The door took his weight and rolled on hidden hinges like a grinder chewing gristle. A seam of red light widened and washed across the stone, turning William's bandage the color of a warning flare. The air that spilled through tasted metallic and faintly sweet, thick enough to chew.
He slipped inside with the knife low. The door thudded shut behind him and the room's rhythm took over.
The heart dominated everything.
It hung from the ceiling in a cradle of bone-white struts, each rib fused to iron hooks, its mass the size of a pickup cab. Flesh and metal had grown together; plates of wet iron patched swollen tissue, veins threaded through bone tubes like wires in conduit. With every beat the chamber throbbed—wrong cadence, wrong pressure—too slow, then too fast, as if the thing could not remember life's meter.
The wrongness filled the air like bass from a bad subwoofer.
A stone altar crouched beneath it, its top sloped inward to a bowl. On that slope lay offerings: goblin trinkets, bone charms, a pair of human sunglasses with one lens cracked. Each beat sent a slow drip of dark fluid from valve-lips to altar; where it touched, the offerings smoked, hissed, and slumped into sludge. Acid, not blood; or blood that acted like acid, a chemistry experiment baked in hell.
He swallowed. His tongue insisted on "iron" but his brain refused to call it blood.
Anatomy gave him something to hold onto. The heart's wall bulged in three places like aneurysms—thin, glossy sacs under pressure. Valves fluttered the wrong way; a septum ridge showed a cleft where none should be. Hypertrophy across the left wall. Calcified plaques embedded like river pebbles. If life had rules, this thing was a deliberate violation.
A rustle broke the rhythm. Something stepped from behind the altar.
The goblin priest was taller than the others, thick through shoulders and chest, ritual cuts stitched across his skin in crude patterns. Scars crisscrossed him like a map of rivers; some were fresh, sealed with clotted paste. His eyes reflected the chamber's red like coals. Veins along his neck pulsed faintly crimson, as if something moved under the skin that wasn't blood.
He hadn't seen William yet.
Opening a door from a dark tunnel should not be obvious. William made it less so.
He flowed forward in three quiet steps, planted, and struck. Knife first—low line, upward slice for the femoral. His off-hand snapped a palm-heel into the goblin's jaw; hips drove; he pivoted and followed with a savate shin across the knee. Clean, decisive, all the new training snapping into a single breath.
The goblin dropped to one leg and bellowed. Black-red spilled down his thigh in sheets.
For half a heartbeat it looked over.
Then the priest roared a single gurgled word and the spilled blood stopped midstream, reversed, and flew back into him like smoke pulled by a vacuum. The wound puckered. Flesh knitted. His eyes flared brighter.
William's mouth went dry. Not a trick of cloth; not his imagination. Magic.
The priest's hand snapped up, fingers crooked like a claw. Pain speared through William's forearm—sharp, hot. Blood erupted from his pores and ran uphill, away from gravity, floating in strings that coalesced in the priest's palm. William swore and tore free, but the line of red followed like a leash, ripping fresh.
He ducked behind the altar, breath tight, and the priest's next spell slammed into the room like an extra gravity field. William's legs went heavy; his knee clipped stone. He rolled with it, spared his head, and came up outside the worst of the pull.
Durability kept him from seeing stars. Barely.
Think. Don't trade blows; you lose. He's stronger and cheats.
The knife wouldn't carry this. The room would.
He sprinted two steps wide as the priest rounded the altar and flicked his wrist. A tight sling of William's stolen blood snapped overhead like a whip; it hissed where it struck stone, leaving a smoking welt. William's hand brushed the altar's drain and came away sticky. The acid blood chewed the air.
He didn't need the altar.
He needed the heart.
He let the priest see him and feinted left, then bolted right, driving straight under the hanging mass where the bone struts cradled it. The priest bellowed and chased, faster than something that size had a right to be; a bloody lash slapped William's shoulder and burned like a forge brand. He choked back a yell and kept moving, eyes mapping bulges and tubes and the slick geometry of valves.
Second aneurysm, right where the left ventricle should flare.
He slid to a stop in a shower of altar grit, planted, and launched. The jump carried him into the cradle's lower rung; he swung up, jammed his boots into a bone latch, and hung one-handed with the other set for a cut. The priest leaped and grabbed his ankle with a crushing grip.
William punched the knife into the aneurysm sac.
The cut was half an inch, no more. It was enough.
The sac ruptured like a rotten fruit and a spray of dark fluid blasted down in a conical jet. It hit the priest across the face and chest with a sound like meat in a deep fryer. The priest shrieked, dropped William's leg, and clawed at himself with hands that started to smoke. The stink of cooked iron and old pennies filled the chamber.
