The government gave him nothing.
they gave him no tuition fees,no stipends etc.but he didnt blame them if he as in their palce he would have done the same,it was the best choice.
when Zyris turned eighteen, he wasnt handed freedom.He was shoved into it.
He stood in the doorway of the orphanage that morning,with a duffel bag slung over one shoulder, clothes neatly folded inside alongside several modified firearms he'd built piece by piece over the last year,they were legal by loopholes. Mrs. Anya stood beside him trying not to say too much. She was in her early thirties now,thirty-one, maybe thirty-two. She had grown gentler, wearier, more protective of him over the years.
She'd done everything she could to delay this moment.But the law was the law.
Zyris looked back at the dormitory he'd lived in for almost nine years. It felt small now. Too tight. Not just physically. The place had never really contained him. Not since he began growing into something else.
He had absorbed over 12.7 million souls from the soul farm till now,if he were to try to find the soul energy of his original soul he wont be able to in a millino years.
He hadnt planned to stay in the orphanage past eighteen.
For four years,he had secretly prepared.He studied economics, coding, psychology, and law using stolen library credentials.He spent nights sketching supply chains, business models, and backup plans.He taught himself to build and modify firearms not for violence but for leverage. He sold some on dark forums to generate seed money.He watched how real companies grew, how fake ones failed, and how people reacted under pressure.
Originating in the Sahel region, the cult of vivec had expanded their grasp like wildfire through Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and even parts of Australia. Not one government formally declared war on them. Instead, nations tiptoed around the carnage, fearful of sparking retaliation. Meanwhile, the Cult carried out bombings, kidnappings, disappearances,targeting people of all religions,Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists etc. Their ideology didn't discriminate, only consumed.
Zyris watched the world adjust to the horror.
He didn't.He simply planned around it.
He didn't seek revenge. He didn't seek justice.He wanted the world to be what he wanted it to be,stable.That needed power.he stayed in a cheap hotel.
Three weeks after leaving the orphanage, Zyris returned to visit Mrs. Anya.
She fed him,stared at his face as if searching for someone who had slipped out of his skin.
"I need money," he said.
She tensed. "How much?"
"Fifteen million dollars."
She blinked. "What?"
"I've already arranged most of it. Through shell firms, crypto wallets, dormant trusts. I only need a final injection from a clean account. Yours."
"I... Zyris, this is madness."
"You have seen what I can do. You know I don't ask without calculations."
Mrs. Anya rubbed her forehead, breathing slow and shaky.
"I'll owe favors. Dangerous ones. If this goes wrong what will i do"
"It wont",he said.
She looked at him for a long time. Then nodded, very slowly.
"I will try."
He formed Oblivion Systems,a stealth registered security tech company.
Its products were adaptive defense modules,Small black cubes, 3 inches each side, which combined motion sensors, sonic alarms, temperature readers, and drone signal interceptors.They were modular, scalable, and nearly impossible to hack.
He hired five people anonymously through encrypted platforms. Paid triple market wages. Spoke only through masked voice calls and synthetic avatars. All deliveries were routed through dead-drop warehouses.
Manufacturing began in a rented building in Noida with fake permits and modified electrical plans. He installed his own surveillance.He tracked every worker's movement.
He told them nothing about himself. They assumed he was part of a shadowy syndicate.
By the third month, he'd shipped his first batch to Eastern Europe through intermediaries. Sales reached $900,000. He reinvested and hired two chemists.
Problems started emerging.
A customs officer intercepted a package.Zyris managed to bribe them through an old contact he had manipulated online months ago, using a false identity.
Then,two employees tried to reverse-engineer a prototype and sell it independently.Zyris responded by replacing their entire workstation hardware with fake systems and using an embedded GPS tracking device to locate the sale point. When they arrived to negotiate the illegal deal, it was already burned to the ground.
He sent no threats. They left the company silently two days later.
He allowed it.
People feared clean exits less than messy punishments.
One morning, he walked into the warehouse to find one third of his inventory gone. Racks were empty. Security footage was missing. Entire systems wiped clean.
He analyzed patterns. Discovered internal log entries tied to one temp worker—a man recently hired under a fake ID. Background check had been bypassed due to rushed onboarding.
Zyris followed the man's trail through transaction logs. Discovered his link to a rival group.
He didn't send anyone.
He visited personally.
he wore a delivery uniform and entered their front operation with a fake invoice.
He walked out thirty-two minutes later.No words exchanged beyond pleasantries.
The next morning, the rival firm's entire server room exploded. No one was injured.
Zyris left a single slip of paper at their gate.
"Don't confuse kindness with absence."
by the the 8th month,Oblivion Systems launched two more productsthat is,blacklight dust,a powder that revealed hidden objects, blood traces, and microchips when exposed to LED frequencies.signal veil,a portable signal-jammer disguised as a phone charger.
They became hits among Eastern European black markets and urban security agencies in Brazil and Indonesia. American preppers found them through proxies.
He opened four ghost warehouses across Delhi, Lucknow, and Bangalore.He trained teams to build, ship, and log without ever meeting one another.
