Primordial Awakening: I Breathe Skill Points!-Chapter 72: The Entrance

Commander Voss stood before the assembled expedition, her amplified voice cutting through the nervous chatter like a blade through silk. The sound carried with unnatural clarity, reaching even the furthest members of the gathering with perfect articulation. "Listen carefully. Entry will be organized—groups of fifty, staggered by ten-minute intervals. This prevents bottlenecking and ensures we don’t have a thousand people crammed into unknown space if something goes wrong."

She paused, letting the implications of that statement sink in—the acknowledgment that things would go wrong, that it was a matter of when and how badly, not if. Her gaze swept across the assembled awakened with the kind of assessment that came from years of command experience, cataloging who looked ready and who looked like they were already breaking under the pressure.

"Your group number was assigned during transport selection. Group One, you enter first. Group Two, you wait ten minutes then follow. And so on. Once inside, maintain your group cohesion but be prepared to adapt. The preliminary surveys suggest the ruins have multiple branching paths. Groups may need to split up." 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

A holographic display materialized beside Voss, showing the organizational structure in glowing blue text. Group assignments scrolled past, numbers and participant IDs organizing chaos into something manageable. The display also showed what little mapping data had been recovered from the preliminary surveys—a descending spiral, some branch points, and then vast sections marked with question marks where the dead had stopped transmitting data.

Zeph checked his assignment mentally—Group 3, participants 101-150. That meant he’d be the third wave entering, twenty minutes after the first group descended into whatever waited below. Not ideal, but not terrible either. The first groups would trigger any immediate dangers, would be the ones to discover the most obvious traps and hazards, sacrificing safety for the honor of being first. Meanwhile, he’d still be early enough to claim valuable discoveries if such things existed, but late enough to benefit from whatever harsh lessons the first two groups learned. The middle ground of risk and reward, which suited Zeph’s approach to survival perfectly.

Around him, the expedition members were organizing themselves by group number, checking equipment one final time with the obsessive attention of people who knew their lives might depend on a buckle being properly fastened or a weapon being easily accessible. Hands ran over armor straps, testing security. Fingers checked weapon sheaths, ensuring smooth draws. People verified their storage rings contained emergency supplies, healing potions, and backup equipment. The pre-descent ritual of preparation, performed with the gravity of people who understood that mistakes underground couldn’t be corrected by running back to base camp.

People were saying quiet goodbyes to acquaintances in other groups as if they might never see each other again—which, given the casualty rates from preliminary surveys, was a very real possibility. The mood was somber, the earlier bravado completely evaporated in the face of that breathing gateway and the memory of Cain’s bisected corpse bleeding out on stone that should have been safe kept playing in everyone’s heads, a stark reminder that death in the Wildlands didn’t require combat or monsters—sometimes reality just killed you for standing in the wrong place.

"Remember," Voss continued, her tone grave enough to make even the most confident warriors pay attention, the kind of voice that demanded focus and got it. "Once you enter, there is no guaranteed way back to the surface. The preliminary teams reported that passages shift, that the ruins are not static. Your survival depends on your skills, your awareness, and your willingness to trust your instincts. If something feels wrong, it probably is. If you see something you don’t understand, don’t touch it. And above all—stay alive. Corpses can’t spend credits or claim achievements."

The last statement drew a few grim chuckles from the assembled awakened. It was darkly practical, reducing survival to its most mercenary foundation—you had to be alive to profit from this expedition. All the glory and wealth in the world meant nothing if you were dead in some forgotten passage, your achievements becoming someone else’s story.

It was practical advice delivered with the bluntness of someone who’d seen too many people die from ignoring common sense. Voss didn’t sugarcoat the danger, didn’t offer false comfort or empty promises of safety. She didn’t tell them they’d all make it back, didn’t pretend that preparation and skill guaranteed survival. Zeph appreciated that, appreciated dealing with someone who understood that survival required acknowledging reality rather than hiding from it behind comfortable lies.

Group One assembled at the entrance, fifty awakened warriors standing before that dark maw with varying degrees of courage and terror on their faces. Some looked eager, hands tight on weapons as if anticipating glorious combat, their expressions suggesting they saw this as an opportunity rather than a threat. Others looked sick, pale and sweating despite the cold, their fear visible in every line of their bodies. Tank was among them, his massive shield already drawn, his expression set in determined lines that suggested he’d accepted the possibility of death and decided to face it head-on anyway. At Voss’s signal, they began their descent, disappearing into the darkness one by one until the last of them vanished from sight, swallowed by the breathing ruins as completely as if they’d never existed.

The waiting began.

Ten minutes felt like an eternity when you spent them staring at an entrance that had just consumed fifty people and wondering if you’d ever see any of them alive again. Every second stretched, measured against the steady 52 BPM breathing of the ruins. The ruins continued their steady breathing, that rhythmic expansion and contraction visible even from outside, that 52 BPM rhythm that Zeph could feel matching the egg’s pulse in his storage ring. The synchronization was undeniable now, impossible to dismiss as coincidence or imagination. Whatever the egg was, whatever it contained, it was fundamentally connected to this place in ways Zeph couldn’t begin to understand. The connection implied purpose, implied that carrying the egg into the ruins meant something, would trigger something, though what that something might be remained terrifyingly unclear.

