The caverns sloped downward, narrowing into fissures where stone dripped with rot. Vel's steps echoed through the dark, the faint rattle of bones marking his passage. His sockets burned steadily, but inside the fire churned restless. The adventurers' corpses had been stripped bare. The storage ring clung to him now like a second marrow, heavy with weapons, potions, relics. And yet even as his inventory grew, something hollow gnawed at him.
The System whispered rewards, assimilation, evolution. But Vel's sockets flickered dimmer with each step, as if the flames within him recognized a greater truth lingering in the stone. Something was calling.
Hours—or perhaps days—bled into one another in the lightless descent. Vel did not tire. His bones did not ache. But the shadows thickened, oppressive, suffocating. The further he went, the more the cavern smelled not of simple rot, but of chemical sharpness, incense burnt into marrow, and the faint copper sting of endless blood.
And then, at the end of a long corridor of jagged rock, he found it.
A door.
It was not stone, nor natural. This was forged, set into the cavern itself—black iron carved with runes that pulsed faintly. The shape was twisted, unnatural, like something dragged from necromancer rites and fused into crude architecture. The hinges screamed when Vel pushed, but the door yielded, shuddering open.
What lay beyond was no cavern. It was a chamber. A laboratory.
Vel stepped inside, sockets dimming as he absorbed the sight. Tables made of bone stretched along the walls, cluttered with scrolls, half-written journals, cracked ink pots dried to black crust. Glass jars lined shelves, filled with organs suspended in bile, eyes drifting, limbs floating in green ichor. Skeletons hung from chains hammered into the ceiling—human, beast, and things unrecognizable, their bones fused, twisted, malformed. One skull had two jaws, stretched grotesquely. Another ribcage bloomed outward like broken wings.
Vel's hand curled instinctively around his broken hilt.
The air here was not silent. It whispered. The groans of the mutilated dead seemed woven into the stone, their agony bound to this place. Each step Vel took echoed with the weight of a thousand failed experiments.
He approached the nearest table, claws brushing over parchment. The paper was brittle, covered in precise, slanted handwriting—lines of equations, arcane formulae, diagrams of skeletal structures intermingled with flesh. Symbols of necromancy scrawled in blood and ink alike. Vel scanned, sockets narrowing. The words swam with the clinical coldness of a surgeon dissecting meat.
Subject 0142: skeletal framework too brittle, unable to support necrotic tissue grafts. Subject disposed.Subject 0149: successful integration of marrow fusion with undead toxin. Rapid degeneration observed. Subject discarded.Subject 0150: promising. Base skeleton retained combat reflexes. Death-energy resonance stable. Further modifications required.
Vel's claws tightened around the page, crumpling it. He moved to the next.
Objective: creation of hybridized undead soldier. Skeleton: structural endurance, tireless, resistant to physical harm. Zombie: flesh medium for toxin, capacity for assimilation. Combined form: perfected deathspawn, evolution without limit.
The fire in Vel's sockets flared. He did not need to read further to understand. This was the truth the cavern whispered. The reason his marrow burned differently than others. The reason the System clung to him like a second soul.
He was not accident. He was not fate. He was designed.
Vel staggered, the weight of revelation grinding into his bones. The experiments, the horrors chained above him—they were not merely curiosities. They were failures, predecessors, stepping stones. And he… he was one of them.
He remembered the Flesh Golem's gaze, the way it had recognized him, called him kin. It had not been madness. It had been truth.
Vel moved deeper into the chamber, claws scratching along wood, scattering scrolls. He ripped open journals, his sockets devouring words, desperate for more.
Subject 0172: Vel. Human origin. Adventurer class. Swordsmanship instincts preserved upon death. Ritual of skeletal rebirth successful. Secondary graft of necrotic energy unstable, but assimilation rate higher than anticipated. Chaos-mana resonance detected.
Vel froze.
His name. Scrawled in black ink, underlined twice.
The words blurred in his sockets, but he forced himself to read.
Vel remains an anomaly. Unlike prior subjects, mind has not degraded into feral state. Consciousness intact, perhaps due to unique exposure to chaos-mana at moment of death. Potential: unlimited. Risk: uncontrollable. Must attempt binding ritual again at later stage.
The parchment crumbled in his grip, snapping to dust beneath his claws. His sockets flared white-hot, fire searing against the cavern walls.
He was not chosen by accident. He was not spared. He was not even reborn.
He had been taken.
Stolen at the moment of death, twisted into mockery, molded into weapon. Every step he had taken since opening his sockets in that cursed cave had been shackled by invisible chains—the will of the Lich who had torn him apart and sewn him anew.
Vel's body shook with fury.
He turned, sockets darting across the chamber, staring at every chained corpse, every jar, every scrawled diagram. They were all him. Failed versions. Broken versions. He was merely the one that had survived longer, fought harder. A vessel, not a man.
At the far end of the chamber, atop a pedestal of cracked bone, lay a final journal. Unlike the scattered papers, this was bound in stretched leather, stitched with thread that looked like tendon. Vel approached, claws trembling.
He flipped it open. The handwriting was neat, elegant, deliberate. The first page bore a date.
Vel froze again. His sockets dimmed, then flared with hollow fire.
The date was one year past his death.
One year.
He staggered back, nearly dropping the book. His mind reeled, though his skull was hollow. A year had passed since his final scream, since his flesh was torn away. A year of absence from the world. His comrades, his home, the people he had once sworn to protect—they had mourned him, buried him, moved on. Perhaps they had already forgotten.
To them, Vel was long dead.
To the Lich, he had been nothing but another number, another experiment in a chamber of horrors.
The book slipped from his claws, landing with a dull thud among the others. Vel stood there, motionless, sockets burning cold and sharp. Not sorrow. Not despair. Something deeper. Something that stripped the marrow of pity and left only sharpened will.
He whispered, voice a rasp that scraped against the stone of the chamber:
"Lich."
The word echoed, a hollow curse.
"You will answer for this."
The chamber fell silent. The jars quivered faintly as though in fear. The chained skeletons creaked softly, their twisted forms swaying. The laboratory itself seemed to recoil from the fury burning in Vel's sockets.
He stood taller, shoulders squaring, broken hilt rattling faintly at his side. His grip tightened around nothing, but the marrow-fire in him surged hotter. The System hummed faintly, numbers scrolling, assimilation percentages whispering at the edge of his vision. But for once, Vel did not care for evolution, nor for power.
What he wanted was vengeance.
The chamber burned behind him as he turned away, sockets narrowing into slits of fire. Every step he took rattled louder, bones grinding with fury. The Lich had crafted him, shaped him, stolen a year of his existence. But Vel still was. He still burned. He still carried rage sharper than any blade.
And when the day came that he found the master of this place, the architect of this abomination—Vel swore his broken sword, his claws, his very marrow would carve justice through the corpse that dared call itself immortal.
The Lich had made him a weapon.
But that weapon would turn.
And when it did, even eternity would not be enough to save him.