Then another realization struck him like a cold blade through his consciousness.
The words he had spoken just seconds ago no longer echoed in the void. He tried to speak again, to call out into the darkness, but nothing emerged. His mouth was gone. Dissolved into the same liquid mass that surrounded him, leaving him voiceless in this ocean of the damned.
He began to look around in panic, the terror of losing himself piece by piece flooding through what remained of his awareness. That's when he began to see them.
The strange beings.
They moved through the ocean of souls like predators in their natural habitat, each one a testament to what happened when hunger overcame humanity.
The smallest ones were perhaps seven feet tall, but their proportions were wrong in ways that made Ren's remaining consciousness recoil. Their arms stretched down to their knees, ending in hands with too many joints that could bend backward as easily as forward. Their fingers were like spider legs, each one capable of independent movement as they scooped souls from the liquid and stuffed them into mouths that split their faces from ear to ear. Their heads bobbed on necks that could extend like telescopes, allowing them to reach into crevices in the soul-liquid to find hidden morsels. When they moved, it was with a skittering gait that seemed to ignore the normal rules of how limbs should work.
The elephant-sized monstrosities were worse. Their bodies had lost all human shape, becoming bloated sacks of consumed consciousness that pulsed with each new soul they absorbed. They had multiple heads sprouting from their torso like tumors, each face a different person they had devoured, all screaming silently in eternal anguish. Their limbs had multiplied as well, dozens of arms and legs jutting out at random angles, some human-sized, others grotesquely enlarged. They moved by rolling through the soul-ocean, their many limbs paddling them forward while their numerous mouths fed continuously. The worst part was that they retained patches of normal human skin scattered across their bloated forms, islands of what they used to be drowning in a sea of accumulated horror.
But the mountain-sized entities were beyond description in any sane terms. They no longer moved at all, having grown too massive to do anything but exist as living landmarks in this realm of the dead. Their bodies were geological formations of compressed souls, layers upon layers of consumed humanity stacked like sedimentary rock. Faces pushed out from their surface like bas-relief sculptures, thousands upon thousands of them, all crying tears of liquid soul-stuff that ran down the creature's flanks in rivers of anguish. Their mouths had become caverns, entire valleys in their flesh that led to stomachs the size of cities. They didn't hunt; they simply created currents in the soul-ocean that drew victims toward them like cosmic whirlpools. Souls would flow up their mountainous forms like waterfalls in reverse, disappearing into the cave-mouths to join the geological accumulation of the devoured.
All of these creatures looked like eldritch monsters pulled from humanity's darkest nightmares, but they retained the same black, transparent quality as the human souls around them. They were see-through windows into horror, revealing the countless faces and limbs of the people they had devoured writhing within their forms like maggots under rotting skin. The consumed souls were still alive inside them, still conscious, their features pressing against the inner surface of their predator's flesh like hands pushing against plastic wrap. Their mouths opened and closed in endless silent screams, their eyes rolled in permanent terror, and their fingers clawed desperately at their prison of living flesh.
Some of the smaller predators had recognizable human features mixed into their grotesque forms. A businessman's tie strangled around what might have been a neck. A child's school uniform stretched over a torso that had grown three sizes too large. A wedding ring fused to a finger that now belonged to a hand with seven joints. These were the remnants of who they used to be, the last fragments of their humanity serving as grotesque decorations on bodies that had long since abandoned any pretense of being human.
The larger ones showed the archaeology of their consumption. Different clothing styles from different eras were embedded in their flesh like fossils, telling the story of decades or centuries of feeding. Medieval armor plates jutted out next to modern business suits, while ancient Roman togas were tangled with contemporary hospital gowns. Each layer represented a different period of their existence, a different group of souls they had consumed to grow larger and more terrible.
And through it all, the faces of their victims remained visible, pressing against the transparent flesh like photographs floating in black water. Men, women, children, elderly, all trapped forever in the bodies of their devourers, their individual identities preserved in perfect clarity even as they became part of something monstrous. They could see out, could witness the horror of what they had become part of, but they could never escape or even influence their captor's actions. They were passengers in their own personal hell, forced to watch as their predator consumed more souls to add to their eternal prison.
All of the beings were doing the same thing.
They were devouring human souls from the ocean.
The smaller ones moved like sharks through the liquid, their mouths unhinging to impossible widths as they sucked in streams of dissolved humanity. The larger ones simply opened massive maws and drew in entire sections of the soul-sea, filtering out the individual consciousnesses like whales feeding on krill.
The mountain-sized entities didn't even need to move. They simply existed, and the ocean flowed into them, drawn by some cosmic hunger that pulled souls toward their dissolution.
"Are those guys used to be human?" Ren thought, though he no longer had the means to voice the question.
The answer came to him with horrible clarity. These monsters had once been like him, desperate souls trying to maintain their identity in this place of eternal dissolution. But instead of fading away, they had chosen to consume others, growing larger and more monstrous with each soul they devoured.
