Lilsage01

In Ether District, souls are currency, and Asher Vale is the broker.

He doesn’t ask questions. He doesn’t get attached. He sells memories, painful ones, precious ones, even the ones people were never supposed to forget. For the right price, anyone can erase their past.

But when a forbidden memory resurfaces in Asher’s mind—one he never knew he lost, everything changes.

Now hunted by forces that shouldn’t exist, haunted by a past he doesn’t remember, and tangled in a conspiracy that stretches beyond life and death, Asher must uncover the truth:

Who stole his soul, and why does the fate of humanity depend on him remembering?

This is not just a story of redemption.
It’s a war for identity.
A chase for forgotten light.
And at the center of it all;
A soul auctioneer who was never meant to survive.

The Soul Auctioner

The tunnel air was thick with silence, so heavy it felt like even the walls remembered the war.

Juno leaned back against the wall, his breathing still uneven. The bleeding had mostly stopped, but something in his eyes had gone distant, like he was still trapped in whatever vision the node had shown him. Asher sat across from him, his hands wrapped tightly around the now-darkened soul key.

"Do you think they'll follow us?" someone asked from the group they had rescued.

"They don't need to," Thorn said under his breath. "The system saw us. Bliss doesn't forget."

Juno gave a faint shake of his head. "That's the cruel part. It forgets you—but never itself."

Asher got to his feet. "We need to move before it adjusts. These people—" he turned toward the scared, disoriented crowd behind them "—they need somewhere safe."

"We don't have that," Thorn replied. "Bliss is rewriting the grid as we speak. The whole city's being redrawn."

A crackle split the silence—then static. A long-dead screen embedded in the tunnel wall flared to life. It was old, clearly relic tech, but Bliss had hijacked it. A distorted face formed in the mess of flickering pixels—shifting, unstable.

"Asher Vale," it rasped, voice warped and mechanical. "Asset zero. Function: nullified."

Nobody moved. Then a boy among the rescued stepped forward slowly.

"I know that face," he said, almost whispering. "It's mine."

He pointed toward the screen. "That's… me. Or it used to be."

Thorn stared, stunned. "They're masking with erased identities. Bliss is wearing the forgotten."

Juno's voice was quiet. "It's not just deleting them. It's becoming them."

That hit harder than any drone had.

Asher turned sharply to Thorn. "We need the next vault location. Now."

Thorn hesitated. "You're still hurt. And Juno—"

"Is still breathing because we didn't wait. We can't give Bliss a second to adapt. That message?" He pointed to the black screen. "That wasn't confidence. That was fear."

Thorn gave a slow nod. "There's one not far. But it's locked down. Beneath the old archives."

"Bliss was born there," Juno murmured. "Figures."

Asher stepped forward. "Then that's where we go. Tonight."

From the darkened edge of the tunnel, Eden finally spoke.

"If we do this… there's no turning back. Bliss won't pull punches again. It'll throw everything it has. Drones. Memory loops. Us."

Asher met her eyes. And this time, there was no hesitation in him.

"I'd rather die free than live forgetful."

Chapter 23| Ghost in the System