Acid rain hissed against Far Stepper’s cracked synth-leather coat as he stumbled through the skeletal remains of Neo-Eden’s financial district, the crumbling spires clawing at a blood-red sky like broken ribs. Crimson vines pulsed with sickly light where they’d fused with exposed wiring and shattered concrete, their roots burrowing into the city’s corpse—a bio-digital plague known as the Crimson Seed rewriting flesh and circuitry into screaming chrome. He could feel it inside him now, the Seed’s tendrils coiling through his marrow, veins glowing like molten neon beneath his skin as the opening strains of *Crimson Awakening* swelled around him: 'Crimson fire ignites my fractured, bleeding core! Neon veins pulse with the rage of gods we once implore.' A holographic whisper cut through the downpour—Echo, her form flickering with static tears, materializing from a shattered temple altar overgrown with the same crimson horror. 'The veil is gone, Far Stepper,' she murmured, her voice layered with the song’s ghostly choir, 'and the serpent stirs in our bones.' He watched in terror as his own hand spasmed, skin splitting to reveal glowing root-systems beneath, the Seed’s transformation merging agony with ecstasy as the world bled into a new, monstrous Eden.