Echoes of the Absent Divine

The gods didn't leave. They were murdered. Sixteen years ago, every divine being across every human mythology — every shepherd, every guide, every silent presence that had watched over civilization since before language existed — ceased to exist in eleven seconds. The event lasted long enough to crack the sky above every holy site on Earth and kill 847 people who had built their lives on faith. Then it was over, and the silence it left behind was the loudest thing humanity had ever heard. The world adjusted. Humans are extraordinary at adjusting. Then the universe arrived. The Primos Universal Integration Protocol has activated. Earth has seven years to reach a civilizational threshold or face absorption by powers that view pre-trial planets as resources, not people. The gods were supposed to guide humanity through this. Someone made sure they couldn't. Kael Duma is twenty-three, sleeping on a rooftop in Harare, and the last thing he expected was to matter. He doesn't believe in destiny. He doesn't believe in heroes. He believes in calculation, in the cold arithmetic of survival, and in the specific clarity that comes from a man who has already lost everything and stopped pretending the world owes him anything. He awakens Grade F, bonded to a shard from a god that history never recorded — a god so thoroughly erased from every mythology, every archive, every collective memory that its very existence is a crime someone committed deliberately. Someone murdered the gods to reach this one. Kael intends to find out who. And why. The trial has begun. Humanity's rank is unwritten. All ranks are earned.