The first thing he felt was heat.
Not the pleasant warmth of a sunbeam on his skin, but a suffocating, sticky heat that enveloped his body, penetrating his lungs, making every breath a torment. The air was heavy, saturated with moisture and something else—something disgusting, making his stomach clench into a tight knot.
He opened his eyes.
Darkness. Almost total, save for a dim, sickly red glow emanating from somewhere above. As if he were inside a giant lantern, draped in bloody fabric.
He tried to stand, but his hands slid over something damp and soft. A warm mass pulsated beneath his palms. His heart sank as he realized—this wasn't earth, not stone, not a floor in the conventional sense.
This was flesh.
Living, breathing, contracting flesh. "What the..."
His voice cracked. His throat was dry, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He pulled his hand away from the pulsating surface, and a long thread of clear mucus trailed after him, refusing to let go.
The hero tried to focus his vision in the dim light. A reddish glow emanated from the walls themselves—if they could be called walls. They stretched upward, disappearing into the darkness, their entire surface covered in sinuous veins, pulsing in a single rhythm. As if he were inside... inside something living.
A vile ooze squelched beneath his feet. He looked down and regretted it instantly.
The floor was littered with remains.
Bones—human, inhuman, all jumbled together in a nightmarish collage. Skulls with empty eye sockets, ribs protruding from the half-digested mass. Scraps of fabric, rusted weapons, scraps of armor—all coated in a layer of sticky slime, half-dissolved.
He vomited. Right there, on all fours, his stomach churning, he realized one simple, terrifying truth.
He was inside something. Something enormous. Something that was eating.
He was in a stomach.
Panic didn't come immediately. At first, there was only shock—the numbness of a mind trying to deny the obvious. This was a dream. This was a hallucination. This was anything but reality.
But the heat was too real. The stench of rot and acid was too pungent. And the flesh beneath his fingers was too alive.
He tried to remember how he had ended up here.
Fragments of memory. A bright flash of light. The sensation of falling. A scream—his own scream—cut off in emptiness. And then... nothing. A collapse. And waking up here, in this biological nightmare. "Where am I?" he croaked into the void. His voice was drowned out by the wet echoes, dissolving in the gurgling and rumbling of the surrounding flesh.
No one answered.
He forced himself to stand. His legs slid apart on the slippery surface, but he held on, bracing himself with his hand against the wall. The flesh beneath his palm was hot and pulsing. It was a disgusting sensation—as if he'd placed his hand on the belly of a huge beast, feeling food being digested beneath the skin.
He had to get out. Immediately.
He looked around, trying to find any way out. Up led darkness. Down—a swamp of bones and decaying biomass. But ahead, about thirty meters away, he could see something resembling a passage—a fold in the flesh, from which a thicker darkness oozed.
He took a step.
And then he heard a splash behind him.
The hero turned. From the fleshy ceiling, from the folds of hanging flesh, something detached itself and fell with a wet slap. A creature the size of a large dog, worm-like, with a dozen short limbs and a round mouth studded with rings of needle-like teeth.
A leech. A gigantic, monstrous leech.
She turned toward him. She had no eyes, but he felt her "see" him—with some other sense, a vibration, the scent of blood.
For a second they looked at each other. Or rather, he looked, and she... felt.
Then she lunged at him.
Instinct made him jump aside. The leech missed, slammed into the wall, and a stream of yellowish liquid spurted from the wound in his flesh. Acid. The air smoked with the smell of burnt flesh.
He ran.
He didn't think, didn't plan—he simply ran, sliding through the vile liquid, jumping over bones and rotting remains. Behind him, he heard a wet squelching sound—the creature was pursuing him, fast and relentless.
He couldn't see where he was running. In the darkness ahead, only a crease in the wall loomed—the supposed exit. Another ten meters. Five.
Something wrapped around his ankle.
He fell face down, right into the rotting mass. A lump of slime filled his mouth, a lump of something soft and disgusting. He spat it out, trying to roll over.
The leech was on him.
Its body wrapped around his leg, slippery and incredibly strong. A round mouth with concentric rings of teeth approached his thigh. He tried to push it away, but his hands slid over the creature's slimy skin.
It had attached itself.
