATMOSPHERIC COLLAPSE: AVERTED]
[RESOURCE CLASSIFICATION: VIABLE]
[WELCOME, EARTH]
[ENTRY REQUIREMENTS SATISFIED]
Translucent blue-white text appeared for both of them, written in Thai.
The text did not hover in the air.
It embedded itself in his vision.
No matter where he looked, cracked pavement, Mali’s face, the widening tear in the world, the words remained anchored to his perception.
He blinked hard.
They didn’t go away.
Mali’s breathing quickened. “Anon… do you see that?”
So it wasn’t just him.
More lines cascaded down.
Mali gasped. “Is this military? Is this some kind of projection?”
Anan reached toward it.
[EXTRADIMENSIONAL BREACH DETECTED]
[RIFT SIGNATURE: UNKNOWN ORIGIN]
[PLANAR ALIGNMENT: UNKNOWN]
[RADIATION EXPOSURE: ELEVATED]
[RIFT ENERGY INFUSION: ACTIVE]
[GENETIC ANALYSIS INITIATED…]
[DORMANT STRANDS DETECTED]
[ANCIENT ARCHETYPE PROBABILITY: VARIABLE]
— ELVEN LINEAGE COMPATIBILITY: LOW
— DWARVEN LINEAGE COMPATIBILITY: LOW
— OTHER: UNDEFINED
— CHANNELING CAPACITY: PRESENT
[HOST COMPATIBILITY: 17% — RARE]
Mali’s notification formed in front of her eyes.
[EXTRADIMENSIONAL BREACH DETECTED]
[RIFT SIGNATURE: UNKNOWN ORIGIN]
[PLANAR ALIGNMENT: UNKNOWN]
[RADIATION EXPOSURE: ELEVATED]
[RIFT ENERGY INFUSION: ACTIVE]
[GENETIC ANALYSIS INITIATED…]
[NO DORMANT STRANDS DETECTED]
[HOST COMPATIBILITY: 0%]
The Nexus pulsed again.
Anan’s probability surged.
17%
28%
51%
89%
Heat flooded his bloodstream.
[RADIATION + EXTRA-PLANAR ENERGY EXPOSURE CONFIRMED]
[MUTATION EVENT INITIATED]
Blue light ignited beneath his brown skin.
Anan dropped to one knee, breath tearing from his chest. The glow traced along his arms, across his collarbone, up his neck.
Then it hit.
At first it felt like a cramp; the kind that seizes a calf in the middle of the night. A tight knot beneath the muscle.
Then it multiplied.
Every muscle fiber in his body clenched at once.
His hands locked into fists, tendons standing out like cables. His back arched violently as something pulled inward along his spine. It felt as though invisible hooks had sunk into his muscles and were twisting them in opposite directions.
The pain didn’t burn.
It compressed.
Like his body was being wrung out from the inside.
His thighs seized. His abdomen folded inward. His jaw snapped shut so hard he tasted blood. Each breath came shallow and broken because his ribs refused to expand fully, intercostal muscles spasming in brutal rhythm.
The glow brightened beneath his skin, racing along his veins.
It felt like dehydration cramps after days without water. Structural. As if his cells themselves were contracting.
His spine convulsed.
And then he screamed.
From the unbearable sensation of being rewritten.
Mali stared at him, fear replacing grief.
“Anan? Anan!”
Another pulse.
The world sharpened violently.
Anan could feel the Nexus like pressure against his ribs.
Mali grabbed his wrist.
The instant their skin touched, their minds collided.
Her grief slammed into him first. Her uncle’s voice on the phone. The roar of water. The crushing knowledge that she was alone now.
He felt her loneliness like a physical wound. She cared for him. She loved him?
And she felt him.
His fear of losing her. The quiet promise he had never said aloud that he would stay.
The connection deepened.
Too deep.
[WARNING: UNSTABLE LINK ESTABLISHED]
[ENERGY FEEDBACK LOOP DETECTED]
The Nexus pulsed.
Energy surged through him.
Through her.
It wasn’t a current. It wasn’t heat.
It was pressure.
A violent compression of something unseen, forcing its way along nerves and bone and blood. Anan felt it tear through his spine and branch outward, filament-thin threads of red light binding him to her like veins outside the body.
Mali’s breath caught, her grip tightening on his arm.
The air between them thickened, humming with unseen pressure. The ground beneath their feet trembled, leaves lifting in small spirals as if gravity had loosened its hold.
“Anan… stop. It hurts.”
The sound cut through him worse than the energy did.
“I’m not!” His voice cracked. “I don’t know how to stop!”
He could feel the conduit.
