The laughter died in his throat, collapsing into a dry, rasping sob that shook his naked, blood-smeared body. The cabin's silence returned, heavier and more suffocating than before. On the dusty floor, in the middle of a pool of his own cooling blood, Devon lay broken—not in body, but in some far deeper, irreparable way. The green magic stone was still clenched in his hand, its gentle glow now a mockery, its smooth surface a mute testament to his boundless foolishness.
He had walked through the gates of hell, dragged himself through a purgatory of his own making, only to discover that the key to heaven had been in his pocket the whole time. Every scream, every cut, every burning second of torment—worthless. He was no warrior forged in suffering. He was a clown who had performed the world's most horrific act in an empty theater.
Slowly, so slowly, he rose. His movements were shaky, his freshly healed muscles alien and weak, as though they no longer trusted the orders his brain sent them. Naked, filthy, hollow, he staggered across the room, his bloody footprints leaving a chaotic pattern in the thick dust. He wiped tears and blood from his face with the back of his hand, his eyes fixed on the green stone. With a tenderness that was almost religious, he placed it on the sturdy worktable, beside the scalpel that had become his instrument of torture. That stone was his anchor now, the one thing in the universe that felt real, dependable. The most precious thing of all.
For now, he needed to understand this place. His prison, and his salvation. He turned again toward the skeleton in the chair, its silent witness. In the dim light filtering through cracks in the walls, the bones no longer seemed like a grim omen of death, but rather like an ironic spectator, frozen forever in the final moment of life's cruel joke.
"You must be laughing at me, huh?" Devon whispered, his voice hoarse. The skeleton did not answer, of course, its jaw hanging open in an eternal, empty grin.
With his mind strangely calmer after his hysterical outburst, Devon began to truly see the room for the first time. Details that fever and pain had previously hidden now sharpened into focus. This was no mere cabin; it was a mausoleum of a life lived on the edge of sanity. The furniture was simple yet crafted with skill: a table, a chair, a crooked bookshelf, a large chest in the corner. But the décor was the stuff of nightmares.
Above the fireplace, arranged in a macabre display, were three skulls. One was clearly not human; its shape elongated and smooth, with large, slanted eye sockets—perhaps a fae or an elf, he thought, recalling illustrations from his old fantasy books. The second was rougher and thicker, with a pronounced brow ridge and an oversized jaw that looked brutal; a dwarf, maybe? And the third, most disturbing of all, was human—but its forehead bore a series of intricate spiral symbols, carefully carved into the bone while the owner had still lived. These were not hunting trophies. They were statements.
His attention shifted to the bookshelf. Most of the volumes were bound in dark, worn leather, their titles hand-inked in faded gold script. Devon couldn't read the language, but some contained meticulously drawn diagrams. He pulled one out at random. Its pages smelled of dust and rotting vanilla. Inside were detailed anatomical illustrations of creatures he had never seen: the nervous system of a mangy wolf with extra joints in its legs, the life cycle of a shimmering insect the size of a beagle, even a study of the internal organs of a giant translucent leech. The cabin's owner had not been merely a hunter. He had been a scientist—a mad one.
As Devon stepped back from the shelf, his bare foot struck something hard beneath the thick layer of dust. A floorboard slightly raised. He crouched, curiosity tinged with cold fear overtaking his exhaustion. Brushing away the dust, he uncovered an iron ring set flush with the wood. A trapdoor. A way down.
His heartbeat quickened, that familiar rhythm of fear and anticipation. He hesitated. What could possibly be worse than what was already up here? What could be more horrifying than what he had just done to himself? With a soft groan, he pulled the ring. The trapdoor creaked open in protest, releasing a breath of air that smelled of damp earth, fungus, and something else… something sweet and metallic. Darkness yawned below, so thick it seemed like a solid substance.
"Oh, it's dark down there," he whispered to himself—a foolish comment that made him feel a little more human. He needed light. His eyes found an old lantern hanging on a nail by the door. Its glass was dusty, its wick bone-dry. He grabbed it, then glanced toward the chest where he had found the magic stones. Taking the red one he had used to heat his knife, he focused his intent. Light. Fire.
He touched the stone to the wick. For a moment, nothing. Then, with a soft hiss, the wick caught, blooming into a steady orange-yellow flame that danced inside the glass. The glow pushed back the dark, casting trembling shadows across the cabin. Raising the lantern high, Devon began to descend. A steep, narrow wooden staircase plunged into the blackness. Each step groaned beneath his weight, as though complaining after decades of silence.
What lay below was no mere cellar. It was a sanctuary of madness. The shadow of a serial killer's mind, a laboratory where nightmares were born.
The room was larger than he had expected, its walls roughly hewn stone, its ceiling low, supported by thick beams like the ribs of some giant beast. The air was heavy and cold, tinged with strange ozone, sharp chemicals, and the faint metallic tang of long-dried blood. The chamber was divided into sections, each devoted to some different facet of its owner's deadly obsessions.