Pain shot through him, sharp and burning, as if a red-hot iron rod had been driven into his leg. He screamed. The leech sucked, and he felt not only his blood but also his strength draining from him, his consciousness beginning to drift.
His hand touched something hard in the nearby muck. A bone. Long, with a sharp edge—perhaps once someone's shinbone. He grabbed it and slashed at the leech with all his might.
Once. Twice. Three times.
The creature jerked, loosening his grip, and he pushed it away. Jumping to his feet, ignoring the bleeding wound on his thigh, he ran on.
The fold in the wall was close. He dove into it, squeezing through the narrow passage between two flaps of flesh. They clenched around him, trying not to let go, but he pushed through—and tumbled out into another space.
It was even darker here. And even hotter.
He leaned his back against the wall, gasping for the scorching air. His leg throbbed with pain. Blood flowed down his shin, mixing with slime and dirt.
He needed to stop the bleeding. He tore a piece of fabric from… something that had once been someone's clothing, and wrapped it around the wound. He tightened the knot with his teeth. Not perfect, but better than nothing.
His heart was pounding. His hands were shaking. He was alive. By some miracle, alive.
But for how long?
He had been trudging through the monster's intestines—there was no other word for it—for who knows how long. Minutes? Hours? In this stifling, pulsating darkness, time lost its meaning.
The passages branched, narrowed, widened. Sometimes he had to squeeze through fleshy valves that tightened around his body, as if trying to crush him. Sometimes he tripped over new clusters of bones—other unfortunates who hadn't managed to escape.
The leeches no longer attacked, but he could hear them—scrambling, squelching somewhere in the darkness. They were here. Waiting.
And then the walls began to close in.
At first, he didn't understand what was happening. He simply felt the passage getting narrower. He thought he was moving into a narrower space. But then the flesh of the walls began to press against his shoulders, his chest, and it dawned on him.
His stomach was clenching.
"No... No, no, no!"
He tried to run, but the walls closed faster. The flesh gripped his body, pressing. His ribs creaked. The air left his lungs. He couldn't breathe.
The darkness closed in around him, flesh pressed from all sides, bones cracked, and somewhere deep in his mind, he knew—this was the end.
His first death.
The last thing he managed to think before his spine cracked was: "So this is what it feels like..."
He woke up with a scream.
He jumped to his feet, gasping for air, his hands instinctively feeling his ribs, his back, checking for damage. Everything was in place. No broken bones.
But the pain... the pain remained.
Ghostly, phantom, it throbbed in his ribs, in his spine—in the places where he'd been crushed. His bones were intact, but the memory of them breaking still lived in every cell. A dull, aching agony that wouldn't let him forget.
He groaned, pressing his hands to his chest. The pain slowly receded, turning into a dull throb, but it didn't disappear completely. Like an echo of death that continued to resonate within his body.
He looked around. The same nightmarish landscape. The same walls of pulsating flesh. The same darkness with a bloody glow. But he was where he'd died. In the same place.
—What the…
Understanding came slowly, like dawn through a thick fog. He was dead. He was crushed. He felt his bones breaking, his organs rupturing, his consciousness fading.
But he was here. Alive. Whole.
He had risen.
His hands were still shaking, but no longer from fear—from shock. Impossible. This was impossible. People don't rise again. People die and stay dead.
But he…
He checked his leg—the leech wound was gone. Not a scar, not a trace. As if it had never been there. But the pain in his ribs still smoldered, a reminder of crushed bones, of the death his body remembered, even if it was physically healed.
A strange feeling rose in his chest—a mixture of horror and something else. Relief? Hope?
If he couldn't die… Then he had a chance to get out of here. No matter how many tries it took.
He died eleven more times before he found a way up.
The third death—acid. It gushed from above, from a rift in the ceiling's flesh, dousing him completely. He only managed to raise his hands before the burning began. His skin smoked, bubbled, and peeled. His scream caught in his throat—the acid had seared his vocal cords. The pain was... unbearable. So much so that he wanted to die quickly, just for it to stop.
When he came to again, his skin was intact. But the pain remained. Searing, acrid, it pulsated throughout his body, as if the acid were still eating away at his flesh. He writhed on the floor for several minutes, until the phantom flame slowly died down to a smoldering agony.
The fifth death—worms.