Group Two assembled, looking somehow smaller and more vulnerable than Group One had, as if watching the first group disappear had made the danger more real, had transformed this from abstract threat into concrete reality. The theoretical had become actual—people had entered, had been swallowed by darkness, and might already be dead for all anyone outside knew. Among them was Whisper, the ghost-like combatant Zeph had observed during the march. They gave no indication of fear, simply checked their weapons with mechanical precision before descending with their group into the dark, movements efficient and emotionless as always.

Another ten minutes of waiting, of watching that dark entrance and listening to that steady breathing and feeling the egg pulse in rhythm with ruins that shouldn’t be alive but clearly were. Some expedition members used the time to meditate, to center themselves before the descent. Others paced, burning nervous energy. A few prayed to awakened gods who had never shown much interest in human survival.

Group Three—Zeph’s group—assembled at the entrance.

Zeph found himself standing alongside Kira, the scouting specialist from his transport, and forty-eight other awakened whose names he hadn’t bothered learning. Faces he’d seen during the march but hadn’t interacted with, people who were strangers despite hours of shared travel. Levels ranging from 31 to 44, a reasonable distribution of combat capability that should be sufficient for whatever they encountered. Should be, anyway, though Zeph had learned long ago that "should be" and "actually is" were often separated by a corpse-filled gap. Statistics and level averages meant nothing when reality decided to kill you.

"All right, Group Three," the organizer called out, a harried-looking Authority official with a datapad and an expression that suggested she was very glad she wasn’t going into the ruins herself. Her job was to count people in and, presumably, count survivors out when this was over. "Your turn. Stay together, watch each other’s backs, and try not to do anything stupid."

"Helpful advice," someone muttered from the back of the group, their voice dripping with sarcasm. "Don’t be stupid. Why didn’t I think of that? Here I was planning to touch everything glowing and split up at the first opportunity."

A few nervous laughs rippled through the assembled awakened, the kind of gallows humor that emerged when people needed to release tension before doing something potentially suicidal. The laughter was brief, almost desperate, a momentary release valve for fear that had nowhere else to go. Then they were moving forward, stepping across the threshold into darkness that swallowed them whole, and the laughter died as abruptly as if someone had cut their throats.

The descent began immediately—a spiral ramp leading down at roughly a fifteen-degree angle, wide enough for five people to walk abreast comfortably. The geometry was perfect, almost artificially so, with no variations or irregularities in the slope or width. Every measurement was exact, every angle precise, suggesting construction by something that understood mathematics at a level beyond human engineering. The walls were that same bio-organic metal Zeph had observed from outside, but up close the effect was even more disturbing. The surface was warm to the touch, not hot but body-temperature warm, as if the walls themselves were alive and maintaining homeostasis like any living creature would.

Faint light patterns pulsed through the metal in rhythmic waves, following the same 52 BPM pattern as the ruins’ breathing. The illumination was just enough to see by, creating a twilight environment that was neither fully dark nor properly lit. The egg in Zeph’s storage ring pulsed in perfect synchronization with the light patterns, creating an odd sensation of being caught between two heartbeats that weren’t his own, as if his body was trying to sync with rhythms that had nothing to do with human biology.

And the sound—the breathing was LOUD inside, resonating through the passage like they’d been swallowed by some massive creature and were descending through its throat. Each inhalation created a subtle wind that pulled at their clothes and hair, strong enough to feel but not strong enough to impede movement. Each exhalation pushed back with equal force, creating a rhythmic pressure change that made ears pop and sinuses ache. The acoustic effect was deeply unsettling, turning a simple walk down a ramp into a journey through living tissue, making it impossible to forget that these ruins were somehow alive in ways that violated every principle of architecture and construction.

"This is wrong," someone whispered behind Zeph, their voice barely audible over the breathing sounds. "Structures aren’t supposed to breathe. This is so fundamentally wrong I don’t even have words for how wrong this is."

No one disagreed. How could they? Everyone could feel the wrongness, could sense that they’d entered something that existed outside normal reality, that operated according to rules that had nothing to do with human understanding of how the world should work. This wasn’t a building. This wasn’t even a dungeon in the traditional sense. This was something else entirely, something that blurred the line between structure and organism in ways that made human categorization meaningless.

They descended in relative silence, boots striking the warm metal floor in irregular rhythm, the sound of fifty people walking creating a percussion that competed with the breathing. Weapons drawn and eyes scanning for threats that could come from any direction. The ramp spiraled down in a consistent pattern, no variations or irregularities, just smooth descent into increasing darkness punctuated by those pulsing light patterns. The consistency was somehow worse than if there had been variations—it suggested intentional design, suggested something had built this place for a purpose that probably didn’t include human survival.

100 meters down, the first alien text appeared.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​