On one side was a workshop. Weapons lined the walls with a collector's precision. A crossbow modified with a complex crank mechanism, serrated daggers coated in dull black resin, bear traps with teeth honed razor-sharp. But what seized Devon's attention lay on the workbench, among carefully drawn blueprints on parchment. A gun. But not like any gun he had ever seen in a movie. This weapon was a grotesque hybrid of medieval flintlock and alien technology. Its grip was polished dark wood, but its barrel was forged from a strange bluish metal. Where the flint should have been, a faintly pulsing violet crystal was socketed, connected to the trigger by a delicate weave of copper wires. It was the insane offspring of science and sorcery, born of a mind both brilliant and deranged.
Across from the workshop lay something that churned Devon's stomach. A laboratory. Three towering glass tanks stood against the far wall. Their contents murky, yet he could make out twisted shapes floating within. In the first tank, a goblin preserved, its skin pale and bloated, its black eyes staring emptily. But its body had been horribly altered—one arm replaced by a mechanical limb of gears and pistons, tubes snaking from its back into a small metal tank. In the second tank, something like a giant lizard, its scales flayed in patches to reveal muscle beneath, a cluster of crystal lenses embedded into its skull. On the nearby table, surgical tools lay crusted with rainbow-colored residues, beside an open notebook filled with diagrams of how to implant magic stones directly into living brains. This was a playground for insane experiments, a god's cruel curiosity made manifest.
But the most terrifying part of the basement stood at its center. A vast wall dominated by a hand-drawn map of the land, painstaking in detail. Hundreds of pins with colored heads marked it. Around it, the wall was plastered with dozens of yellowed, torn news clippings. Holding his lantern, Devon stepped closer.
The headlines told a story of terror spanning years:
"TERROR IN SILVERWOOD: ELF NOBLE FAMILY SLAUGHTERED, NO WITNESSES!"
"SHADOW KILLER STRIKES AGAIN! DWARVEN MERCHANT GUILD IN IRONPEAK FOUND DEAD AT THEIR OWN FEAST!"
"FEAR SPREADS IN PORT CITY: IS 'THE NIGHT OF BLADES' THE WORK OF THE CORVUS PHANTOM?"
Corvus. The name repeated on every sheet. Corvus Nightshade. Some clippings bore rough sketches from terrified witnesses: a tall, shadowy figure, masked. The descriptions were always the same—appearing from nowhere, killing with cold, brutal efficiency, vanishing without trace. He had terrorized every corner of the realm. Even the proud elves, the hardy dwarves, the savage beastmen—none could hear his name without fear.
And the most chilling revelation, the one that froze Devon's blood, lay in a longer, more analytical article from a paper called The Citadel Chronicle:
"…What confounds mages and scholars most is the fact that Corvus Nightshade appears to have no magical power at all. No trace of aura has ever been detected at the sites of his massacres. He wields no fireballs or lightning. He is a man, nothing more. His terrible success comes not from divine blessing nor infernal might, but from something perhaps more frightening: an unlimited intelligence devoted entirely to the art of killing. He relies on cunning, tactics, strategy, and ruthless psychological manipulation to spread chaos across the land…"
A man. Without magic. Who brought the realm to its knees through his mind alone.
Devon swayed, dizzy, bracing himself against the table. He, who had been tortured by monsters and nearly killed by his own stupidity, now stood in the lair of the greatest monster of them all—a man.
And then he saw it. In the farthest corner of the room stood a lone mannequin. Upon it hung the costume.
It was not gleaming armor, nor a grand wizard's robe. It was a masterpiece of practicality and death. A long black leather coat, reinforced with thin metal plates at vital points. Belts and straps crisscrossed the chest, designed to hold dozens of daggers, pouches of poisons or explosives, coils of wire. Gloves of the same leather, their knuckles plated, their fingertips tipped with tiny claws. Silent boots, soles designed to leave no trace.
But the centerpiece, the instantly recognizable feature from the sketches in the clippings, was the mask. A full-face mask of smooth, pale porcelain. It bore no expression—no grin, no scowl. Just two hollow black eyeholes, and a thin slit for a mouth. It was the face of nothingness, of death itself, crafted to strip its wearer of humanity and reflect pure terror back at its victims.
Devon stood in the cold silence of the basement, lantern light flickering across the empty porcelain mask. He had come to this world as an ordinary teenager longing for a story. He had been a victim, a prey, then, in a blind burst of violence, a trembling killer. He had tortured himself nearly to death through his own stupidity.
And now fate—or some cruel cosmic joke—had brought him here. To the legacy of Corvus Nightshade.
A cold, dreadful realization began to creep through his mind. The lesson of the giant bear was wrong. It wasn't only about brute strength. The lesson of the goblin was wrong. It wasn't only about speed or skill. The true lesson was hidden here, in this basement.
The greatest power in this world, the power that could make ancient races tremble, was not magic or claws. It was the human mind, honed into a weapon sharper than any obsidian blade.
Devon's gaze drifted from the magic pistol, to the grotesque experiment tanks, to the map studded with death, and finally back to the empty porcelain mask. He had proven himself a fool. But before him now lay the legacy of a genius. A mad, evil genius—but a genius nonetheless.