Zyris added layers of misdirection to company records. He created synthetic data leaks showing the company belonged to a fake Russian syndicate. Journalists picked it up and repeated the false info. No one looked further.
His digital shell was now deeper than his physical one.
in the 12th month,rumors reached the ears of a local politician with ties to corporate competitors.They sent investigators to inspect a warehouse.
Zyris had already anticipated it. The warehouse they visited was a decoy.
He invited them in, smiling, offered them tea. A small TV played a recorded fake meeting in the background showing a Chinese logistics firm as the supposed owner.
He handed over fake contracts, forged government certificates, even staged a worker confrontation to show legitimate stress.
The investigators left confused.
Days later, the politician's personal cloud drive was leaked anonymously, exposing offshore accounts and blackmail schemes.
He made no demands. But the politician never mentioned Oblivion again.
by the end of the year,Oblivion Systems had earned over $50 million USD in revenue.
Now,his soul was enough to expand his own soul's mass to the equivalent of half a million average human beings.
Yet, he didn't use those powers directly.
Not yet.
He didn't need to.They are for emrgencies.
His systems were enough.
But not everything was solved.
8 of his warehouses were burned down in different corners of india he couldnt be everywhere at one time,it had aken him weeks to recover.The sabotage incident had left deeper implications,someone had learned the patterns of his operation. Someone had tested his perimeter.
He had buried the problem.
But it hadn't been erased.
And when it returned, it wouldn't knock.
Zyris had made enemies before. That was expected.
But this felt different.
The sabotage of his warehouse had left more than just broken shelves and missing inventory. It left a fingerprint—a surgical level of precision, like someone had mapped his systems long before entering the building. The way surveillance had been looped, the entry timed with the only blackout he'd ever had, the precise inventory selected—not just valuable stock, but experimental tech with prototype trace signatures—this wasn't done by angry competitors or failed employees.
This was military precision.
He traced what little trail he had through backdoors—old bank account logins, fake tax ID purchases, third-party proxy services. There was a pattern. All roads pointed, strangely, east.
To Nepal.
It didn't make sense at first.
Nepal was barely on the geopolitical radar these days. But in Zyris's world, nothing remained unexamined.
He thought more.
Nepal had been through a civil war in 2021
the cult of vivec had grown in number and tried to take over,they had failed but had made the land of nepal a river of blood
They hated the cultists too.
They suspected everyone of being an infiltrator.
And Zyris? With no birth record, no college, no political alignment, no online trail, but rising power and influence across black markets and security tech?
He was a ghost.
And to them, ghosts looked like Vivec cultists.
But a government doesn't dirty its hands directly.
So they hired someone who could.
Rudra Kaul.
A name once whispered across the Indian military like a myth.
He was a retired colonel,a special forces legend.
Man of a hundred operations and zero known failures. He disappeared from the radar five years ago,officially "resigned".
Now he had reappeared.
For money.
Nepal had paid him—heavily.
Not just with cash, but with guarantees.
He had complete operational autonomy.He had diplomatic shielding through their embassies.
They gave him dossiers on Zyris compiled from dozens of unofficial sources.
They believed he was an early-stage Cult operator.
A financier.
A recruiter.
or maybe worse.
They didn't want to arrest him.
They wanted him dead,silently,efficiently and permanently.
Each week after the warehouse incident, strange disruptions occurred.
A shipment meant for Surabaya vanished on route.
There was no insurance,no logs.It was just gone.
Two of his anonymous employees reported that someone had approached their families, asking questions about their "new tech jobs".
A shell company Zyris had buried in six layers of false ownership got hit by a random tax audit days after he used it to launder a key payment.
It wasn't just paranoia anymore.
It was war.
Mrs. Anya called him that night,voice tight.
"Someone came asking about you."
Zyris paused.
"Who?"
"He was a tall man,Lean and he had grey hair.
He had a Clean cut.
He Asked about 'Zy',Not your full name."
"Accent?"
"Indian,North,Maybe from Uttarakhand,He had an army badge on his satchel.He daid he was doing charity checks."
It was rudra kaul.
The name hit Zyris's mind like a stone into a pond.
He didnt feel fear.
Not exactly.
But a strange calm settled in his bones.
This wasn't just about his business anymore.
Someone powerful had noticed him.
Someone clean. Cold. Deadly.
He had to accelerate everything.
More layers. More shields. More money. Less noise.
Zyris ended the call and deleted its log. He turned off every traceable signal in his room.
He then opened a secure terminal and began rewriting his own security infrastructure from scratch.
This was going to be a war.
But he had no intention of losing.
Late that night, in a diplomatic villa on the outskirts of Kolkata, Rudra Kaul sat in a dark study, reading a printed dossier.
No screens.
No signals.
Just paper and silence.
A photograph of Zyris rested on the desk.
Kaul smiled faintly.
"He's not the cult probably",he muttered to himself.
"But he's not normal either."
Outside,the rain fell like a whisper.
Kaul folded the file, slid it into a steel case, and made one call.
"Confirm phase two,I'll handle the attack myself."
He hung up.
His eyes lingered on Zyris's photo one last time.
"You're not the only ghost in this game kid."