The first night was a lesson in slow subtraction.
Leo lay where he'd fallen, a puppet with cut strings. The twin suns had descended, replaced by two unfamiliar moons—one bone-white and pocked, the other a sliver of blood-orange. The temperature plunged. The sand beneath him lost its heat.
He watched his Soul Spark count with a focus that bordered on madness.
SS: 1.8/10… 1.9/10… 2.0/10.
The regeneration was agonizingly slow, a trickle from a source he couldn't see or feel. Each tenth of a point took nearly an hour. The grey scavenger core lay five feet away, glowing with a soft, taunting light. Salvation, just out of reach.
"Natural regeneration rate is insufficient for current crisis," Cocytus stated, its voice a flat line in the silence of his mind. "Scavenger Core detected. Estimated SS yield: 8 to 12 units. Absorption method: Physical contact plus conscious will. Risk: Accrual of one Corruption Point per core absorbed."
Corruption. The word had weight. Explain.
"Soul-Fire is an alien energy signature within this reality's framework," Cocytus replied, data streams flickering at the edge of Leo's perception. *"Utilizing locally-sourced death-energy creates systemic dissonance. This dissonance is quantified as Corruption Points. Accumulation leads to progressive degradation: Tier 1 (1-100 CP): minor physical alterations, intrusive mental patterns, localized reality warping under one-meter radius."*
A chart, glitchy but clear, appeared. Tiers 2 through 5 promised mutations, identity loss, and transformation into something called a 'Gloom-Entity.'
"Assessment: One CP is an acceptable risk for necessary energy," Cocytus concluded.
Leo ran the calculation. He needed roughly 8 SS to move without immediate stasis risk. The core promised at least that. The Corruption was a future cost. His immobility was a present death sentence.
The choice was no choice.
Moving his arm was an agony of expenditure. He commanded his right arm to drag his fingerbones through the sand. SS: 1.7/10. The action cost more than the pathetic regeneration gave. He was digging his own grave with his energy. Millimeter by millimeter, he scraped forward. SS: 1.4/10. The core glowed, so close.
His middle finger touched the cool, smooth crystal.
Will it. He poured his need, his desperation, his engineer's demand for function into that point of contact.
The core dissolved. Not into light, but into a stream of fine, grey smoke that flowed up his fingerbone, into his wrist, up his arm. It was cold. It felt like inhaling dust.
+10 SOUL SPARKS.
SS: 11.4/10.
CORRUPTION: 1/100 (TIER 0).
Energy flooded him. The blue-white flame in his chest cavity roared to life, bright and vigorous. He felt strong. He could move. He could—
The soul-burden hit.
It wasn't a memory. It was an impression. A sensory ghost. The gritty taste of desiccated insect carapaces. The blissful, mindless warmth of basking on sun-heated stone. The simple, thrilling pulse of chase-catch-consume. A consciousness that was all hunger and instinct brushed against the edges of his own. It had no language, no self-awareness. It was a pattern of wants, and it was now smeared across his soul.
He felt nauseous without a stomach. Violated. Something other was in the house of his mind, and though it was small and fading, its footprints were on the floor.
"Soul-fragment assimilation," Cocytus noted. "A side effect of direct consumption of death-energy constructs. The impressions will fade. Mostly."
Mostly. The word hung in the air, ominous.
Leo pushed himself up. He stood, the new energy making his joints feel almost fluid. He looked at the flame in his chest. It burned blue-white, but deep within its heart, he saw it—a single, faint, black flicker. Like a flaw in a gemstone. His Corruption. His price.
He spent the next hours exploring the immediate ruins with cautious efficiency, testing his limits. The soul-burden faded to a background whisper, the ghost of a taste in a mouth he didn't have.
At midday, voices shattered the desert silence.
Leo froze behind a crumbling wall of fitted stone. Human voices.
"—told you, Marek. Waste of time. This sector's been picked clean for years. That energy spike was probably a mirage-fire or a minor spirit winking out."
"The guild sensor flagged it, Tessa. A little death-energy bloom. Could be a ghoul nest. Easy bounty."
A man and a woman rounded the corner of a nearby structure. They were clad in practical, sun-bleached leathers. The man, Marek, was older, with a cynical set to his jaw and a well-used mace at his hip. The woman, Tessa, was younger, her eyes scanning the ruins with eager intensity, a short staff in her hand.
They saw him immediately. He was in the open.
Thought ceased. Instinct—cold, survival instinct—took over. He went limp. Every joint loosened. He collapsed into a pile of bones, his skull lolling to the side, mimicking the mindless undead he assumed they expected.
Marek sighed, a long-suffering sound. "See? Just a broken skeleton. Sun probably re-animated it for an hour. Happens out here." He walked over and kicked Leo's ribcage with a booted foot.
THUMP.
BONE INTEGRITY: 92%.
Leo forced absolute stillness. No reaction. He was a thing. A broken thing.
Tessa approached, more curious. She prodded his femur with her staff. "It's pretty intact. No major damage. That's… odd for a wanderer." She knelt, peering at his skull. Her eyes widened. "Look at the color, Marek. Not the usual graveyard grey. It's almost… opalescent. Has a sheen."
