Transmigrated into Eroge as the Simp, but I Refuse This Fate

Chapter 309: Cradle (2)

His eyes opened.

No glow. No light. No system notification.

Just breath.

Ragged. Cold. Real.

Damien inhaled once—and the air scraped down his throat like broken glass. Sharp, thin, metallic. Not the sterile air of a facility, not the heavy mana-tinged atmosphere of a chamber, but something far older. Raw.

His cheek pressed against something hard—stone, maybe. Damp. Coarse.

He didn’t move right away.

Let the moment settle.

Let the silence speak.

A wind crawled through the air—slow, whispering. It didn’t howl. It dragged. As if the world itself had grown tired of screaming.

He exhaled.

“…Not exactly the cradle I was promised,” he murmured.

Then he moved—just a twitch of the fingers at first. Dust clung to his skin like ash. Fine grains, old as bone, cold as the breath of something that had never learned how to live.

His muscles ached. Not from pain. From being held too long.

He pushed himself upright, palms grinding into the ground. It wasn’t stone. Not really. It was something carved, something left behind. He could feel the lines under his fingertips—etched patterns, worn down by time or pressure or… worse.

He looked up.

And stopped.

The sky wasn’t there.

Not properly.

Just a vast, inverted dome of slate-colored clouds that didn’t move, didn’t breathe. They watched. Like a ceiling painted by something with too many eyes and no hands.

All around him—ruins. Just an empty place it felt like. As if an open world. The remnants of something that had once been symmetrical… now twisted into memory.

A place abandoned.

No, not abandoned.

Left.

Left behind, because nothing sane wanted to stay.

“Where the hell did you drop me, Kael…” he muttered, brushing dust from his arm.

He stood slowly, body cracking at the joints. The weight of mana here was different—thinner, but constant. Like a sound just beyond hearing, a hum that never stopped. Not oppressive. Not friendly either. Just… watching.

Damien scanned the horizon—if it could be called that. The land didn’t curve gently into distance. It folded. Sharp inclines. Collapsed terrain. Shadows moving not with the wind, but with thought.

What is this feeling?

It wasn’t fear.

Damien had tasted that before—back when his core first cracked open under pressure, back when monsters screamed into his bones. This wasn’t that. This was colder. Slower. Quieter.

Like something breathing beside him without lungs. Watching him without eyes.

Something that shouldn’t exist. Yet did.

His brow furrowed slightly.

Every instinct said move—get up, assess, prepare.

But his body didn’t respond the way it should have.

No, it did move.

Too well.

Too smooth.

He flexed his fingers again. They obeyed. But the response wasn’t natural—it was precise. Like his nerves had been replaced by something better. Something alien.

’This…’

He looked down at his own hand.

The skin was his. The shape, familiar.

But the texture—the subtle hum of energy beneath it—it wasn’t just mana.

It was aligned. Tuned.

Like his body wasn’t just using mana—it was built around it.

Every breath fed it. Every twitch echoed with it.

Something was wrong.

Or maybe…

Something had changed.

His spine prickled. The kind of itch that didn’t start on the surface, but deep—somewhere in the marrow, where names and memories blurred. The kind of sensation that said he wasn’t alone, even if no one stood near.

A faint static burned at the edge of his thoughts.

’System.’

He didn’t say it aloud.

Just the command. The mental trigger.

The one that always answered.

Silence.

He tried again.

’System. Display status.’

Nothing.

No ding. No glow. No interface.

Like calling out into a void that had already moved on.

Damien tilted his head back, eyes narrowing as they locked onto the sky—or what passed for one.

It didn’t move.

It watched.

Slate clouds hung in permanent suspension, like a shroud stretched taut over a corpse. No light bled through them. No wind stirred them. But still… something shifted.

Not motion.

Recognition.

As if the moment he looked, something old blinked back.

And with that, it clicked.

The warnings. Kael’s voice, calm and exacting, echoed in his head.

“Not astral projection—not spirit separation. Something deeper. Your mind, your essence, everything that forms the ’you’ beneath the core.”

He had said the moment the crystal broke, consciousness would sever from flesh. That this wasn’t a walk through memory or a dive into energy. It was transference. Fully. Fundamentally.

Another realm.

Another plane.

Damien’s breath tightened.

Of course the system wasn’t responding.

It wasn’t part of him.

It was external. Layered onto his being like code on hardware—powerful, reactive, but not rooted in who he was. And this place? It didn’t just pull him away physically—it detached.

The hum in his bones wasn’t just mana.

It was reality rewriting itself around him.

’The system…’ he thought again, slower now. ’It was built to follow me by the Righteous_One, and then it was tempered by Goddess Selene. But that was inside the world of my own.’

His eyes dropped to his hands again.

Still his. But too clean. Too sharp.

’Here, it’s different.’

Either the system had been left behind.

Or—

’It can’t reach me.’

The thought struck with quiet finality.

Not just a delay. Not just a reset.

A wall.

’So this is what Kael meant. A mirrored realm. A place folded into the seams of the old world. No interface. No anchors.’

Just Damien.

And whatever this place had waiting for him.

A slow, wry breath slipped from his lips.

“Well,” he muttered, voice low, “guess I’m really on my own now.”

He turned his eyes forward again—toward the horizon that wasn’t, toward the shifting dark that bent without wind.

Damien stood there, still, the silence folding around him like old cloth.

Then the question rose—uninvited, obvious, inescapable.

What now?

His fingers curled slightly at his sides. There was no path ahead. No sign. No voice whispering objectives. Just the soundless hum of a world that didn’t care whether he breathed or bled.

He was here to Awaken.

That was the point. That was the plan. That was the damn deal.

But what did that mean, exactly?

He exhaled slowly, the breath curling in front of him like smoke—despite no visible cold. Just… absence.

“The Cradle isn’t a place—it’s a state,” Dominic had said once. “It reshapes you. Breaks you. If you survive, you come out changed.”

Damien looked around again.

Plenty of breaking here.

Nothing about this place felt designed for guidance. It wasn’t a trial. It wasn’t even a prison. It was an invitation. A test you didn’t know the rules to until you failed them.

“So what?” he murmured, glancing down at his hands. “Just sit cross-legged and meditate?”

He almost laughed at the absurdity.

He’d never cultivated a day in his life. Not really. Not the way the old-world texts described—sitting under moonlight, pulling mana through spiritual veins, forming cores like glass orbs suspended in the soul.

Hell, he didn’t even know if that method worked anymore.

Not in his world. And definitely not here.

But…

That sensation again.

That tuning. That internal pressure that wasn’t pain or power—but presence.

The mana here wasn’t flowing.

It was held.

Like the air itself was clenching its fist, waiting for him to try something.

Resonation… That was what Dominic showed him, wasn’t it?

The word echoed, not in the air, but in the bones. Deeper. Like a vibration trying to remember itself.

Damien closed his eyes.

He let go of sight, of thought, of the strange terrain pressing down on his instincts. He wasn’t here to map this place. He wasn’t here to conquer it.

Not yet.

He was here to change.

His breath slowed. Shallowed. Not out of calm—but out of narrowing. Drawing in.

He let his mind drift back—not to memories of comfort, but to pressure.

Dominic’s voice. Quiet. Precise.

“My Mana is guiding you. Tuning it. Not invading. Not replacing. Just… striking the same chord.”

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