He walked carefully, pressing against the wall, trying not to make any unnecessary sounds. Another passageway was visible in the darkness ahead, and he had almost reached it when he felt a vibration beneath his feet.
The flesh of the wall bulged, tore, and they poured out.
Worms. Dozens, hundreds of tiny worms—each the size of a finger, but so many of them. They rained down on the floor in a wave of writhing flesh, and before he could react, they covered his legs.
He screamed.
The worms crawled up his body, piercing his clothes, biting into his skin with needle-sharp teeth. Hundreds of tiny bites at once, each a drop of searing pain. He tried to shake them off, but for every one they shed, five more came.
They crawled into his mouth, his nose, his ears. He choked, trying to scream, but the worms clogged his throat. They bit into his eyes. They gnawed through his skin, burrowing deeper, into his muscles, into his bones. Death was long and painful, as his body slowly turned into a sieve of writhing flesh.
Resurrection was no better. He woke up whole, but every inch of his skin burned, as if the worms were still there, still gnawing at him. He clawed at himself, trying to peel off the nonexistent parasites, until he realized—they were gone. Only pain. Only memory.
The seventh death was suffocation. He licked through the narrow passage, but suddenly found himself stuck as the flesh began to shrink. He had no strength to escape. Consciousness faded slowly, while his lungs struggled unsuccessfully to find even a breath of air. After resurrection, his throat ached as if he'd been choking for hours, and every breath was a sharp pain.
The ninth death was falling. The floor beneath him collapsed—it turned out it wasn't a solid surface, but a thin membrane. He plummeted into a boiling pool of gastric acid deep within the monster's intestines. Dissolving in minutes, he felt his flesh literally flowing from his bones.
The hero awoke with the sensation that his body was still melting, still dissolving in acid. The pain was so acute that he couldn't move for almost an hour, simply lying there and whimpering in the darkness.
After each death, he woke up again. And again. And again. And each time, the pain remained with him—a collection of agonies that grew with each resurrection.
But with each time, he learned.
Where the walls close in, and where it's safe. Where the huge worms, sensitive to vibration, hide, you must move slowly, carefully, pressing against the wall. Where the small worms nest, you must go around in a wide arc, even if the path is longer. Where acid drips, you must not go there. Where leeches hang from the ceiling, you must go around or quickly run past.
He was transforming from a helpless victim into something more. Not stronger—he hadn't become stronger. But more cunning. More experienced. And terrifyingly persistent.
The pain no longer stopped him. It became a background, a constant companion, a reminder of every death. But he learned to live with it, to move through it.
And finally, after twelve deaths, he found it.
The valve. A huge, fleshy sphincter at the top of the "stomach," where the wall rose almost vertically. It contracted and expanded in a slow rhythm, and beyond it a passage was visible—narrow, slimy, but leading somewhere higher.
He waited for the valve to release and then climbed.
The flesh gripped him, slippery and warm, trying to push him back down. But he clambered, clinging to folds, pushing through muscle rings. His hands slipped, his feet found no purchase, but he stubbornly climbed upward. Phantom pain throbbed in his ribs, his back, his skin—an echo of all twelve deaths—but he ignored it.
The valve began to contract.
He was halfway there when the fleshy walls began to close around his waist. Squeezing. Cutting. A little more—and he would be cut in half. The memory of his crushed ribs flared like a bright flash of pain, but he gritted his teeth and continued to climb.
He grabbed the edge of the passage above and yanked with all his might.
He slipped. He literally shot upward, like slippery soap from his palms, and tumbled into a new space.
He fell onto a hard—hard!—stone floor. Behind him, the valve slammed shut with a meaty squelch.
He lay on his back, breathing heavily, looking up. The ceiling was higher here. And instead of pulsating flesh, there was stone. Cold, dry, beautiful stone.
He was out. Out of the stomach. Out of this biological hell.
His body still throbbed with pain—twelve deaths, layered one on top of the other, creating a symphony of agony. But he was on the nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-ninth floor.
And there were still nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine more to go.
But at that moment, lying on the cold stone and hearing drops of water somewhere far away instead of the gurgling of flesh, he smiled through the pain for the first time.
Because he understood one simple thing: he could die as many times as he wanted. He could suffer endlessly.
But he couldn't lose.
Sooner or later, he would get to the top.
Even if it took a thousand lifetimes. Even if each one was painful.