"Who cares about interior decorating?" Marek grumbled, hefting his mace. "Smash it, get the core if it has one, and let's go. I'm not getting paid for ambiance."
Tessa held up a hand. "Standard test first." She pulled a small, crudely carved wooden symbol from her belt—a stylized sun within a circle. A holy symbol. She held it near Leo's skull.
A warm pressure built around his head. It wasn't pain, but a deep, resonant discomfort, like standing too close to a roaring furnace. He felt his Soul-Fire vibrate, the blue flame flickering in response. SS: 11.2/10. A tiny drain. He willed no reaction. His skull remained empty, inert.
Tessa watched for a moment, then nodded, tucking the symbol away. "No reaction. No fear, no aggression. Definitely not sentient. Just bones and leftover magic."
Marek raised his mace again. "Good." The weapon gleamed in the twin sunlight.
This was it. Leo prepared to lash out, to burn every last Spark he had in a desperate attack—
"Wait!" Tessa said, her voice sharp. "We can sell it."
Marek paused, mace held high. "Sell a pile of bones?"
"An intact, unusual skeleton," Tessa corrected, a merchant's gleam in her eye. "The Alchemy Guild buys them for base materials—ground bone meal for potency rituals. Or the Arcane Senate's research division pays for peculiar specimens. It's worth… five, maybe ten silver on the Oasis market. More than a scavenger core."
Marek's cynical expression melted into a slow grin. "Now you're thinking." He lowered the mace. "Truss it up."
They produced a coil of rough, hempen rope. As they bound his wrists and ankles, Leo saw faint, glowing sigils woven into the fibers—simple, brush-stroked holy symbols. The bindings hummed against his bones, a constant, prickling pressure. A new, grim notification appeared.
STATUS EFFECT: BASIC HOLY BINDINGS.
EFFECT: Constant low-grade purification field.
SOUL SPARK DRAIN: 0.1 per minute.
They hauled him onto a makeshift travois made of lashed-together poles and dragged him out of the ruins. Leo watched the world pass by upside down: the endless magenta dunes, the towering crystal spires, the distant, shimmering haze that was the Oasis of Mirrors. A destination. A market. A fate as ingredient or lab subject.
Tessa's cheerful voice floated back to him. "Don't worry, bonebag. You'll be part of a potion or a thesis in no time."
Humiliation was a cold, sharp stone in his non-existent gut. He was inventory.
Their camp was a shallow cave in a wind-sculpted rock outcrop. They dumped him beside their small, crackling fire as the blood-orange moon rose higher. Leo maintained his act, allowing an occasional, spastic twitch in a limb—the kind of random movement a residual magic might cause.
He listened.
They talked of guild politics, of a slow season. Marek complained about the rising cost of healing potions. Tessa mentioned a wanted poster she'd seen in the last oasis town.
"...for that Cursed agitator, Elara," she said, warming her hands. "Reward for information. Not even for capture. Church is getting nervous."
"The Necrotic Surge has them spooked," Marek grunted, chewing on a strip of dried meat. "More undead activity from the Scar. They're offering a bonus on sentient undead sightings now. Not just for destruction—for confirmed information."
Tessa looked intrigued. "You believe those rumors? Skeletons that talk? Ghosts that plan?"
"I believe gold," Marek said flatly. "If we see one, we don't engage. We run, we report to the nearest Church outpost. That kind of bounty is retirement money."
Leo filed the information away. The Church was the monolithic threat. But adventurers were vectors, opportunists. His sentience was a commodity of extreme, lethal value.
He turned his focus inward. Cocytus. Analyze these bindings.
A pause. *"Scanning… Basic faith-weave. Inefficient construction. Emits a constant low-level purification field designed to erode undead energy signatures. Estimated time to drain host to stasis threshold at current SS levels: 16.7 hours. Method of rupture: A sudden, focused SS burst exceeding the field's containment capacity—estimated requirement 15 SS—applied directly to the binding's physical knot. Risk: The energy discharge will be visible as a flash of Soul-Fire. High probability of host detection if observers are present."*
Fifteen SS. He currently had 10.1/11.4, and the count was ticking down every minute. He needed to gather more, then wait for the perfect moment when both were distracted.
He began to experiment. He focused not on the air, but on the ancient rock beneath him. This desert had seen millennia of death. He tried to draw from it, to siphon the faint, ambient death-energy seeping from long-decayed bones buried deep in the stone.
It was slower than watching paint dry. +0.2 SS per hour. But it was something. A trickle against the drain.
A plan formed in his mind, clean and structured as a blueprint. Variable A: SS levels. Variable B: Guard patterns (Marek took first watch, Tessa slept). Variable C: Proximity to Oasis (increasing danger). Solution: Maximize A during B, execute when C is minimal—preferably before they broke camp at dawn.
He was a prisoner. A resource. A calculation.
But within the cage of his own bones, the architect began to draft his first blueprint: escape.