[MEMORY FRAGMENT: THE RITUAL CHAMBER]
[SYNC RATE: 99.9% - USER IMMERSED]
The preparation was unlike anything recorded in the scrolls of the dead.
Through Iyad's eyes, Kai felt the sharp, freezing shock of the sacred oils.
Tristan did not bathe the King in water; he submerged him in alchemical liquids that seeped deep into his pores, numbing his skin until his nerve endings felt distant and muffled, packed in cotton.
Then came the honey.
Gallons of thick, golden amber flowed over the King's bronze skin. Great Iyad stood completely naked, a paralyzed golden statue breathing shallowly in the flickering torchlight.
Tristan began the binding. He wrapped heavy linen strips tight against Iyad's sides, pinning his massive arms, locking his powerful legs, and winding the rough cloth upward until only his honey-coated face remained exposed.
"Listen closely, Great Iyad," Tristan whispered, his smooth voice echoing off the cold stone.
"There was once a King, blinded by love, who sought to steal immortality for his mother. He made a pact without reading the terms of the scroll. And the god granted his wish."
Tristan leaned in close. His breath was hot against Iyad's sticky cheek.
"His mother would live. Vibrant. Ageless. Eternal." Tristan's eyes flashed with that terrifying violet hue.
"But the King... ah, the King was cursed. Not with death. He was cursed with an absolute inability to die."
Before Iyad's mind could process the trap, an unseen, localized gravity field slammed into his chest.
The Blue Cube—the Seed—embedded itself directly into his heart.
[SYSTEM OVERRIDE: FOUNDATION PLANTED]
Iyad tried to roar, to shatter the linen with his god-like stats, but the honey and the paralytic oils choked him.
Tristan stepped back and casually tilted a large clay jar.
Skitter.
Skitter.
Skitter.
Hundreds of black Scarab Beetles poured over the lip of the jar.
They landed on the honey-coated linen, their mandibles clicking frantically. Driven by a ravenous, unnatural hunger, they immediately began to burrow through the sweet amber, seeking the warm flesh beneath.
At that exact moment, the heavy stone door creaked open.
Servants carried Queen Nefertari into the room on a gilded litter. She looked past Tristan.
She looked at the open, upright sarcophagus. She saw her invincible son, bound, paralyzed, and swarming with insects.
"Iyad!" she screamed.
She wept, her face twisting in absolute agony at the sight of her son buried alive.
"What have you done? My son! My sun!"
Iyad felt a beetle bite directly into his lower lip.
He felt another burrowing deep into the muscle of his neck. The pain was sharp, electric, breaking right through the numbing oil.
Inside the shared consciousness, Kai's modern mind began to violently panic.
Calculate an exit. Calculate an exit! But there were no variables to manipulate. Just the dark. Just the clicking mandibles.
But Iyad forced himself to look at his mother. Her pale skin was already flushing with color. The Wasting Sickness was fading in real-time. The deal had worked.
"Do not weep, Mother!" Iyad choked out, spitting a black beetle from his mouth. He forced a mask of absolute bravery, his eyes burning with tears he couldn't wipe away.
"This is the price. I pay it gladly. Live longer, Mother. Live for me."
Tristan placed a comforting, flawlessly mocked hand of sympathy on the sobbing Queen's shoulder.
"He is a true hero, my Queen," Tristan said softly.
"Let him rest."
Tristan grabbed the heavy, solid gold lid of the sarcophagus.
Iyad saw the flickering light of the torches one last time. He saw Tristan's violet eyes smiling at him, staring right through the memory, directly at Kai.
SLAM.
The lid sealed shut.
[CRITICAL WARNING: SENSORY DEPRIVATION]
[LIGHT LEVEL: 0%]
Total, absolute darkness.
The air supply was instantly cut off, but the mechanical Seed pulsing inside his heart wouldn't let his lungs fail.
It forcibly recycled the carbon dioxide in his blood. It kept his brain perfectly, terrifyingly alive.
Then, the feast began in earnest.
The beetles ate. They chewed through his epidermis. They burrowed into his dense muscle fibers. Iyad tried to scream, but the linen held his jaw shut.
[ERROR: PAIN RECEPTORS AT 10,000%]
He tried to count the seconds to ground himself, but time quickly lost all measurable meaning.
Minutes stretched into agonizing hours. Hours rotted into years. Years compressed into millennia.
He tried to remember the warmth of the sun, but the absolute agony completely wiped his RAM. Thoughts slid off the pain like water off polished stone.
The beetles ate, reproduced in his chest cavity, died, and the next generation ate again.
And the cruelest part of Tristan's code? The Seed regenerated him.
Every single time a beetle tore a piece of his flesh away, the Blue Cube forced his cells to multiply, growing the meat back just fast enough to be eaten again. An infinite loop of digestion.
Iyad's mind completely shattered. He forgot his name. He forgot his kingdom. Inside the wreckage of that mind, Kai's logic loops completely fried.
The Developer was experiencing a two-thousand-year torture simulation in the span of a few seconds.
The memory files corrupted and bled together. Kai couldn't tell where the King ended and he began.
He thought he heard Anna screaming in the dark. He thought the beetles were made of broken code. His identity was being violently overwritten by the swarm.
[IDENTITY FRAGMENTATION: CRITICAL]
Then, suddenly, after two millennia of localized hell, the darkness shifted.
The grinding of mandibles stopped. The temperature plummeted.
A new presence entered the sealed coffin. It wasn't a beetle. It was something heavy. Something undeniably divine.
Iyad slowly opened his eyes—which had just grown back for the millionth time.
Standing over him, suspended in the spiritual void of the underworld, was a towering figure. It possessed the muscular body of a man and the terrifying, obsidian head of a jackal.
Anubis.
The Guardian of the Scales had finally come.
But the God of the Dead did not look surprised. He did not hold his scales to judge a mortal soul.
Instead, his glowing eyes looked down at the broken, half-eaten, infinitely regenerating thing that used to be a King, analyzing it like a localized system error.
Anubis tilts his head slightly, like encountering something not meant to exist.