The Nexus’ power wasn’t dispersing blindly anymore; it was flowing. Directed. Moving through him like a stabilizer, like his body was built to channel it.
Hers wasn’t.
The energy density climbing inside her was chaotic, unstructured. It flowed through him in defined pathways, in geometric precision, in ordered pulses, but in her it scattered.
Overloaded.
He tried to pull away.
He couldn’t.
Their hands were fused in light, red strands threading skin to skin, bone to bone. The interface flared at the edge of his vision, symbols cascading too fast to read.
Transfer.
Synchronization.
Incompatible host.
“No – no – stop,” Mali choked, her knees buckling.
Her spine arched violently as another pulse tore through her. Not outward, but inward. Like something was trying to rewrite her structure and failing.
Another pulse.
“Please,” she gasped, barely audible now. “Anan.”
The last pulse struck like a hammer.
Her body arched once more and then went utterly still.
The energy didn’t fade.
It withdrew.
Like a tide pulling sharply back from shore.
The red filaments unraveled between them in snapping strands of light, recoiling into his chest, into the air, into nothing.
She collapsed into his arms, eyes empty.
“Mali?”
Anan stared at her.
He reached inward blindly, clawing for the pressure he had felt moments before, forcing it toward her chest.
Nothing answered.
He held her tighter, as if pressure could become warmth. As if warmth could become breath.
The faint flicker beneath her skin faded.
She had just told him she had no one left.
And now, what did he just do?
[ENERGY ABSORPTION COMPLETE]
[EXTERNAL HOST TERMINATED]
[CHANNELING CAPACITY INCREASED]
The words felt cruel.
Mutation Path Updated
Previous Classification: Latent Conduit
New Classification: Channeler – Tier I
Channeler – Tier I
An organism capable of stabilizing and directing extra-planar Nexus energy through internal biological matrices.
Passive Traits Acquired:
? Nexus Sensitivity – Detect planar tears within 12 km
? Energetic Perception – Visualize energy density gradients
? Minor Regeneration – Accelerated cellular repair during exposure
Active Abilities Unlocked:
? Pulse Draw (Rank I) – Absorb ambient Nexus energy within 3m
? Conduit Surge (Rank I) – Temporary physical and neural enhancement
? Link (Unstable) – Establish consciousness bridge (High Risk)
Something was different.
He was still five foot nine. Still slight. Brown-skinned. Thai.
But beneath the surface, faint lines shimmered for a heartbeat, thin veins of blue light threading under his skin before fading.
His dark eyes now carried a narrow ring of crimson around the iris when caught by the light.
The air around him felt tight.
Responsive.
As if reality were thinner near him.
[PLANAR SYNC: 3%]
Anan looked down at Mali.
He pulled her close. He silently wept.
In Thailand, they did not bury their dead.
There were rites. Monks. Chanting. Fire and ash and offerings. The body returned to smoke, not soil. That was how it was supposed to be. Her parents had been cremated.
But he could not carry her to a temple.
He could not walk into the nearest village with her in his arms and try to explain the light, the tear in the sky, the way her veins had briefly glowed beneath her skin. How something he did killed her.
And he could not leave her here for animals.
The soil was hard red clay. He dug with a fallen branch, blue light flaring faintly each time his muscles strained.
The clay split his knuckles. Packed beneath his nails. Blood mixed with dirt until he couldn’t tell which was which.
He didn’t stop.
Mali had been small and slight, but she felt almost weightless in his arms now. He lowered her into the grave as if setting down something fragile enough to break again.
“You said you had no one left,” he whispered. His voice shook despite the effort to steady it. “You were wrong.”
His voice broke.
He covered her slowly.
Placed flat stones over the mound.
A small marker.
No name.
No date.
Just weight.
When he stood, dirt clung to his hands.
The jungle noise had returned.
He turned toward the Nexus.
The red world beyond clarified.
Massive industrial towers embedded in desert rock. Steam vents. Rail systems cutting across dry plains. Short, broad figures in reinforced suits moving along platforms.
Beyond them, the distant faint silhouette crossed the red sky again.
The Nexus pulsed.
[PLANAR SYNC: 4%]
[ENERGY RESERVES: 68%]
He looked once more at the stone-covered grave.
“I’ll come back,” he said quietly. “I’ll bring you to the temple.”
Then Anan turned toward the mountains, strained muscles moving with new precision through forest and red earth.
Above him, the sky was blackened, broken only by scattered light leaking from the tear.
And somewhere beyond that tear, a shape crossed the distant sky formed by dust and light. His mind reached for words and found none that fit.
The Nexus waited.
