No one forgets what happened five hundred years ago. There is no exact line between past and present in the world of survivors, only a bitter feeling that everything that matters was born from disaster. They call it the cataclysm, but there was never a word big enough to name the horror that fell from the sky and rewrote the rules of Earth. It was on a starless dawn that the horizon exploded in light and everything changed forever.
A machine, colossal, unlike anything that had ever existed, plummeted from the void, tearing the sky open like a never-ending bolt of lightning. It crashed with such violence that maps lost all meaning: continents split, oceans boiled, and cities vanished like glass dust. The impact wasn't just crushed matter. It was the arrival of something beyond comprehension, a living radiation, a kind of silent hunger that spread in every direction, tampering with the roots of the world and the bones of those who survived.
In the beginning, no one understood what was happening. Nights became bright, but there were no stars. The air smelled of rust, and an uncertain light danced through the ruins, as if the whole ground was breathing in sync with fear. People began to die for no reason, animals disappeared, plants grew twisted, and the Earth itself seemed to shed its skin. Only months later came the first great metamorphosis: children started to be born with a strange mark on their chest, a tiny, translucent sphere, pulsing a very weak light, almost white.
These children grew up different. From birth, they carried a new organ in their chest: a translucent sphere with a slightly whitish hue, called a core. Over time, it became clear that this was much more than a mutation—it was a legacy imposed by the cataclysm, a seed of living energy connected to the very machine that fell from the sky. The core was nestled right in the center of the chest, between the ribs, just above the heart. In the beginning, it was no larger than a walnut, but it grew along with the child, becoming more robust and gaining unique reflections. Its surface was smooth and almost luminous, seeming to pulse in sync with the heartbeat. If someone looked closely, they could see thin lines swirling inside, like liquid energy in constant motion.
During childhood, the core emitted only a faint glow. Because it was impossible to hide, mothers would put special clothes on their children to protect the core from shocks and prying eyes. At first, no one truly understood what it was for, until the first tragedies came. On the fifteenth birthday of those first children, the cores began to change color, each one radiating a unique light, impossible to imitate, thus becoming the true center of the resonant's identity: reacting to touch, to strong emotions, and even warming up when the owner felt fear or anger. It was not just a birthmark, but a living, physical, and energetic extension that connected each person to the mystery that forever changed the fate of the world.
That's how a new order of power was born. Resonants, that's the name given to those who cross adolescence and watch their core's color transform, revealing their strength to the entire world. The ones with white cores never become more than ordinary people, weak, unable to enter the dangerous domains of the Earth. Black is the first step for those who can already endure a bit of the new horror. Then come orange, green, blue, silver, and at the top, gold. The gold ones are living legends, few, powerful, capable of moving entire cities with the strength of their chest.
But none of this would matter without the Nexuses. They appeared as open wounds from the cataclysm, dimensional portals that appear whenever the Earth shakes. They are not places of stone and concrete, but impossible rifts, corridors where time and logic twist. Inside the Nexuses, alien monsters hunt and grow, feeding on what is most precious in that universe, the energy stones.
These stones don't come from the earth, but from the living walls of the Nexuses, sprouting like fungi in invisible colonies. When removed, they solidify into minerals of pulsing light, able to power an entire city, heal diseases, move ancient machines, but also corrupt or kill those who try to extract more than their limit. Their classification is strict, from level one, common and unstable, to level five, a gem capable of guaranteeing the survival of thousands, or triggering a war.
Nexuses are never in the same place. They appear and disappear as earthquakes spread, always leaving a trail of death and hope. If a resonant enters a Nexus, they know they may never come out. Passages change, walls close, and sometimes the only exit opens in another continent, in a city already destroyed. That's why every incursion is a leap into the abyss, a contract with the unknown.
It was in this scenario that the organizations of the new world were born. The Resonant Union was formed to control the chaos, map Nexuses, register every core, create rules for the use of weapons, all powered by the living energy from the chest of those who enter the portals. It didn't take long for syndicates to emerge as well, groups formed by the strongest resonants, almost always commanded by golds. They manage the most lucrative Nexuses, fight for control of the energy stones and, often, decide who lives or dies in the cities.
In the midst of this chaos, clans spread as the response of the weak. Small teams face low-level Nexuses, cleaning the edges of the unknown in search of survival. It is these resonants who ensure the minimum order in the devastated world, although they are almost always disposable, used to clear the way for the more powerful.
The true origin of the Nexuses, the stones, and the cores themselves is still a mystery that hangs like a shadow. Some whisper that the meteor-machine never really slept, that it manipulates the portals as if they were tentacles spread under the Earth's skin. Others swear there is a cycle, a horror that returns whenever the planet seems to recover. What is known is that no one escapes the resonance. Each core pulses in sync with the original catastrophe, each color defines the fate and the price to be paid for the chance to resist the end of the world.
In the end, the cataclysm wasn't just a ruin. It was the beginning of a new kind of humanity, forged in fear, in the shadows, in the energy of a core that never stops shining. And as long as Nexuses arise, and energy stones feed survival, each resonant carries in their chest the living memory of horror, and the secret hope for a new beginning.