The cavern reeked of iron and smoke. The adventurers' corpses sprawled in broken heaps, limbs bent at awkward angles, armor rent and soaked red. The silence that followed their deaths pressed against the stone, suffocating in its weight. Vel stood among them, skeletal frame hunched, broken blade still gripped in his hand. Blood clung to the ruined edge, dripping slowly, each sound echoing into the hollow dark.
He should have walked away. He should have left their bodies to rot as carrion for whatever vermin crawled these caverns. But something rooted him there—something deeper than instinct. His sockets burned with quiet fire as he gazed down at the corpses, not with pity, nor guilt, but with the same predatory hunger that had driven him since his rebirth.
The System hummed faintly inside him, the way it always did when something valuable was near.
Vel crouched beside the first body, the woman with the torch. Her face was frozen in a grimace, eyes glassy, lips parted in a soundless scream. His claws probed carefully, peeling away pouches, straps, and belts. Gold coins spilled, dull gleam of silver, the rattling of metal trinkets. Worthless to him—currency meant nothing to bone and flame. He tossed them aside, clinking into the dark.
But then his hand brushed against something colder. A ring.
It was silver, etched with lines that shimmered faintly in the dark. To any mortal, it would appear like jewelry, an adventurer's keepsake. But to Vel's sockets, the fire within him whispered recognition. His marrow trembled. The System's voice rang out:
[Item Identified: Spatial Storage Ring.][Bound to no user. Capable of storing equipment, resources, artifacts.]
Vel froze. A storage ring. He remembered them from his days as a man—rare treasures coveted by adventurers and nobles alike. A hundred battlefields had been painted red over the possession of a single one. And now one lay on the body of this fallen woman, slipping easily into his skeletal claws.
He turned the ring slowly between bony fingers. He had no flesh, no blood to bind it. But the System intervened:
[Would you like to integrate Storage Ring into System interface?]
Vel hesitated. Then, with the faintest flicker of his sockets, he whispered into the silence of his mind: Yes.
The ring pulsed once, a dim shimmer, before vanishing into the void of the System's domain. A new icon flared across his inner vision, alien yet familiar.
[System Inventory unlocked.][Current Capacity: 100 slots.]
For the first time, Vel felt something akin to satisfaction. He was no longer merely scavenging corpses like a beast—he was claiming dominion, claiming tools of humans and making them his own.
He moved from corpse to corpse, stripping each with mechanical precision. Armor plates, swords, daggers, even scraps of cloth. All vanished into the invisible vault of the System's storage. He found mana potions glimmering faintly blue, their liquid shimmering like stars captured in glass. He found throwing knives hidden in boots, small vials of poison tucked in belts. A staff of dark wood, humming with residual mana. He claimed it all.
The cavern floor grew bare as he harvested every piece, leaving nothing but pale flesh and spilled blood. The adventurers were reduced to husks—empty shells of what they once were, stripped of dignity, stripped of memory. Vel towered above them, his sockets glowing faintly brighter as his inventory filled with human relics.
But when his claws brushed the hilt of his broken blade, lying near the corpses, he paused.
It was cracked beyond repair, the edge shattered, the steel warped from countless blows. It was nothing but a ruin, unfit for battle. And yet… Vel lifted it slowly, cradling it in his hand as though it were alive. Memories flickered, fragments of his former life—velvet banners under sunlit skies, comrades training in the courtyard, the weight of a sword that was once extension of his soul.
This weapon had followed him through death, shattered in his hands, and yet still remained. It was no longer a tool—it was a gravestone. A marker of who he once was.
Vel stared at it for a long moment, then reached into the System's storage. He could have discarded it as he had discarded everything else. But instead, he did something stranger. He slid the hilt into the invisible vault—only to pull it back into his grip again.
He tied the broken hilt to his waist with a strip of leather, the last human ornament he would wear upon his form. A reminder, not of weakness, but of transformation.
He was no longer Vel the swordsman. He was Vel the weapon. His body was the blade, his marrow the steel. The hilt was nothing but a relic, bound to him as a ghost of memory.
Vel stood among the corpses, sockets dimming, burning with a quiet intensity. Around him, the System whispered of rewards, of power, of evolution. But deeper within, in some marrow-deep shadow, he felt something else. A severing. A line crossed.
The act of looting—once survival, once practicality—had become ritual. These tools of humanity, these weapons, potions, trinkets… they no longer belonged to humans. They belonged to him. He was not merely killing men and monsters. He was inheriting them, stripping their world away piece by piece, folding it into himself.
A monster gathering human tools, forging himself into something neither man nor beast.
Vel's sockets burned cold as he turned from the corpses. His broken hilt rattled at his waist. Behind him, the cavern reeked of silence and death. Before him, the tunnel stretched endlessly into shadow.
He stepped forward, and his marrow whispered truth: Every kill is not only a step toward evolution—it is a step away from humanity.
The fire in his sockets flared brighter. He did not mourn. He did not falter. He carried the weight of looted steel and shattered memory, and deeper into the darkness he marched.
For the first time, the System whispered something new, a faint message hidden beneath the hum of numbers and points:
[Bearer has claimed human relics. Identity shift recorded.][Path Divergence: From Swordsman to Living Weapon.]
Vel's sockets narrowed, a faint crackle of fire within them. His path was no longer chosen. It was being carved.
And in that endless dark, among echoes of the dead, Vel walked forward not as a man clinging to tools—but as a monster who had begun to forge his own dominion.