He suddenly began to panic and tried to swim away from the nearest feeding creature. But he couldn't move properly anymore. Looking down, he saw that his arms were already gone, melting into the human soul ocean like sugar dissolving in water. The transparent flesh that had been his limbs was becoming indistinguishable from the liquid around him.
I don't want to disappear, he thought desperately, but even his thoughts were becoming fainter, harder to hold onto.
Then he dissolved completely.
His consciousness scattered like drops of water hitting hot stone. Everything that had been Ren became part of the greater mass, his memories mixing with countless others in a swirling chaos of experiences and identities.
Some memories began to flow through him, foreign thoughts and feelings that weren't his own. He experienced the life of a woman who had died in childbirth, her final moments filled with joy and terror as she held her baby for the first and last time. Then came the memories of a child who had drowned in a lake, the cold water filling his lungs as he called out for his mother. An old man's memories followed, decades of quiet contentment ending in a hospital bed surrounded by grandchildren he barely recognized through the haze of his failing mind.
It mixed in a chaotic mess, hundreds of lifetimes blending together until he couldn't tell which experiences belonged to whom. He had crumbled completely, becoming just another part of the soul ocean with no individual identity to call his own.
Then he lost consciousness entirely.
.
.
.
In the darkness of his dissolved state, Ren experienced a nightmare crafted from the collective trauma of every soul in the ocean.
He found himself in a twisted version of his childhood home, but the walls were made of writhing flesh and the floors bled when he stepped on them. His family was there, but they weren't quite right. His mother's face kept changing, cycling through the faces of every woman who had ever died in despair. His father spoke with the voice of every man who had died in war, his words a mixture of love and the screams of the battlefield.
The house itself was alive, breathing with the rhythm of a diseased heart. Doors led to rooms that shouldn't exist, filled with the worst moments from every life that had ever ended in suffering. In one room, he saw endless rows of hospital beds filled with children who would never grow up. In another, he watched soldiers dying in every war that had ever been fought, their blood seeping through the floorboards to pool in the basement.
His childhood dog was there too, but it had too many eyes and spoke with the voice of everyone who had ever loved an animal that died before them. It begged him to stay, to be part of this place where all the lost souls could be together forever.
The nightmare shifted and changed, pulling him through scenes of every type of death and loss imaginable. He experienced being burned alive, freezing to death, dying of disease, being murdered, committing suicide, and every other way a human life could end. Each death was someone's real final moments, preserved in this hellish collective unconscious.
Sometimes he was the one dying, feeling every sensation and emotion. Other times he was the one left behind, experiencing the grief and guilt of survival. The nightmare had no beginning or end, just an eternal cycle of suffering that grew more intense with each repetition.
This hell continued for what felt like eternities. Time had no meaning in this place, and Ren lost count of how many deaths he experienced, how many lives he lived through their final moments. He became every victim and every survivor, every tragedy and every loss.
Then, in one of the memories, he suddenly gained consciousness again.
Everything still seemed surreal and distorted, like looking at the world through water or broken glass. The nightmare continued around him, but now he was aware that it wasn't real. It was just the collective trauma of the dissolved souls, playing out endlessly in this realm of the dead.
But he knew what he had to do.
If he wanted to continue living, if he wanted to escape this place and return to existence, he would have to become something else. Something that could survive in this ocean of dissolved humanity.
He turned toward the nearest figure in the nightmare, a man who looked like his father but spoke with the voice of every disappointed parent who had ever lived. Without hesitation, Ren grabbed the figure by the throat and squeezed until the light went out of its eyes.
The kill felt real, despite being in a dream. The figure dissolved into the same black, transparent liquid that filled the soul ocean, and Ren felt a surge of strength flow through him.
He began hunting through the nightmare, killing every human figure he encountered. His mother with her changing faces, the children in their hospital beds, the soldiers with their war wounds, even the dog with too many eyes. Each death strengthened him, made him more solid and real while everything around him became more insubstantial.
When the killing was done, he began to bite their corpses.
He ate them piece by piece, tearing flesh from bone with teeth that had become too sharp, too numerous. The taste was indescribable, like consuming liquid despair mixed with the essence of life itself. Each bite made him stronger, more defined, while the nightmare around him began to fade.
If I lose my humanity in the process of trying to regain my humanity, then so be it, he thought as he devoured what had once been his childhood dog. The creature's extra eyes watched him even as he consumed it, but there was no judgment in its gaze, only understanding.
I won't die.
He continued eating, consuming everything and everyone in the nightmare until he was the only thing left. The twisted house, the bleeding floors, the flesh walls, all of it went into his mouth and down his throat. He was becoming something new, something that could exist in this realm of the dead without dissolving.
Even if the world were to be destroyed, I will be eternal.
As he consumed the last remnants of the nightmare, Ren felt his consciousness solidifying into something harder and more terrible than what he had been before. He was no longer just a human soul lost in the ocean of death. He was becoming one of the predators, one of the beings that fed on the dissolved to maintain their existence.
But unlike the other monsters he had seen, he retained his sense of self. His memories, his identity, his will to survive, all of it remained intact even as he transformed into something that could devour souls without losing himself in the process.