William dropped, landed hard, and didn't hesitate. He drove forward through the spray's edge, planted, and cut the priest's hamstring to ground him, then stepped behind and slashed across the throat while the creature still writhed and choked. The blade bit; he pulled; the priest went down burbling into a puddle that chewed its own reflection.
Silence, except for the heart's wrong beat.
His own blood ran down his forearm and shoulder in thin lines from where the magic had taken hold. He felt light, too light, like the floor might let him float through. His fingers trembled when he wiped the knife clean on a scrap of priest's sash.
The System's voice fell into the room like a judge.
[Enemy Defeated: Goblin Priest]
EXP Gained: 200
Loot Acquired: Blood Rites of the Red Vein (Very Rare)
[Level Up]
Level: 3
Unallocated: +1 Stat Point, +1 Skill Point
He swayed. The world pulsed a shade darker with each beat of the heart. His legs wanted to fold.
A normal person would be dying. He wasn't sure he wasn't.
He stared at the book lying in the runoff beside the altar, bound in something too fresh to be leather and stamped with a sigil of intersecting veins. He didn't need to lick it; the air did that for him. Metallic wine with a rotten note under it; temptation perfumed with hospital disinfectant. Everything in him said wait.
He didn't have time.
William tore the book open with his teeth and chewed. The taste hit in layers—warm copper, sugar-sick sweetness, a thread of clove—and the world narrowed to the steady ritual of swallow, breathe, keep swallowing. Knowledge came like a drip into a vein.
[Book Consumed: Blood Rites of the Red Vein]
+2 Durability
Skill Gained: Rituals (Basic)
Resistance Gained: Blood (Minor)
Ability Unlocked: Resorb Blood (Self)
Cold clarity slid through his veins. His skin prickled where the priest's magic had left burns, then cooled. The hollow floating sensation eased a notch as if something in him had sealed a dozen tiny leaks.
He focused on the new words for the new trick.
Resorb Blood (Basic) [Self]: Reclaim shed personal blood within short range in order to heal
He set his palm to his shoulder and willed it. Fine red threads lifted from his skin, from the stone where drops had spattered, from the torn edge of his bandage. They drifted to his hand and vanished. The burn pulled tight and dulled. Pain ebbed; stamina steadied.
It felt like cheating. It felt like survival.
He swallowed again and found breath he could trust. The heart's rhythm still sounded wrong, but it no longer drowned thought.
He checked his status because the ritual of reading steadied him as much as a wall under his hand.
Status: William Page
Age: 18
System: Unbound Bookeater
Class: None
Level: 3
EXP: 0 / 300
Strength: 11
Speed: 12
Durability: 13
Mental: 12
Social: 5
Luck: 5
Traits:
– Hunger for Knowledge
– Synesthetic Cognition
– Rational Mind
Skills:
– Survival (Basic)
– Mycology (Basic)
– Cooking (Basic)
– Knife Use (Basic)
– Herb Lore (Basic)
– Knife Combat (Basic)
– Medicine (Basic)
– Magic (Basic)
– Anatomy (Basic)
– Unarmed Combat (Intermediate)
– Wrestling (Basic)
– Situational Awareness (Basic)
– Rituals (Basic)
Abilities:
– Sense Magic (Basic) [Touch]
– Resorb Blood (Basic) [Self]
Resistances:
– Blood (Minor)
Combat Values:
– Critical Hit Chance: +10%
Unallocated Points:
– Stat Points: 1
– Skill Points: 2
Inventory:
– Knife (Common, Durability 81%)
– Trail Mix (Mundane, 340g)
– Water Bottle (Common, Empty, Durability 100%)
– Paracord (Common, 16 ft, Durability 98%)
– Firestarter (Common, Durability 87%)
– Poncho (Common, Durability 80%)
– Goblin Key (Uncommon)
– Improvised Sling (Common, Durability 85%)
– Smooth Stones (x3, Mundane)
He put a hand on the altar's lip and listened to himself breathe. The chamber's red light crawled; the heart kept beating like a lie.
Magic had caught him and wrung him out. Without Durability and the new trick he'd be a sack on the floor. He needed counters; he needed rules; he needed to turn "wrong" into a map.
He looked up at the heart, at its bulges and valves and stitched-on metal. Not a shrine. A machine. A factory for a god that liked its offerings half-digested.
"Noted," he whispered.
The heart beat too slow, then too fast, then found a rhythm that matched neither of theirs.
And he watched it, planning which vein he'd cut next if it tried to feed again.